As an old SimCity 4 fan, I don't mind the transportation being center in Cities Skylines. It is the most fundamental aspect of city design. However what frustrates me is when the traffic simulation fails. Like when people don't use public transport or walk when it is available Another frustration is the death dynamic, which given that sims often move to a certain area at certain time, often means certain neighbourhoods suddenly are filled with dead bodies
To be fair, people driving to a store that is within walking distance isn't exactly unheard of. Same thing with age ranges, usually you'll find the residential zones averaging into three different types: family, youngsters, and seniors. So I think you generally don't notice this as an individual but when you get the insights of a city manager it ends up being highly visible. Most often these issues can be worked around the same way they're worked around in real life: incentives & rezoning.
not better.... Simcity 3000 has more "atmosphere" to it... and Simcity 2000 graphics are timeless lol @ attractive spreadsheet..... literally all videogames are spreadsheets of arrays and objects.... what a dumb statement....
@@Microphunktv-jb3kj that's not really what the statement is about. It's more about the fact that Sim City uses a more classical statistical simulation model whereas Cities uses agent-based modeling. It is a more sophisticated way of doing things though it has it's tradeoffs especially in CPU cost. Yes, you can represent both games using spreadsheets if you want, but the modeling paradigm is completely different.
I have a citybuilder music compilation folder, it's made form the full SC3KU, SC4RH soundtracks, with a few added from Cities XL, a few from SC Societies (yup!!), some from streets of Simcity and some from SC2013... best music ever.
Back in the day you could build a city in SimCity 2000 and fly over it in SimCopter. That was mindblowing at the time! Thanks for another interesting video!
I was blown away by SimCopter when I first got it in 1997. The fact you could import your SimCity 2000 city was incredible. Imagine if you could import your CS city into GTA V. That's what SimCopter (and Streets of SC) did in 1996-7.
@@computergamingyesterday, I had both SimCopter and Streets of SimCity and as a kid they left me hungry for a larger integrated SimUniverse. Just imagine a farm simulator that let you drive the equipment with in your SimFarm's property
SC4 was peak citybuilding, the only drawback was the crashes, but I loved every bit of it! I gotta play CS2 when Paradox finish the optimization, it looks interesting.
Tons of small tweaks that modders were able to pick up and keep the game healthy for nearly two decades. Tried City Skylines one, went right back to SC4. After playing CS2....I may have a hard time going back to SC4 finally after 20 years.
Except Simcity is an actual city simulator, CS is a city builder. CS has miniscule populations, has very limited and super simplistic economics and other limitations that actual simulators did not have or would not have if done competently today. Unfortunately, we don't have city simulators anymore.
Exactly. These videos on RUclips of City Skylines "building X city" are so freaking ridiculous. All you're doing is plopping things down, how is that remotely satisfying!? City Skylines is shockingly inane.
Yea I definitely get that. What I would really like to see the agent system from City: Skylines built in a more serious simulator. Dream game, right there. It's funny how history is repeating itself. SimCity didn't really have much competition in its day. Neither does Cities: Skylines. Can we get more than one modern day, real-world city simulator at a time, please?
@@computergamingyesterday "What I would really like to see the agent system from City: Skylines built in a more serious simulator." I have thought about how this could be done, maybe if an agent was representational of a population group, but I can see how this approach introduces a lot of problems.
Cities Skylines remains at its heart more of a traffic simulator than anything else. The weird scale that everything has, with buildings and infrastructure way too big, and the land forms way too small (what I refer to as "toybox cities") reveals that it's not intended to look like a real city, but be a representation of one. You have a city of a population of 20K and it's like two farms, a mine, 200 houses, 100 factories, 10 downtown skyscrapers, and more highways than Kansas City. And even those single-family houses have utterly enormous footprints. The agent system is superior to a representative one only if agents actually have human intelligence. They do not! They are both a lot dumber than human beings, but contrariwise also a lot more consistent in their behaviors. Humans can navigate more fluidly, but also do things unpredictably. This means that the best methods for corralling agents is always going to be some trick that isn't the same as in real life anyway. Instead of a city simulator meant to representatively model human behavior collectively, you have a city of robots behaving individually. But my biggest problem (for me) is always the upper size. Not necessarily population (that's just a number) but level of sprawl attached to it. As advertised, SC4 can have populations in the millions, and at least over region view can sprawl for tens of miles. If you have the drive and technical know-how, you can import real-world USGS data maps (conveniently in the exact same greyscale range that SimCity 3&4 uses to generate terrain height) and make an entire county or small state in real scale. Farms and suburbs stretching across the horizon. You can NEVER do that in Skylines, 1 or 2. The agent system in the first CS restricted population to somewhere around 150K (on paper about 65,000 agents but not all of them are active at once) because the agent system was capped and once reached the entire system would collapse as no new "sims" could be created to do things. The second has about the same restriction because it's so horribly unoptimized that even the best gaming computer you can build starts to struggle when it reaches 100K, because they focused on graphics over the simulation and apparently do not understand the concept of proper LODs. And even if they fix that (which I seriously doubt) the fact that the agent system is baked in means that computations needed will increase at an accelerated rate as the agents have to interact with more agents. Mathematically, 3 agents have 4 possible multi-agent interactions. Add in a 4th and that jumps to 11. Add in a 5th and it jumps to 26. 10 agents goes up to 1013... With a representative system, it's roughly linear. This means that eventually the CPU as well as the GPU is going to tap out, and I guarantee it's going to be before it hits "millions". If you want to optimize a game, it has to be abstracted. Factorio is a perfect example of this. If you look at it, it seems like it's always modeling individual items on belts. Just like agents. But there are hundreds of thousands of them on those belts, so how can it function? Simple: once the belt is completely full of items, the game starts calculating the ENTIRE BELT as if it's a single item, since at that point the number of items is just (#per belt section)x(#of sections). Why waste system resources calculating them all individually? There is no way the game would function if these kinds of tricks were not employed by the programmers. Cities Skylines doesn't do this, so the upper limit of complexity will be very low. The cities will always be "toybox cities", and until they drop or at least restrain the agent system, that will not change.
This. Gamedev in general is always filled with tricks to simpify calculations in order to create a convincing illusion for the player. Light, rain, vegetation, there are always tricks under the hood because optimization is important. If the outcome is similar its completly irrelevant if you just use a grid or actual ai-agents. So no - Cities Skylines doesnt work better, it works differently and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Brilliant summary. I found this more on CS2, that my computer was running everything fine on 80,000 pop, then slowed a little by 100,000, and by 120,000 it had completely ground to a halt and putting it on max speed still had cars crawling down the road. And the services also began to break down like they weren't all functioning. "How could it decrease so fast?" I thought, but your explanation makes perfect sense. It's exponential interactions. My city also had three large office high-rise zones, four types on university and three colleges, about ten fully expanded water treatment plants (each the size of a university itself), and five incinerator plants to deal with garbage. All for a moderate provincial town of 100,000 people. My home town is 70,000 of mostly suburban sprawl and it's centre has no high-rises, and a few blocks of commercial zone, and the industrial area is about 1sq mile in total. That's a real sized town. The assets are all wrong too. The 30 storey office building should employ more than 150 people.
@@JackChurchill101I think the problem is that in the real world, a small town doesn’t need to provide all the jobs. I know in my own wee town of 13,000 people, a lot of people travel to the bigger towns and cities for work. But in cities skylines since you can only play in the one area you have to provide a job for everyone within that same town, so you end up building a lot more commercial and office districts than you would see in a real town of the same size. In simcity you could build multiple cities in a region and citizens could travel across the border to the other cities to work instead of working in the city they live in.
this 100%. the main attraction of city skylines is the traffic simulation. the agent modeling really doesn't offer much, ultimately what occurs under the hood may be more Realistic but is fundamentally not that dramatic of a change from the simcity model. if city skyline's agents did anything other than make traffic, age, get education, and die, i would be more forgiving and be willing to play the game on a tiny ass scale. i would so love it if they maybe simulated city politics! that would be cool
SC4 does in fact have a minor form of automatic pathfinding vehicle movement, but it's used mainly for emergency vehicles the player designates destinations for during a disaster, however since there doesn't tend to be much other traffic, the vehicle tends to just sort of get there with little issue, so it doesn't stand out a lot.
IIRC, in Cities Skylines each agent after picking destinations for the first time didn't change them unless it was necessary. In SimCity 2013 version each agent picked nearest open job or empty home, and this changed constantly. The CS approach saves a bit on computation, while providing more realistic behavior. But this makes traffic/path calculation exponentially more complex with longer distances between points. The big limitation of agent-based system is number of concurrent agents. Game must keep all relevant data in RAM, and constantly update it for all active agents. While also rendering the game and running any other underlying systems and tasks. That's why cities Skylines slows down with huge populations, and SimCity 2013 had even bigger limitations on population size...
Couldn't a simplification be a solution for this? Who needs 1M citizens realistically simulated? Cut it down to a cap of let's say 10K or even 100K - I know not a "pure" simulation but isn't there a point of deminishing returns at some point?
@@AECH_CH, that actually would be a reasonable solution. Simulate one citizen, and then use that data for 9 or 99 neighbors. This could be adjusted dynamically, depending on the size of the population. Still it would require memory to store data for each citizen, but might significantly reduce the computation needs.
Cities Skylines 2 solves the issue of agents not changing destinations. The agents choose alternative lanes and pick different ways to travel based on their personality and needs (Time, price, comfort). Simcity 2013's approach is both unrealistic and worse than any game.
The best feature of SC 2013 was that if you had a bad enough traffic jam, you could have a nuclear power plant meltdown due to lack of highly educated workers. I wonder if they ever patched that…
Whoa! I clicked on this as a suggested video and didn't realize Will Wright lived in my hometown. I grew up in Berkeley and used to ride by his place all the time. It was up in the hills and had a beautiful view. I was in Berkeley the day of the firestorm and woke up to see the daytime sky was black and glowing orange. I told my mom I was gonna ride down the street to my friends house but him and I almost immediately rode towards the hills to investigate. We got a few blocks from the fire which was raging through the hills and could feel the heat of it. We turned back and rode past police and fire trucks. I was probably on the same street he was that day. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the video! ❤
There's just about three non-Finnish people in the thanks section of the 'Cities in Motion' credits which I think explain the history of how 'Cities: Skylines' came about just about perfectly. The first is Will Wright. That's pretty straightforward. The second one is Chris Sawyer and you might immediately start thinking how did the 'Rollercoaster Tycoon' merit a mention that high up in a city simulator? Well, it's because he created 'Transport Tycoon'. But how do you get the through line from that to 'Cities: Skylines', there's like a decade and a half gap and they feel extremely different. The answer is in the third name, not listed as "Special Thanks", but as "Inspiration" instead. And that name is Hans Schilcher. He's responsible for a little known (at least outside of Germany and Austria) series of simulation games, the 'Giant' series by Austrian game developer JoWood. The first entry was 'Industry Giant', which was basically a Transport Tycoon clone for Windows. And that lent itself to a simulation of public transport by the year 2000, called 'Traffic Giant'. Cities in Motion was basically a clone of that a decade later, JoWood having gone bankrupt in the meantime. Cities in Motion 2's change was to set it in the Unity game engine instead and Cities: Skylines basically changed up the formula by incorporating the city building aspects from SimCity into that game loop. My point is that Cities: Skylines is basically one third SimCity, sure, but also one third Unity city painter but also one third Transport Tycoon as applied to public transport. That's the magic formula that made Cities: Skylines work and it's all explained in the credits of a game that came out four years earlier.
