Steam version also has better deals on DLC since you can buy keys from other retailers (WinGame Store, Game Billet, Fanatical, etc) that have deeper discounts than Steam has natively. For example, $6.49 is the lowest Green Cities has been on Steam but both Game Billet and WinGame Store have had it for $1.99 (with a Steam key)
600+ hours in and with (I believe) all meaningful DLC, here’s my ranking of what order I would buy them if I were starting over and could only buy one at a time.
I may have lengthier reviews to post in the next day or so, but for now:
1 After Dark for bicycles
2 Green Cities for the recycling center
3 Airports for double-capacity buses
4 Park Life for the amusement park
5 Mass Transit for 2- and 4-lane highways
6 Natural Disasters for general awesomeness even with disasters disabled
7 Industries for the postal service
8 Sunset Harbor for fishing
9 Campus for the football stadium / game day event
10 Concerts because it’s sort of an upgradeable area and also an event
11 Snowfall. Meh. I use nothing from this.
For sale prices, on Steam you’re looking for 50% off, for steam keys from WinGameStore et al you’re looking for 60% off.
EDIT: I just placed my very first ever industry main building to start an industry zone yesterday. It has not progressed yet, but once it does I expect the Industry DLC will move higher in my rankings.
You can check historic Steam prices at steamdb.info.
Out of curiosity I loaded up my Boom Town save, the one where buses are first unlocked. (1800 pop for the map I’m using.) Placed a bus depot, set a line, switched the buses to Airport Doubledecker, and boom. Clicked the first bus that came out (even though I could see it worked by the distinctive airport paint job) and it did indeed say 0/60.
So it looks like the airport buses (double capacity), airport subway (slightly faster and 180 capacity vs vanilla 150) and airport trains (similar upgrades as subway) are completely unrelated to airport areas. Once you have the airports DLC you just get them from the start if you want them.
I have never, ever trusted third-party sellers of Steam keys. There have been waaay too many scams in the past and I simply never feel comfortable with these third-party sellers. I’m not risking my whole Steam account getting banned because I bought some sketchy keys to save a few dollars.
Maybe some are totally legit but I can’t keep up with the good from the bad.
That’s just me though.
That’s basically you. The sites I mentioned are authorized resellers, approved by Paradox to sell game keys retail.
Even if they were 100% fraudulent, Valve wouldn’t ban an account over them. Getting your account banned on Steam requires fraud through Steam such as using a VPN to falsify your region and buy games through the Steam store at cheaper regional pricing. If you were to buy and activate a fraudulent game key purchased elsewhere (grey-market sites I won’t name) at worse you’d get your individual key revoked. Which makes sense since you wouldn’t want a situation where I can give you a key, you activate it and I just got you banned. Valve wants to know that you were actively and intentionally trying to cheat them before they take decisive action.
Yup. I have too many games to want to test it.
Plus, if I like a game, I want them to get the profits.
Yes, Steam would nullify the key but not ban you, AFAIK.
The best way for that was to patronise the Paradox store itself, as then they got the store cut also. However it is currently down for a major rework.
So really any of the authorised resellers or Steam would be fine until then!
I’m a little lost on what you mean. You posted about the game being on sale so you don’t seem to be opposed to buying stuff on sale. Third party retailers are buying the Steam keys from the publishers so the publishers are getting paid and making profits. Authorized resellers are getting their keys from Paradox and paying whatever Paradox and the store agreed to. It’s just another avenue for Paradox to sell copies of their product.
You’re right…I do not know how the profits are distributed.
It seems shady that someone can sell a Steam key for less than Steam. Someone is losing money. I can’t believe Steam is cool with such an arrangement so I assume the developer is the one losing cash.
It’d be like Walmart selling Item-X for $10 but you can get a coupon online for $8 and go into Walmart and get that item. Seems nuts to me.
But I do not know how that works with Steam.
I do remember, in the past, scams with Steam keys so I am not keen on using those dubious sites to save $2.
YMMV
The grocery store I frequent will accept coupons from competitors.
Many stores will match prices with Amazon, provided they’re matching with Amazon itself and not a third-party seller.
Valve produces the keys for 3rd party retailers (and bundles, etc). Valve does so free of charge as both an incentive for publishers to use the Steam ecosystem and to stymie other stores from creating/using their own clients. It used to be that most stores had their own clients/launchers or offered direct downloads but Valve managed to leverage their free key generation into making “You get a Steam key” the standard.
