Greetings, and welcome to another LGR Cities Skylines thing!
Ah yes, it's that game that I forget how much that I enjoy
unless something new and shiny comes out for it
every couple months or so.
Or in this case, like 10 months.
The last pack for this was back in May of 2019,
but you know what, I'll take it.
It's rather fortuitous timing because of,
I don't know about you, but I've been finding myself
rather physically isolated recently,
and you know what?
Jumping into a virtual city to explore
and build and mess around with
sounds like a pretty great time at the moment.
So yeah, let's dive into Sunset Harbor,
the 9th expansion pack to Cities Skylines
released on March 26th, 2020.
And this time around there was no code
provided to me for review, no early access or anything,
but that's okay, I just went ahead and bought it
whenever it came out and it costs $14.99,
or your regional equivalent as always.
As for what you actually get in this expansion, well,
this is an intriguing mix of items and things and features.
Kind of think of this as an expansion
to previous expansions, really adding on to the same ideas
introduced in Industries, Mass Transit,
and little bit of Green Cities tossed in there,
because why not?
One of the first things you'll note
is that there are five new maps that make pretty good use
of the new resources, as you'd expect.
But it will work on any existing map,
as long as it has waterways.
Meaning that the new desert map, Desert Oasis,
is going to be a challenge for this water-centric content.
To say the least, you might be missing out on a few things.
Like one of the biggest additions to Sunset Harbor,
the fishing industry.
Really it introduces a new resource supply chain,
augmenting both industry and commerce,
and that new resource being-
["Fresh fish!"]
Four fresh types of fish
to be exact, with each one spawning
under different conditions in the waters.
Anchovies will like still, shallow waters.
Salmon, they need shallow flowing water.
Shellfish requires deep, still waters,
and Tuna likes deep flowing water.
And yeah, this means that you can just
manipulate the terrain to generate different fish
as you terrain edit in real-time.
And naturally, one of the main things that's
going to screw up fish production is pollution,
so you've got to keep an eye on that.
Like, you might have some ideal water
but it's full of crap, so that'll screw things up,
reducing your yield significantly.
How we actually get them fishies out of there
is by building a fishing harbor to begin with.
There's more specialized ones that we'll unlock
the more fish you fish.
And the way you dial in what your boats
are going to be grabbing out of the water
are with fishing routes, and yeah,
these work a lot like the Road tool,
pretty much the same as blimps.
Just draw yourself a path out in the open waters,
and as long as it connects in a closed loop
back to the originating harbor then it'll work just fine.
In fact, you can even send boats outside of city limits,
although you do want to make sure that they're long enough
to catch 100% load per boat,
but not so long as to waste time either.
Like some of the ones I made early on, it's like
half of the boat's travel was coming back
after they had already gotten 100% load.
And you can overlap them as much as you want,
but it's annoyingly tricky to tell each
individual fishing route apart after a while,
as all are the exact same pattern and color.
As far as I can tell there's no way to change this,
at least right now, it's confusing.
A far less confusing and much more simple option
are Fish Farms, and these will unlock at City Milestone 5,
letting you farm fish in the area instead of going out
to search for them, and actually later you can also
farm seaweed and algae, but, yeah.
The farm, man, it's a static thing
so it doesn't need a route.
And in fact it'll also work in a small lake,
which is pretty cool.
As long as you've got some kind of water
that's not polluted, you can farm water critters.
Much like the farms that you'll find on land in the game,
each one has its own growth cycle,
showing the current yield and the more healthy the farm is,
the quicker and more effectively you'll grow
whatever you tell it to grow.
These farms and harbors only hold a limited capacity
of fish at any given time, so it's well worth building
one of the places that can do things with fish.
One being the Fish Market where the raw food material
can be sold directly to citizens and tourists,
and it gives the surrounding area
a nice health benefit for some reason.
And also, some entertainment.
The other place you can send the catch of the day
is the Fish Factory,
a more traditional, industrial destination
where sea creatures of all kinds are packaged up
as generic goods to be shipped out to whoever needs them.
It's worth noting that this doesn't work
how the Industries DLC does,
you're not going to be painting fishing districts
or unlocking more levels
or adding a bunch of little extra buildings off to the side.
It really is just another way to accumulate
generic, commercial goods,
which is somewhat disappointing, honestly.
