Cities: Skylines II

[MatskiMonk]

Love Cities!!!!

Last week I bit the bullet and got GeForce Now so I could play this on my potato laptop .... Totally worth it. Need to demolish part of my city in Barrier Island to work on the traffic flow as its a nightmare, but otherwise loving this!!!

Post up some pictures of your city!

 

[eran0004]

New Region pack dropped today, Eastern Europe, I think some of these buildings will work well in your city!

I had high hopes for this pack, but I'm positively surprised by what I have seen so far! I have a couple of ideas already

 

[ElectricNaz]

Post up some pictures of your city!

Will try later - think I'm going to restart on another map first!

 

[eran0004]

I used the Eastern Europe pack to build a little industry town in the mountains, with inspiration from the city of Rustavi in Georgia. I used the town hall from the pack as an industry headquarters and gave it a prominent location. There's a bit of oil in the surrounding hills so I will add a couple of oil fields in the area.

 

[eran0004]

Some more screenshots from the new industry town, now with oil fields.

 

[eran0004]

Another update to the island project. I changed the main hospital in the capital city from the French version to the Eastern Europe one and finished the modern redevelopment of the old harbour.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Built a dam. After a long long long time spent messing around, I finally got the power to go from 300kW, to 200MW... after all the terraforming though, the terrain was glitching massive quantities of water, so I built a bit of a spill way and some other stuff to disguise the mess...

Not pretty, but somewhat succesful detailing around glitching.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Another region pack drops today...

 

[MatskiMonk]

I have to say the region pack stuff has been great... but the game is currently in the most unplayable state, for me, since launch. The loading time has skyrocketed to get into the game, and to load a save game now takes quite a bit longer - I mean we're not talking massively modded asset bloat from CS1 10-11 min load times, but it's getting there, and what's worse is that I'm only getting about 5-15 mins of play time before instant crash to desktop. My autosave interval is 2 minutes and I'm still loosing a big chunk of what I'm doing each time. I go back to one of my earliest posts about Cities: Skylines, there's a reason why I've never fully embraced PC gaming the way I have with console gaming, and this it.

 

[redhed17]

I have to say the region pack stuff has been great... but the game is currently in the most unplayable state, for me, since launch. The loading time has skyrocketed to get into the game, and to load a save game now takes quite a bit longer - I mean we're not talking massively modded asset bloat from CS1 10-11 min load times, but it's getting there, and what's worse is that I'm only getting about 5-15 mins of play time before instant crash to desktop. My autosave interval is 2 minutes and I'm still loosing a big chunk of what I'm doing each time. I go back to one of my earliest posts about Cities: Skylines, there's a reason why I've never fully embraced PC gaming the way I have with console gaming, and this it.

I agree that the Region Packs have been very welcome. Whilst my loading times have increased over the last month or two, crashes are not as frequent as you seem to be having. 🤔

I think there are pluses and minuses to PC gaming, and the Cities Skylines games are the first, and only games that I have played on PC, being a console player since the original Playstation, but I would not have considered Cities Skylines on a console. Trying to play this with a controller would not be appealing, and whilst you could probably use a keyboard and mouse, that would not be as easy to do with my setup with the console. I was attracted to this game in the first place by accidentally seeing a Biffa video on YT, and that was played on PC with mods and assets, and so that was what was so appealing.

And after playing both CS games with mods, and with CS1 extra community created assets, the added functionality that they add to the game are transformative imho. I don't think I would enjoy playing either games without mods or assets for any length of time, as I would find it frustrating, and that would be as a player without the knowledge of what mods and assets add. With that knowledge now, if I no longer had a PC, I would not even think about playing a 'vanilla' version of the game on a console.

 

[TheCracker]

I think there are pluses and minuses to PC gaming, and the Cities Skylines games are the first, and only games that I have played on PC, being a console player since the original Playstation, but I would not have considered Cities Skylines on a console. Trying to play this with a controller would not be appealing, and whilst you could probably use a keyboard and mouse, that would not be as easy to do with my setup with the console. I was attracted to this game in the first place by accidentally seeing a Biffa video on YT, and that was played on PC with mods and assets, and so that was what was so appealing.

