Cities:Skylines

[Syt]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads%2Fcontent-update-1-1-0-is-live-on-retail.856707%2F

So what are you getting today?
Over 50 European style buildings
Wall-to-wall buildings enabling players to build those European streets and neighbourhoods
Three new starter maps
Tunnels, one of the community's most requested features
A number of Asset Editor additions including the ability to import custom vehicles
A multitude of smaller cosmetic additions and bug fixes.
Please note:
The European style buildings are a map theme, meaning you will need to play a map in the European biome in order to see them.
Many mods and (some) custom assets will not work with 1.1.0 and will need updating by their author. We have worked hard to cause as few conflicts as possible with popular mods, yet this is a substantial update and with the code & functionality changes some issues have been impossible to avoid. Going forward we aim to find a solution where we can work with our core modders pre-launch to give them ample time to adjust their creations before the public have access.
Our brand manager (the handsome guy you've seen in several videos) has the following to say about the expansion plans for Cities: Skylines.

"Cities: Skylines will continue to follow the traditions set by other recent Paradox releases such as Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV of paid expansions combined with large updates of free content ensuring that all players, whether they choose to purchase the expansions or not, will have plenty of new features to look forward to. One of the major differences, however, between those titles and Cities: Skylines will be that minor DLC updates will be uncommon. The majority of content updates will be significant upgrades and additions.

Going forward, we will focus on giving away the main features for free and improving the modding tools, while also selling major expansions around new mechanics. But we will also continue to offer free content such as new buildings and road types."

Full patch notes for Cities: Skylines 1.0.7 - 1.1.0

Features & New
New: European theme added
New: 72 European buildings in the European theme
New: Support for corner and adjacent buildings in the European theme
New: 3 maps added with European theme (Cliffside Bay, Foggy Hills and Grand River)
New: Tunnels for roads and rail added
New: Metro tunnels can be built at different levels
Options: V sync option added
Options: Invert Y mouse axis added

Editor & Modding
Launch options: added -noWorkshop to disable Steam workshop
Asset editor: Increased limit for bridge pillar count
Asset editor: Hedge added to residential props
Asset editor: Added custom vehicle importing
Asset editor: Added the ability to set custom thumbnails and tooltip images for all types of assets (in the save panel)
Asset editor: New editable properties exposed
Asset editor: Added ability to inherit building unlock milestone from template
Asset editor: vehicles have a Steam tag "Vehicle"
Asset editor: Fixed cut off text and missing spaces in the Properties box
Asset editor: Water Service buildings can now have proper pipe connections
Asset editor: Custom harbors and cargo harbors are now usable in-game
Asset editor: Custom airports now get visited by planes, like an actual airport
Asset editor: Fixed issue where some custom assets could not be loaded in-game after editing
Asset editor: Fixed missing texture for landfills
Asset Editor: Fixed a rare issue where holding and releasing the mouse button would not be recognized
Content manager: Introduced a new layout
Modding API: Added OnEnabled/OnDisabled support for IUserMod. Called everytime a mod is becoming active or inactive
Map editor: Fixed issue where users could place a water source outside the map area
Map editor: Fixed free camera hotkey not working

Bugfixes & Misc
Linux: support for JPG workshop previews added
Linux: users can now use numpad-Enter in-game
Linux: Fixed rare issue where users crashed due to a faulty asset
Fixed issue with 1x1 buildings "disappearing" when zoomed out too far
Fixed several localization issues
devInfo.txt is no longer needed
Achievements are now properly localized
Small contrast changes in some information windows to improve colorblind accessibility
Fixed issue where some elevated roads became immune to interaction
Metro and train lines now properly update when changed
Cruise ships no longer travel over land :'(
The 2x2 OreCrusher now has a purpose in life
Ireland is properly represented on the Union Jack
Cursor no longer disappears when you press Esc whilst rotating the camera
Adjusted upkeep cost of some roads to the one displayed in their tooltip
People no longer die when your city is at 0 population
Fixed an issue where right clicking a button would highlight it incorrectly
Fixed an issue where free camera mode was not enabled after viewing milestones
Fixed an issue where changing language in-game would not change language for some menus
Fixed an issue with mouse button key bindings
Fixed an issue where the options menu would not be closed properly by hitting the esc key
Fixed an issue where temporary save files would sometimes be visible
Fixed an issue where roads would snap to inaccessible sections of hydro dams
Fixed a graphics issue where text would sometimes be corrupted at the bottom of save and load menus
Trees in terrain heights view should now have the proper colors for their elevation
Fixed an issue where users could elevate the height of gravel paths, even though they could not place them
Fixed a minor graphical issue in the content manager
Fixed some text alignment problems
Text references to left and right mouse buttons now take left-handed mouse settings into account
Added confirmation prompt for Reset Unique Buildings

[Caliga]

Whoa, looks awesome.