Effectively, it's just an industry overlay
saying you're doing something different with each type
of fish and building, but in reality it's producing
those generic items all generically.
I will say it is nice to have boats at least,
not just giant cargo and cruise ships
going around in your waterways all the time.
It kind of always bothered me that Jetski rentals
and marinas that we had in the game before this
didn't generate boats.
So having a bunch of different types of fishing boats
out there, yeah, it's a cool look.
And really that's about it for the harbor part
of Sunset Harbor.
Aesthetic diversification really is
its shining attribute.
You get harbors at sunset, and boatloads of boats,
and that's that.
Thankfully there's a good bit more to go over,
just not really related to fishing or harbors or anything.
For whatever reason they've included a bunch of stuff
regarding water and waste management, bus systems,
transportation hubs, and aviation city services.
I don't know why they bundled all these in this pack,
but I'll just go over them anyway,
starting with the water and waste management buildings,
adding on to the usual city-wide garbage service.
With the two main new buildings being
the Waste Processing Complex and Waste Transfer Facility,
each sending out transfer and collection trucks
to go and handle trash
in between the normal trash collection stuff.
The way it works is that you get these other trucks
that are picking up garbage from landfills and incinerators
and the Green Cities recycling centers and such,
then they take them to be processed at a Transfer Facility,
before again being taken to another place
for its final destination.
The positive being that this also works well
in residential zones, you can put one of these buildings
there and it's not going to be extremely polluted,
I mean it's still going to be a little bit,
but it keeps it way down compared to a lot
of the other garbage buildings, and opens up some room
for other, less nasty things.
There's also the Inland Water Treatment Plant,
which will clean up your water
without dumping it into a waterway, so hooray!
Now you get tons of ground pollution instead.
These new treatment plants also come with an Eco variant,
kind of going along with the Green Cities stuff,
as well as advanced versions of the same buildings,
doing the same thing but more... advanced-ly.
Oh, and the new, bigger Water Tower.
I think this thing looks excellent,
it's all retro-future-funky-looking,
very much from the Cloud City school of architecture,
I approve.
The next big addition to this pack are,
inexplicably, bus systems.
First up being the new intercity buses,
and these work differently than any other bus in the game.
It just allows citizens and tourists to travel
to and from off-screen cities,
reducing highway traffic and traffic overall ideally.
There's no need for stops or lines or anything like that,
you just need a Depot or a Terminal,
place it down somewhere and it just works.
I like the effects of this and I like the idea as well,
but the execution, man, I just still wish
that you could do something more
with those unseen outside cities,
like trading things back and forth or something,
I don't know, I played too many SimCity games.
As it is you've just got these buses going in and out
of the blue void at the edge of the map,
and supposedly there's other cities out there.
I don't know, it's fine, I'm glad these buses are here.
Something I'm less on board with are the trolley buses,
basically trackless trams, electric buses
drawing power from overhead wires,
meaning that they require yet another specialized road
that you've got to commit to if you want to use them.
And I'm not really sure I see much reason to use them.
It's nice that they're not stuck in one track like a tram,
so they're able to change lanes and pull over
to the side of the road and stuff,
but the biggest reason to want them
would seem to be an aesthetic choice.
A lot of the advantages that I could think of
for having these in real life,
they're just not modeled in the game,
things like vehicle pollution or smog.
Yeah, Cities Skylines doesn't worry about that with traffic,
and you don't get any advantages over, like, a gasoline bus,
extra torque or endurance that an electric would have,
going up hills or anything,
it's just not modeled in-game.
So, I don't know, man, props to them for solving
the technical challenge of making the wires work,
it's cool to see that animation happening,
but I can completely leave these behind
and I don't think I'll ever be using them after this video.
Keeping in line with all the transportation add-on stuff,
they have also added five new Transport Hubs,
connecting different networks together
and allowing citizens and tourists to change
from one type of transportation to another in the same spot.
And I like these, they're a good way to simplify things
and save a little bit of space.
So you've got a hub for bus and intercity buses
to transfer between one another,
a hub for Metro and intercity buses to do the same thing,
a bus/Metro hub to go back and forth between those,
and a train/Metro hub doing exactly what it sounds like.
And the last one is a little bit of a different thing,
it's the Metropolitan Airport,
counting as a really large hub.