And after playing both CS games with mods, and with CS1 extra community created assets, the added functionality that they add to the game are transformative imho. I don't think I would enjoy playing either games without mods or assets for any length of time, as I would find it frustrating, and that would be as a player without the knowledge of what mods and assets add. With that knowledge now, if I no longer had a PC, I would not even think about playing a 'vanilla' version of the game on a console.

Its a bit of a double-edged sword, PC gaming. You have the opportunity to use better-than-console hardware, plus a wide range of community-created assets, but performance, in both extended loading times and crashing, can be an issue. I found the PS5 and PS4 versions of C:S to be pretty stable and load times, especially on SSD equiped PS5, pretty swift. But when you see the content available on PC, you do feel you're missing out on what the game can be.

The only time i've ever played a console game with community created assets was Fallout 4 on the PS4. Even then they were heavily curated they did add to the game, especially if you'd already played through all the game stories and had explored everything it had to offer, but even the curated content they did let through still caused so many performance issues with glitches and crashing, usually down to conflicts between those assets, that i struggled to keep interest in continuing playing it.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Spending most of my spare time trying to get some stuff finished in GT7 but as a side 'project', I've slapping down stuff in a city just to see how my computer handles higher populations. It's not a total mess, but a lot of it is fairly low effort... 216k pop so far.

Still getting lots of Crash to Desktop issues, hence I'm not feeling like doing anything complex.

 

[eran0004]

I started a new project, mostly because I was tired of not having much traffic on the island map. Also the tourism was bugged in that save, no tourists would show up in the city.

The new project is on easy mode, I think that would strike a nice balance between "build anything you want" and having to care a little bit about the economy. I started with some rural development and a monumental bridge. Got a funny screenshot of the bridge with some divebombing geese in the foreground.

 

[eran0004]

My new project has evolved from rural area to small town. I'm using the police station from the German pack as a town hall. I also built two shopping centres, one more modern with plenty of parking and the other as an old factory area converted to a shopping mall.

 

[eran0004]

Some more development around the town centre.

 

[eran0004]

Here's a new little residential neighbourhood by the shore. I used detached and semi-detached housing from the UK pack and created a little suburban road layout in a pocket between some farms. Some more exclusive houses (including a mansion) closest to the water.

In the city centre I built the first proper park of the city. The map I'm playing on has rather hot summer climate so I wanted to use vegeation to create a lot of shade. After building the paths I did a little terraforming to create some small hills here and there.

Industry spokespersons have been complaining lately about a lack of workforce. Fine, I said and sent a couple of bulldozers into the woods. When the dust had settled the trees and the bears had been replaced by 840 brand new modernistic apartments in pre-fabricated concrete, sprinkled within a maze of one-way streets and pedestrian paths.

 

[eran0004]

I built a new arterial road around the city with grade-separated intersections.

The industry worker housing project got a school, a welfare centre and a couple of neighbourhood shops.

Spiced up the area around the transformation station by adding a petrol station and a little bit of commercial activity. And of course bushes. When in doubt, add more bushes.

The new arterial dips down into a tunnel and provides a new connection to the mainland. I like the unusual layout of the interchange.

 

[eran0004]

Expanded the city with a little residential block, but got more apartments than I had anticipated. The city grew overnight from 7000 citizens to 11000 and parking became a nightmare. I built two parking garages and as much surface and street parking as I could reasonably fit and now the situation seems to have calmed down. Got a nice little school complex by combining the elementary school and the high school from the Eastern European pack.

Some future plans for the city:
1. The blue district will be redeveloped into a modern city centre, with commercial, office and mixed zoning.
2. The red district will be upgraded from low density residential to medium density.
3. A new low density residential district will be developed in the yellow area, to compensate for the low density housing that will be demolished in the city centre.

 

[HarVee]

I've liked how reminiscent of SimCity 3k (and lesser extend 4) that CS2's lighting is, but without custom assets I've had the shelve the game. I know there are gameplay mods for features like MoveIt and ploppable RICO, as well as those official asset packs, some which I've tried in the past, but it still isn't enough to keep me engaged. I find all my cities I create in CS2 just look the same regardless of how hard I try to make them differentiate. CS1 was easier to make different cities as well as specific districts feel more unique and personalized. I've got steam trains running through my oil drilling area, a midtown with condos, farming area which spawns rusty '50s farm pickups, etc. etc.

