QoL for Cities Skylines

[SPECTREtm]

The game is approaching its 6th year, and looking back to the beginning nothing major has really changed to the game. What we have seen over these past years are various DLCs of IMO mostly very low-quality content that is easily eclipsed by what the talented modding community has delivered - especially in the last year with some very impressive mods that really have shown the monumentally wasted potential that Cities Skylines has become. I hope the lack of apparent interest in the game from the developers is because they are making a successor, given that pretty much the entire community has asked for it for years now.

As it stands the game needs a QoL far more than new DLCs which could include:

1. Overhauling several aspects of the game mechanic, such as road, rail, port/airport building. This could be expanded with even more content added to the Mass Transit DLC. The modding community has pretty much everything lined up here for CO do something awesome. MoM, Road marking, and traffic manager etc there are plenty of good ideas that should be implemented as part of the vanilla game.
2. Adding higher limits (buildings/road segments/moving and parked vehicles) and provide the players with actual option settings to control these increases.
3. Updating the graphics if possible - the antialiasing and LoD is truly horrendous.

In essence. Hardware has moved quite a bit since 2015, and this game would really benefit from taking advantage of this progress and I for one would consider both reinstalling and even buying some of the newer DLC's if CO could just convince me they haven't abandoned the game. That being said I would much rather have CO develop a proper successor to this game.

Edit: Apparently some people here don't want QoL for this game but are perfectly content with piss-poor DLCs.

 

[ASGeek2012]

With only a very few exceptions, I've found the current limits to be adequate to build a fairly large city. I've built upwards of 250K residents without hitting any of the vehicle, node, or segment limits. When the city gets about that size, that's when the game starts to slow down for me, and I have a fairly beefy CPU.

So am I just the odd man out that I don't see these issues? What sizes are other people building to that are bumping up against these limits?

 

[MarkJohnson]

It sounds like a good idea at first glance, but adding some of the mods will make performance worse than it already is. If they could have done it, they already would have. They have added a lot mods to the game already. It is just plain overloaded right now. This game was actually overloaded on release day. The minimum requirements wouldn't let you fully play the vanilla game and recommended requirements would lag end game.

It is time to retire this game and give us Cities: Skyline 2.

I figured it would be out by now, when they were talking about having something in the works soon a couple of years ago. I assume it should be near ready by now. I just hope they weren't starting something new at that time.

Plus they couldn't sell such a DLC, as everything would need be added to the base game. You couldn't make a game mechanic DLC without making a whole new separate game.

 

[UsmanSyed]

I think work must have started on Cities 2 in 2019, and they must be in pre-alpha or alpha stage by now. There hasn't been any update to the game since March 2019, which means that work on the current version has stopped and they are focused on somewhere else. With the new community manager, and no big release currently in sight, I believe announcement will be coming soon.

 

[jcitron]

I doubt the program/product has been forgotten and abandoned. This is too popular and brought then a lot of fame, and fortune. Why kill it when the going is still good.? What is up is there's probably a lot going on that we're not privy to, and in general, if the staff aren't hanging around the forums it means they're doing what they've been paid to do and that is to work on a new version.

I have no issues at all building large cities either as other here have said. Two of my cities have 450K and 550K residents. I haven't run into any limits that I can find, although, they take a long time to load up and are definitely getting sluggish. This is understandable given the size and complexity of my cities. I don't have block after block of buildings and instead build neighborhoods interspersed with forests, parks, and other things that make up a state or county rather than a single huge city.

In regards to DLC, there are two kinds. There are the custom packages created by Colossal Order. These are rare because they themselves focus on the game mechanics and rarely on the content and instead left the content creation mostly for the community to supply for free up on the Steam Workshop. From what I remember way, way back in the early days is this was going to be their policy right from the start.

With the last point, this is a ball of sugar and worms at the same time. Sure, we have plenty of goodies to choose from, but the content varies in quality not due to the hard work of the content-creator, but instead due to their skill level and experience. This why we see some stuff that looks great, has great LOD, and works well, while other assets that can bring the game to its knees as they melt the underlying computer.