Valve generates keys for publishers, publishers sell keys to retailers, retailers sell keys to consumers. If Valve thought a publisher was abusing key generation, they would either have a talk with the publisher about changing the MSRP on Steam or else cease giving them keys (or both). If a store sells a key for 80% off, it’s because a publisher sold THEM the keys and maybe the publisher expects to make it back in quantity or maybe the retailer is taking a loss to drive people into making GameBillet accounts or whatever. Just like any other store.
There’s nothing dubious or shady about these stores. There’s zero risk in using them. I don’t care if you don’t use them but brushing authorized retailers as some dubious risk that’ll get you banned from Steam just because you admittedly don’t understand the business is pretty out there.
I’ll leave it at that since the last time this came up (in the free game thread) a mod eventually said it was derailing the thread but I felt it was on topic here since it’s someone saying that buying Cities: Skylines keys and DLC from 3rd party retailers is “dubious” and a potential account risk.
Campus DLC
Yesterday devolved into the Campus Decade for my city, in that I figured out how to max out a campus area but it took 8 game years to do it. The whole time I was getting progressively more annoyed at how expensive it was ($45k per week, for years!) but then in the end it snapped back to moderately profitable: My finished campus area costs $68k/week but generates $70k/week in tuition, for a net profit around $1600. Meh.
(EDIT: On testing now, the two policies Student Health Care and Free Lunch @ $6/week/student was costing me $18k+/week for my 3k+ students. Turning both off doesn’t seem to lower my enrollment, so that’s now more like 20k profit. Nice!)
How the Campus area works
First let me say that Campus areas are HUGE. If you’re thinking about buying this DLC to add a college to your city, figure a minimum size of like 50x50. Mine is as efficient and minimalized as I could get it and it’s double that: Two full giant city blocks in my grid design. And it would be far more if you want to give your students any space between buildings or from the street, which I did not.
How it works: You paint a campus district, place a main building and then build many duplicates of all the buildings it lets you at level 1 until you reach the absurdly high Attractiveness requirement for level 2. (200 for level 2, where each giant 10x6 building is worth like 20.) In addition to Attractiveness, most campus buildings also provide student housing, not just dormitories. Dorms house 300, study hall 400; the big buildings either give you none or range from 50 for clubs (chess, math, etc…) up to 600 for the auditorium. If you want to handle thousands of students, you need many large buildings.
Students are finicky and need to be coerced to attend your campus area. First, delete any vanilla University on your map that’s anywhere near your campus area. You won’t get any students, otherwise, until the current generation has babies who grow up to go to college. But if you delete the nearby competition, those displaced students will hop right over.
You also should strongly consider applying the Boost Education policy city-wide. And finally, having easy mass transit access sure doesn’t seem to hurt.
When I started my test run I did not delete the nearby vanilla university, and I did not apply the Boost Education policy. I just placed a reasonable number of all the buildings it let me – 2 dormitories, a study hall, a ‘Futsal’ club (lame), etc… There’s a separate research mechanic you also have to satisfy to upgrade, which takes years, so fine, I let it run. I only got barely 200 students, and you need 500 to get to level 2. My student population was stable, between like 185 - 215, for like two solid years. No progress.
So I plopped down an extra Dormitory, and immediately 20 new students showed up. 20 happens to be the attractiveness value of a dorm. I tried plopping a few more study halls, same deal. Around 20 new students showed up per building. Leaning into the mechanic, I just kept plopping until I had 500 students. Note that after these plop-boosted enrollment spikes, the numbers remained stable. Delete a building and those 20 students will leave.
At this point I had 12 dorms, 6 study halls, 15 futsal clubs, etc… Just preposterous numbers, but I needed them to force students to show up. I remember around level 3, I would show something like “600/800 students, 1800/450 attractiveness.” Just way overbuilt to force butts in seats. I was over 2700 attractiveness by the end, I think, despite the max reqs being 1800 each students and attractiveness.
At level 4 I finally wised up and deleted the nearby vanilla university and applied the Boost Education policy city-wide. Immediately my student population doubled, from like 1500 to 3100. Clearly I had been doing it wrong, and now all my problems were solved.
In the end, you need 1800 attractiveness for a max campus, and you must maintain it or the campus will downgrade itself. That’s a shitload of buildings, and they’re all like hospital-sized. You could just put in a dozen or so of the three 5x5 clubs (math, chess, and ‘futsal’), which are worth 75 each, so that’s technically possible but looks and feels artificial. And that won’t house very many students.