[Syt]

I'll wait a bit till modders latch onto the new features and a slew of new buildings becomes available.

[Warspite]

 

[Grey Fox]

Told you it would look awesome.

[FunkMonk]

Finally I turn my eastern European industrial hellscape dream into reality.

[Warspite]

Wait a minute. You need to start a new city to use these buildings, and then your city will *only* have these buildings. Which is great if you want a city to be a great big pre-1920s conservation zone.

[lustindarkness]

I am so tempted to buy this game in hopes I can play it on my laptop at the lowest settings.   

So even though I really don't have time for it, I took a look around the forums and it seems it may play with all the settings at low. Key word "may". Should I spend the money and get it? Is it worth to play it like that?

[Syt]

I'm not sure. If you say "may", though, you "may" want to hold off till you have a better computer.

Have you checked http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri ?

[lustindarkness]

I'm not sure. If you say "may", though, you "may" want to hold off till you have a better computer.

Have you checked http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri ?

I just got a new laptop last fall, I will not have a better computer for years.
Have not checked that link, but will. I did check the game forums, people with the same graphics card have been able to play the game with low settings.

[lustindarkness]

Well that link/app was depressing , I guess I'll save my money and time.

[Syt]

Besides, there's plenty other games to play in the meantime. Rest assured, though, that once you have a PC to run this there'll probably expansions, sales, and a myriad of user content.

[Syt]

First expansion incoming:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/06/cities-skylines-after-dark-preview/

Crime, Clubs And Beach Bars: Cities Skylines – After Dark

Delving into the glamour, glitz and grime of nightlife, Cities: Skylines' first expansion, After Dark, introduces revamped crime mechanics, specialised commercial areas, beachfront entertainment and a day/night cycle. We've been looking at the expansion in the company of developers Colossal Order.

What do you give to the game that has everything?

Nobody – developers Colossal Order included – would argue that Cities: Skylines contained every feature that a citybuilder could possibly need, but the robust modding support and creativity of the community have led to a metropolis of new content. From a first-person viewpoint to plant you in the head of your citizens to thousands of new buildings, Skylines has received a great deal of support from its many modders.

The first expansion, just announced by Paradox, seeks to expand the game in ways that the modders can't. Going by the name After Dark, it adds a day/night cycle and new zoning specialisations and services to take advantage of the nightlife. Along with the expansion, Paradox and Colossal Order will be releasing a free update that brings some improvements to the base game. The free update will include the day/night cycle itself, allowing you to see your cities glowing in the dark, but the extra features that take advantage of the small hours are only available to those who pay for the DLC. The price, we're told, will be around the same as a a "regular Paradox expansion". Think Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV DLC, which generally ranges between £4.99 and £9.99.

When the sun goes down, people who live in real cities tend to hit the town and spend all of their hard-earned on overpriced fizzy lager. Then they fall over and someone steals their phone. That seems to be the case in Cities: Skylines as well. The new leisure specialisation for commercial zones sees them cluster with bars, nightclubs and casinos. They operate as ordinary commercial properties during the day and experience a boom in business at night. While profitable, the bright lights of leisure districts create new problems for your consideration.

Traffic is the primary concern, just as it is one of the primary concerns of the city as a whole. Leisure zones attract an increased flow of citizens at night, which can create temporary bottlenecks and change the pattern of traffic around the city. Instead of travelling to work and then back to their houses, with an occasional detour to the park, citizens will now require access to work, home and leisure, using different routes at different times.

To complicate matters, they're also more likely to use public transport at night rather than designated themselves as dangerous drivers. Trains and buses are an option but taxi services will also be included in the expansion. Rounding out the improvements to transport are bicycles, which can be restricted to dedicated cycle lanes, and multi-purpose transport hubs. For the latter, think of the train or metro station within an airport or the rail connections to a cargo harbour. The multi-purpose buildings mean that you won't have to plonk two buildings side by side if one is large enough to contain both functions. And it means that citizens won't have to walk out of an airport and straight into the train station next door.