I wish they'd put more Transport Tycoon into Cities Skylines 2 tbh. The Industry DLC for Cities Skylines 1 was the best of the bunch and I wish you could do more with it like, privatize parts of the city, like bus transport, and perhaps even build competing companies. A game within a game. Something that's probably never going to happen would be making that experience multiplayer where there's a GM, game master or game 'mayor' if you like, and then other players playing transport tycoon, trying to cater to the need of the city or cities.
I agree that CS has a better simulator, but SC4 is a better game, IMO - the gameplay is more fun with a lot more charm; the way the Sims in it can panic, get pissed off (or love you), the different disasters, the missions are hilarious... etc - but Skylines is *almost* a straight up simulation game. Which is fine. I really want them to make a modern SimCity (not like SC2013), all they really gotta do is bring back that charm and make a better simulation engine.
SimCity definitely has more charm. Cities Skylines would feel like the generic brand version of a simulator…if there were any others like it right now!
@@computergamingyesterday If there is such a lack of city builder games, why do you claim we are in a "golden age" of city builders right now? There's basically just 1 at the moment.
I discovered the genre with Simcity 2000 when I was in 7th grade. It was the first video game I ever stayed up all night to play. It also earned me my first detention at school when I fell asleep in english class the next day.
SimCity 2000 and SimCopter are the biggest reasons why I became the obsessive nerd I am today. Literally personality defining. They were my introduction to gaming and would alter the course of my entire life from then on.
I’ve finally made the shift from SimCity to Cities Skylines myself - while SC def has its charms, and I def miss being able to hit 1 million residents, CS just has way more to offer. And I _finally_ just got a computer than can run it well haha. One cool feature of SC4 was that, even though you don’t have thousands of agents representing citizens running around the map, you could import your character from The Sims (or create a basic one) and give them a home and a job in your city. That was a cool little touch.
I'm hoping that if it isn't a feature eventually in CS2, that being the ability to make custom characters and add them into your city; either in as a DLC or be made as a mod (I may undertake that project given the desire to have custom "Sims" running around in my city in CS2).
The wild thing about SimCity vs Cities Skylines is SimCity had a dev team of (I believe) around 400, while Cities Skylines was made by 10 people. CS2 has only stretched to 30 people, pretty wild given CS has been that successful it seems nobody wishes to challenge them in the city builder genre.
@@craigseddon4884 Well the release process was different (and paradox operates on a passion driven dev team, rather than corporate structures) but the time frame etc and content of the games was very different. Also, as much as paradox is hated for their DLC politics, I find it genious - it's unreasonable to demand a game for 50$ today when anything goes up in prices + they always provide free content for everyone.
@@craigseddon4884 A year ago Colossal Order had 28 employees(2022 financial statement). Some of these aren't part of actual game developing so team is like 20 people. They are hiring so number of people right now is probably a bit higher. 2023 statement is not out yet.
Holy shit it’s 3 am and I’m watching Terence McKenna talk city simulators with the simcity4 soundtrack blaring in my mind like a tornado siren fuck yeaaa
I liked Simcity 2013. It ABSOLUTELY needed some work and was released too soon. But I still enjoyed it, played it for years before finally picking up Skylines 1.
Small correction, X-plane has been doing flight simulation using real time airflow calculations to simulate flight since 1995, they are up to version 12, and honestly even decades ago were doing VERY accurate simulation modeling on planes you could make yourself in game. Honestly, sounds like you might appreciate doing a deep dive into the making of X-Plane.
The two approaches to simulating things aren't necessarily better or worse. I could see a way to combine the two in the same game. If you're going to make a city-builder game, you could simulate the player's city with the individual citizens, but you could have other cities you can trade with simulated using the tile method to save on CPU, while still having something you can look into. Hell, you could go further and use coarser, less-detailed statistical models for simulating other states within the nation and even simpler ones for other nations on the global scale, all of which produce data the player can look through. Going the other way, you could combine The Sims with Sim City and send your sims around an entire city. When playing with individual sims, they and everything around them (within a few tiles) are simulated on an individual level, but the rest of the city is simulated with tiles, keeping things lively and dynamic. Take the idea to another genre, and you could have an RPG where AI players are essentially playing a strategy game, the effects of which feed into a tile-based system covering the country the game takes place in, and that tile-based simulation triggers events with individual NPCs the player interacts with, giving emergent stories. Probably too complicated for a game with voice-acting, but might be doable for one where you only read the conversations. You know what? All this is basically a level-of-detail system! Except, rather than being for graphics, it's one for AI. That tree that's 200m away doesn't have every leaf rendered. It's just a rough low-poly model of the trunk and main branches with some big-bunch-of-leaves sprites on the ends. The one that's 2km away on the hillside doesn't even have a model, and is just a sprite. The individual characters are like the full-poly tree where you can see every leaf, the tiles are the coarse one with a few sprites for bunches of leaves, and the simple statistics are like the sprite on the hillside.
That's fine and all, but the huge road block with using multiple level-of-detail of simulation is to keep a coherence when switching from one to another. It's a problem that often plagues games like Mounts & blades or the X serie from Egosoft, where combat can be solved ever by direct participation, or by simulation. It quickly becomes apparent that some strategies works better in simulation mode while others are better for real-time battles. The less detailled simulation will have to ignore some parameters, and that generally can be exploited by the player.
@@Roxor128 Well, depends on what you're looking for in a game. Sure, if for you a game is just a system that you must try to "beat" in every way possible, well yeah, that may be part of the fun. Other people want immersion and internal consistency, and exploiting bugs and holes in the system is perceived as unsastisfactory, like cheating. Because that's not gaming, but meta-gaming -you're not playing a game, you're gaming the system. "Then don't do it" you may answer, and you would be right. However when you're still trying your best to perform well in a game, but you know there is an easy way to "win" by exploiting some bug that you have to stop yourself from using for the sake of your own consistency (and because you want a "fair win"), it's still a bit frustrating. After all, as I see it any game is about problem solving. You may be able to solve it easely by exploiting some kind of inconsistency in the system, but in the end you didn't solve the problem, you just avoided it. So what's the point ?
The "simulate everything" is the better option... except that we are limited by our computers... and such a thing can NOT be done today for a citybuilder without atrocious performance or severely limiting the scope. Citybuilders should still be using statistical simulation instead of getting over-ambitious.
This sounds sort of like how Dwarf Fortress works? Except instead of tiles there are interconnected nodes defining such things as cities, NPCs, organizations, needs, etc which are used for the higher-level simulation which in turn affects the local more fine-grained simulation. It also has its Adventure Mode to explore the world as an RPG.
Cities Skylines may work better, with better Tech... But at least Maxis never Nickle & Dimed everyone to Death, like Paradox & CO. Cities Skylines = "Pay more for the all the DLCs, than the regular game!" I'd rather have Maxis back.
@@catriona_drummond Challenge of city builders is managing traffic and your city's needs. WHy would you ever want a city builder without traffic? It would just become mindless building spamming game
According to the one official guide, apparently SimCity 3000 has a tile by tile value on each tile of road, road by bus, rail, subway, and other things like getting on a bus station and swapping between one method to another, like car to bus station, etc. I seem to recall it coming out to something like this: Roads, directly from one zone tile in a straight line to another zone tile, can go about 1/4 the map Roads by bus go slightly further Rails about half way across the map Highway I think is equal to rail, except via a car or bus Subway can go across the entire map Then there is the value to transition travel methods. If you have to drive to the train station to reach it, it takes a bigger chunk of time than a single road tile to switch travel methods. Meaning having to drive more than a block to a train station to get to work can greatly reduce the effectiveness of bothering to take the train. It can also just generate even more local traffic issues driving to the train station, especially if you use the IRL logic, a person might drive a few blocks IRL to get to the station. However, this is compounded by the fact that industry born traffic checks can't go by bus or subway ever, and means industry always needs direct access to roads or rail, and by extension, both limits how far away industry can be from the other zones, and also means you might have to run undesirable trains occasionally through residential areas, at least until you get to 100% clean industry and can put them right up against stuff like residential zones. This results in annoying things, like a R to R, R to C, R to I, C to R, C to C, C to I traffic can all use subway to travel the entire map, but your I to R, I to C, or I to I traffic can only be at most half a map away, if you use trains. Also, apparently there's at best an 80% chance or such, WITH ordinances, to use non personal vehicle travel. Meaning if you want to ensure 100% successful traffic attempts, everything has to be built confined by road travel restrictions. I used to love SimCity 3000, even while not fully understanding the traffic for years, as overall I thought it was the best city sim made (until Skylines). But I always wondered why traffic flow felt so, weird. Now I know. And when I built a recent city using all this in mind, and built things in squares around bus stations and later subways, I began to realize that an ideal city seems to require building a ton of mass transit entry points directly in range of zone tiles. This most recent city, once I got the ordinances going, was the first ever where I eventually saw road traffic almost disappear after getting subways and trains everywhere. Also, while the game doesn't have physically rendered traffic jams, at least in SimCity 3000, there is supposed to be something to calculate being stuck in a traffic jam via the simulation, that's supposed to increase travel distance per tile, which can reduce travel efficiency, and result in a failed trip. And apparently the game will try to recalculate future travel attempts around the jams. So SimCity 3000 does have traffic management, just not in the same overt, physical way. At this point, it's still a good game, but by understanding how to better manipulate the road traffic to nearly not exist, and get people on mass transit, I kinda feel like my zoning strategy has become super cookie cutter by necessity. Skylines, however, as you point out, actually follows some sense of IRL logic, and you can actually get people to travel all the way across town to a job, and not just two blocks away.
Very good summary of the history and evolution of the genre, great job! You credit CS with the switch to the agent based simulation, but SC2013 did it first. Do you think if that failure was the end of the story, devs wouldn't dare try it today? I just felt addressing this was missing from your essay.
I decided not to talk much about SC2013 because while it was first, it ended up being a dead end. Now, if Colossal Order had not been around to immediately follow up with their own city builder…I suspect we still would have eventually seen a new city builder and it probably would be agent based. I think the whole genre has veered this direction. But this hypothetical game would probably focus less on traffic and transportation.
