Welcome to Cities: Skylines The Dev Diaries
These videos take a closer look the official Dev Diaries that can be found
at the Paradox Interactive forum and I'll include a link to them in
the video description
In this episode we'll be looking at the Simulation
Now I've been looking forward to reviewing this diary because I wanted to take this
opportunity to show just how different this game is from SimCity 2013
When it comes to city building games my mantra has always been
"Well how does it work in the real world?"
and I'm pleased to say that Collosal Order, the developers of Cities: Skylines
seem to have the same philosophy
The latest SimCity featured a simulation that was so distanced from reality as
to be verging on the ridiculous
People having no fixed home, just grabbing the first available building they came across
when they left work
Kids and students that never grew up
Buses and trains that moved around completely at random with no concept of routes
a completely crazy education system
and don't get me started about the tech / educated worker mechanism for industry
Cities: Skylines, on the other hand, is all about the real world simulation
Skylines features a full life cycle for its citizens, they're born, age
and eventually die
Citizens have a fixed home that they travel to and from every day
Buses and trains followed fixed routes that you create and control
Students have to go to elementary school before they can progress to high school and have
to graduate high school before they can
go to college
and when students finished their education at whatever level they go find a job that
reflects their level of education and become part of your workforce
Before we jump into the real details I want to say a quick word about agents versus
statistical modelling
Right now we're in the the middle of a paradigm shift in city building games
We're moving away from the statistical modelling of
games like SimCity 4 which arguably set the benchmark
for that paradigm
to agent modeling where the game creates and manages
every citizen and every vehicle in your city
In SimCity 4 the roads only gave you a visual representation of 'traffic density' at any
particular location, they weren't real, cars didn't have real destinations
In the new paradigm each and every vehicle and person is a real simulated
entity heading to some real destination
And every one of those entities takes up processing power
That's why, in the latest games, we don't see
the huge maps and huge populations that we became used to in games like SimCity 4
But where SimCity 2013 opted to give us fudged population numbers, Cities Skylines have
opted for real numbers
and while the city populations in Cities: Skylines
may not reach the multi millions that we might find in a real world metropolis
we'll certainly be getting into the hundreds of thousands
But this does mean some compromises
So, for example, some residential buildings have a quite low amount of people living in
them compared to the size of the building
But every one of those people is fully simulated with a home, a job and a logical pattern of
moving around the city
Every citizen has a name, which by the way you can change, an age, a home and
either a workplace or a school to attend
unless of course they're senior citizens or pre-school children
which is a category technically known as 'slackers'
And citizens keep the same job at the same workplace
not charging around looking for a random place to
work each day
and when it comes to how they get to work or go shopping or get to school or
wherever it is they are going
the simulation once again attempts to reflect the real world,
for example, not all citizens have cars
and those that don't have cars will either walk
or use public transport if it's available
and even people WITH cars will figure out if
their journey would typically be faster by car or
public transport and change their travel habits accordingly
And lets talk about cars for a second
One big criticism of the SimCity 2013 simulation was that cars always took the shortest route
regardless of traffic conditions which is obviously not how things work
in the real world
People are a little bit smarter than that OK, not much, but they are a bit
So in Cities: Skylines drivers actually chose their route so that they try to avoid busiest
traffic
and they take into consideration things like the faster speed limits on major roads and
highways
And as city builders, if we do run into traffic problems, we actually have a realistic set
of tools that we can use to solve our problems
roundabouts, one way streets, elevated roads
In fact everywhere you look in Cities: Skylines you see reflections of the real world
The ability to create Districts with varying tax rates and local policies
which incidentally we'll be looking at more closely in the next video
Roadside parking Industrial Shipping
Import Export Public Services
Public Transport Water Dynamics
Noise Pollution and the list goes on and on
Now there are a few things where the simulation does take a little detour away from reality
for example it appears that commercial buildings don't create any jobs, their only role being
the sale of goods created by industry
and emergency vehicles don't get automatic right of way, they have to fight their way
through traffic like everyone else
but those little detours seem to be few and far between and I think on balance
we'll be forgiving them just because of how much the devs have got right
Guys, this is a good simulation
And that's it for this episode
I'd like to thank Karoliina for putting together the original Dev Diary
I'd like to thank you for watching
and you enjoyed this vid hit the like button or better still, leave me a comment
and I'll be back for episode 8 where we'll be looking at
Districts and Policies