![]() The resulting urban sprawl works about as well as Los Angeles does: skyscrapers grow and the wealth pours in, but traffic is a mess and I always find myself scrambling to address the congestion my lack of foresight has created. Low-income citizens need a place to work? Pile a few more factories into my pollution-riddled industrial quarter, home to hastily erected garbage dumps and sewage treatment plants. Citizens want more places to shop? Toss down a few commercial zones. ![]() I’ve always been a rather reactive city-planner, and that causes me problems in this game. SimCity has always been a data-driven experience, but the bevy of graphs have largely been replaced with colorful bars that give you a quick idea of where problems lie. As you lay down roads, helpful guidelines give visual cues as to how much space a particular zone will need to fully expand. These tools are crucial if you want to make the most out of your space, as building too tightly will result in zones that don’t have enough room to grow. The game’s simple, fluid tools belie an astonishing level of depth: you can lay down roads in traditional (boring) grids, or give the new curved roads a try and paint asphalt down at your leisure. Subtle guidelines like this edge-of-zone marker give you information about your city without being obtrusive. Roads are the lynchpin to a thriving city: power and water flows along your roadways, which are themselves available in low, medium, and high capacities, ultimately determining how large your zones can be. ![]() The new SimCity keeps the familiar Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zone trinity, but the classic approach of plopping down low-, medium- and high-density zones to balance your city’s development has given way to a more organic approach: buildings start small, and only grow when they have enough money, happy residents, and space. I assume this is because of the curved roads, but either way it’s a bit of an annoyance.Cities in the new SimCity are decidedly smaller than previous entries in the series the sprawling metropolises of yore have necessarily given way to a focus on careful planning and design, largely because of the GlassBox engine’s hefty computational requirements. You lay out roads, and then zoning areas automatically appear. In fact, the only thing I didn’t like about my time with Cities: Skylines is that buildings are tied to roads, the same as the recent SimCity. We’ll see how it works when there are thousands of people to track, but at least Colossal Order has a plausible explanation for why Cities: Skylines will work as advertised. Those games relied on tracking every civilian in order to accurately simulate traffic, so the hard work was mostly done. I’m told that isn’t the case this time around, but I have no way of independently verifying that at the moment.Īll I can do is repeat what I was told, which is that the system is built off the same fundamentals as Colossal Order’s previous Cities in Motion games. ![]() Of course, those claims later turned out to be complete garbage in the case of SimCity, with the game simply fudging the numbers. Cities: Skylines also claims to simulate every single person, the same as the most recent SimCity. ![]()
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