Of course, I am comparing a heavily modded CS1 to a (relatively) vanilla CS2, but I would've thought the asset editor and steam workshop support would've been there day 1. And without being able to finely tweak and customize my experience, I find CS2 just falls flat.

Glad to see you all enjoying the game though, but to summarize all of this, I have but one question to you guys here - How do you stay engaged with CS2?

 

[eran0004]

Glad to see you all enjoying the game though, but to summarize all of this, I have but one question to you guys here - How do you stay engaged with CS2?

I'm playing the game like a puzzle game. Figuring out how the land would have been developed over time in a realistic way and how the road network would have evolved. I'm checking Google Maps for references and often trying to incorporate features from locations I have visited. And on top of that you've got to think about how to make the city function. So for me there's plenty of stuff to do in CS2.

 

[MatskiMonk]

I have but one question to you guys here - How do you stay engaged with CS2?

Whatever the limitations of the game are, they still exceed my ability to make good looking cities. I only have to look as far as the likes of infrastructurist on YouTube to see that it's my ability that's lacking more than the game is, so it's still worth persevering with.

.. that said, I'm still getting persistent crash to desktop problems, so I'm mostly not playing until I can get round to re-installing the game.

 

[eran0004]

I redeveloped the two districts I talked about earlier, including some big upgrades to the road network. Got a pretty interesting intersection with curved roads and slip lanes.

 

[eran0004]

I ran into a critical problem with my city. The autosaving started to fail in a way that locked the menu and prevented manually saving the game (as well as quitting the game, loading a game, starting a new game, etc). I could still play the game, but couldn't save the progress. So I switched off the autosave feature and that briefly solved the problem, but the next day the same error occured while I was saving the city manually and unfortunately the error nuked my main savefile, as I was in the process of overwriting it. I do have second savefile, but it's from about a month ago and I'm not in the mood for redoing all that work - I would rather start a new city. So for now it's game over for this city.

The last screenshot I have is from about a day or two before the problems started. I had claimed some farmland next to the old clinic to build a new hospital and medical research centre.

Moving forward I removed two of the regional packs, thinking that perhaps the error was triggered by having too many assets loaded. I removed the French pack and the North-East US pack as those are the ones I tend to use the least. Then I downloaded a new map by Teddy Radko called Saint Angelo and started chipping away at some rural development, including an excessively detailed sewage outlet. This time I'll be more careful about overwriting old savefiles...

 

[MatskiMonk]

That's a shame @eran0004, but I can relate. I know there's been problems since the last patch, but at my end I can now have entire sessions that don't crash to desktop every 10 mins! Are you running many mods?

 

[eran0004]

That's a shame @eran0004, but I can relate. I know there's been problems since the last patch, but at my end I can now have entire sessions that don't crash to desktop every 10 mins! Are you running many mods?

I'm running a handful of mods. If it's a mod issue my prime suspect would be the road builder mod, I don't think any of the other ones need to have any data saved.

Glad to hear your problems got better

 

[redhed17]

Up until this last update, CSII has been great, and some of the updates have returned quite big performance boosts, with few negatives bar the odd mod having problems. This last update has been awful. At first, none of my saves would start the game. After deleting some files, I got the last saved city to open, but older city saves will not open.

I was playing every night, but this update has taken that enthusiasm away a bit, when all that 'work' can be nullified.

 

[MatskiMonk]

Mine's been fine until a couple of days ago. Now I can only start the game with code mods disabled. I'm assuming this means a mod has recently been updated and borked the game.

I have been really tempted to go back to CS1 recently. I like CS2, and it has the potential, but over a year and a half in, the combo of glitches/bugs and not having proper asset support yet really sucks the fun out of it.

 

[TheCracker]

Sounds like the devs are in a bit of a mess right now. Still no sign of the console port, which was originally due over a year and a half ago, and the PC version seems really unstable. At least as far as mod integration goes.