My reviewlet: Praise, comments, critique

[Emre Yigit]

Praise

Like so many others, I'm delighted to see a new city simulator emerge. Been a long time waiting for this. Thank you!

And extra kudos to such a small team that designed such a game!


Comments and critique

What I hadn't expected (though with hindsight should have, given the developer) was that I would spend so much time on traffic. On the one hand, it is great fun. On the other, sometimes the game feels like a traffic simulator, where every driver is choosing to use the turning lane. While it is possible to design roads that largely take care of this, I must admit I still find it funny. But plenty of opportunities, for land, sea and air connections, thanks.

Given this focus on traffic, it is odd that there are gaps - eg you jump from two-lane one-way roads to six - in the type of roads (more later).

Medium density commercial & residential zones, as well as differentiated zoning intensity for industry would have been nice. And why do they all have to be heavy industry? Love the addition of office zones, though.

Information about things is sorely missing. For example, someone is ill in a building. Why? Is it the proximity to an industrial zone, stress from noise pollution or a lack of food because he couldn't get to the grocery? Why is that high school student loitering next to the metro station? Is he waiting for a train? Is he planning on mugging someone? etc

The option to build undergound electricity lines would have been nice. As would the option to build sunken rail lines - IIRC the train lines from Stockholm and Helsinki to their respective airports are not entirely aboveground.

Some things I do not understand: build a school next to an industrial zone and it will help it upgrade?

Some things are highly annoying. Prime among these is that you cannot place anything on the map without a road connection first. Woe to you if your first map has uneven ground and you're desperately trying to place an airport. Even outside of that example, I can't understand why buildings couldn't just have been made non-functional without road access (unless it's a processor-use issue.)

Which brings me onto another point: no smoothing of terrain possible at all after the game has started. There are greater chasms in my city than appeared after the latest (small) movement of the plates around the San Andreas Fault.

Wgich in turn brings me to the pre-game editor. I don't know what others think of it (and there have been some pretty amazing maps made, so I think this might be to do with my skills) but it seems clunky and counter-intuitive.

The necessity for all parks and plazas to have road access is a little strange.

The base game for Tropico has a hugely higher number of buildings you can place. I want my casinos, opera houses, balloon rides, museums to the mayor's glory. The number of "cultural" buildings you can place is, err, zero.

The buildings styles are so culturally neutral, I don't know whether to praise or criticise the developer; but give us more options asap, please, even if just as a DLC. At the moment it's terribly greige.


That's all.


So, I'm really pleased, overall, and very happy the game runs smoothly. But it needs more than a few mods, it needs improvement.

 

[muttonnoir]

I would agree with most of your comments, can I also add that I think dev have missed a major trick by not having a day/night cycle. Cities take on a magical quality during the hours of darkness and the prospect of viewing your sprawling metropolis with light twinkling for miles and miles is orgasmic! It would also give the game a badly needed rhythm of time and definition

 

[magitsu]

Editors are fine. There's hundreds of usable maps done already. Since it's only a matter of importing a height map pretty much every kind of realistic map type is covered.
Tropico had many placeable buildings all right. Because it required you to place and build every building, not just zone and take care of utilities/logistics.
There are already mods that allow free placement. But it seems that the restriction was due to the unresolved issue (for these mods) that people might die there and without roads they couldn't be cleared out.
Workshop is starting to overflow from buildings. There are many, they are in need of curation into packs soon enough rather than just adding more.
It's good that there's plenty to do traffic-wise because it's hard to see what else could occupy people for as long in a citybuilding sim (because you'll run out of space to build faster than problems with traffic).

Basically I think the ability to terraform in-game is the only actually annoying limitation for the vanilla game at launch.

D/N would be purely cosmetical. How it actually would provide definition is hard to grasp seeing as time already flows in so many different layers. Movement on map and cim aging for example are very far apart in their progression.
There are no rush hours so just going between light and dark would add nothing substantial atm.

 

[Emre Yigit]

I take your points, though I might not agree 100% with them, except as follows: wrt to the editor, there are those of us who would prefer not to have to go to another program for heights.

And there is too much to do traffic-wise with the tools you are given.

But then again, autres peuples, autres moeurs.