Cities: Skylines was already a pretty big game, and now it is simply huge thanks to a big free patch and the first expansion.
Launch trailer:
You can see the full notes of what’s free, and what’s left in for the expansion right here. I think their commitment to the game is fantastic, and the free updates will hopefully continue too.
Some thoughts
I’ve played quite a few hours in the game, and I simply love it. This expansion makes me love it even more.
The addition of a day/night cycle makes for some interesting looking cities, as they beautifully light up at night and put you in awe of your own creations. It does however give solar energy a bit of a drawback, so don’t go relying on it like our Samsai did.
I didn’t quite understand when it would become night time at first, but on the lower left corner the world icon now has the sun moving around on it to indicate the time of day. It’s done in a weird way, but I understand why they did it. Instead of there being a true day/night cycle it goes through days at a time being in the light, and then days of it being night. Otherwise day and night would come and go in the blink of an eye and it wouldn’t be great.
I think my favourite part about the night cycle is seeing Wind Turbines lit up with spotlights from the bottom, it looks so awesome and it’s such a simple thing.
The new dynamic lighting system is great too, as you see your city slowly creep into the shadows and lights flicker on. I find myself quickly zooming in and out on all sections of my city, simply to stare at all the detail at night time.
As for new buildings and services: amongst other things you now need prisons! As those dastardly criminals love to come out at night. I did wonder what the police did with people before, it seems they weren’t trained very well and just sent them on their way with a pat on their back—no more!
It expands on almost everything! It’s not going to drastically change the way you play the game, but it adds lots of extra kit to keep you coming back to play it even more.
I think it’s fantastic, and I still have a very firm belief that I should not be allowed to run a city, ever. I’m constantly out of money, I think residents should be fine lighting candles to cook their dinner with no electricity, and why is running water such a necessity?
One thing they do need to tweak now are the messages from your citizens, as I had someone tweet “good morning, what a beautiful sunrise” in the middle of the night. Amusing, and a very minor issue, but something that would be nice to see ironed out eventually. I can’t imagine that being hard to fix though.
Considering the amount of possible city variations you can do, especially now with the new buildings I think the price is very reasonable too.
Check out Cities: Skylines on Steam here, and After Dark right here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Launch trailer:
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Direct Link
Direct Link
You can see the full notes of what’s free, and what’s left in for the expansion right here. I think their commitment to the game is fantastic, and the free updates will hopefully continue too.
Some thoughts
I’ve played quite a few hours in the game, and I simply love it. This expansion makes me love it even more.
The addition of a day/night cycle makes for some interesting looking cities, as they beautifully light up at night and put you in awe of your own creations. It does however give solar energy a bit of a drawback, so don’t go relying on it like our Samsai did.
I didn’t quite understand when it would become night time at first, but on the lower left corner the world icon now has the sun moving around on it to indicate the time of day. It’s done in a weird way, but I understand why they did it. Instead of there being a true day/night cycle it goes through days at a time being in the light, and then days of it being night. Otherwise day and night would come and go in the blink of an eye and it wouldn’t be great.
I think my favourite part about the night cycle is seeing Wind Turbines lit up with spotlights from the bottom, it looks so awesome and it’s such a simple thing.
The new dynamic lighting system is great too, as you see your city slowly creep into the shadows and lights flicker on. I find myself quickly zooming in and out on all sections of my city, simply to stare at all the detail at night time.
As for new buildings and services: amongst other things you now need prisons! As those dastardly criminals love to come out at night. I did wonder what the police did with people before, it seems they weren’t trained very well and just sent them on their way with a pat on their back—no more!
It expands on almost everything! It’s not going to drastically change the way you play the game, but it adds lots of extra kit to keep you coming back to play it even more.
I think it’s fantastic, and I still have a very firm belief that I should not be allowed to run a city, ever. I’m constantly out of money, I think residents should be fine lighting candles to cook their dinner with no electricity, and why is running water such a necessity?
One thing they do need to tweak now are the messages from your citizens, as I had someone tweet “good morning, what a beautiful sunrise” in the middle of the night. Amusing, and a very minor issue, but something that would be nice to see ironed out eventually. I can’t imagine that being hard to fix though.
Considering the amount of possible city variations you can do, especially now with the new buildings I think the price is very reasonable too.
Check out Cities: Skylines on Steam here, and After Dark right here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Performance is a bit poor on a i7/32GB/980GTX with a city of 100K habitants...
Still, great game!
Cheers!
Still, great game!
Cheers!
