Cities: Skylines from Colossal Order

I'm on a laptop with an i7 4710 and a GTX 860M.

Tried running at 1960x1200 at high detail.

I would have to describe it as...disappointing, to say the least.

At the moment, it's no better than the Cities XXL that Quil18 laid into a few weeks ago.

Thank you guys for all the feedback. Didn't meant to turn this thread into a PC building help tutorial. I have spoken to my guy, and we're coming up with something powerful. The way I see it, I think it's better to shell out right now for a better rig that'll last longer, than spending more frequently on updated hardware every time. We'll see.

In the meantime, post pictures of your cities fools!! I wanna see your creations, and chaos management skills! Those dead bodies piling up because traffic doesn't allow hearses to reach in time! Fires! Crime! The whole shabang!

MeatMan wrote:

Also, Rollercoaster City :shock:

Oh I surely must try that. I must.

davet010: You probably know this, but first launch for me didn't use the NVidia card, it was using the on-chip Intel GPU (it actually still played, albeit laggy). I had to go into the Nvidia Control Panel and add it to the list for programs which use the full Nvidia card.

davet010 wrote:

I'm on a laptop with an i7 4710 and a GTX 860M.

Tried running at 1960x1200 at high detail.

I would have to describe it as...disappointing, to say the least.

At the moment, it's no better than the Cities XXL that Quil18 laid into a few weeks ago.

Are you saying the game is no better or the graphics?

kexx wrote:

Thank you guys for all the feedback. Didn't meant to turn this thread into a PC building help tutorial. I have spoken to my guy, and we're coming up with something powerful. The way I see it, I think it's better to shell out right now for a better rig that'll last longer, than spending more frequently on updated hardware every time. We'll see.

But we don't get to geek out very often!

Dude, I'll send you a video card.

All you need is a 64 bit OS. If this guy built your rig for you and put Windows 7 32 bit in it I wouldn't ever go back to him. I don't even know why they made a 32 bit version of Windows 7 or why anyone who put it on a game's system.

Didn't both 32 and 64 bit come on Windows 7's disc? Wait, I think you only need a serial and you could download the 64 bit version. Let me check.

garion333 wrote:
davet010 wrote:

I'm on a laptop with an i7 4710 and a GTX 860M.

Tried running at 1960x1200 at high detail.

I would have to describe it as...disappointing, to say the least.

At the moment, it's no better than the Cities XXL that Quil18 laid into a few weeks ago.

Are you saying the game is no better or the graphics?

Probably performance, as Cities XL is notorious for its poor performance.

I swore I wouldn't pick this up until I had done some hardware upgrades myself, and some time had passed for any major bugs to be fixed. So I didn't even look to see if there are any good pre-order deals. Five hours after release, here I am down-loading the game.

garion333 wrote:
kexx wrote:

Thank you guys for all the feedback. Didn't meant to turn this thread into a PC building help tutorial. I have spoken to my guy, and we're coming up with something powerful. The way I see it, I think it's better to shell out right now for a better rig that'll last longer, than spending more frequently on updated hardware every time. We'll see.

But we don't get to geek out very often!

Dude, I'll send you a video card.

All you need is a 64 bit OS. If this guy built your rig for you and put Windows 7 32 bit in it I wouldn't ever go back to him. I don't even know why they made a 32 bit version of Windows 7 or why anyone who put it on a game's system.

Didn't both 32 and 64 bit come on Windows 7's disc? Wait, I think you only need a serial and you could download the 64 bit version. Let me check.

He will need a 64 bits OS to run more than 3.6 gig of ram. The 64 bits OS could have seen that full dimm, or pair.

This game almost let me cancel my gta5 preorder. I let it 1-2 more week to see what you guys think on the long term. I just don't want a shiny game that won't get played.

This game is really fun... It's super smooth.

Here ya go Kexx:
IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/39743575000497855/4878C8B582635BF4FCF5173AC107E25B8C63EDA6/)
Westdale aka Chumptown

Using a custom map because why not.

Click to make larger.

tboon wrote:

Westdale aka Chumptown

IMAGE(http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-laughing002.gif)

So far, the attraction to this for me is not the generic city builder stuff. It's the granularity. I just spent like 10 minutes strategizing on where to put a pedestrian overpass to allow people to walk to shopping areas easily. I started thinking about leaving lanes in the city for foot paths, and connections to parks... A whole network for walkers!