In fact it's the biggest building in Skylines to date.
Effectively it's an international airport
with two Metro stations and two landing pads
for passenger helicopters, more on that in a sec.
Because of those Metros, man, yeah,
you get some Metro additions here
with the overground Metro.
Finally, you've got some ground level
and elevated Metro tracks that can also connect
to existing underground Metros.
So yeah, I don't know, I like this kind of stuff,
having elevated trains going around your city
for passengers is just cool.
It looks neat, it's fun to play with,
and it's also free with the latest patch for City Skylines,
so you don't even need this pack to get them.
Good stuff!
Let's move on to the aviation things
and those passenger helicopters, because yeah,
that's a new thing, it definitely changes a lot
in terms of the overall look of the skies of your city.
They are effectively re-skinned blimps
working really just the same way,
they need pathways laid out like blimps do,
and you've got Helicopter Stops that can be placed
anywhere you like as buildings,
but you can't place stops on top of existing buildings.
That's something that I thought would maybe be in the game,
I don't know, that'd be awesome in my mind.
And it makes sense considering all the pre-existing
rooftop landing pads, look at all those H's
just dotted all over your cities.
It'd be pretty neat if you could have
helicopters just going from building to building
and hopping around, and picking up whoever needed
picking up anywhere and, yeah,
maybe it's not feasible but I think it'd be cool.
Then there's the last of the new flight-related buildings,
the Aviation Club.
This right here is just a little bit different
than the others, this is new, unique building
that you can plop down.
It doesn't really do anything in terms of
adding to your transportation system,
it's just a single small terminal
with an Air Traffic Control and hangars and a runway,
and allows light aircraft for flight enthusiasts
to just go wandering around in little planes
up above your city, it's cool
in terms of how it looks.
But it really is just another entertainment option
for your citizens and it's pretty noisy,
but it's attractive and they seem to like
using it in my city, so I'm going to keep this around.
Let's see what else is left here, yeah,
we've got a couple of new city services
put into effect by placing down a couple of buildings.
One service being elder care,
and the other being childcare.
And this also comes free with the latest patch.
So the childcare comes in the form of
the Child Health Center, increasing the health
and ultimately the happiness of all children
and teenagers in the surrounding area,
and also increasing the birth rate
so you get more citizens more quickly.
And then there's the Elder Care Facility,
which is something you plop down
to increase the health of all your elders,
heal sick elders, attract new elders,
and overall increase the average lifespan
of your older citizens.
However, do use it with caution,
I've had some weird results with this thing.
It just seems to mess with the older, educated population
of your businesses and I ended up with a bunch of them
going out of business as a result of the elder care.
I guess just my older skilled workers were going
to that Facility instead of working anymore,
so it threw things out of whack.
And finally, the last bit of newness in this pack,
are six new City Policies,
mostly pertaining to fishing industry maintenance
and revenue, along with the ability to use
algae-filtered water and incentivize greater use
of the intercity buses and the Aviation Club.
Yeah, that's Cities Skylines Sunset Harbor,
an awful lot of other things beyond sunsets and harbors,
I've got to say.
Personally a little confusing in terms of all the things
they decided to include in one pack this time,
even more so than some of the other
confusing packs we've had.
And if you ask me my verdict is just
wait for a sale with this one,
unless you really care that much about changing up
the visuals without a whole lot going on underneath the hood
to change up or improve the actual gameplay.
I'm all for additional choice in terms of changing up
the way your city looks, I'd just prefer that the
aesthetic changes weren't so surface-level
and similar to things that are already here.
You get trolley buses instead of trams,
and helicopters instead of blimps.
Small planes instead of only jetliners.
Fishing boats in addition to ships,
and fine, it's all fine, decent stuff,
that I'm glad to have and play around with,
but do we really need to spend $15 for the pleasure
at this point in the game's five-plus year existence?
No, not really, no matter how much it varies
the existing look of your cities.
It's not going to change the overall feel of the game
enough for me to want to recommend it at full price.
[jazzy music]
And if you found this review useful or just enjoyed
something you saw here or heard here,
then check out some of my other videos,
I've done all of the different Cities Skylines packs,
and there's all kinds of other stuff being uploaded
each week right here on LGR.
And as always, thank you for watching,
and stay safe out there.