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[puke]

Colossal are from Finland, you'd think they'd be familiar with snow.

Really?  That is a huge shock.  After seeing their interpretation of Traffic Circles, I assumed they were Americans.  After seeing that there were only upsides and no downsides to legalizing drug use, I assumed they were from Berkeley or something.

My wife just picked this up, and it looks pretty fun.  But the criticism in this thread seems pretty legit as well, and I'm on the fence if I want to bother with it or just load up SC4 again.

I see there is a pretty good looking Traffic Management mod, watched a video of a guy building properly optimized roundabouts or traffic circles with it.   I like how you can control right of way as well as which lanes turn.

What other mods are must haves that improve the intelligence and logistics of the city?  Anything that makes the policy sliders actually meaningful like they were in Sim City?

[Putnam]

If you want to play a city sim, especially if you want any challenge, play Sim City 4.

If you want to play a traffic sim where you can see traffic actually flowing about that actually has things to do, play Cities Skylines.

If you don't care about whether you can actually see the traffic and only care about getting traffic to work, probably still Sim City 4 (with the expansion).

[Neonivek]

If you want to play a city sim, especially if you want any challenge, play Sim City 4.

If you want to play a traffic sim where you can see traffic actually flowing about that actually has things to do, play Cities Skylines.

If you don't care about whether you can actually see the traffic and only care about getting traffic to work, probably still Sim City 4 (with the expansion).

I am not sure Cities Skyline is a good traffic simulator either due to one reason: Vehicles always take the closest path, whether or not it makes sense to.

[Putnam]

Yeah, that's true, too. I don't think it's that hard to pathfind through a weighted graph, by which I mean I know for a fact that it's not even remotely hard to make a weighted graph and the single most used pathfinding algorithm in games is designed specifically for them.

[Culise]

If you want to play a city sim, especially if you want any challenge, play Sim City 4.

If you want to play a traffic sim where you can see traffic actually flowing about that actually has things to do, play Cities Skylines.

If you don't care about whether you can actually see the traffic and only care about getting traffic to work, probably still Sim City 4 (with the expansion).

It's been a while since I picked up SC4, and back when it first came out, the only online communities I followed were forum games and art, not game mods.  I appreciate that there may not be much in the way of good mods for Cities Skyline, but do you have any advice on good mods for Sim City 4?  Thanks. ^_^

[Putnam]

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26793-network-addon-mod-for-windows-installer/

[MrRoboto75]

If you want to play a city sim, especially if you want any challenge, play Sim City 4.

If you want to play a traffic sim where you can see traffic actually flowing about that actually has things to do, play Cities Skylines.

If you don't care about whether you can actually see the traffic and only care about getting traffic to work, probably still Sim City 4 (with the expansion).

I am not sure Cities Skyline is a good traffic simulator either due to one reason: Vehicles always take the closest path, whether or not it makes sense to.

They do favor roads with higher speed limits as well.  If you have two roads from one place to another, and they are equal in physical length, but different in speed limits, all the cars will take the faster road.

[Culise]

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26793-network-addon-mod-for-windows-installer/

Thank you.  That does look rather nice, given some of the things I recall from the last time I played years ago.

[Sergius]

AFAIK, even with the transportation mods, SimCity 4 always prioritized the most direct route than one that was faster in a roundabout way (when going from point A to point B, they only consider the roads that are within the rectangle formed by both points...)

[Mech#4]

I think so, I don't know if roads like the cement streets had lower pathing importance. I remember making housing areas with dead-end roads so only people coming from or going home would use them.

[puke]

Okay, just got this and am pretty happy.

The Added the Network Extension mod and a couple others that add things like pedestrian only walkways, and local only roads and transit stops.  Got the Traffic President thing which seems to have the best features / stability and lets me totally customize intersections, bus lanes, and make actual proper Traffic Circles that are not comical parodies of proper traffic management.

I picked up a handful of other quality-of-life as well as simulation-improvement mods, which I am enthusiastic about.

I also got this thing that adds dropouts, so that even with universities everyone will not be perfectly educated.  Their dropout rates seem high though (and it isn't tuneable), so I might not enable it.

A thing that seems lacking are "content packs".  The "Network Extensions" is a good example of one that exists, but I expected to be able to find collections of power systems, additional city policies, and similar. 

Instead, there seem to be no modifications or expansions upon the policy system.  And power buildings are all one off designs of "hey, I modded this famous power station" or "look, I ported this thing from SC3000" rather than any sort of assembled collection of coherent and balanced assets.

Ah well.  Regardless, I'm pretty happy so far and it seems like there is lots of potential here.

[puke]

well i've put some time in and certainly got my money's worth.  The mods improve things greatly, thats for sure.

Some problems that I thought would be addressed by mods that are not:

There are no libraries or museums, except for unique buildings.  Some mods add a few unique buildings, you can see some of the worlds great national libraries and art museums, and a few odd things from random peoples' home towns. 

But none of them actually add SYSTEMS of libraries or museums, in Small-Medium-Large sizes that have a presence on your budget panel, and effect property values, immigration, education, and tourism.

My other large complaint is that zones are attached to roads.  This means that industrial / commercial / residential zones are all the same size, and if you specialize in farming or forestry it is compressed into a tiny little block. 

I can see the design meeting happening now:  "well, we can't improve this feature without rewriting all of our road code, so we'll just have to deal with it." 

SC4 allowed sprawling farms and large office blocks, because you drew zones independent of roadways, and then laid roadways down to provide access.  It was much more flexible in that regard.

On the other hand, assing about with Traffic President makes me pretty happy, so I'm willing to forgive a few sins.

[Neonivek]

The biggest difference between SimCity and Cities boils down to just one thing...

Residential can fail really easily in SimCity, It actually reflects the death of the city center rather interestingly.

While you almost have to try to ruin residential in Cities: Skylines... Having it fail represents just an outright total collapse.

---

Heck I might even go as far as to say that SimCity 4 makes balancing the zones tricky. Having low density residential in a place where the land value is extremely high will force expensive mansion estates to appear which are bad for income... adding an additional way a zone can fail.

While the goal of Cities: Skylines is just to make sure all your buildings reach max stars for the extra cash (I think max gives like, double the value). They can't really fail as long as you have the amenities and road connections nearby.

[Putnam]

Yeah, C:S is incredibly easy as far as management is concerned. Maybe disasters will give some challenge.

[Sensei]

Well, the Disasters DLC is out. That looks cool, but I haven't bought any of the DLC so far and probably won't until it's all on sale in a bundle.

However, while smashing up your city with disasters and building disaster response buildings is neat, I expect that the Scenario Editor will have a bigger effect on the game as a whole, especially seeing as the thread previously trickled off with a discussion about how non-traffic parts of the game were too easy. Everyone gets the scenario editor for free, and can create and share custom scenarios with goals like "Reach a population of 10,000 in one year" ala Rollercoaster Tycoon, as well as creating events which happen when certain triggers are met, EG a Tsunami that happens six months after the start of the scenario, or a Chirper message that appears when your budget is in the red. Assuming you haven't modded Chirper out entirely.

I expect to see a scenario out of you guys in which an alien overlord drops meteors on you if you don't meet bizarre city-building commands, so get cracking.