Having played 132 hours of Cities: Skylines, and thousands of hours of the SimCity series, (including over 100 hours of SC2013! I know right!) I’m a big fan of city builders. However, I wasn’t a big fan of the base game for Cities: Skylines, so I’m going in with mods and sandbox mode disabled!

FUN FACT!

At launch, I was so annoyed at the game that I got a refund after three hours of playing it. After checking online, I realised that mods were starting to fix some of the game’s issues. A week after getting a refund, I bought the game again and fell in love with it.

As a side note, I currently own the expansions After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, and of course all of the free updates. It will be interesting to see how much the game has progressed since launch.

Preparation

To get the full experience, I created a new map with the map editor. I loved all of the customization and tools that were not in SC2013. The new highway types and one way rails are a great edition since the updates! The rail was free, but for some reason the highway types were part of the paid expansion, even though they were free in a mod (and there were more options too).

I was careful in making sure that the highway had a roundabout at the end so that I could easily connect my roads to it later, because I remembered that the game restricts your options to just one road type at the very beginning.

Playing The Game

The game has too many limitations on what can be built at the start. This hinders creativity, and makes the player feel like there is only one way to succeed. The initial starting money, and there should have been an option to start with extra money.

I began with the game paused, laying down some roads, (maybe a few too many roads in hindsight) building utilities, and painting the zones. One thing I noticed is how unbalanced the power buildings are. Five wind turbines at maximum capacity equals the capacity of one coal power plant! And turbines cost less in upkeep! Then you have to consider that coal power plants also need materials importing!

In SimCity, whilst wind turbines were cheaper, coal always worked out the better deal due to the much larger capacity and smaller space, with the disadvantage being of course the extra pollution. Wind turbines are so cheap and powerful in this game, that you may as well depend your city on them! So yes, I built a couple of wind turbines.

I soon ran out of money, and I was unable to buy enough water pipes to connect my residential and commercial areas. I pressed play, and as the first people moved in I went to get a loan so that I could build the pipes. Unfortunately, you can’t even take out a loan until you reach 540 people!

I was stuck, because I couldn’t sell enough buildings to get out of debt, and once my population had reached 200 it started to go down again because of the lack of water. So now I was unable to reach the 540 people needed to take out a loan, and so I had no choice but to quit and restart. Fun!

I’ve started building a new city, and it has gone quite well! I will write a more positive blog post in the near future. Thanks for reading!

Quick Rant About Water

In the map editor, I created a river that winded down a nearby mountain. Unfortunately, the water in this game isn’t very good. People will cry “But this was one of the best new features of the game”; however, I think it looks ugly. Not only is it a strange colour, but more importantly, there are no reflections! This is in a 2015 game with lots of updates!

Then there’s the issue where you try and create a flow down a mountain, but the water moves incredibly slowly. When it reaches a drop or a steep decline, the water should gain speed and crash into the ground, creating splashes. Whilst I agree that this sounds expensive, there are ways to fake it. The splashes can be created with white rotating sprites that fade in and out at the bottom of the waterfall, with a limit to perhaps a hundred or so simulated particles being sprayed around.

This creates a problem. The water doesn’t move correctly unless the terrain is flat. But when the water is level, it looks ugly due to the colour choice and lack of reflections. So it doesn’t look good either way! Plus, the whole point of simulated water is so that you can have more than just flat water. Because it doesn’t flow properly, they might as well have just added a fill water tool and not made spawners. Rant over.