Shantys and Urban Decay

[Langeveldt]

I am pumped for the release of this game and it looks to have all the bases covered, except for one thing which has been absent from all city builders.

You can sort of tell that the game was developed in Scandinavia and everything looks a bit too clean and perfect, like I guess how many of the cities are up there. Some of the cities I want to build though are your more challenging environments and I want the buildings to reflect that more. I've spent a lot of my life in areas where "level one" houses in the game look far too good. I'm not sure how moddable things are going to be, but I think it would be great if shanties and slums developed in areas without proper sanitation and schooling. These guys pay less in taxes and huge amounts of crime develop, wherever residential is layered without services. You could have an influx of people flooding to urban centers as soon as you start the city, as happens in developing countries and that could be a huge challenge to deal with. Suddenly a load of people to house and school on a budget, or your city ends up a chaos of slums.

I'm not sure about you guys on the forum and if people can make that happen. But lets throw ideas around. I'd love to build a Detroit or a Cape Town. Mixing wealth and poverty a bit more than is evident in the game.

 

[FourWinds]

I want large ghettos in a smog filled industrial city. Really hoping they put in graffiti in high crime areas and decay later on after release. I have seen graffiti in games as crime increases before so i hope they do this.

This is the sort of example that you should feed back to CO as development of the modding tools goes on after launch. So moddable district policies and the possibility of extracted local crime figures feeding in to what subset of modded buildings are allowed to generate within a district.

CO have said that they need to know what people want from moddind by working with the community so they can expose what they can of that over time:

Skylines is being made with player freedom in mind.

That's one of the better ideas for a mod that I've heard up to now, man; I like that a lot.

 

[Vvolkov]

This is the sort of example that you should feed back to CO as development of the modding tools goes on after launch. So moddable district policies and the possibility of extracted local crime figures feeding in to what subset of modded buildings are allowed to generate within a district.

CO have said that they need to know what people want from moddind by working with the community so they can expose what they can of that over time:

Skylines is being made with player freedom in mind.

That's one of the better ideas for a mod that I've heard up to now, man; I like that a lot.

+1 here too!
More policies = more varity = more realism = more fun IMO 8)

 

[JimmiG]

Haha it's fine. I'm a stickler for etiquette when it comes to good Geography. I've been trying to explain to my Dutch girlfriend how Northern Ireland is in the same country as me, yet Ireland is a different country and uses Euros. I also make the faux pas of saying she lives in Holland, although she only lives in the Netherlands, not Holland..

I was aware Finland was different linguistically but thought all it was Scandinavia by virtue of having a similar flag to all the Scandinavian nations.

The devs keep talking about Stockholm though? So maybe this game was made in Scandinavia after all!

Yeah, "outsiders" are often unaware of distinctions that might be important to locals. Many confuse the UK, Great Britain and England, Holland and the Netherlands, America and the USA etc. and personally I have no clue about all the divisions and distinctions in e.g. Russia or China.

The publisher, Paradox Interactive is based in Stockholm, while Colossal Order, the developers are based in Tampere, Finland.

My point still stands though, the countries are overwhelmingly pristine and well kept and this is reflected in the game art. I've spent most of my adult life in Africa and I want to make cities I've experienced which are, for me, the most interesting.

To illustrate my point, this is where I used to live, and you can see the horrors of apartheid planning, and how suburbia and shanties can rub shoulders in a depressing yet very interesting way. I like how the district model in Cities Skylines could be used to create entirely different neighbourhoods.

It's indeed different. In Sweden, you often see something like this:

To the left, public housing in Le Corbusier-esque apartment blocks, to the right, wealthy detached homes. There are no shanty towns or trailer parks - You either live in a house or an apartment complex (or in an older, expensive apartment building in the downtown).
I've also travelled a bit in South-East Asia, where the cities are far more chaotic with little or no planning. It would be very hard to make a city builder that can emulate all those different types of architecture and urban growth. But maybe mods can take use there eventually.

 

[westy159]

I think this feature would need a complete redesign of how the game works. No one (and i'm thinking about the average player here) would purposefully build crap areas of their city. It needs to be forced. At the beginning the player would have no option but to zone for dirty industry, cheap commercial and low rent housing - because of lack of demand from higher class citizens and business. Over time the player would improve the quality and value of their city so that demand from richer investors would improve, allowing the old factories to be knocked down for shiny new office towers and such. We could choose to not let some areas go through redevelopment which would give us our shanty towns.

This would be a really interesting rags to riches aspect to the game. But it's not what Cities Skylines is about.

Edit: Actually I guess there is this element in that the buildings get upgraded in CSL, but the look and feel of the low level buildings is still of high wealth.
What I think this game needs is a policy to select which specific building models can be built in our districts. That way, once modders have created the custom buildings we are after, we can control the look of each district and really have cities that are built up of varying levels of class.

 

[cRAGGLE]

Shanties and favelas are probably a bit extreme to reflect low wealth housing in this kind of game. Maybe demountable homes and caravans (trailers as the yanks call them) would be better.