Tidier cities should result, aided by bus terminals that connect multiple routes within one building, and the other new specialisation: commercial beach properties. As well as entertaining the plebs, shoreline activities perform a far more important function; they make cities look prettier. No more tiny buffers of land between a residential zone and the sea and no more disconnect between the water and the land. As marinas, fishing tours, beach bars and restaurants are constructed, there should be a natural fit between shore and city.

Returning to nightlife, there is the issue of the bad behaviour that a night on the fizz sometimes causes, as well as the less desirable activities that occur under the cloak of darkness. Crime is an issue and the way Skylines handled it was an issue for Colossal Order.

The developers weren't satisfied with the policing systems in the base game so as well as introducing a cyclical rise in criminal activity during the night-time phases, they've introduced jails. Now, police will actually travel to the location of a crime, collect the criminal and take that criminal to a jail. That'll feed into traffic flow again – if the police can't reach the scene, they can't do much about the crime – but sirens will presumably clear a path in most situations.

Jails will fill up, however. As soon as modders add Iso-Blocks, and they surely will, it'll finally be possible to construct a Mega-City One, complete with entire neighbourhoods set aside for the housing of the criminal population.

Any excuse to revisit Skylines – our inaugural game of the month in April – is fine by me and After Dark seems like a strong expansion. Watching cities light up as the sun goes down taps into the hypnotic quality that comes from observing the flow of digital life, and the ongoing work going into the underlying systems is more than welcome.

[Syt]

Picked up the expansion. The cities look pretty at night. If you have downloaded any buildings, you need to check which ones have been updated for night time illumination (otherwise it's just dark).

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/24/cities-skylines-after-dark-review/

After Dark is the first expansion for Colossal Order and Paradox's well-received citybuilder Cities: Skylines [official site], and is focused on tourism, leisure and neon-lit night skies. It's out today, and here's what I made of it.

What could have been a goodwill-killer has turned into yet another poke in the eye for EA's approach to ill-fated SimCity. Cities: Skylines had flung the doors open to modding from day one, and by now it's unbelievably simple to render the entire game essentially unrecognisable, and massively improved, with a just a few clicks. With all this free stuff raining down, what possible point would there be in a paid add-on?

SimCity was a walled garden in order to ensure it could subsequently be nickel and dimed in the manner of The Sims, but first Skylines expansion After Dark proves that philosophy was misguided. It neither interferes with nor is undone by the legion of mods, but instead identifies and fills holes in its central simulation, thus improving the game as a whole.

In a world where game add-ons so often mean #content, DLC with a real purpose stands out a mile. It's trying to do a whole bunch of things to the parent game, not just cram in a few new policies and some pretty night-time buildings.

First and foremost of these changes is intended, I think, to address Skylines' major shortcoming, which is that for many folk it wore thin after they'd built their first couple of cities. Expanding, at least in the middle stretch of a game, became too much about repeatedly zoning new areas and connecting up water pipes, rather than exciting escalation.

What After Dark does is offer alternative goals – different ways of expanding, with their own big-building pay-offs. And, most importantly, the option to build a very different type of city, regardless of how many official and unofficial buildings you might have stuffed into it. Though we get some lovely neon lighting to look at, After Dark is not really concerned with the pleasures and sins of the night, but rather on making your city more flexible.

Colossal Order achieve this by fleshing out what was perhaps the weakest part of their game's simulation – commercial zones. These primarily retail areas weren't anything to really care about, and had nothing of note to finesse. Efficiency of placement brought in more cash, but there wasn't really a way to make them reflect your city's ethos in the same way that tweaking policies and districts for residential and industrial areas did.

Now you can manually tag Commercial zones to be Tourist or Leisure districts, which leads to new types of automatically generated buildings and super-structures in either case, with an emphasis on plenty of colourful night-time lighting. There is perhaps a little bit too much thematic crossover between the two district types – tourists want leisure – but nonetheless you're likely to find yourself building new, discrete zones which ultimately make your city look more dramatic as well as making you far more thoughtful about how and where you place commercial zones.

Without specifically planning too, I ended up with a marina area on one side of town, designed to meet my residents' shopping and consumption needs, and a Magaluf-like high-rise hotel nightmare not too far from the airport on the other side of town. While in reality each of these would be horrifying troughs of binge drinking, here they're about bright lights and big money.