0 Likes
Performance is a bit poor on a i7/32GB/980GTX with a city of 100K habitants...
Still, great game!
Cheers!
Yeah, it's a Unity3D engine game. Performance is going to be poor until the people behind Unity decide to fix whatever is wrong with it.
Regarding running a city, I've found if you tend to splurge, you will always be in the red. You have to pace yourself and make sure you just don't spend more than you make (kind of like life). Patience is a good thing, and this game is very relaxing.
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Stupendous Man Sep 25, 2015
I've held out on buying this game because so many people are reporting performance issues on Linux, which never seems to be fixed; has it become any better now?
According to rumours the performance was much better during beta, and suddenly went down close to release. The developers don't seem to know why...
According to rumours the performance was much better during beta, and suddenly went down close to release. The developers don't seem to know why...
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I've held out on buying this game because so many people are reporting performance issues on Linux, which never seems to be fixed; has it become any better now?
According to rumours the performance was much better during beta, and suddenly went down close to release. The developers don't seem to know why...
It is not a rumour, i had pre-release access and reported on it directly. Performance is still an issue, but it's not like it's a first person shooter, it's not a game breaking issue.
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lucifertdark Sep 25, 2015
It is not a rumour, i had pre-release access and reported on it directly. Performance is still an issue, but it's not like it's a first person shooter, it's not a game breaking issue.Sorry but yes it is a game breaking issue, just because it's not an FPS doesn't mean it's suddenly ok for it to run like it's been dunked in custard.
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Stupendous Man Sep 25, 2015
I agree. I would expect at least 30+ fps for any kind of game to be playable. Certainly, any FPS should run at 60+ to be smooth, and I can accept slower paced games to run at less fps, but why don't the developers investigate why their game suddenly runs worse at release? As usual, we Linux users are 3rd rate customers, and that saddens me; I don't expect them to drop everything in their hands to solve this, but the game has been out for what? 6 months?It is not a rumour, i had pre-release access and reported on it directly. Performance is still an issue, but it's not like it's a first person shooter, it's not a game breaking issue.Sorry but yes it is a game breaking issue, just because it's not an FPS doesn't mean it's suddenly ok for it to run like it's been dunked in custard.
I guess I'll continue holding out on buying this game.
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Almost had no impact to me in what I'm building (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 20th, 22nd district of Vienna). But it looks beuatiful :-).
For the Money issue, this usually is only an issue in the beginning, and it means you're growing your city too fast! You need to consider that you'll need to build new expensive buildings within each milestone you reach (especially if you need to build facilities in several districts, as it's for police and fire department in the industrial and housing zone), so it's a pretty good idea to settle close to that milestone and let the city run, and only do necessary maintenance tasks to save up cash, and maybe prepare for where you'll build which things with the street layout, get up your energy to a level that you can expand faster once you reach the milestone, look that the garbage system won't be overwhelmed by new citicens, as well as water supply, sewers and energy supply.
You can afford to loose some people (you won't loose enough to get a significant drawback in money), and you can afford that the housing is not fully satisfied, that's not a huge issue. Especially in the beginning your maintenance costs are not too high (if you didn't overbuild).
Last edited by STiAT on 25 September 2015 at 10:51 am UTC
For the Money issue, this usually is only an issue in the beginning, and it means you're growing your city too fast! You need to consider that you'll need to build new expensive buildings within each milestone you reach (especially if you need to build facilities in several districts, as it's for police and fire department in the industrial and housing zone), so it's a pretty good idea to settle close to that milestone and let the city run, and only do necessary maintenance tasks to save up cash, and maybe prepare for where you'll build which things with the street layout, get up your energy to a level that you can expand faster once you reach the milestone, look that the garbage system won't be overwhelmed by new citicens, as well as water supply, sewers and energy supply.
You can afford to loose some people (you won't loose enough to get a significant drawback in money), and you can afford that the housing is not fully satisfied, that's not a huge issue. Especially in the beginning your maintenance costs are not too high (if you didn't overbuild).
Last edited by STiAT on 25 September 2015 at 10:51 am UTC
1 Likes, Who?
Performance is a bit poor on a i7/32GB/980GTX with a city of 100K habitants...
Still, great game!
Cheers!
That's pretty interesting, I'm running an i7/8GB/760GTX and didn't realize bad performance (except for loading :D), and I'm running a city with 344k inhabitants now at 40-50 FPS.
Last edited by STiAT on 25 September 2015 at 10:24 am UTC
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Yeah I have a habit of trying to build everything possible, without thinking about managing my economy, oops.
