cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/5266864
I’ve been playing a ton of Cities Skylines II since its release a week ago. After building a 230k population archipelago I started playing around with the in game cinematic video tools and this is the result.
This is 100% in game footage and effects using the Photo Mode. Recorded using the Microsoft/Xbox Game Bar, only editing was to trim the start and end.
The thing that kept turning me off with Cities Skylines was that the range of city services was too small and citizens weren’t using public transportation enough. It felt unrealistic and dumb compared to real life where I live. To get police station, fire station, schools, parks etc all in range of your residents you have to build so much that there’s no room left for the residents. It seems an impossible equation to solve.
For example in real life, my kids take the bus to the other side of town (6 km away) to go to school; in Cities Skylines they need the school to be at most something like two blocks away. I used to walk 3 km to school when I was a kid. And in real life not everybody needs to go by car or even own one. They can walk on the side of the road. But if you are in a car and an ambulance comes up, you move to the side let it through. In Skylines it can take months (!) for an ambulance to reach its destination, because of traffic.
In short, I can’t apply real-world solutions to problems in the game and that makes it not fun for me. Does the sequel have improvements in this regard?
Yep, the citizens are now far smarter in their path finding. They’ll walk quite a distance now, or follow a route via multiple different transport types.
A feature I’m really enjoying is pedestrians will walk along routes not intended for them if you’ve failed to provide adequate pedestrian routes. They will walk alongside a highway without a pavement if it saves them time. Or even more recklessly I’ve got people finding their way onto my rail tracks to shortcut their way to the station in places I’ve failed to put pedestrian paths.
Each citizen has their own preferences too, They’ll take whatever transport is most suited to them. There’s a surprising amount of depth to it.
https://cs2.paradoxwikis.com/Citizens#Age
https://cs2.paradoxwikis.com/Traffic
Cars have seen massive improvement as well. They do indeed now pull into another lane to make way for emergency vehicles.
No longer do citizens store them in a magical pocket, they need to find parking which can be roadside or in dedicated parking structures.
Roads can be upgraded to remove roadside parking, given wide pavements, you can add signage to prevent left hand turns etc. But rather enjoyably some more reckless drivers will ignore your road layouts and intentionally take turns they aren’t allowed to, or if a road becomes blocked they will perform an illegal u-turn and find an alternative route.
Honestly, I’m really not understanding why this game is getting so many people complaining. Sure it has bugs, but the core mechanics are working perfectly fine - it’s an incredible feat of software engineering.
I really appreciate the thorough answer, thank you. I think I will give the game a go after they’ve sorted out the worst performance kinks.