Both Cities Skyline as well as Sim city 2013 have a grid. Actually the grid of SC 2013 is identical to that of SC4. While SC4 is 4096 meter of 16 meter tiles, SC 2014 is 2048 meter with 8 meter tiles. CS1 is 1920meter with 8 meter tiles. What make SC2013 look different is that it have a sub precision system as well as a rotational angle system So everything in both CS1 and SC2013 is actually square and grid based, it have only a rotation and ofset system just prior to rendering making it look like its not. Here is the thing, both SC2013 and CS1 have a set of grids that is close to 2x2km squared. But look at the cars when they driving in and out of a player controlled tile. The cars moving over the tile boarder deload then reloads. This is not the case in CS1. If we look closer to how the grid works one might get a clue. The number of grid squares in SC2013 is 2048/8, that happen to be 256, and that happen to be one byte. In CS1 the map size is 1920/8 that is 240, that is slightly under a byte. So in SC2013 a vehicle move to the grid limit, the moving square reach 256 (or 0), then ticks over, get a overflow limit, unload the car, from the grid simulation, move the data to the other grid simulation where its loaded and the car keep roaring. This take several frames and its clearly visible. In CS1 the car move from square 248 and up in square 249, the car seamlessly move outside of the grid border into the next grid, and is unloaded in reloaded synchronous to moving. This allow all vehicle to seamlessly move from tile to tile with no interruption. It also more importantly allow cars from NOT moving, say if its a grid lock, and the car is stuck at square 249, the car behind it can see that there is a car stuck at grid 249 so it cant move into 248, allow a car grid lock to move past the tile limit, that is not possible in SC2013. This small detail allow a city tile to be placed right next to a other tile seamlessly integrated making it look that 2, 4 or 16 tiles are one and the same. This is the core and main reason why CS1 is so much better than SC2013. Still pretty much all modern games still have tiles down to the raw math. And most modern games have subtitles allowing precision placement with in a tile. This is typically not part of the simulation but just a visual improvement. So really apart from using agents in SC2013 and CS1, all the game back to the original Sim City works exactly the same. Its also worth saying that OG Sim City 1989 had 120x100 cell maps, its really not that different to 256x256 of Sim city 4 and 2013.
The Sim City reboot did change quite a lot of this though. You can follow cars from home to work for example. You can follow buses or cargo trucks while they do their job, even if they leave the city you can still follow them in the region map.
I mean you had a limited version of that in SImcity 4 in that you could create pedestrians and follow them, within the city at least. Not much point in trying to follow randos of course.
Really great video! The real reason Sims city died is because of DRM. Fighting piracy with a "always online" mode could possibly ddos your own servers. Making the game unplayable, since players aren't able to connect.
I had none of connectivitiy issues. I abandoned it for a lot of other reasons. The tiny square being probably the primary one. I filled it up completely and got bored of it in like a week or so.
I've been playing the last cities skylines and the last sim city. While SC2 is the better of two I find always going back to sim city. It has a more satisfying crunch to it on a whole, the sounds effects and the simulation of their sims I think it's just much better than SC2. Were it not for the small plots and lack of better traffic control sim city would come on top
Happy you mentioned the prior CiMs being the base of Skylines. Been on SimCity since the SNES and 4 RULES, but after the EA debacle, Cities took a leap of faith and WOW. They've heavily leaned in to the community too, embracing tools and mods, that legit improve the game. Cannot wait for C:S2!!!
I am pretty sure you are wrong about many of your claims. cities skylines did not create many of the feature, they exist in simcity before the reboot during the peak of Sims as EA wanted to cash in on Sim branding. nor does cities skylines have true agent model either. no game has because of the 65k agent limit in the engine cities skylines use. there is clearly cities that are bigger than 65k population, this limitation is well known in the modding community. in fact the biggest change and what make cities skylines successful is just that... modding.
Just tried Skylines 2 yesterday, I've never played the first version, but SimCity 2000 is one of my all time favourite games. Your video helps to explain a lot, thank you!
I played Simcity when it released and people where so obsessed with it we would have dedicated machines that would just run it. Then check on it throughout the day during breaks & lunchtime at work. 😂
I miss the old days of SimCity because if I'm being frank and honest, SimCity 2013 is what killed the franchise. From the small map size all the way to the always online requirement. Yeah sure EA and Maxis reversed the always online requirement after the fact, but the damage had already been done by then. CS1 and 2 is and ALWAYS will be the answer to what was once a great game and what SimCity 2013 SHOULD have been from the start.
I can't say I agree with your premise that agent simulation makes a city sim better. I would rather play a city builder that approximates things if it means I can have a realistically sized town. It's just too bad there's nothing to really rival SC4 except maybe NewCity but that game seems to be dead.
Looking back at how prescient your words about how CS2 "technical limitations" would eventually kill, or at least hamper CS2's success, SimCity 4 was definitely the heyday of City Building (though Cities Skylines 1 has put up a fantastic effort and might technically be better)
He is credited as co-designer on SimAnt, and the only designer on Simcopter. So, yes, he do design work on some - though not on others, like SimFarm, SimTower, and SimTown.
I will say, I've played a lot of CS and SC4. Ive gotten fed up trying to play CS for two reasons: Its too gentle on pollution and finances, and the traffic simulation is mediocre at the best of times. Lane management is tedious with tmpe, and impossible without it. Highways are likewise obnoxious. Freight rail is not worth investing in, as the station gets saturated throughput far too easily.
So WEDIT became SimCity and CHEDIT became SCURK of the later iterations of asset editors that came with the game. I made lots of custom buildings. It was quite fun.
I would love a new Sim City game, but with European city planning. Shops and houses side by side, no stroads and huge parking areas, walking-streets, bike lines etc.
Workers and Resources, Soviet Republic. But problem with this game is that it tries to be everything (simcity plus transport tycoon) and it's very complex and not well optimized. It takes into account things like education, heating plants, electricity, seasons of years (no crop growing in winter, slower trafic due to snow), export and import costs, constructions from your our resources delivered to site. Tip: automatic buying of resources is cheaper closer to map border. I think latest versions have waste management
You talk about Cities Skylines as a successor to SimCity, but it's really more of a successor to Cities XL 2011/2012, which itself came about to try to fill the gap left after SimCity 4 was officially announced to be the end of SimCity (before EA saw how strong the fanbase continued to be and did the 2013 reboot). Much of what's in Cities Skylines is a direct result of the new features and changes Cities XL brought to the genre.
i know some people don't like the game as much, but cities xl and it's derivatives would be interesting for you to evaluate in the same way. would be interesting to know what they are doing there since it's obviously not grid style like simcity, yet not like cities skylines either, yet still seems to work fairly reasonably. otherwise the main issues people had with the game itself at the time largely were performance related and etc. game itself though i found quite unique and fun to play.
I mean you can have individual citizens that are tracked in Simcity 4 but yea the models were limited and it wasn't tracking everyone in the city and just spawning cars and citizens for visual appearance and utility purposes.
Why comparing Cities Skylines with a game made in in 2004? It's funny how Cities Skylines community like to shit on SimCity being a cancelled franchise yet they use "Cims" to refer to people living in their cities 🤦🏻♂️.
I liked the old sim game better and if it was remade or reworked with curved roads, modding, and unlimited map sizes i would buy it. The cartoonish look is just more enjoyable.
Honestly, the aesthetics is one of the least important things in a city simulator. I want the simulation to be top notch, not having pretty things to look at.
Job Request Agents vs Needs Agent. It was a little more random since jobs were not constent and most devs didn't think was needed. The deapth required for true fullfilment would be tricky. I felt and feel that x64 multi core and alot more resources were needed. Its a complicated subject with alot of depth. (XoXiDe101)
Very enjoyable and informative video overall! 2:50 The non-mainline 2008 Wii game SimCity Creator wasn't tile-based, AFAIK. (Edit: Actually it appears to be-it supports curved roads, but those are aesthetic rather than mechanical. It probably stores the appearance of the roads separately instead of dynamically generating them from their grid layout as in other SimCity games. Regardless, that shows that 6:00 was not always true.) 3:20 Isn't the non-mainline 2007 game SimCity Societies an exception? The division of Sims into classes seems like it would require Agent-level simulation. 3:50 With flight simulators to an extent that's still true today-you'd need the most powerful supercomputer on Earth to directly and perfectly simulate airflow around an airframe. But does MSFS 2020 use a simplified CFD model as you suggest? I know Kerbal Space Program and especially its mod Ferram Aerospace have one, but don't think in any of those examples that it's grid, point-cloud, or particle-based like research-grade ones. 6:25 Not entirely sure something like Magnasanti couldn't exist IRL-you had the Kowloon Walled City, for example. 8:15 What about the profoundly-innovative yet (as you did) oft-overlooked City Life series (City Life, Cities XL, Cities XL 2011, Cities XL 2012, and Cities XXL)? AFAIK City Life was the first modern agent-based non-tile-based fully-3D city builder ever, and Cities XL briefly allowed MMO play. 13:00 I mean, that is realistic... 14:55 Not entirely sure what you mean there. If you consider Cities: Skylines to "accurately" simulate a city, it has a vanilla cap of 1 million people (the maximum realistically achievable being around 500-600 thousand), which is rather greater than "modestly sized" unless you're talking about somewhere like India or China. I'm not sure what it takes to run a city at that level hardware-wise, but it's obviously doable. And assuming the algorithms used in Cities Skylines are parallelizable, it would absolutely be possible to simulate the entire world using a modified build of the game on the most powerful supercomputers.
Curved aesthetic roads in the Wii version remind me of a similar method used to make them in SC4 through mods, they look nice and function as you'd want them to, but if you delete 1 tile of them it tends to turn the rest into a jumble of seemingly random road tiles no longer 'assigned' to the road curve.
I disagree. Cities Skylines is not a City Builder, it's a traffic micromanagement simulator. you just zone zone some houses, shops and factories around the most efficient transport systems. It's more about optimisation than about City building. And if I want that I go all in and play Factorio and not Cities Skylines. Or I design traces on a PCB.
Well how do you reckon I found out that micromanaging traffic lights and occasionally putting some city around my carefully designed transportation system was no fun to me?
Not sure why traffic management and "city builder" are incompatible in your mind. Given traffic management is one of the biggest challenges in city planning, it kinda makes sense for that to be a big part of a city builder game. Besides, there's really only a handful of basic principles you have to apply to manage traffic well.
@@JasonEfstathiou They are not incompatible but in Skylines they are imbalanced. traffic overshadows absolutely everything else. and it's very micromamangey. All other aspects of the game are more like creative mode, barely a challenge.
@@catriona_drummondCities in real life face traffic management issues when designed poorly. Cities Skylines mirror that hence clearly THE BEST city building games there could ever be!
It's incredible! After playing C.S 2, i got back to C.S 1 and realized even more of how great this game is, much more complex and realistic than the new one. Unfortunatelly C.S 1 don't make the economy part very hard to manage, but it seems like a big challenge if compared to the C.S2. And of course, Sim city 4 is the best one! It will take years for some company to do better than this game.
Skylines 2 is already shaping up to be far better than SC4. And I say this as a city planner fanatic that has been playing these games since the OG SC on Commodore 64.
I played SimCity 4 quite a bit, and it was frustratingly bad, and pretty much abandoned by the developer EA other than one expansion. The only thing that made it even tolerable was that players reverse engineered the game to try to fix and expand it. The hill I'll die on is that SC4, and not the 2013 SC, is really what killed the series.