Oh, and the University architectural theme was apparently Brutalism. Hopefully Trade School buildings look better.
After maxing out my campus area I pared down my buildings closer to the minimum requirement (2055/1800 vs 2700/1800), and my enrollment seemed to hold fine. Arranged all the buildings in as small a grouping as possible. Came up with the perfect plan to build it from scratch but then, meh, I said screw and just saved my campus test run as my live build. I’m confident I could rebuild it according to my layout, but why bother? Besides, in the decade I ran the test my severe traffic problems somewhat corrected themselves. Win-win! I’d rather have a trade school for the tourism bonus, but the university is fine I guess.
My final layout includes:
1 main building (12x12)
8 dormitories (10x6)
4 study halls (8x12)
4 cafeterias (8x5)
2 outdoor study areas (12x12)
2 laboratories (12x10)
1 each gymnasium, auditorium, bookstore, library, media lab, and commencement office, all similar size to the dorms and study halls.
the 3 unique ‘school’ buildings, which are huge: 24x13, 28x12 and 16x24. Just ridiculous.
And, of course, a football stadium: 24x30
Then I filled in any empty space between buildings with clubs and statues (5x5), fountains (6x6), and groundskeeping (4x3).
That ends up being two full 54x58 city blocks in my city completely packed with buildings. I think I’m voting thumbs down on the Campus DLC. It’s just too sprawling. It dwarfs my friggin’ airport area!
Here’s a video showing my campus area, starting with the whole city for scale and ending with some bonus crowdwatching.
Copy / paste from another thread - more relevant here:
I’ve loved city building games since the original Sim City on Commodore 64. I’ve played a bunch; I continue to download games like Banished and Depraved and Frostpunk and Civ and all that, but nothing has ever come closed to Cities: Skyline. My problem is I modded it to high heaven so many times with so many extra assets and tools that I don’t even know how to use that I pretty much seized the engine and it just stopped working worth a poop. I’d gone through waves of subscribing and unsubscribing and had some rehab success and continued to have fun, but this holiday I decided to buy a bunch of DLC stuff and take them out for a spin. To that end … I unsubscribed to every last thing that I ever subscribed to in the Workshop and deleted every save file and temp file I could find related to the game and completely re-downloaded and re-installed everything.
I miss my mods so much.
I’m pretty sure I have in mind the most important ones (Move-It, Find-it, Better Menus, etc) but I’m not sure I even remember all I had. I’m going to steer clear of assets (maybe I’ll go there to round out my public works) but I’ll just stick with vanilla buildings for the time being.
Anyone else still playing this? Modders? What are the don’t-miss mods?
Here’s a user-maintained list of common mods, to make sure you don’t pick any that are broken or bad:
That aside you might check our the game’s forum:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/cities-skylines.859/
Yeah, I always kind of dread a new DLC release as half the mods stop working, some will crash old games, and often the modders have long abandoned their work.
Plus you can’t just unsubscribe some mods as they will break your saved game once you unsubscribe.
I think I can say I went all vanilla in my only city, over 800 hours worth. I did use one asset from the workshop, the yumble spui interchange. It handles moderately heavy traffic with little slowdown for any cars if you “cheat” and have no lights or stop signs. I don’t think I have to worry about new DLC breaking it, but even still, knock wood.
I used it specifically so I could go modless. You can’t make that spui or its functional equivalent without mods; you need road anarchy to place it and move it to align it. But it’s all vanilla pieces so you can place the finished workshop asset without needing any mods at all. Techincally you kind of need TM:PE to control it, but I don’t bother. It’s good enough even with some lane issues.
I’m not sure if that makes my build vanilla or not. Mods were used to make the asset, but I still get achievements by default because no mods were ever active in my game. (I did try a few times, but my use of mods just about always made whatever problem worse. I was particularly bad with TM:PE. Every intuitive attempt I made to fix traffic consistently made it so much worse. Even the obvious fix to the SPUI made things slightly worse.)
I tell you, that yumble SPUI was a real gamechanger for my modest 130k population city. Unfortunately I kind of lost interest when I discovered that growing my city further wouldn’t increase the number of cars or people out on the streets; you reach the max number of objects around 120k population, I think I read. The thing I loved about the game was making bigger and bigger throngs of people and cars moving fluidly through the city. Expanding further would just lower the density of people-per-block, which defeats the whole point I was playing for in the first place.
I’d say definitely don’t use mods that have not been updated for the current game version! For those that have, odds are the modders are active and will update them soon after a further game update.
You can see my link above to the bad mod list.