Where airports, mainline trains and cruise ships had previously been late-game fripperies I'd stuck in because I could, now I was trying to place them as soon as possible in order to feed endless visitors into my hotels, beachside restaurants and jetski rental shacks, and to watch those areas rise sky-high in response. My poor residents got short thrift, just sardined into the centre as and when I needed more staff for my vast tourist-trap.

Nothing I'd done or even planned was particularly different from what I had in vanilla Skylines, but I wound up feeling profoundly different about my city. I didn't much care about its attractiveness, or about the quality of life of its residents: just about whether those tourists were piling into my airport and harbour. Though the space was the same, my city felt so much bigger because it had these new areas. Expansion wasn't about spread, but about creating districts with specific purpose. More things to thinker with, in other words.

I've said somewhere before that Skylines is refreshingly non-capitalistic compared to SimCity: it's more about the pleasure of tinkering than the hamster wheel pursuit of cash. After Dark, by contrast, turned me into a money monster. I had to feed the beast, rather than just placing something big as a reflection of being on an even keel for a while.

This is a choice, not a mandate: making phalanxes of hotels that spread and improve is an alternative (or additional) way to max out wealth, landmass and access to monuments. If you want to make a more residential and/or industrial city, you still can. You can do both, in fact, if you have the will and headspace to (and if you're doggedly sticking to building options only unlocking when you hit population milestones, but at this point I'm starting new games with everything available from the off). I enjoyed building philosophically different cities: where once I was building Chicago or Boston, now I was making Vegas and Saint-Tropez.

Well, sort of. Skylines' greatest problem was always its somewhat anodyne appearance, and that hasn't changed dramatically here. Some of the new night-time scenes, festooned with neon and uplighting, are spectacular, and make the game look better than it ever has before, but it all still feels like a melding of US and Euro architecture with all the edges filed off. I'd love for a future expansion to really focus on tweaking and honing your city's aesthetic, to truly reflect different cultures and architectural styles, but then again the modding community's made great strides there already.

Trying to cram in ever-more detail, now that we've got zoos and casinos and beach volleyball courts in there alongside everything else, is showing up the limitations of the engine too (or, at least, the limitations of just how much it can be reasonably expected to render at once). Seeing a cuboid polar bear or volleyball players who look like they fell out of a Quake 1 mod doesn't really create the I-made-this excitement, but instead faint deflation. Skylines was always better at buildings than lifeforms, but with After Dark's focus now being on things lifeforms like to do rather than simply where they live, work and die, the cracks are a little more obvious.

Long-standing irritations, such as the endless busywork of waterpipes, finickity pylon placement and opaque traffic problems, haven't gone away (and, indeed, the provision of utilities remains Skyline's least interesting aspect), but this is really an expansion concerned with filling holes and expanding possibilities, not rethinking the foundations.

It does that very well, both by giving me new objectives and by making more of underplayed features – the novel but hitherto slightly pointless district system also gets new purpose, thanks to the big effects of the Tourism and Leisure concepts.

I'm not sure I'd go all the way to saying After Dark is essential, given I saw every new feature and building it offers within the space of a single (if intense) day's play, but I think it's about as a good an expansion as we could have wished for from Skylines. There's also a whole bunch of smaller new features I haven't mentioned, such as bus and cycle lanes, taxi services and prisons (intended to reflect rising crime at nights, though honestly this wasn't something I noticed so long as I was sufficiently zealous about police station placement) and different taxes for night-time businesses, and while none of these are revelatory, combined they feel like a substantial box of new toys.

Best of all, After Dark is a true companion piece to all those wonderful mods, not a misguided attempt to replace them. If anything, we'll end up with new mods designed to take advantage of After Dark – famous hotels and seafronts, gaudy Vegas strips and maybe even some more convincing zoo animals.

After Dark is, I think, the best possible outcome for Skylines: successfully sticking its hand out for more cash but doing nothing to puncture goodwill in the process. Cue more swearing at EA HQ, perhaps.

Some screens from the review:

[garbon]

I've waited on pulling the trigger for now as nothing about the expansion makes me hunger to play again.

Sidenote, is it ever possible with a new city to build with say access to larger roads from start? I hated in my first couple plays that I couldn't start city foundation with roads that anticipated things to come - best I managed was building enough space between roads and zones to allow me to put in high capacity roads once I'd reached that level.