@@LordofSyn I can agree with you that C.S2 has a very, very strong potential just like an atomic bomb to grow up and become a unreal game. I understand that you love it, cause you're a city planner, thing that i'm not, unfortunatelly. My cities are made of a big spoon of luck, some smart thinking and luck once again! lol. I'm 27 years old, so unfortunatelly i didn't live those glory days of video games where everything was brand new. I started playing Sim City 2000 on PS1 i guess. It was also a long time ago. But also so unfortunate as everything else, i just can't understand why the company released a alpha game, with a lot of non-finished stuff and bugs that weren't present in the first C.S. A lot of things missing, crucial mechanics working like a old man on ICU and so on. They had more years to make it, i was bought by the official trailers showing every essencial part of the game and in the end, a disaster with compared with its predeessor. People still like it, cause it's an excellent game to build cities, but lack this ''sim city part'' if you stop to observe. Now they're releasing some ''patches'' to fix the ''simple problems''. But i really hope this becomes old news in the future anyway. They have a gold mine in their hands, but maybe old people who just invested money want it back without taking the quality of the game into the quation.
I don't get how people could say cities skylines is just a traffic simulator as if it's a bad thing, given that traffic is the majority of a city's backbone and what limits and grows it. I think they just dont realize that cities are transportation once you reach that scale and run into that limitation.
It's a game. Most people don't play the games as a substitute for real-life city building. Even then cities involve more than traffic, and that might not be the most interesting aspect for everyone. The appeal for me are the social and economic systems. But skylines is the obvious choice for anyone who wants a traffic simulator.
Huh, this sort of shows why both Simcity 4 and Skylines both kind of suck, they're not as fun as the original as they add a lot of complexity, but this complexity doesn't offer much more richness, as both are fundamentally limited in gameplay, which just comes off as annoying, eg. I've watched plenty of Skylines YT, but only played it for an hour before deciding it's gameplay loop was just tedious traffic management (what's with all the 'stroad' based cities in skylines, isn't it created by europeans, did BP and Enron sponsor it or something?)
There is something to the simplicity of the earlier titles. It takes an awful long time to create a city in later games and it's not always obvious the result is all that realistic or deep.
I just don't like that their is not alot to change in your city. Sim city you could go tourism or manufacture processors with their specializations. Also don't like the upkeep cost on alot of the upgrades in some cases the upgrades would be double when you could just spam more buildings, upgrades in general just not worth except for a few here and there.
I'm starting to realize I can specialize in Cities: Skylines 2, but it's pretty opaque. It requires spending a lot of time looking at the production menu and drawing conclusions from what's visible. I'm not really sure that's a bad thing - it's at least some challenge to figure it out - but it does feel easy to miss.
@computergamingyesterday not really a big fan of simply drop down a "specialization zone" or having to fill it in, at the very least ide rather it auto fill in like a zone meshing with the others and become dezoned if something els built on it. Their becomes a time when you start moving into full-on simulator and less into actually playing a game. If you know what I mean. The simple things in life like causing a natural disaster because you feel like it. Playing in a scenario mode with pre-set challenges and time frames. Anything really cause right now it feels bland and lacking other than being a simple builder. Right now, you can't even see all your income types. You make money even though you appear negative. Tracking things in general is difficult at a glance its easier to see the traffic jams than to see them on the overview with its bland static colors unlike Sims cities moveing lines with direction of travel and citizens tracking to see most traveld areas. How much are my recycling centers actually contributing? How much are the individual specialization zone buildings actually producing? Are they worth it? Do I need to turn off underperforming ones. Upgrades have a tendency to be upkeep intensive and inefficient relative to simply getting a whole nother building. Hopefully, in the long run, some things get fixed, like water being imported when you're clearly overproduced by a large margin.
Agreed but the 'simple' power and water in CS:S is a 'meh' point for me. As a layman, I know that transit is population based. Lots of people want to go to a particular place? (e.g. Times square in New York or OXford Street in London) Get transport from the people to the place. But how does power work? I don't know
I think the biggest plus of having the more technical stuff properly simulated is being able to take that into account when planning our city. These things influence the very layout of an urban environment, and if done in an easy to follow way, it can really enhance the simulation aspect. I think CS2 has a neat foundation for the devs to really double down on these aspects.
I highly disliked SimCity 4 because of the traffic portrayal being segmented, where the cars fade away at each intersection. I liked how at least with SC3K it pretended to portray complete car trips. Then again I just like Sim City 3000 far better overall.
We can argue Skylines works better or is more realistic, but SC4 is still just a more enjoyable game IMO. Maxis games had this quirky, personable charm to them that hasn't been recaptured.
Best modern city builders for me 1.simcity4 2.Soviet republic workers and resources 3simcity3 4.Simcity and cities skylines 5.city state2 1567.cities skylines 2
Can you finally have isolated power systems in CS2? I remember when I last played CS1 I tried having a separate wind turbine powering a building that was a away from the rest of the city and the whole grid went down. Dunno if they ever fixed that in CS1 or not.
The huge drawback of Cities Skylines which he failed to mention was that because of the huge computing power it takes, even a supercomputer is never going to simulate anything on the scale of a mega city like London or Tokyo. The largest city in C:S is only ever going to be a 'large town' at most
Eh? The only reason that _may_ be true is if the algorithms used in Cities Skylines aren't parallelizable, making it clock-bound rather than core-bound. Otherwise, even at Tokyo level, the most powerful supercomputers on Earth could devote more resources to a single NPC than the system requirements of the game itself. You would certainly be able to simulate not just London or Tokyo, but the entire world.
@@grantexploit5903 OK so 'theoretically' that may be possible, but what are the chances any ordinary person will own a computer capable of simulating a mega-city?
I agree, its a shame the game needs to touch a limit that doesn't let you get to the million population. But i think there are ways to fix it, and that is doing the same thing simcity 4 did, separate cities in squares over a huge region, that way you are just loading the current active city. The other thing cities skyiles could do, is remove the agents, but make them look like as if they are actually there.
@@Gonzas97 Yeah, I'd love to see a new city builder that uses a separate cities system similar to SC4, but with slightly greater simulation depth as expected, because in SC4 the limited amount of calculations that happen between cities isn't very interesting at all.
@@grantexploit5903 What if your algorithm scales in a non-linear manner? What about Amdahl's law? It is not as trivial as throwing more cores at the problem.
I want to say that I never liked Cities Skylines 1, but the second game is a lot better, I already have more hours in CS2 than in 1. CS1 is a city painter, not a city builder. Sim City 4 is still the best city simulator. I don't care about individual citizens, I only care about my city, which is why SC4 is still the best city simulator. You can break any simulation if you try, I don't consider that the benchmark for the overall quality of the simulation.
I just can't really get into Skylines even though I was a huge SC4 fan. It really is just a game about traffic and the city building parts feel hollow. The cities feel like they have no history, landmarks, or real people living in them. Instead the city feels like it's just a large pipeline for commuters getting to their jobs. Nature is also just absent, the landscape is sparse and blandly green. Even in a game like Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which is ostensibly all about traffic and transport, I was more interested in developing the towns, industries and shape the region as a whole, rather than creating really efficient junctions or whatever. The fundamental issue really is that I just don't care about individual citizens. The "agent model" adds nothing to the game for me, because my citizens are little more than users of services and (unlike Dwarf Fortress for example) just don't have very interesting lives. I do not mind that they are abstracted away, as long as the overall city simulation feels fun and alive, and the game remains playable even at very large populations.
Or just look at 9:22 . To me, this looks like a city: it's dense with detail, it looks like millions of people live here, it's like a garden where you can prune and sculpt and adjust to your liking, it looks organic. Skylines by comparison looks bland, rough and mechanical. There's a tension between scale on the one hand, and detail on the other that SC4 got just right. A modern version, maybe foregoing 3D graphics in favor of sprites (the Brigador engine comes to mind here) on arbitrarily large maps, and having a conservatively designed agent model that doesn't attempt to show people's teeth while still taking advantage of our greater CPU power, would be ideal for me.
Why does this guy sometimes sound like an AI trying to be human when he's presenting to the screen? This was an awesome fucking video though, easy sub and looking forward to more!
you failed to mention how cities skylines is basically a traffic simulator instead of a city builder
Well... Indeed
Also SimCity has character and details to every single buildings, Cities Skylines is just another gray building.
He mentions exactly that at 12:50
@@TomYaxley yeah cause I have time to watch the whole clickbait video
As an old SimCity 4 fan, I don't mind the transportation being center in Cities Skylines. It is the most fundamental aspect of city design.
However what frustrates me is when the traffic simulation fails. Like when people don't use public transport or walk when it is available
Another frustration is the death dynamic, which given that sims often move to a certain area at certain time, often means certain neighbourhoods suddenly are filled with dead bodies
To be fair, people driving to a store that is within walking distance isn't exactly unheard of.
Same thing with age ranges, usually you'll find the residential zones averaging into three different types: family, youngsters, and seniors.
So I think you generally don't notice this as an individual but when you get the insights of a city manager it ends up being highly visible.
Most often these issues can be worked around the same way they're worked around in real life: incentives & rezoning.
not better....
Simcity 3000 has more "atmosphere" to it...
and Simcity 2000 graphics are timeless
lol @ attractive spreadsheet.....
literally all videogames are spreadsheets of arrays and objects....
what a dumb statement....
@@Microphunktv-jb3kj that's not really what the statement is about. It's more about the fact that Sim City uses a more classical statistical simulation model whereas Cities uses agent-based modeling. It is a more sophisticated way of doing things though it has it's tradeoffs especially in CPU cost. Yes, you can represent both games using spreadsheets if you want, but the modeling paradigm is completely different.
Are you buildings a transport network needs?
SimCity's soundtrack from 3 to 4 is legitimately incredible.
I'm a big fan of 2000's as well!
I have a citybuilder music compilation folder, it's made form the full SC3KU, SC4RH soundtracks, with a few added from Cities XL, a few from SC Societies (yup!!), some from streets of Simcity and some from SC2013... best music ever.
"Cities of tomorrow" was almost Vangelis in quality
@@Daimo83 yeah Chris tilton did a great job
I love Simcity 5’s soundtrack too, that was probably the best thing about that game
Back in the day you could build a city in SimCity 2000 and fly over it in SimCopter. That was mindblowing at the time!
Thanks for another interesting video!
I didn't have SimCopter but I did have Streets of SimCity. Which was pretty busted. But I got some fun out of it.
You could also import your character from The Sims, give them a home and a job, and watch them drive to work and stuff :)
Someone will probably make a mod for City Skylines 2 to let you do that.
I was blown away by SimCopter when I first got it in 1997. The fact you could import your SimCity 2000 city was incredible. Imagine if you could import your CS city into GTA V. That's what SimCopter (and Streets of SC) did in 1996-7.
@@computergamingyesterday, I had both SimCopter and Streets of SimCity and as a kid they left me hungry for a larger integrated SimUniverse. Just imagine a farm simulator that let you drive the equipment with in your SimFarm's property
SC4 was peak citybuilding, the only drawback was the crashes, but I loved every bit of it! I gotta play CS2 when Paradox finish the optimization, it looks interesting.