I started out with a grid, but as the city grows, I've gone to curved roads, and started adding in some nice touches for the citizens, like ball courts in a residential neighborhood and spots for little bodegas. I think I'll try out some cul-de-sac layouts and other suburban niceties next.

But the fact that I can pretty much break what would be a "block" in something like SimCity into a group of much smaller squares and dedicate them to very specific uses is what I think will separate this from the other city builders. Just the fact that such a level of granular design exists really opens up interesting design possibilities.

Manach wrote:
garion333 wrote:
kexx wrote:

Thank you guys for all the feedback. Didn't meant to turn this thread into a PC building help tutorial. I have spoken to my guy, and we're coming up with something powerful. The way I see it, I think it's better to shell out right now for a better rig that'll last longer, than spending more frequently on updated hardware every time. We'll see.

But we don't get to geek out very often!

Dude, I'll send you a video card.

All you need is a 64 bit OS. If this guy built your rig for you and put Windows 7 32 bit in it I wouldn't ever go back to him. I don't even know why they made a 32 bit version of Windows 7 or why anyone who put it on a game's system.

Didn't both 32 and 64 bit come on Windows 7's disc? Wait, I think you only need a serial and you could download the 64 bit version. Let me check.

He will need a 64 bits OS to run more than 3.6 gig of ram. The 64 bits OS could have seen that full dimm, or pair.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. He absolutely needs Windows 7 64 bit.

If you want to move from a 32-bit version of Windows to a 64-bit version of Windows 7 or vice versa, you'll need to back up your files and choose the Custom option during Windows 7 installation. Then, you'll need to restore your files and reinstall your programs. For more information about performing a custom installation, see Installing and reinstalling Windows 7‍.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/w...

You can use the serial you already have.

And I was serious about giving get you a card. I've got a 460 in my closet. It'll be a decent upgrade for you and free. FREE!

Unless you want to do a whole new rig, then more power to you.

Chirpy is growing on me... click for embiggens
IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/713031719275130883/C0B5D4B563418E3BF12631FA67C09FC82FF23F5A/)
Don't judge me for my transit, I'm just mucking around.

Holy crap its midnight, and I gotta go to work at 6am. Where did the time go?

MeatMan wrote:

For those of us who are sure they will be annoyed by the feature, someone at RPS linked me to this forum post by a Paradox staff member.

The change we have gone for is that you will now have an option to disable the sound and animation/pop up from Chirper. The bird will still stay on your screen, but you must click it to see the updates from your Cims.

The very first thing I did after launching the game for the first time was to explore the options menu to find this promised option to disable Fake Twitter Bird. On the Misc menu, I found the option labeled, "Auto-open Chirper messages".

IMAGE(http://s15.postimg.org/o2qbdncjf/image.jpg)

Like any reasonable person, I expected that when I toggled off that option, I would get the promised result from the devs, which I quoted above. So I start playing and, within minutes, I hear the "ding" sound that Fake Twitter Bird makes, which I recognize from all the streams I've watched over the last week. "Something must be wrong", I think to myself. "I toggled off the option." Eventually I realize that toggling off that option only disables the pop-up/animation part of Fake Twitter Bird. And each time I heard the "ding", I realized that the little number displayed on Fake Twitter Bird increased by one.

IMAGE(http://s22.postimg.org/ae0cailsd/image.jpg)

So I start tinkering with the various options on the audio menu, and sure enough, the only way to silence the "ding" is to move the User Interface Volume slider all the way to the left (zero), which, obviously, results in you losing all audio associated with the UI, including building and/or demolishing anything, as well as clicking any items on any part of the UI.

I'm certainly not happy about this. IMO it's kind of sh*tty to force players to lose all UI audio when they just want to silence Fake Twitter Bird's goddamn "ding" sound.

As far as I can tell, this doesn't actually do anything, sadly. I think maybe it automatically toggles off the "Auto-open Chirper messages" option, but I don't know for sure, because, like I said, I manually did that as soon as I launched the game.

The pile is too big right now, but when I get around to this game I'm SO going to legalize weed in the Munchies district!

Quick question for those with the game. One of the video previews linked here (I think Lazy Gamer's) sounded like it said that you can't have more than one city saved at the same time. In other words if I bought the game and my kids wanted to play it, we wouldn't be able to have our own city saves. I'm hoping/thinking I heard that wrong, but can anyone confirm?

I think what he meant was that you can't have separate cities that affect eachother in terms of commerce, commuters, tourists etc. Separate saves are disjoint and on separate maps.