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Yeah I have a habit of trying to build everything possible, without thinking about managing my economy, oops.
Common mistake, took that way very often when I started playing :-).
A good thing in such phases as well is to check your traffic, and do necessary adoptions, even re-building parts of the City and/or districts. Once before reaching a Milestone I completely rebuilt one whole housing district since it was always traffic jammed from the highway into the city, which is a common mistake done. I've done well with "rings" around the city giving multiple entry points.
Last edited by STiAT on 25 September 2015 at 11:05 am UTC
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I agree. I would expect at least 30+ fps for any kind of game to be playable. Certainly, any FPS should run at 60+ to be smooth, and I can accept slower paced games to run at less fps, but why don't the developers investigate why their game suddenly runs worse at release? As usual, we Linux users are 3rd rate customers, and that saddens me; I don't expect them to drop everything in their hands to solve this, but the game has been out for what? 6 months?
I guess I'll continue holding out on buying this game.
I've not seen it go below 30 fps, but I also have a GTX 970. The issue with Unity seems to be some specific aspect of it. I don't know if it's shadows, lighting or what, but it can get very high FPS depending on the scene, but then dip low in others. It's not consistently low. It's definitely Linux (or OpenGL) specific. Windows performs much better.
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This update kinda broke my city design. My city runs 100% on renewables and day-night cycle kinda knocked out my solar power plant for half of the time. Luckily a total overkill dam got me about 700 megawatts of extra power. :D
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Yeah I have a habit of trying to build everything possible, without thinking about managing my economy, oops.
Just think about it like a real city. If you build houses for people, the people need jobs, so build industry. That gets the economy going. Let some money flow in and then slowly expand. Make sure you're making more money than you're spending. I went to dinner last night and forgot I left the game running and came back to find a huge amount of unspent money.
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For that you need patience, and in the beginning I wasn't too patient as well. After I realized it's more fun to go slower and think about your steps, slowly optimize etc, I got it managed.
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I am good at destroying Cities not to build....
WTB a simulator with Cities already build and destroy them... :D
WTB a simulator with Cities already build and destroy them... :D
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[quote=STiAT]
@performance: It's really an issue for me. I actually stopped playing the game since i'm not able to scroll smoothly across my city (on a GTX970). At first I thought - no problem... but the bigger the city grows the more annoying the sluggish performance gets.
Almost had no impact to me in what I'm building (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 20th, 22nd district of Vienna)As I lived in the 3rd and 4th for some time I'm curious how your copy looks like. Would you mind sharing a few screenshots of it?
@performance: It's really an issue for me. I actually stopped playing the game since i'm not able to scroll smoothly across my city (on a GTX970). At first I thought - no problem... but the bigger the city grows the more annoying the sluggish performance gets.
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tuxintuxedo Sep 25, 2015
Unity people are in the middle of rewriting their OpenGL part (and going past OpenGL 4 and forth). I can only hope the devs will update the game with the new engine later.
1 Likes, Who?
I'm playing Cities: Skylines since release on my (heavily) outdated AMD Radeon HD6950 2GB with the mesa (open source) drivers without any problems at any time whatsoever.
Of course I do not have 60fps+ but I stay over 30 fps for the overwhelming majority of my games, so I guess I'm being very lucky.
Of course I do not have 60fps+ but I stay over 30 fps for the overwhelming majority of my games, so I guess I'm being very lucky.
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Performance is a bit poor on a i7/32GB/980GTX with a city of 100K habitants...
Still, great game!
Cheers!
That's pretty interesting, I'm running an i7/8GB/760GTX and didn't realize bad performance (except for loading :D), and I'm running a city with 344k inhabitants now at 40-50 FPS.
To be complete, the game runs from a SSD Samsung 840 EVO 1TB.
I guess performance depends on the zoom:
* near >30 FPS
* medium (horizontal view) ~20 FPS
* far >30 FPS
Perhaps it's about LoD level and number of items or something like that... anyway, I do agree it's not a shooter, hence it's still playable.
After playing Shadow of Mordor or Dying Light, is a bit of a disappointment this low FPS...
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Mountain Man Sep 25, 2015
Yes, just think of it like a real city... as long as that city isn't Detroit, Chicago, or Los Angeles.Yeah I have a habit of trying to build everything possible, without thinking about managing my economy, oops.Just think about it like a real city. If you build houses for people, the people need jobs, so build industry. That gets the economy going. Let some money flow in and then slowly expand. Make sure you're making more money than you're spending. I went to dinner last night and forgot I left the game running and came back to find a huge amount of unspent money.
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