Tons of small tweaks that modders were able to pick up and keep the game healthy for nearly two decades. Tried City Skylines one, went right back to SC4. After playing CS2....I may have a hard time going back to SC4 finally after 20 years.
@@bretthousman8317 Don't bet on it, the entire agent based simulation is fatally flawed.
Except Simcity is an actual city simulator, CS is a city builder. CS has miniscule populations, has very limited and super simplistic economics and other limitations that actual simulators did not have or would not have if done competently today. Unfortunately, we don't have city simulators anymore.
Exactly. These videos on RUclips of City Skylines "building X city" are so freaking ridiculous. All you're doing is plopping things down, how is that remotely satisfying!? City Skylines is shockingly inane.
Yea I definitely get that. What I would really like to see the agent system from City: Skylines built in a more serious simulator. Dream game, right there.
It's funny how history is repeating itself. SimCity didn't really have much competition in its day. Neither does Cities: Skylines. Can we get more than one modern day, real-world city simulator at a time, please?
@@computergamingyesterday "What I would really like to see the agent system from City: Skylines built in a more serious simulator."
I have thought about how this could be done, maybe if an agent was representational of a population group, but I can see how this approach introduces a lot of problems.
Cities Skylines remains at its heart more of a traffic simulator than anything else. The weird scale that everything has, with buildings and infrastructure way too big, and the land forms way too small (what I refer to as "toybox cities") reveals that it's not intended to look like a real city, but be a representation of one. You have a city of a population of 20K and it's like two farms, a mine, 200 houses, 100 factories, 10 downtown skyscrapers, and more highways than Kansas City. And even those single-family houses have utterly enormous footprints. The agent system is superior to a representative one only if agents actually have human intelligence. They do not! They are both a lot dumber than human beings, but contrariwise also a lot more consistent in their behaviors. Humans can navigate more fluidly, but also do things unpredictably. This means that the best methods for corralling agents is always going to be some trick that isn't the same as in real life anyway. Instead of a city simulator meant to representatively model human behavior collectively, you have a city of robots behaving individually.
But my biggest problem (for me) is always the upper size. Not necessarily population (that's just a number) but level of sprawl attached to it. As advertised, SC4 can have populations in the millions, and at least over region view can sprawl for tens of miles. If you have the drive and technical know-how, you can import real-world USGS data maps (conveniently in the exact same greyscale range that SimCity 3&4 uses to generate terrain height) and make an entire county or small state in real scale. Farms and suburbs stretching across the horizon. You can NEVER do that in Skylines, 1 or 2. The agent system in the first CS restricted population to somewhere around 150K (on paper about 65,000 agents but not all of them are active at once) because the agent system was capped and once reached the entire system would collapse as no new "sims" could be created to do things. The second has about the same restriction because it's so horribly unoptimized that even the best gaming computer you can build starts to struggle when it reaches 100K, because they focused on graphics over the simulation and apparently do not understand the concept of proper LODs.
And even if they fix that (which I seriously doubt) the fact that the agent system is baked in means that computations needed will increase at an accelerated rate as the agents have to interact with more agents. Mathematically, 3 agents have 4 possible multi-agent interactions. Add in a 4th and that jumps to 11. Add in a 5th and it jumps to 26. 10 agents goes up to 1013... With a representative system, it's roughly linear. This means that eventually the CPU as well as the GPU is going to tap out, and I guarantee it's going to be before it hits "millions".
If you want to optimize a game, it has to be abstracted. Factorio is a perfect example of this. If you look at it, it seems like it's always modeling individual items on belts. Just like agents. But there are hundreds of thousands of them on those belts, so how can it function? Simple: once the belt is completely full of items, the game starts calculating the ENTIRE BELT as if it's a single item, since at that point the number of items is just (#per belt section)x(#of sections). Why waste system resources calculating them all individually? There is no way the game would function if these kinds of tricks were not employed by the programmers. Cities Skylines doesn't do this, so the upper limit of complexity will be very low. The cities will always be "toybox cities", and until they drop or at least restrain the agent system, that will not change.
This.
Gamedev in general is always filled with tricks to simpify calculations in order to create a convincing illusion for the player. Light, rain, vegetation, there are always tricks under the hood because optimization is important. If the outcome is similar its completly irrelevant if you just use a grid or actual ai-agents. So no - Cities Skylines doesnt work better, it works differently and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Brilliant summary.
I found this more on CS2, that my computer was running everything fine on 80,000 pop, then slowed a little by 100,000, and by 120,000 it had completely ground to a halt and putting it on max speed still had cars crawling down the road. And the services also began to break down like they weren't all functioning.
"How could it decrease so fast?" I thought, but your explanation makes perfect sense. It's exponential interactions.
My city also had three large office high-rise zones, four types on university and three colleges, about ten fully expanded water treatment plants (each the size of a university itself), and five incinerator plants to deal with garbage. All for a moderate provincial town of 100,000 people.
My home town is 70,000 of mostly suburban sprawl and it's centre has no high-rises, and a few blocks of commercial zone, and the industrial area is about 1sq mile in total. That's a real sized town.
The assets are all wrong too. The 30 storey office building should employ more than 150 people.
@@JackChurchill101I think the problem is that in the real world, a small town doesn’t need to provide all the jobs. I know in my own wee town of 13,000 people, a lot of people travel to the bigger towns and cities for work. But in cities skylines since you can only play in the one area you have to provide a job for everyone within that same town, so you end up building a lot more commercial and office districts than you would see in a real town of the same size. In simcity you could build multiple cities in a region and citizens could travel across the border to the other cities to work instead of working in the city they live in.
this 100%. the main attraction of city skylines is the traffic simulation. the agent modeling really doesn't offer much, ultimately what occurs under the hood may be more Realistic but is fundamentally not that dramatic of a change from the simcity model.
if city skyline's agents did anything other than make traffic, age, get education, and die, i would be more forgiving and be willing to play the game on a tiny ass scale. i would so love it if they maybe simulated city politics! that would be cool
SC4 does in fact have a minor form of automatic pathfinding vehicle movement, but it's used mainly for emergency vehicles the player designates destinations for during a disaster, however since there doesn't tend to be much other traffic, the vehicle tends to just sort of get there with little issue, so it doesn't stand out a lot.
IIRC, in Cities Skylines each agent after picking destinations for the first time didn't change them unless it was necessary. In SimCity 2013 version each agent picked nearest open job or empty home, and this changed constantly. The CS approach saves a bit on computation, while providing more realistic behavior. But this makes traffic/path calculation exponentially more complex with longer distances between points.
The big limitation of agent-based system is number of concurrent agents. Game must keep all relevant data in RAM, and constantly update it for all active agents. While also rendering the game and running any other underlying systems and tasks. That's why cities Skylines slows down with huge populations, and SimCity 2013 had even bigger limitations on population size...
Couldn't a simplification be a solution for this? Who needs 1M citizens realistically simulated? Cut it down to a cap of let's say 10K or even 100K - I know not a "pure" simulation but isn't there a point of deminishing returns at some point?
@@AECH_CH, that actually would be a reasonable solution. Simulate one citizen, and then use that data for 9 or 99 neighbors. This could be adjusted dynamically, depending on the size of the population. Still it would require memory to store data for each citizen, but might significantly reduce the computation needs.
Cities Skylines 2 solves the issue of agents not changing destinations. The agents choose alternative lanes and pick different ways to travel based on their personality and needs (Time, price, comfort). Simcity 2013's approach is both unrealistic and worse than any game.
The best feature of SC 2013 was that if you had a bad enough traffic jam, you could have a nuclear power plant meltdown due to lack of highly educated workers. I wonder if they ever patched that…
Whoa! I clicked on this as a suggested video and didn't realize Will Wright lived in my hometown. I grew up in Berkeley and used to ride by his place all the time. It was up in the hills and had a beautiful view. I was in Berkeley the day of the firestorm and woke up to see the daytime sky was black and glowing orange. I told my mom I was gonna ride down the street to my friends house but him and I almost immediately rode towards the hills to investigate. We got a few blocks from the fire which was raging through the hills and could feel the heat of it. We turned back and rode past police and fire trucks. I was probably on the same street he was that day. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for the video! ❤
Crazy to hear about. I know of the fire but had never looked into it until researching for this video. The footage from it is intense.
There's just about three non-Finnish people in the thanks section of the 'Cities in Motion' credits which I think explain the history of how 'Cities: Skylines' came about just about perfectly. The first is Will Wright. That's pretty straightforward. The second one is Chris Sawyer and you might immediately start thinking how did the 'Rollercoaster Tycoon' merit a mention that high up in a city simulator? Well, it's because he created 'Transport Tycoon'. But how do you get the through line from that to 'Cities: Skylines', there's like a decade and a half gap and they feel extremely different. The answer is in the third name, not listed as "Special Thanks", but as "Inspiration" instead.
And that name is Hans Schilcher. He's responsible for a little known (at least outside of Germany and Austria) series of simulation games, the 'Giant' series by Austrian game developer JoWood. The first entry was 'Industry Giant', which was basically a Transport Tycoon clone for Windows. And that lent itself to a simulation of public transport by the year 2000, called 'Traffic Giant'. Cities in Motion was basically a clone of that a decade later, JoWood having gone bankrupt in the meantime.
Cities in Motion 2's change was to set it in the Unity game engine instead and Cities: Skylines basically changed up the formula by incorporating the city building aspects from SimCity into that game loop. My point is that Cities: Skylines is basically one third SimCity, sure, but also one third Unity city painter but also one third Transport Tycoon as applied to public transport. That's the magic formula that made Cities: Skylines work and it's all explained in the credits of a game that came out four years earlier.
These are some great points. I'm familiar with the "Giant" games - might be a good video topic in the future.
I wish they'd put more Transport Tycoon into Cities Skylines 2 tbh. The Industry DLC for Cities Skylines 1 was the best of the bunch and I wish you could do more with it like, privatize parts of the city, like bus transport, and perhaps even build competing companies. A game within a game. Something that's probably never going to happen would be making that experience multiplayer where there's a GM, game master or game 'mayor' if you like, and then other players playing transport tycoon, trying to cater to the need of the city or cities.
I agree that CS has a better simulator, but SC4 is a better game, IMO - the gameplay is more fun with a lot more charm; the way the Sims in it can panic, get pissed off (or love you), the different disasters, the missions are hilarious... etc - but Skylines is *almost* a straight up simulation game. Which is fine. I really want them to make a modern SimCity (not like SC2013), all they really gotta do is bring back that charm and make a better simulation engine.
SimCity definitely has more charm. Cities Skylines would feel like the generic brand version of a simulator…if there were any others like it right now!
@@computergamingyesterday If there is such a lack of city builder games, why do you claim we are in a "golden age" of city builders right now? There's basically just 1 at the moment.
I love cities skylines, it just lacks character.
I discovered the genre with Simcity 2000 when I was in 7th grade. It was the first video game I ever stayed up all night to play. It also earned me my first detention at school when I fell asleep in english class the next day.
SimCity 2000 and SimCopter are the biggest reasons why I became the obsessive nerd I am today. Literally personality defining. They were my introduction to gaming and would alter the course of my entire life from then on.
