According to Paradox the game has sold 250,000 copies in it’s first 24 hours. Good for the devs!
I’m astonished at how careless my citizens are with fire.
Muddling along in my first “real” city and broke 7,500 people last night. Also had my first bout of “Let me do this… and this… and… oh crap, it’s 1:15am?”
There doesn’t seem to be a good way to connect the initial highway to a four lane road. Once my town started growing, I had a massive traffic jam there and was trying to break it. Vehicles won’t use ramps because there’s no median so they can ignore the ramp and still use the intersection. I finally made it a little better by moving the incoming traffic connection down a way so at least both intersections weren’t right next to one another. I suppose the REAL solution is a lot of demolition and restructuring of the entire junction but I couldn’t bring myself to wipe out that much town. I did go through and switch a lot of roads to one-ways which was a big help.
I wish there was a way to reclaim polluted land. I have a strip that was supposed to be agriculture but missed it with the districting tool and, before I noticed it, was already turning purple. Where’s my Superfund grant?
I just made my first metro network and it’s way too easy. I realize in this game we’re not exactly focused on realistic construction times and such - you can instantly build a highway network and demolish buildings, which will regrew in a matter of days, so I get that. But even factoring that in, Metros are too easy to use. You can place stations all over the place - they only need a tiny 1x1 space for their stairwell entrance and then you have no limitation at all in terms of placing your tubes. You could instantly and easily have a city with a grid of subway tubes covering everything with no regard for traffic jams or needing to place things carefully or worrying about how placing new things will prevent other things from being built there. They’re more expensive than busses but not by a huge amount - since I’ve already got well over 3 million dollars I could build the biggest subway network in the world and not feel it.
I think that if Metros took a few weeks to construct, and they had to disrupt the businesses above them for the duration of the construction, and they created traffic problems when digging across streets, etc. then it might be an interesting challenge to place metro lines optimally. But then if I’m allowing for that, it doesn’t really make sense to instantly demolish and rebuild a city block, or to construct a highway out of thin air all in piece.
A game where actions like that took time to develop and build is actually one I’d like to play. I wonder how flexible the modding system is, if someone could implement a system like that. It would definitely add to the realism and challenge of construction.
Anyway, that’s one of those things that makes things too easy but you have the choice not to do it. I’m only going to build metros in the high density areas of my city where they’d make sense, and not make them a mass transit utopia of Vietcong Tunnels.
I hope they have an expansion that fleshes out mass transit somewhat, or just patch improvements. I really want to be able to pull up a screen for each sort of mass transit - see all of my bus routes laid out statistically, which one is seeing the most passengers, what the average transit time/speed is, all sorts of stuff like that. And I would like to assign a certain percentage of my busses to each route. The system that automatically manages how many busses per route doesn’t seem to work very well - I’ve seen one of my bus stops have 150 people standing around it and only a few busses on the route, and I’ve seen other routes where 5 busses are stuck behind each other in traffic each carrying 0-5 passengers on the same route.
Couple things I’d like to see (and given the modability I suspect I may eventually):
Day/night/rush hour traffic cycles
An easier way of placing street grids. Yes, in real life, they build buildings to fit the grid. But we all know how in all city sims, there is an ideal block spacing to get the max building sizes.
Also echoing what someone else said about highways tapering to 4 lanes
Oh and an easier way to place the highways so I can have the option of placing both directions at once.
Whereas, in real life, that’ll buy your local government a subway ticketing kiosk and turnstile.
Days pass so quickly that I think a day/night cycle would make me dizzy. Even at the slowest speed, it’d be constant slow throbbing of light and dusk. I guess you could cheat and not make day/night match the actual clock (like how it can take a kid two days to walk to school) but then you probably wouldn’t want to link it to traffic patterns.
There is a smoke detector policy you can implement for your districts. It cost you revenue (you are giving away smoke detectors) but it should reduce fires. How it all balances out with your fire department and such I don’t know.
The first Railroad Tycoon made it so a single 24 hour day passed every month or every year, forgot which. You could think of it as the game showing you one average day out of the larger time unit and it worked just fine.
The Finnish dev team is just 13 people, and 250k copies means something like 4-5M euro after Steam takes their cut. Even with Paradox also taking their cut, I foresee some nice bonuses for everybody this year.
I watched a Let’s Play where I think I recall them implementing some forestry policy in their industrial district. Whatever it was it caused a lot of trees to be planted and it seemed they got rid of pollution.
Not 100% sure about the details but I am pretty sure there is a way to get purple land back to green.
I originally implemented it city wide and lost about 90% of my revenue, so I turned it off. I finally turned it back on just for my downtown area where traffic is heaviest and it’s working out ok. I just think it’s hilarious how many fires one city block can manage to set at a time.
I think you can mitigate the cost of smoke detectors by lowering funding of your fire department. Again though not sure how that all balances out.
What difficulty level are you playing on?
I have not tried the higher difficulty setting but I am assuming it makes things more expensive. While that does not solve most of your complaints you may find it more interesting if the game at least made balancing your economy and building more difficult.
If you try it let us know how it goes.
I tried plopping some trees down on polluted sites myself and mainly got a bunch of stunted-looking trees out of it. Haven’t tried making it a forestry district though and maybe even my planting method takes longer to reclaim the soil than I was expecting.
Speaking of fires, last night my police station managed to go ablaze. Luckily, it was right next to my fire station.
That’s what the dev said on a message board.
Really what you need is several simultaneous clocks/calendars like SimCity. The dates would fly by to simulate construction and budget activities. Separately you’d have a 24 hour clock that even on the fastest settings would still require a few minutes to cycle through a day. IOW, a day according to the clock that tracks traffic and the sun/moon might actually take a week or longer according to the calendar that tracks the budget calendar and construction.
Where do you set difficulty levels? I didn’t know there was one. It doesn’t ask in the creation of a new game.
There isn’t, but the developers added a “hard” mode mod. You can access it via the mods menu.
Mods disable achievements though, in case you care.
The hard mode makes things more expensive and the population ornery.
Thanks. I knew I had seen something in the menus when poking around about a more difficult mode but I ignored it and forgot it was a mod.
I understand why mods disable achievements, but I sort of wish there were some way to have mods that don’t. Hard mode really shouldn’t, for instance. I downloaded an autosave mod, but it also disables achievements. I’m not sure how they would make it work with user-added mods; perhaps a way to appeal to the developers if you want your mod to function with achievements or something. Whatever.
I’m not terribly good at these sorts of games (I’m terrible at roads and traffic management) but I’ve managed to built a nice little mini-opolis of 28,000 people. My residential demand has flatlined, but I have had incredible industrial demand which I’ve been trying to satisfy with office zones since I don’t want a whole lot of heavy industry around. I think I need to start building lots of industrial/office parks off in new areas. I’m worried about commutes, but my original downtown is getting cramped.
Do offices satisfy industrial demand? They’re color coded blue, and demand is also color coded (blue = commercial), so I thought there were 3 forms of commercial and only 1 of industrial.