I'd love to ask Colossal Order how they got it so right while EA/Maxis got it so wrong. They made the game they knew people would want, were very transparent about development, let the game be shown and talked about prior to release, and now they have a success on their hands. The formula seems pretty simple, and yet it's been over decade since we've had a proper city builder. The developers deserve every bit of money and praise they earn.

Colossal Order had the fortune of seeing the mistakes that Maxis made with the Sim City reboot and avoided said mistakes. But yes, Skylines is a great game. I think this may be the first city building game where I spend a lot of time to build a massive metropolis instead of spending just a few hours on a city then stepping away.

Wow, this game seems to be getting some great reviews. Also, the user score on Metacritic is 9.8, which is the highest I've ever seen there. Although, to be fair, I'm sure a large part of that score is people scoring it high to 'stick it to EA', or whatnot.

Regardless, March is turning out to be a pretty good month for games...

I'm waiting for the Quick Look before I buy but I'm pretty hyped.

I accidentally put in 5 hours already. It seems to be everything I wanted out of a city builder.

I saw someone streaming this the other day and it REALLY clicked with me. I doubt my PC can run this game right now but this may be the city building game I've always wanted.

Heres a hint: Take your time building your city and try to plan. I kind of rushed a bit and ended up with serious traffic issues that I only made worse by adding buses on to the roads. Every thing went on fire because fire trucks could not get places on time. My city is now a pile of garbage.

Next one will be way more sensible!

Really looking forward to picking this up soon. Working through a few backlog games at the moment, but plan on getting this soon.

It'll be nice to have a game like this to just relax and play. Most games I play regularly (CS:GO and the like) are competitive and aren't always 'calming' games lol. Can't wait to just kick back and build a city in a game that looks to be really well-rounded (especially w/ mod support).

I've only sunk an hour or so in but, man, this game makes a terrific first impression. I was a little surprised to see just how much it cribs from SimCity — right down to the tilt-shift rendering — but it executes on those ideas so well and adds just enough of its own to get away with it. The only real knocks I have against it are that aligning roads seems much more finicky than it was in the rebooted SimCity, and I don't think it pulls off the tilt-shift look with nearly as much style. Those are fairly minor gripes compared to what it does right, though.

I'll add in that the game does seem to be great (especially at $29.99). And give it a week or two for people to really start building mods in the workshop and this game will be endless.

Just fyi, don't plan your city around a small roundabout that connects to every part of the town. Trying to get to 8k population to buy a piece of land next to me so I can try and un-fuck that traffic jam.

Yeah, I've avoided a plague (or whatever happens when too many bodies pile up) by making cemetaries on the outer bit of my town as to not deal with the traffic hell, but it was definitely something I completely ignored and am now paying for.

Also, there's apparently a "mod" type included with the game for unlimited money and everything unlocked, if you really just wanna go crazy. I might try it out sometime if/when my town crashes and burns.

According to PC World, apparently there's already a Workshop mod that unlocks all 25 tiles to use too.

Seems cool, I would like to know more.

I'm curious to know how this compares to some of the other city builders that have come out in the last few years? I completely passed on the Simcity reboot so the last great city building game to me was Simcity 4 (although Tropico is awesome in it's own way)

The Kotaku review just went up, and it seems like design doesn't really influence the traffic issue too much. This is a shame, since it sounds like the one flaw in an otherwise fantastic game. Hopefully this gets fixed quickly and then we can finally let Maxis rest in peace.

@pkmnfrk:

"I have parts of the city with a fire station or cemetery on every street corner, and as absurd as that is, those services still aren't being performed" There's your problem, the city would probably function better and the services would do their job if he removed some of them. As it is he is probably creating gridlocks with all the service vehicles.

Public transit is also a good solution for a lot of traffic problems, and reading that review I doubt he made good use of it.

Its pretty odd to find that these developers have their headquarters in the same town that i live in (population number is about 220k inhabitants). Great to see finnish developers making their mark in the world (besides Remedy, Redlynx etc.).

Have read that the development team is about 16 people which is quite a small number compared to the amount of people who were developing the latest sim city game at Maxis.

I saw the trailer and tried to buy this but it wasn't out for like four more days but now it's out and you guys apparently liked it so now I'm stoked.

This game is pretty damn great.

That's exactly how you want a city builder to play!

@finaldasa: The game shouldn't be that tough to run. It's a Unity game isn't it?

@hassun: Why whould that matter? The game is probably more CPU limited.

This game is awesome and has builder tools to boot. It only needs a few tweaks to the lane switching UI and more unique "stuff" (which will be addee by paid DLC Latein I guess. At around 30 EUR this is still a bargain however.

This game borrows so much from SimCity, all they really did was tweak a few things and fix the main issues people had with SimCity.

It's a great game, but saying Maxis/EA got things so wrong is incorrect. CO had an amazing formula already build by EA/Maxis to work with, that is why their game is so good.

I hope they QL this.

Hm, added to wishlist. For now, Monhun!

Knowing the formula is very different from executing well on it. What makes this game even more impressive is that Colossal Order is only 13 people.

This game is pretty awesome. My first city is a complete mess, but its fun learning.

Now I really want this game!! I would want them to add disasters to the game, day/night cycle, and ability to edit the map during gameplay. I'm not sure if it is possible to do that last one but it would be a great addition.

@wuddel: In my experience they usually play well with lower end PCs.