I’ve finally made the shift from SimCity to Cities Skylines myself - while SC def has its charms, and I def miss being able to hit 1 million residents, CS just has way more to offer. And I _finally_ just got a computer than can run it well haha.
One cool feature of SC4 was that, even though you don’t have thousands of agents representing citizens running around the map, you could import your character from The Sims (or create a basic one) and give them a home and a job in your city. That was a cool little touch.
I'm hoping that if it isn't a feature eventually in CS2, that being the ability to make custom characters and add them into your city; either in as a DLC or be made as a mod (I may undertake that project given the desire to have custom "Sims" running around in my city in CS2).
The wild thing about SimCity vs Cities Skylines is SimCity had a dev team of (I believe) around 400, while Cities Skylines was made by 10 people. CS2 has only stretched to 30 people, pretty wild given CS has been that successful it seems nobody wishes to challenge them in the city builder genre.
@@craigseddon4884 I had no ideia of this.
@@craigseddon4884 Well the release process was different (and paradox operates on a passion driven dev team, rather than corporate structures) but the time frame etc and content of the games was very different.
Also, as much as paradox is hated for their DLC politics, I find it genious - it's unreasonable to demand a game for 50$ today when anything goes up in prices + they always provide free content for everyone.
@@craigseddon4884 A year ago Colossal Order had 28 employees(2022 financial statement). Some of these aren't part of actual game developing so team is like 20 people. They are hiring so number of people right now is probably a bit higher. 2023 statement is not out yet.
Holy shit it’s 3 am and I’m watching Terence McKenna talk city simulators with the simcity4 soundtrack blaring in my mind like a tornado siren fuck yeaaa
Only 5,7K views? I don't understand, where's the other million? Excellent video!
I liked Simcity 2013. It ABSOLUTELY needed some work and was released too soon. But I still enjoyed it, played it for years before finally picking up Skylines 1.
I went back to it and addicted
Small correction, X-plane has been doing flight simulation using real time airflow calculations to simulate flight since 1995, they are up to version 12, and honestly even decades ago were doing VERY accurate simulation modeling on planes you could make yourself in game.
Honestly, sounds like you might appreciate doing a deep dive into the making of X-Plane.
The two approaches to simulating things aren't necessarily better or worse. I could see a way to combine the two in the same game. If you're going to make a city-builder game, you could simulate the player's city with the individual citizens, but you could have other cities you can trade with simulated using the tile method to save on CPU, while still having something you can look into. Hell, you could go further and use coarser, less-detailed statistical models for simulating other states within the nation and even simpler ones for other nations on the global scale, all of which produce data the player can look through.
Going the other way, you could combine The Sims with Sim City and send your sims around an entire city. When playing with individual sims, they and everything around them (within a few tiles) are simulated on an individual level, but the rest of the city is simulated with tiles, keeping things lively and dynamic.
Take the idea to another genre, and you could have an RPG where AI players are essentially playing a strategy game, the effects of which feed into a tile-based system covering the country the game takes place in, and that tile-based simulation triggers events with individual NPCs the player interacts with, giving emergent stories. Probably too complicated for a game with voice-acting, but might be doable for one where you only read the conversations.
You know what? All this is basically a level-of-detail system! Except, rather than being for graphics, it's one for AI. That tree that's 200m away doesn't have every leaf rendered. It's just a rough low-poly model of the trunk and main branches with some big-bunch-of-leaves sprites on the ends. The one that's 2km away on the hillside doesn't even have a model, and is just a sprite. The individual characters are like the full-poly tree where you can see every leaf, the tiles are the coarse one with a few sprites for bunches of leaves, and the simple statistics are like the sprite on the hillside.
That's fine and all, but the huge road block with using multiple level-of-detail of simulation is to keep a coherence when switching from one to another.
It's a problem that often plagues games like Mounts & blades or the X serie from Egosoft, where combat can be solved ever by direct participation, or by simulation. It quickly becomes apparent that some strategies works better in simulation mode while others are better for real-time battles. The less detailled simulation will have to ignore some parameters, and that generally can be exploited by the player.
@@theslay66 Well, exploiting the game's systems is half the fun of playing, isn't it?
@@Roxor128 Well, depends on what you're looking for in a game.
Sure, if for you a game is just a system that you must try to "beat" in every way possible, well yeah, that may be part of the fun.
Other people want immersion and internal consistency, and exploiting bugs and holes in the system is perceived as unsastisfactory, like cheating. Because that's not gaming, but meta-gaming -you're not playing a game, you're gaming the system.
"Then don't do it" you may answer, and you would be right.
However when you're still trying your best to perform well in a game, but you know there is an easy way to "win" by exploiting some bug that you have to stop yourself from using for the sake of your own consistency (and because you want a "fair win"), it's still a bit frustrating.
After all, as I see it any game is about problem solving. You may be able to solve it easely by exploiting some kind of inconsistency in the system, but in the end you didn't solve the problem, you just avoided it. So what's the point ?
The "simulate everything" is the better option... except that we are limited by our computers... and such a thing can NOT be done today for a citybuilder without atrocious performance or severely limiting the scope. Citybuilders should still be using statistical simulation instead of getting over-ambitious.
This sounds sort of like how Dwarf Fortress works?
Except instead of tiles there are interconnected nodes defining such things as cities, NPCs, organizations, needs, etc which are used for the higher-level simulation which in turn affects the local more fine-grained simulation.
It also has its Adventure Mode to explore the world as an RPG.
Cities Skylines may work better, with better Tech... But at least Maxis never Nickle & Dimed everyone to Death, like Paradox & CO.
Cities Skylines = "Pay more for the all the DLCs, than the regular game!"
I'd rather have Maxis back.
me too. Also I prefer an actual City builder over a traffic micromanagement simulator.
They are part of EA, they would do the same as what they did with the Sims and sell humdreda of dlc
@@Perrirodan1 Yeah pretty much this. Like, if SimCity 2013 did well at all, there'd be tons of them, and probably not any that increase the map size.
@@catriona_drummond Challenge of city builders is managing traffic and your city's needs. WHy would you ever want a city builder without traffic? It would just become mindless building spamming game
Looks like Stan decided to stick his head in the sand when EA took over Maxis. Next, he'll claims BF 2042 is the best game ever.
According to the one official guide, apparently SimCity 3000 has a tile by tile value on each tile of road, road by bus, rail, subway, and other things like getting on a bus station and swapping between one method to another, like car to bus station, etc.
I seem to recall it coming out to something like this:
Roads, directly from one zone tile in a straight line to another zone tile, can go about 1/4 the map
Roads by bus go slightly further
Rails about half way across the map
Highway I think is equal to rail, except via a car or bus
Subway can go across the entire map
Then there is the value to transition travel methods. If you have to drive to the train station to reach it, it takes a bigger chunk of time than a single road tile to switch travel methods. Meaning having to drive more than a block to a train station to get to work can greatly reduce the effectiveness of bothering to take the train. It can also just generate even more local traffic issues driving to the train station, especially if you use the IRL logic, a person might drive a few blocks IRL to get to the station.
However, this is compounded by the fact that industry born traffic checks can't go by bus or subway ever, and means industry always needs direct access to roads or rail, and by extension, both limits how far away industry can be from the other zones, and also means you might have to run undesirable trains occasionally through residential areas, at least until you get to 100% clean industry and can put them right up against stuff like residential zones.
This results in annoying things, like a R to R, R to C, R to I, C to R, C to C, C to I traffic can all use subway to travel the entire map, but your I to R, I to C, or I to I traffic can only be at most half a map away, if you use trains.
Also, apparently there's at best an 80% chance or such, WITH ordinances, to use non personal vehicle travel. Meaning if you want to ensure 100% successful traffic attempts, everything has to be built confined by road travel restrictions.
I used to love SimCity 3000, even while not fully understanding the traffic for years, as overall I thought it was the best city sim made (until Skylines). But I always wondered why traffic flow felt so, weird. Now I know. And when I built a recent city using all this in mind, and built things in squares around bus stations and later subways, I began to realize that an ideal city seems to require building a ton of mass transit entry points directly in range of zone tiles. This most recent city, once I got the ordinances going, was the first ever where I eventually saw road traffic almost disappear after getting subways and trains everywhere.
Also, while the game doesn't have physically rendered traffic jams, at least in SimCity 3000, there is supposed to be something to calculate being stuck in a traffic jam via the simulation, that's supposed to increase travel distance per tile, which can reduce travel efficiency, and result in a failed trip. And apparently the game will try to recalculate future travel attempts around the jams. So SimCity 3000 does have traffic management, just not in the same overt, physical way. At this point, it's still a good game, but by understanding how to better manipulate the road traffic to nearly not exist, and get people on mass transit, I kinda feel like my zoning strategy has become super cookie cutter by necessity.
Skylines, however, as you point out, actually follows some sense of IRL logic, and you can actually get people to travel all the way across town to a job, and not just two blocks away.
Very good summary of the history and evolution of the genre, great job!
You credit CS with the switch to the agent based simulation, but SC2013 did it first. Do you think if that failure was the end of the story, devs wouldn't dare try it today?
I just felt addressing this was missing from your essay.
I decided not to talk much about SC2013 because while it was first, it ended up being a dead end.
Now, if Colossal Order had not been around to immediately follow up with their own city builder…I suspect we still would have eventually seen a new city builder and it probably would be agent based. I think the whole genre has veered this direction. But this hypothetical game would probably focus less on traffic and transportation.
This was awesome! I appreciate how this adds context to the constraints found in city builders. Here’s hoping this video is recommended more!
This is such a well put together history. I love this. Keep doing it. Great job!
Thank you! Will do!
Both Cities Skyline as well as Sim city 2013 have a grid. Actually the grid of SC 2013 is identical to that of SC4. While SC4 is 4096 meter of 16 meter tiles, SC 2014 is 2048 meter with 8 meter tiles. CS1 is 1920meter with 8 meter tiles.
What make SC2013 look different is that it have a sub precision system as well as a rotational angle system
So everything in both CS1 and SC2013 is actually square and grid based, it have only a rotation and ofset system just prior to rendering making it look like its not.
Here is the thing, both SC2013 and CS1 have a set of grids that is close to 2x2km squared. But look at the cars when they driving in and out of a player controlled tile. The cars moving over the tile boarder deload then reloads. This is not the case in CS1. If we look closer to how the grid works one might get a clue. The number of grid squares in SC2013 is 2048/8, that happen to be 256, and that happen to be one byte. In CS1 the map size is 1920/8 that is 240, that is slightly under a byte.
So in SC2013 a vehicle move to the grid limit, the moving square reach 256 (or 0), then ticks over, get a overflow limit, unload the car, from the grid simulation, move the data to the other grid simulation where its loaded and the car keep roaring. This take several frames and its clearly visible.
In CS1 the car move from square 248 and up in square 249, the car seamlessly move outside of the grid border into the next grid, and is unloaded in reloaded synchronous to moving.