 

[Langeveldt]

I think this feature would need a complete redesign of how the game works. No one (and i'm thinking about the average player here) would purposefully build crap areas of their city. It needs to be forced. At the beginning the player would have no option but to zone for dirty industry, cheap commercial and low rent housing - because of lack of demand from higher class citizens and business. Over time the player would improve the quality and value of their city so that demand from richer investors would improve, allowing the old factories to be knocked down for shiny new office towers and such. We could choose to not let some areas go through redevelopment which would give us our shanty towns.

This would be a really interesting rags to riches aspect to the game. But it's not what Cities Skylines is about.

Edit: Actually I guess there is this element in that the buildings get upgraded in CSL, but the look and feel of the low level buildings is still of high wealth.
What I think this game needs is a policy to select which specific building models can be built in our districts. That way, once modders have created the custom buildings we are after, we can control the look of each district and really have cities that are built up of varying levels of class.

Completely right. It's easy to fix though, all we need are some terrible level one buildings from modders that create real squalor and give a better incentive to improve your city.. The system is there already, it's just the level one buildings look too respectable!

 

[GMeador]

I can't believe some of you guys want a cruddy looking city- on purpose. To each his own I guess. (Why doesn't anyone want an all mansions city?)
It is going to be 'interesting' when you want to build that new road, but, because of low income, you don't have the money.

 

[Langeveldt]

I don't want a cruddy looking city, but I want a city that looks cruddy if I don't manage it properly.

 

[Zed68]

I don't want a cruddy looking city, but I want a city that looks cruddy if I don't manage it properly.

+1

 

[Jursk]

There is certainly a strong demand to influence the wealth of areas. First, for their aesthetic value, poor regions (and the contrast between these and richer ones) are important. Secondly, as a source of cheap labour, low income areas are key in any industrial or agricultural economy. A pyramid of poor at the bottom and rich at the top may strike us as a bit unfair, but it undeniably gives rise to a lot of what we see around us in our own towns and cities.

This desire is not, however, worthwhile to think of as a choice where we actively influence a district so that it becomes poor; it's to default to low-wealth and to increase the wealth of other districts by way of infrastructure, services, etc. What Langeveldt said, basically. SC4 managed beautifully to let the player choose between density, which conforms to city planning and zone regulation in real life. Land value and residential income was therefore highly dynamic, giving rise to districts. What Cities XL was so horrible at was to begin with the wealth classes, as if you were the head of some capitalist apartheid. This meant greater control of the city's appearance, but for me that's an abominable thought which is incompatible with a challenging game, as well as a game where my city ends up looking beautiful. (it looks beautiful because it looks like it grew organically - not because it's a model of Manhattan)

The more realistic my city looks, the happier I am. Defaulting to poor looking houses is vital to achieve not just that look, but also to provide incentive to plan an area into high value. If you start off with high-end middle class housing, there's no indication that your workforce is unemployed and shit, and consequently no desire to improve on an already smashing look.

Currently, the crispness that has been remarked on is partly to do with an extreme colour saturation, as well as buildings predominantly built from blocks. If the distance between the camera and the buildings will take more colour fade into consideration, that will be an important contribution. If the developers won't make that, then I'll damn well mod it myself by taking every texture and dimming its values. The second element, real-looking buildings, is something that CO apparently won't deliver much on. SC4 had the architectural styles to choose from, which could be hugely influential, but there doesn't appear to be enough variety in the building mass here that it's a realistic alternative.

Edit: GMeador's "mansion" city and my cities are as far, far apart from one another as possible. CO take heed of your audience's disparate desires.

 

[Hannodb]

Haha it's fine. I'm a stickler for etiquette when it comes to good Geography. I've been trying to explain to my Dutch girlfriend how Northern Ireland is in the same country as me, yet Ireland is a different country and uses Euros. I also make the faux pas of saying she lives in Holland, although she only lives in the Netherlands, not Holland..

I was aware Finland was different linguistically but thought all it was Scandinavia by virtue of having a similar flag to all the Scandinavian nations.

The devs keep talking about Stockholm though? So maybe this game was made in Scandinavia after all!

My point still stands though, the countries are overwhelmingly pristine and well kept and this is reflected in the game art. I've spent most of my adult life in Africa and I want to make cities I've experienced which are, for me, the most interesting.

To illustrate my point, this is where I used to live, and you can see the horrors of apartheid planning, and how suburbia and shanties can rub shoulders in a depressing yet very interesting way. I like how the district model in Cities Skylines could be used to create entirely different neighbourhoods.

Cities XL is ideal for making Apartheid style cities, since you zone for different wealth areas separately.

Regarding shanty towns, I don't think the game's underlying logic will allow for that. Shanty towns develop when the influx of people are greater than the city's ability to accommodate them. Tropico did this rather well. However, in most city builders, people do not come to the city unless there is a demand for them, so it is impossible to have shacks. (Frankly, I'm glad for that. That is one bit of realism which I do not care for.)