It's true that the program has made assets obsolete, but that's the nature of a program like this. Scripts too play a big part in performance, and scripts can cause all kinds of issues overall especially when they begin to stomp not only on the program code, but also on each other as we've seen with Workshop DLC breaking and causing things not to load properly. New versions will always break something. At least we have dedicated users such as Avanya (congrats!) to help us and provide the list of broken assets. The list, by the way, is far shorter now than it was in the past. This is in part due to the great content creators who have updated their wares before the patches have been released. This is also the nature of community-supplied content. The company can't be responsible for what other people have created, therefore, it's up to the content-creators to keep their assets up-to-date.

I agree that there are things that need addressing such as the underlying AI agents, rails, roads, and other systems, but as I said in the beginning, we don't know exactly what the staff are doing. The program could very well be in development therefore, they're not only not hanging around the forums and schmoozing with us and instead are busy readying the product for release. They are also quiet too so that any competition that's possibly out there can't see the program before it's been released.

I'm saying much of this from experience with another simulation I use. Similar comments come up from time to time in their forums on this very subject then low and behold there's an announcement by the CEO saying there's a beta release ready for users to test, or a new product ready for people to purchase or upgrade to.

 

[AndrewT]

There hasn't been any update to the game since March 2019

Most recent minor patch is 1.13.1 released June 2020, major patch 1.13 February 2020.

 

[UsmanSyed]

My bad. I meant there hasn't been any major update since March 2020, when Sunset Harbor was released. Now that the 6th anniversary is coming in March, I can't wait to see what they have planned for us.

 

[antrachton]

With only a very few exceptions, I've found the current limits to be adequate to build a fairly large city. I've built upwards of 250K residents without hitting any of the vehicle, node, or segment limits. When the city gets about that size, that's when the game starts to slow down for me, and I have a fairly beefy CPU.

So am I just the odd man out that I don't see these issues? What sizes are other people building to that are bumping up against these limits?

I had hit buildings limit without even reaching 80K... That was completely disappointing as no city consists of skyscrapers only. And I hadn't even finished creating a city centre. And all buildings were high density... only not skyscrapers.

 

[ASGeek2012]

I had hit buildings limit without even reaching 80K... That was completely disappointing as no city consists of skyscrapers only. And I hadn't even finished creating a city centre. And all buildings were high density... only not skyscrapers.

That should not be happening and indicates a problem with your game. Are you just building normally by zoning or are you using some sort of ploppable RICO mod? In fact, are you using mods at all? If so, one of those mods is likely the source of your problem.

EDIT: After going away for a bit I realized I may be interpreting your use of the term "building" too strictly. I was thinking the buildings that go up in your zones. You could have also meant things like service buildings or parks. What's the exact error you're getting? 80K is way too small a city to be hitting up against any limits at all. I think that's even under one of the last milestones.

 

[antrachton]

That should not be happening and indicates a problem with your game. Are you just building normally by zoning or are you using some sort of ploppable RICO mod? In fact, are you using mods at all? If so, one of those mods is likely the source of your problem.

EDIT: After going away for a bit I realized I may be interpreting your use of the term "building" too strictly. I was thinking the buildings that go up in your zones. You could have also meant things like service buildings or parks. What's the exact error you're getting? 80K is way too small a city to be hitting up against any limits at all. I think that's even under one of the last milestones.

I can't really remember that now, it was 2-3 years ago. I definitely was not using mods much those days, especially no Rico or plop the growables, cos I didn't like it.
Since then I rarely build above 50k population level mostly because some lovely assets creators do remove their assets for no other reason than making a prettier version. Or at least they think it's a better looking one. But what it does to the game save is... simply rendering it unplayable, game crashes on opening or simply has too many errors to deal with.

But yes I think game counts any buildings in the game... including services. Can be checked any time throughout the game, just have the mod showing the limits. And no, I wasn't big on parks either. Yes they were sparsely there, and they are treated as buildings too I think.
And yes 80k is below at least one other milestone ... But that's how the game is limited.