This allow all vehicle to seamlessly move from tile to tile with no interruption. It also more importantly allow cars from NOT moving, say if its a grid lock, and the car is stuck at square 249, the car behind it can see that there is a car stuck at grid 249 so it cant move into 248, allow a car grid lock to move past the tile limit, that is not possible in SC2013.
This small detail allow a city tile to be placed right next to a other tile seamlessly integrated making it look that 2, 4 or 16 tiles are one and the same. This is the core and main reason why CS1 is so much better than SC2013. Still pretty much all modern games still have tiles down to the raw math. And most modern games have subtitles allowing precision placement with in a tile. This is typically not part of the simulation but just a visual improvement.
So really apart from using agents in SC2013 and CS1, all the game back to the original Sim City works exactly the same.
Its also worth saying that OG Sim City 1989 had 120x100 cell maps, its really not that different to 256x256 of Sim city 4 and 2013.
Cities Skylines 2 is going to be an incredible game when it's playable in 5 years.
hahaha, yeah...
The hours of my life lost to SimCity, SimFarm, The Sims, SimGolf are immeasurable!!
The Sim City reboot did change quite a lot of this though. You can follow cars from home to work for example. You can follow buses or cargo trucks while they do their job, even if they leave the city you can still follow them in the region map.
Except that the cars or sims in SC2013 always went to the nearest job/house... it was idiotic.
@@tonyzed6831 true
I mean you had a limited version of that in SImcity 4 in that you could create pedestrians and follow them, within the city at least. Not much point in trying to follow randos of course.
This was a great video, keep up good work. Quality definitely better than I would expect with 2.7k subs
Really great video!
The real reason Sims city died is because of DRM.
Fighting piracy with a "always online" mode could possibly ddos your own servers. Making the game unplayable, since players aren't able to connect.
There were LOTS of reasons why SimCity died, let's be real. Not just to do with DRM.
I had none of connectivitiy issues. I abandoned it for a lot of other reasons. The tiny square being probably the primary one. I filled it up completely and got bored of it in like a week or so.
The main reason of it all: Electronics Art.
@@Gonzas97 And their idiotic always online requirement amongst other things.
Electronic Arts killed and buried Maxis and Bullfrog.
I've been playing the last cities skylines and the last sim city. While SC2 is the better of two I find always going back to sim city. It has a more satisfying crunch to it on a whole, the sounds effects and the simulation of their sims I think it's just much better than SC2. Were it not for the small plots and lack of better traffic control sim city would come on top
Happy you mentioned the prior CiMs being the base of Skylines. Been on SimCity since the SNES and 4 RULES, but after the EA debacle, Cities took a leap of faith and WOW. They've heavily leaned in to the community too, embracing tools and mods, that legit improve the game. Cannot wait for C:S2!!!
I am pretty sure you are wrong about many of your claims. cities skylines did not create many of the feature, they exist in simcity before the reboot during the peak of Sims as EA wanted to cash in on Sim branding. nor does cities skylines have true agent model either. no game has because of the 65k agent limit in the engine cities skylines use. there is clearly cities that are bigger than 65k population, this limitation is well known in the modding community.
in fact the biggest change and what make cities skylines successful is just that... modding.
Great history of SimCity! I never knew how it worked under the hood. Would love to see a similar documentary on Wing Commander
Just tried Skylines 2 yesterday, I've never played the first version, but SimCity 2000 is one of my all time favourite games. Your video helps to explain a lot, thank you!
Skylines 2 has a lot more granularity to the sim than Skylines 1.
That must be a wild jump.
13:21 remember how much trouble Biffa had with this part of town.
I played Simcity when it released and people where so obsessed with it we would have dedicated machines that would just run it. Then check on it throughout the day during breaks & lunchtime at work. 😂
I miss the old days of SimCity because if I'm being frank and honest, SimCity 2013 is what killed the franchise. From the small map size all the way to the always online requirement. Yeah sure EA and Maxis reversed the always online requirement after the fact, but the damage had already been done by then. CS1 and 2 is and ALWAYS will be the answer to what was once a great game and what SimCity 2013 SHOULD have been from the start.
I can't say I agree with your premise that agent simulation makes a city sim better. I would rather play a city builder that approximates things if it means I can have a realistically sized town. It's just too bad there's nothing to really rival SC4 except maybe NewCity but that game seems to be dead.
Nice job! Really good presentation of the history of the genre.
Looking back at how prescient your words about how CS2 "technical limitations" would eventually kill, or at least hamper CS2's success, SimCity 4 was definitely the heyday of City Building (though Cities Skylines 1 has put up a fantastic effort and might technically be better)
this aged well.... esp for those few who are able to actually play it on their Nvidia 6070's.
Did Wright have anything to do with all the Sim spinoffs? Simant? Simcopter? etc...?
He is credited as co-designer on SimAnt, and the only designer on Simcopter. So, yes, he do design work on some - though not on others, like SimFarm, SimTower, and SimTown.
I will say, I've played a lot of CS and SC4.
Ive gotten fed up trying to play CS for two reasons: Its too gentle on pollution and finances, and the traffic simulation is mediocre at the best of times. Lane management is tedious with tmpe, and impossible without it. Highways are likewise obnoxious. Freight rail is not worth investing in, as the station gets saturated throughput far too easily.
So WEDIT became SimCity and CHEDIT became SCURK of the later iterations of asset editors that came with the game. I made lots of custom buildings. It was quite fun.
I would love a new Sim City game, but with European city planning. Shops and houses side by side, no stroads and huge parking areas, walking-streets, bike lines etc.
Workers and Resources, Soviet Republic. But problem with this game is that it tries to be everything (simcity plus transport tycoon) and it's very complex and not well optimized. It takes into account things like education, heating plants, electricity, seasons of years (no crop growing in winter, slower trafic due to snow), export and import costs, constructions from your our resources delivered to site. Tip: automatic buying of resources is cheaper closer to map border. I think latest versions have waste management
You talk about Cities Skylines as a successor to SimCity, but it's really more of a successor to Cities XL 2011/2012, which itself came about to try to fill the gap left after SimCity 4 was officially announced to be the end of SimCity (before EA saw how strong the fanbase continued to be and did the 2013 reboot). Much of what's in Cities Skylines is a direct result of the new features and changes Cities XL brought to the genre.
i know some people don't like the game as much, but cities xl and it's derivatives would be interesting for you to evaluate in the same way. would be interesting to know what they are doing there since it's obviously not grid style like simcity, yet not like cities skylines either, yet still seems to work fairly reasonably. otherwise the main issues people had with the game itself at the time largely were performance related and etc. game itself though i found quite unique and fun to play.
CS is grid based.....
I should. I played Cities XL for a hot minute when it came out. I don't recall why I didn't stick with it.
12:50 . Yes. a traffic simulator. and that's what i like most about it lol. never thought id gain such an appreciation for interchanges.
Thanks for the video. Judging by the reviews, they have had big problems evolving CS2 beyond the transport elements.
why did you miss simcity 5 from the narrative? it had the same mechanics as Cities Skylines.
nah, simcity 2013 does have a agent simulation (even tho its muchinferior than skylines)
societes don't get even close to a true agent simulation.
I mean you can have individual citizens that are tracked in Simcity 4 but yea the models were limited and it wasn't tracking everyone in the city and just spawning cars and citizens for visual appearance and utility purposes.
Why comparing Cities Skylines with a game made in in 2004? It's funny how Cities Skylines community like to shit on SimCity being a cancelled franchise yet they use "Cims" to refer to people living in their cities 🤦🏻♂️.
I liked the old sim game better and if it was remade or reworked with curved roads, modding, and unlimited map sizes i would buy it. The cartoonish look is just more enjoyable.
Honestly, the aesthetics is one of the least important things in a city simulator. I want the simulation to be top notch, not having pretty things to look at.
Just found you, loved the videos, subscribed!
Welcome aboard!
Job Request Agents vs Needs Agent. It was a little more random since jobs were not constent and most devs didn't think was needed. The deapth required for true fullfilment would be tricky. I felt and feel that x64 multi core and alot more resources were needed. Its a complicated subject with alot of depth. (XoXiDe101)
Very enjoyable and informative video overall!
2:50 The non-mainline 2008 Wii game SimCity Creator wasn't tile-based, AFAIK. (Edit: Actually it appears to be-it supports curved roads, but those are aesthetic rather than mechanical. It probably stores the appearance of the roads separately instead of dynamically generating them from their grid layout as in other SimCity games. Regardless, that shows that 6:00 was not always true.)
3:20 Isn't the non-mainline 2007 game SimCity Societies an exception? The division of Sims into classes seems like it would require Agent-level simulation.
3:50 With flight simulators to an extent that's still true today-you'd need the most powerful supercomputer on Earth to directly and perfectly simulate airflow around an airframe. But does MSFS 2020 use a simplified CFD model as you suggest? I know Kerbal Space Program and especially its mod Ferram Aerospace have one, but don't think in any of those examples that it's grid, point-cloud, or particle-based like research-grade ones.
6:25 Not entirely sure something like Magnasanti couldn't exist IRL-you had the Kowloon Walled City, for example.
8:15 What about the profoundly-innovative yet (as you did) oft-overlooked City Life series (City Life, Cities XL, Cities XL 2011, Cities XL 2012, and Cities XXL)? AFAIK City Life was the first modern agent-based non-tile-based fully-3D city builder ever, and Cities XL briefly allowed MMO play.
13:00 I mean, that is realistic...
14:55 Not entirely sure what you mean there. If you consider Cities: Skylines to "accurately" simulate a city, it has a vanilla cap of 1 million people (the maximum realistically achievable being around 500-600 thousand), which is rather greater than "modestly sized" unless you're talking about somewhere like India or China. I'm not sure what it takes to run a city at that level hardware-wise, but it's obviously doable. And assuming the algorithms used in Cities Skylines are parallelizable, it would absolutely be possible to simulate the entire world using a modified build of the game on the most powerful supercomputers.
Curved aesthetic roads in the Wii version remind me of a similar method used to make them in SC4 through mods, they look nice and function as you'd want them to, but if you delete 1 tile of them it tends to turn the rest into a jumble of seemingly random road tiles no longer 'assigned' to the road curve.
Kowloon was actually much denser than Magnasanti, almost ten times higher from what i could find
Amazing video, please keep it uo!! You remikd me of the channel called Ahoy :)
Keep doikg these online blogs!!
I disagree. Cities Skylines is not a City Builder, it's a traffic micromanagement simulator. you just zone zone some houses, shops and factories around the most efficient transport systems. It's more about optimisation than about City building. And if I want that I go all in and play Factorio and not Cities Skylines. Or I design traces on a PCB.
Tell me you haven’t played Cities Skylines without telling me you haven’t played it.
Well how do you reckon I found out that micromanaging traffic lights and occasionally putting some city around my carefully designed transportation system was no fun to me?
Not sure why traffic management and "city builder" are incompatible in your mind. Given traffic management is one of the biggest challenges in city planning, it kinda makes sense for that to be a big part of a city builder game. Besides, there's really only a handful of basic principles you have to apply to manage traffic well.
