I decided to wait for a good sale.
“Painting cities” is basically what I did in SimCity 4.
I prefer playing with unlimited money, but the underlying simulation needs to be legit. CS2 has good bones, but it’s not yet fleshed out. I’ll put it on the shelf and watch the patch notes and forums for progress.
I like it, but I’m also thinking back to how bare bones the original CS was when it first came out. And even with all the DLC, it still required extensive modding to approach working well. I feel like the larger CSII community has become “toxic” because they were expecting CSII to have been release as if it were an upgraded CS with all the mods and DLCs already seamlessly baked in.
I think I’ve kind of reached the limits of the current game. I’ve built a sprawling city of around 230,000 and it looks very pretty, but also a but bland and generic without any sort of landmarks, distinctive buildings, points of interest, or custom props. And the simulation itself has slowed to a crawl so it’s not really fun to watch cars and people slowly creep around town.
I’m sure my interest will build as new content and options are added.
I might try building a small town just to see if I get a sense of a living city where people commute back and forth to school and work with rush hour peaks and whatnot. Because right now I just get a sense of a city that’s always busy and where it snows all the time.
You’re not alone.
The first DLC is out now and consensus is that it blows.
Mods and editors are now out in beta form, so that’s good, I guess. Still needs a bit of polish to make them easier to use.
The “Beach Properties” DLC is totally lame. Basically all it is is a new light residential zone of upscale suburban homes and a few plop-able mansions. Nothing that stands out as particularly “beachy” to me. They could have added a whole bunch of new assets, transportation options and industries that I typically associate with “beach towns” like The Hamptons, Cape Cod, or the Jersey Shore - stilt houses, weathered beach houses, ferries, piers, fishing industries, seaside restaurants and bars, hotels, boardwalks, etc.
Another thing I find odd about SCII is that even though it’s supposed to be larger than SC, for some reason it feels smaller. Almost like they made everything larger so less of it fits on a larger map.
I really liked the first game so I’m trying to be optimistic about this game. But to be honest, I’m not seeing it at this point.
Is the economy/simulation stuff still borked?
In the pipe. Five by five.
I’ve heard that the main problem may have been a simple language issue. A lot of people are particularly annoyed that you can’t actually paint a beach area, like with sand and whatnot, with the beaches DLC. But if you go back and look at dev videos talking about the DLC while they were working on it, they call it coastal, not beach.
The blame for this language issue is probably marketing.
I’m also curious about this. As far as I’m aware, nothing in the economy/simulation has ever been improved, and continues to this day to not have any effect whatsoever on anything.
It’s not like the simulation and economy in the original CS was particularly difficult to manage. The main point was just that it existed. Without it, you may as well just be playing with unlimited money. I never found unlimited money to be interesting to play at all.
I like unlimited money, as I tend to focus on the efficiency of the transportation infrastructure and the movement of people (Cims?) around the city.
The thing is, my city of 150k people has basically ground to an unplayable halt and I have no idea wtf SC2 is crunching all these numbers for.
And all of this is made 1000x worse by not being able to turn off the damn weather! Yes, I created a city loosely inspired by New England cities like Boston. That doesn’t mean I want to play in a perpetual blizzard.
This is just the break SimCity has been waiting for!
Yeah, I know the franchise/studio is dead. Funny that the game that did it (aside from the self-owns) only lasted a single title before disappointing fans as well.
From what I understand, the original CS had a hard limit on how many individual cims were simulated. After around 125k population, you would be at the max number of cars and people walking around, and any further population growth wouldn’t change that. CS2 removed that limit completely, so that the more you grow the more moving pieces there are to keep track of.
Compounding this effect is that CS2 pathing is dynamic, as opposed to the original game that would come up with a path the cim would calculate before heading out and then it would never deviate from that path.
Something I’ve seen many times on reddit that scares me is that people who don’t like CS2 find that they also no longer like CS because they miss the new road building tools too much from CS2. Essentially ruining the first game and leaving them with no game at all that they like.
I imagine most of their core player base are like you, caring less about the economy and more about aesthetics and traffic. But I engage best with games when I have that kind of structure; activating cheat codes is always my last phase of playing a game.
In all fairness, the first game has been for like ten years now. And as I recall, it took me at least a year of mods and DLCs and custom user assets to really get into the first game. But yeah, my concern is that CS 2 will take so long to get halfway decent that it will never build up the critical mass of talented modders and asset builders to make it good.
@Johnny_Bravo - I don’t “not care” about the economy. But I also don’t want the game micromanaging an economy I can’t see. Really what I want to see in a city sim is the city feels “lived in”. What does it matter if the sim tracks the lifecycle of 150000 people if it isn’t collectively reflected in patterns of people community to and from work and/or school?
Unfortunately that is a fair concern. And I can’t imagine their decision to not use steam workshop will help the cause.
From what I’ve seen so far, the Paradox mod interface is pretty easy to use and seamlessly integrated into the game. The Steam workshop always felt a bit clunky and temperamental to me. So I’m not as worried about that.
CS1 wasn’t a perfect game by any means either. It also suffered from slow performance and bugs and crappy graphics. Much of the original game was almost unplayable without extensive mods.
It took over 2 years of paid DLC content to get stuff like disasters, day/night cycles, advanced transportation options, and other key features.
Some of the updates like large park zones, college campuses, and customizable airports didn’t come out until the past couple of years.
And really both games overpromise on their technical ability to realize the city of my dreams!
So if I want to go build a city, it’s a bit of a conundrum. Do I kick off a new city with the original CS where I have access to all the tools, features, mods, and assets I need to create the exact city I want? Or start it in CS2 where I have some cool road tools and in theory will be the future of the game, except that it all feels very vanilla and featureless and I can barely edit or modify anything. Or do I wait 5 years before starting a new a city?
I have the same conundrum, and have essentially given up playing either version of the game because both annoy me with their glaring, albeit different, flaws. All I can hope for is that, at some point, they are able to make CS2 playable, but I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon considering that updates are coming at a glacial pace. Maybe I’ll circle back to it in a year or two. I’m almost tempted to download Sim City 4. At least that game was enjoyable.