This runs silky smooth, crashed the game setting up a bus route though that glitched and decided to take the highway route, which probably caused the error..... but other than that it runs great and is just a good core city sim experience. It lacks the TLC of Sim City 5 (such as day night cycles) but these can be patched/modded in down the line so I am excited. Traffic is a bit of a bitch though.

I hope Vinny and Alex specifically QL this

I've managed to mostly un-jam my traffic via liberal re-routing of highways for better on/off ramps (using the three-way exchanges + roundabouts).

I also annihilated my industrial sector and replaced it almost entirely with offices, only putting a little bit of industrial near my cargo train yard. Also replaced dumps with incinerators. I also set up a hydroelectric dam down-river and accidentally flooded a highway bridge that I had to re-construct higher because vehicles would get stuck.

I somehow lost about 8 hours to this game last night.

You get exactly as much out of traffic as you put into your network design. Being agent based, you also get exactly as much out of your services as traffic allows so if you are bad at designing road systems your service agents are stuck in jams instead of effectively servicing inhabitants.

The lane switching AI is exactly an idealized driver (minus a zipper merge that the AI disparagers want but is slightly unrealistic): they will get in the lane they need at the next intersection when they pass the previous intersection. If a lane does nothing useful at downstream intersections, noones going to want to use it. If you balance your downstream network with measured divestments of traffic you can get a good lane usage balance going. If you cram a highway into a side street, the traffic pattern on the highway is going to look a lot like the side street, ie slow and 1-2 lanes.

It's simply awesome. They have done everything SimCity did but better, then added and tweaked things on top of that to make it even better.

One thing I had not realized at first was how much you can do with the Asset Editor. You can actually fiddle around with roads there to create custom intersections, roundabouts etc. You can also make new buildings, which will then populate your world as any other building does.
On top of that, you can use this site here to get map of anywhere you want, then import it into the game to play on. How cool is that!

In relation to the asset editor, less than a day on the store and there's 700 intersections alone in the Workshop.

Custom round-a-bouts and imported grid referenced cities? My dream of destroying Milton Keynes could become reality!

Joking aside this wasn't on my radar until yesterday and now the more I hear the more I want to jump in. I'll probably pick this up in a bit purely based on good word of mouth, this is the game surprise I like.

just don't fuck with the dams

I'm definitely going to pick this up once I churn through my immediate backlog of Hotline Miami 2, Ori and Helldivers. I'd actually rather play this at the moment than all those three, but I've got to prioritize what I've already spent my money on.

Also, yay for another successful Finnish developer!

Welp, that's good to know. It's still a bit weird that emergency vehicles follow the same model, but hey!

I've picked it up now, so as soon as I'm done with Ori, I'll have to dig into this.

@skip124: well I'm sold on buying this game

@jaqen_hghar said:

That is really cool.

I have gotten a massive problem, if anyone knows something that could help it would be appreciated.

I built a huge hydroelectric dam that was supposed to make me able to free up the space where my wind turbines were built. The dam was estimated to provide 112 MW, and it started out providing like 140 MW. So I went ahead and tore down all my wind turbines. Just a minute later my dam now fluctuates between providing 0 and 48 MW, which of course leaves the city powerless!

Is there a bug with the dams? The only thing I can think of is I built two freshwater pumps upstream. I bulldozed them but the problem is still there. :(

Edit: Now it causes massive flooding DOWNSTREAM from the dam. Fucking what? The simulation must be fucked, I guess that is what is wrong.

I've never played one of these types of games before, but all the positive reception is making me want to try it out! Added to my wishlist.

@honkalot: The simulation is just a bit slow, as far as I can tell. It has actual fluid dynamics (albiet not necessarily using true to life physics), so it takes time for the dam to settle. I imagine that in your case the water has drained, and the body of water it previously emptied into is now flowing upstream. Eventually the power output seems to stabalise, as well as the water (sometimes disastrously).

Yeah this. All the footage I've seen of this game makes it look like they sure borrowed a lot from the new Sim City too. I also liked Sim City.

The weird road pathing bug that's in that Kotaku article actually looks pretty damn similar to Sim City too. Basically all the cars that wanted to turn at a junction only used the lane on that side of the road and left all the other lanes empty. Weird.

@pcorb: You were right, it resolved itself after a few weeks.

I think I started it by building pumps upstream from it, so that seems like a good thing to avoid in the future. :)

I am absolutely terrible at this but I'm so addicted. I haven't had this feeling since playing SimCity on Windows 95 in elementary school.

@honkalot: I have all my water pumps upstream and it was fine after the water settled, but then again I had them like, miles up the river and the dam as far South as I could get it. It flooded a highway bridge (had to rebuild it higher) but other than that, the water settled pretty fast and I haven't had a problem with it since. Even have a few turbines and two ship ports a bit downstream of it too.

From what I've seen around, it really does depend on where you place it. Too near where a river splits and the water will just go down the other river, apparently.

Also found this off reddit:

Edit: Actually thinking about it, I think it floods a tiny bit of my city (a few apartments by the river) whenever I load the game and the water re-settles, because it's fine after a few minutes but I noticed them complaining after I loaded my city.

Massive negative: No Autosave as far as I can tell, just lost a lot of progress when the game crashed on me (the 2nd game crash might I add in about 4hours play) kind of frustrating.

@yesiamaduck: Workshop has a configurable autosave mod available (just change a number in a text file, default is 5m). Though since it's a mod, it'll disable achievements if you care about 'em. Sucks about the crashing; I haven't had one yet (about 13h in).