@@JasonEfstathiou They are not incompatible but in Skylines they are imbalanced. traffic overshadows absolutely everything else. and it's very micromamangey. All other aspects of the game are more like creative mode, barely a challenge.
@@catriona_drummondCities in real life face traffic management issues when designed poorly. Cities Skylines mirror that hence clearly THE BEST city building games there could ever be!
It's incredible! After playing C.S 2, i got back to C.S 1 and realized even more of how great this game is, much more complex and realistic than the new one. Unfortunatelly C.S 1 don't make the economy part very hard to manage, but it seems like a big challenge if compared to the C.S2. And of course, Sim city 4 is the best one! It will take years for some company to do better than this game.
Skylines 2 is already shaping up to be far better than SC4. And I say this as a city planner fanatic that has been playing these games since the OG SC on Commodore 64.
I played SimCity 4 quite a bit, and it was frustratingly bad, and pretty much abandoned by the developer EA other than one expansion. The only thing that made it even tolerable was that players reverse engineered the game to try to fix and expand it. The hill I'll die on is that SC4, and not the 2013 SC, is really what killed the series.
@@cinnanyan
Except that 20 years on, SC4 has a thriving Mod community. SC2013 does not.
@@cinnanyan I agree, becasue i writing about SC4 after i modded it a little to make it functionable. But in matter of simulation, it's the best.
@@LordofSyn I can agree with you that C.S2 has a very, very strong potential just like an atomic bomb to grow up and become a unreal game. I understand that you love it, cause you're a city planner, thing that i'm not, unfortunatelly. My cities are made of a big spoon of luck, some smart thinking and luck once again! lol. I'm 27 years old, so unfortunatelly i didn't live those glory days of video games where everything was brand new. I started playing Sim City 2000 on PS1 i guess. It was also a long time ago.
But also so unfortunate as everything else, i just can't understand why the company released a alpha game, with a lot of non-finished stuff and bugs that weren't present in the first C.S. A lot of things missing, crucial mechanics working like a old man on ICU and so on. They had more years to make it, i was bought by the official trailers showing every essencial part of the game and in the end, a disaster with compared with its predeessor. People still like it, cause it's an excellent game to build cities, but lack this ''sim city part'' if you stop to observe. Now they're releasing some ''patches'' to fix the ''simple problems''.
But i really hope this becomes old news in the future anyway. They have a gold mine in their hands, but maybe old people who just invested money want it back without taking the quality of the game into the quation.
Good content from a small channel, well done.
Poor cities XL doesn't even get mentioned. It's the last city building sim i played. it was pretty fun. came out a couple years before skylines.
And then there's Cities XL, the iterations of which resold the same game with some content packs and never fixed any bugs.
I don't get how people could say cities skylines is just a traffic simulator as if it's a bad thing, given that traffic is the majority of a city's backbone and what limits and grows it. I think they just dont realize that cities are transportation once you reach that scale and run into that limitation.
It's a game. Most people don't play the games as a substitute for real-life city building. Even then cities involve more than traffic, and that might not be the most interesting aspect for everyone. The appeal for me are the social and economic systems. But skylines is the obvious choice for anyone who wants a traffic simulator.
Didn't Sim City 2013 actually embrace the agent-based simulation model? Or is it dead to us?
SimCity has so much details and character for each single buildings. Cities Skylines is just hundreds of gray buildings.
yeah but simcity has charme and skylines not
miss sim city it should come back
Huh, this sort of shows why both Simcity 4 and Skylines both kind of suck, they're not as fun as the original as they add a lot of complexity, but this complexity doesn't offer much more richness, as both are fundamentally limited in gameplay, which just comes off as annoying, eg. I've watched plenty of Skylines YT, but only played it for an hour before deciding it's gameplay loop was just tedious traffic management (what's with all the 'stroad' based cities in skylines, isn't it created by europeans, did BP and Enron sponsor it or something?)
There is something to the simplicity of the earlier titles. It takes an awful long time to create a city in later games and it's not always obvious the result is all that realistic or deep.
I use to be a Legend...
Thanks big brother EA-...
This was fantastic. Thanks so much!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I just don't like that their is not alot to change in your city. Sim city you could go tourism or manufacture processors with their specializations. Also don't like the upkeep cost on alot of the upgrades in some cases the upgrades would be double when you could just spam more buildings, upgrades in general just not worth except for a few here and there.
I'm starting to realize I can specialize in Cities: Skylines 2, but it's pretty opaque. It requires spending a lot of time looking at the production menu and drawing conclusions from what's visible. I'm not really sure that's a bad thing - it's at least some challenge to figure it out - but it does feel easy to miss.
@computergamingyesterday not really a big fan of simply drop down a "specialization zone" or having to fill it in, at the very least ide rather it auto fill in like a zone meshing with the others and become dezoned if something els built on it. Their becomes a time when you start moving into full-on simulator and less into actually playing a game. If you know what I mean. The simple things in life like causing a natural disaster because you feel like it. Playing in a scenario mode with pre-set challenges and time frames. Anything really cause right now it feels bland and lacking other than being a simple builder. Right now, you can't even see all your income types. You make money even though you appear negative. Tracking things in general is difficult at a glance its easier to see the traffic jams than to see them on the overview with its bland static colors unlike Sims cities moveing lines with direction of travel and citizens tracking to see most traveld areas. How much are my recycling centers actually contributing? How much are the individual specialization zone buildings actually producing? Are they worth it? Do I need to turn off underperforming ones. Upgrades have a tendency to be upkeep intensive and inefficient relative to simply getting a whole nother building. Hopefully, in the long run, some things get fixed, like water being imported when you're clearly overproduced by a large margin.
Great video! I miss your content.
More to come!
Agreed but the 'simple' power and water in CS:S is a 'meh' point for me.
As a layman, I know that transit is population based. Lots of people want to go to a particular place? (e.g. Times square in New York or OXford Street in London) Get transport from the people to the place.
But how does power work? I don't know
I think the biggest plus of having the more technical stuff properly simulated is being able to take that into account when planning our city. These things influence the very layout of an urban environment, and if done in an easy to follow way, it can really enhance the simulation aspect. I think CS2 has a neat foundation for the devs to really double down on these aspects.
I highly disliked SimCity 4 because of the traffic portrayal being segmented, where the cars fade away at each intersection. I liked how at least with SC3K it pretended to portray complete car trips. Then again I just like Sim City 3000 far better overall.
We can argue Skylines works better or is more realistic, but SC4 is still just a more enjoyable game IMO. Maxis games had this quirky, personable charm to them that hasn't been recaptured.
Best modern city builders for me
1.simcity4
2.Soviet republic workers and resources
3simcity3
4.Simcity and cities skylines
5.city state2
1567.cities skylines 2
I like the depth of workers and resources soviet republic
Bro Will Wright was a g
But if CS 1 is entirely agent based - why is CS 2 sooo much more computationally heavy?
An excellent overview! Thank you!
Great video - super interesting
Glad you enjoyed it
he's baaaaaack!!!
CS2 did a lot for power and water systems compared to skylines 1. Enjoying the new challenges they added.
Can you finally have isolated power systems in CS2? I remember when I last played CS1 I tried having a separate wind turbine powering a building that was a away from the rest of the city and the whole grid went down. Dunno if they ever fixed that in CS1 or not.
SimCopter-1, reporting heavy traffic!
lovely and informative retrospective!
whats in the helmet?
This video should be longer
very well researched TY
This discussion is pretty shallow, considering it does not discuss sim city 2013
Nicely explained thanks.. what happened to the industry giant 2 games I miss them lol
I had Raid on Bungling Bay for my NES. What a crap game, even by NES Standards.
Better? It works like a power point slide show lol
ANNO 1800 eats Skylines 2 for breakfast
City skylines is more of a grabage truck managment game 😅
The huge drawback of Cities Skylines which he failed to mention was that because of the huge computing power it takes, even a supercomputer is never going to simulate anything on the scale of a mega city like London or Tokyo. The largest city in C:S is only ever going to be a 'large town' at most
Eh? The only reason that _may_ be true is if the algorithms used in Cities Skylines aren't parallelizable, making it clock-bound rather than core-bound. Otherwise, even at Tokyo level, the most powerful supercomputers on Earth could devote more resources to a single NPC than the system requirements of the game itself. You would certainly be able to simulate not just London or Tokyo, but the entire world.
@@grantexploit5903 OK so 'theoretically' that may be possible, but what are the chances any ordinary person will own a computer capable of simulating a mega-city?
I agree, its a shame the game needs to touch a limit that doesn't let you get to the million population.
But i think there are ways to fix it, and that is doing the same thing simcity 4 did, separate cities in squares over a huge region, that way you are just loading the current active city. The other thing cities skyiles could do, is remove the agents, but make them look like as if they are actually there.
@@Gonzas97 Yeah, I'd love to see a new city builder that uses a separate cities system similar to SC4, but with slightly greater simulation depth as expected, because in SC4 the limited amount of calculations that happen between cities isn't very interesting at all.
@@grantexploit5903 What if your algorithm scales in a non-linear manner? What about Amdahl's law? It is not as trivial as throwing more cores at the problem.
I want to say that I never liked Cities Skylines 1, but the second game is a lot better, I already have more hours in CS2 than in 1. CS1 is a city painter, not a city builder. Sim City 4 is still the best city simulator. I don't care about individual citizens, I only care about my city, which is why SC4 is still the best city simulator. You can break any simulation if you try, I don't consider that the benchmark for the overall quality of the simulation.
I just can't really get into Skylines even though I was a huge SC4 fan. It really is just a game about traffic and the city building parts feel hollow. The cities feel like they have no history, landmarks, or real people living in them. Instead the city feels like it's just a large pipeline for commuters getting to their jobs. Nature is also just absent, the landscape is sparse and blandly green.
Even in a game like Transport Tycoon Deluxe, which is ostensibly all about traffic and transport, I was more interested in developing the towns, industries and shape the region as a whole, rather than creating really efficient junctions or whatever.
The fundamental issue really is that I just don't care about individual citizens. The "agent model" adds nothing to the game for me, because my citizens are little more than users of services and (unlike Dwarf Fortress for example) just don't have very interesting lives. I do not mind that they are abstracted away, as long as the overall city simulation feels fun and alive, and the game remains playable even at very large populations.
Or just look at 9:22 . To me, this looks like a city: it's dense with detail, it looks like millions of people live here, it's like a garden where you can prune and sculpt and adjust to your liking, it looks organic. Skylines by comparison looks bland, rough and mechanical. There's a tension between scale on the one hand, and detail on the other that SC4 got just right. A modern version, maybe foregoing 3D graphics in favor of sprites (the Brigador engine comes to mind here) on arbitrarily large maps, and having a conservatively designed agent model that doesn't attempt to show people's teeth while still taking advantage of our greater CPU power, would be ideal for me.
Why does this guy sometimes sound like an AI trying to be human when he's presenting to the screen? This was an awesome fucking video though, easy sub and looking forward to more!
That was a super interesting video, thanks
I like how you constantly went our of your way to say "Cities: Skylines" instead of "Citieskylines" 😄
The result of slurring it into something like "shit-key-ki-lines" too many times...