 

[ASGeek2012]

I can't really remember that now, it was 2-3 years ago. I definitely was not using mods much those days, especially no Rico or plop the growables, cos I didn't like it.
Since then I rarely build above 50k population level mostly because some lovely assets creators do remove their assets for no other reason than making a prettier version. Or at least they think it's a better looking one. But what it does to the game save is... simply rendering it unplayable, game crashes on opening or simply has too many errors to deal with.

But that has nothing to do with any inherent limits in the game itself. The devs can't control whether assets remain available on the workshop. The fact that Steam insists on being able to reach the workshop over the internet to use mods and assets is a Steam thing and not something the devs can control.

But yes I think game counts any buildings in the game... including services. Can be checked any time throughout the game, just have the mod showing the limits. And no, I wasn't big on parks either. Yes they were sparsely there, and they are treated as buildings too I think.
And yes 80k is below at least one other milestone ... But that's how the game is limited.

No, the game is not THAT limited. Whatever you had going on, it was something else other than the game limits. If the game had been limited that much, the bug report forum would be full of other people complaining about it, and you would not see people reporting here that they could build cities much bigger than 80K. The fact that you seem to be the only one who hit a limit at 80K means the problem was specific to your situation or installation of the game. Since you admitted it was 2-3 years ago and you don't remember the details, I suspect you're misremembering the cause of your issue as well.

 

[icedancer]

I think work must have started on Cities 2 in 2019, and they must be in pre-alpha or alpha stage by now. There hasn't been any update to the game since March 2019, which means that work on the current version has stopped and they are focused on somewhere else. With the new community manager, and no big release currently in sight, I believe announcement will be coming soon.

There is nothing on YouTube about C:S2 on cities building games coming out in the next year or so.

 

[ASGeek2012]

There is nothing on YouTube about C:S2 on cities building games coming out in the next year or so.

I'm starting to doubt that CS2 is being worked on. If it really had been in development this long, I would think some announcement would have come out by now, or something would have leaked. My money would be on some really big DLC for the existing game.

I could be wrong, of course. They may just be very good at keeping a secret.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I'm starting to doubt that CS2 is being worked on. If it really had been in development this long, I would think some announcement would have come out by now, or something would have leaked. My money would be on some really big DLC for the existing game.

I could be wrong, of course. They may just be very good at keeping a secret.

Well, CO hired a bunch of people to work on something about a year or two after release. They have to be working on something, as they didn't need more people for making DLC, as the original crew was making 4-dlc a year in the beginning.

They have to be working on something, and they said something was in the works about the time the paradox launcher was released. Plus they purchased a cities2.com site at this time.

It takes time to write a very good game. Maybe it just asn't as ready as they though and are still fixing it. Debugging it a PITA, and very, very time consuming.

 

[ASGeek2012]

Well, CO hired a bunch of people to work on something about a year or two after release. They have to be working on something, as they didn't need more people for making DLC, as the original crew was making 4-dlc a year in the beginning.

They have to be working on something, and they said something was in the works about the time the paradox launcher was released. Plus they purchased a cities2.com site at this time.

It takes time to write a very good game. Maybe it just asn't as ready as they though and are still fixing it. Debugging it a PITA, and very, very time consuming.

Yeah, I didn't know/forgot about them buying the domain. So you may be right.

I hope you're right, actually.

 

[UsmanSyed]

I know there hasn't been any announcement yet, but there has been signs that it could be coming soon. They being quiet for so long, having the word 'Sunset' in the title, offering free base game on Epic, and they have pretty much said that adding new gameplay elements is not possible as they will basically have to start from scratch. Of course I know nothing of certain, But I think annoucement might be coming sometime this year, though release date can be bit far off.

 

[Four eyed fish]

CO have to maintain and build on a game run on a wide variety of systems. They can't just abandon some on the lower spec systems that were in spec on release day. They'd have far more legitimate complaints if they did.
Again, I appreciate the support and development this game has received. If they removed legacy assets that look out dated now, I'm sure there would be also be complaints.