I think you can have more than one city saved at a time.

I was looking over the Steam Workshop page and noticed there was a tab for Game Saves. There weren't many selections, but one toward the top was tagged with a comment saying the dev CEO thought it was one of the most efficient builds they'd seen in forever. I subscribed to the save just to see how my laptop could handle a couple built-up squares (surprisingly well, woot), and when I went back into the game the Load menu had both my first save and the 3rd party save sitting there.

So I don't know if the Steam Workshop part makes multi-save states possible or it's just possible in general, but I definitely had a couple completely different save states to pick from last night.

Whee. I stayed up way too late playing this last night.

IMAGE(http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/714157619183496174/5FA1736F7E0DB06A10D7B37E24485F0FCF5753E5/)

If I recall right, I was basically into the "my city is humming along on its own and is kind of maxed out" stage with my first region around this point in SimCity 2013. (Even though I hadn't played with all of the specialization stuff yet.) There was still stuff I hadn't seen, but I didn't feel like any of it might surprise me. A lot of my thought was "okay, how can I optimize stuff, break things, and force traffic to behave the way I want it to?"

In Skylines, I've just reached the 8,500-ish point, unlocking a number of new buildings and stuff, and feel like I now absolutely need to start expanding into neighboring squares to continue to grow. I just barely have the sense of "okay, this is starting to be a real city now", and it's been balancing on a knife edge at times to get it this far. All of my thought is into "okay, how am I going to manage to keep growing without my city completely falling apart?" None of the behaviors of the city (traffic, etc.) have really surprised me, but that hasn't made managing them easy. My last big milestone was "oh crap, if I don't figure out a better way to handle this garbage situation things are going to get really bad", and I spent a while and managed to wrestle that under control. My next task is going to be to try to get industry to start working effectively again (because it started to fall apart a bit recently and I'm not totally sure why. I think it's probably because I don't have enough citizens interested in doing manual labor any more.)

Over all I'm really impressed with Skylines. It feels both more logical and less easy than SimCity 2013 did. There's a regular pattern of "growth causes a problem", "work needs to be done to solve the problem", "work needs to be done to get the city growing again", "everything seems to be humming along nicely", "new problems appear" that's very satisfying--with some problems being caused by a need to provide new services, and others caused by the effects of the city's changing scale. I know that at some point I'll know all of the mechanics well enough to predict these problems--but I don't think it will ever be trivial, which is fantastic.

ubrakto: No, you can have as many cities going as you want. He was talking about how SimCity 2013 let you have multiple cities on a region (larger area map) that you could switch between and have them import and export stuff to each other. In C:S it's one city per large area map. So you and your kids can play on different maps, but your cities can't interact with each other.

The bird didn't annoy me as much as I expected.

Sucks for screenshots though.

See that little camera icon at the bottom-right of Hypatian's screenshot?

Click that for free-camera mode. It removes all the on-screen UI and also doesn't highlight buildings with your mouse cursor. Great for screenshots or just casually touring your city.

Oh, is that what "free camera mode" is? I assumed it was just unlocking from the tilt perspective.

omni wrote:

davet010: You probably know this, but first launch for me didn't use the NVidia card, it was using the on-chip Intel GPU (it actually still played, albeit laggy). I had to go into the Nvidia Control Panel and add it to the list for programs which use the full Nvidia card.

Oh for the days when in-game options had "Video Adapter" dropdown boxes and you could just choose

omni wrote:

davet010: You probably know this, but first launch for me didn't use the NVidia card, it was using the on-chip Intel GPU (it actually still played, albeit laggy). I had to go into the Nvidia Control Panel and add it to the list for programs which use the full Nvidia card.

Actually, that was completely news to me - never come across that before. Managed to change the setting, but not had chance to restart the game.

Thanks for that, omni.

The game does not autosave, but there are now a few autosave mods up on the Workshop if (like me), you want that functionality.

Edit: Learned that mods disable achievements. I guess I'll try to remember to save every so often.

DonD wrote:

The game does not autosave, but there are now a few autosave mods up on the Workshop if (like me), you want that functionality.

Edit: Learned that mods disable achievements. I guess I'll try to remember to save every so often.

Oh, that's good to know (autosave). Thanks!

Thanks for the answers/confirmation, everyone! I was hoping I mis-heard/understood what he'd said in that video and that he meant multiple cities on the same map. It's good to get confirmation that this is the case.