We have been busy little bees working on something completely new for Cities: Skylines and now we finally get to talk about it!

Cities: Skylines Snowfall is inspired by the Finnish winter that just seems to last forever. It's all about what we see and feel around us: Snow, ice and cold weather. You get to experience the snowfall, so make sure your citizens stay warm by offering heating, and tackling the challenges of slippery roads slowing down traffic.

People have been asking us to add seasons to the game. However we felt that winter should have it's own theme with unique challenges. This means that winter maps have eternal snow and new features tied to it. You can create your own winter maps in the map editor or play the three maps that are available in Snowfall.

The snow is naturally a very visual feature and we have created quite a few new buildings for the theme. Many of the base game buildings have been varied to fit winter conditions better, so you won’t have flowerbeds or palm trees in your winter wonderland. For modders we'll have more information how to prepare their assets for the snow coming later, but what we can say at this point is that the snow is generated by code and the assets should work with minor tweaks. Roads are also covered by snow and citizens wear winter clothing. Just like in European maps, winter maps have special buildings only available in them. We have also added some weather effects for all the other map themes.

Not only is the winter map about the visuals but there are special services that are available only in this theme. So make sure you clear the roads of the snow and heat up the citizen's home because the temperature is dropping. We'll be talking about these new features and more in a weekly developer diary until the release, so stay tuned!

Are you ready for a gorgeous winter wonderland?

 

[nyirog]

Im just curious about, that is it possible to make circa 2 maps, or just add the abilty to the map creator to add full 4 season cycles to maps? So in this version already existing maps wont change, and de feature will be only available on new map types. 3 or 6 ingame days (I think 6 would be better choice) should be enough for each season, so you can just sit and enjoy watching them how they affect your city, but you will have enough time to prepare for them and for their challenge; and of course chirpy's look changeing always for the actual season to indicate them for the players (and the usual text notes, hints from it).

 

[dreadicon]

So, a few things...

First, I love skylines. I have hundreds of hours played, and I've spent over 100 hours toying and fiddling with modding (code). The game is, at-present, not Sim City. It's a diorama builder with traffic, much more like Cities XL, but without proper farms or custom ground texturing. This is fine, but to say otherwise is not being objective about things. Also, buildings/assets aside, the game is only moddable because of the language and engine. The rest of their modding API is barely enough to say 'yeah, it has modding'.

The announced content for Snowfall amounts to about $5, including trams, snow maps, snow map mechanics, and pure-aesthetic weather. They'll have to triple the content before it's worth 15$ to me and a lot of other people. That's just what it is right now. I was actually extremely excited when I first saw it. But learning that seasons don't change (I wouldn't have minded there being just two seasons for now even) basically killed my enthusiasm for the moment.

Yes, it's early in the dev news, but people are right to be skittish. CO is trying the same thing they did last time; a feature that is primarily aesthetic but with lots of mechanic potential. However, there's already a red flag that it's mechanics/meaningfulness is lacking, which is that all mechanics related to the core feature are relegated to a new game mode that replaces the current one. AD was worth about 2/3rds what they charged, if they had fixed the big bugs. with the bugs, it should have been half what it is.

Concerning 'CO is a small company', I don't buy it. They sold over 1.8 million copies of the game at 30$ each last year. lets be very modest for their final revenue and assume 10% cut for Valve, 40% Paradox, then 50% of what's left for taxes. That would leave them with 14.58 million dollars, which is more than enough to cover 20 people for the entire duration of the original dev, and all of last year, and still have money left over. Now let's again be modest about revenue and assume the same figures for AD and it's 200,000 sales: this gives us a total of 800k in revenue from just a few months of sales, which again should cover a staff of 20 for about 6 months minimum (unless people are drawing way bigger incomes than they should). Yes, new devs take time and effort to find and train, but that should have happened in the months after release. If staff is limiting them, then they are making bad business decisions. If Paradox is costing them that much (or more), then Paradox can join EA on my leech publishers dart board. If their taxes are higher, then why are they operating out of that country? Basically, they have the money, they have the ability, they're just....not doing.

Despite this, I believe they mean well; funds just need re-allocated to dev (efficient dev, that is). Anything else I have to say in terms of critique/suggestions has already been mentioned in other posts before mine.

P.S.: I know very well how much money and time all these things take. I've been working in software for 4 years now, across 3 companies from megga-corp to 4-man startup, from cloud integrations to Unity games to casino games; I've seen a lot, and I always keep my ears and eyes open to learn about them. I've also been researching software management for almost a decade learning how to run a software firm (because it's still my goal to start my own one day) and working out why indies just roll over and die or fall on their face even when they 'make it big.' Often, it's either because they made bad deal and the investor took their money, because one or more people decided to pocket the money rather than re-invest, or because they wanted to make the game 'their way' with 'their team', refusing to hire more skilled developers (looking at you Notch).

 

[BadPeanut]

14. Elevated Stations and Multitrack systems.
...
Elevated Stations and Multitrack stations for example, can be easily done by CO. It's a mixed feeling of happiness and sadness to see modders do Elevated stations only during their freetime, while CO has all the codes and the resources to create those great stuffs in just a matter of weeks or months.

Just so you know, the code for multitrack stations without using the mod is in the game. i figured out how to do it a couple of days ago so sit tight man

 

[lexAsaP]

Expansions
Just to start. There are going to be roughly a few groups of players in the near future. People with only the base game. People with the base game with after dark expansion, people with the base game with snow and of course people with the base game with after dark and snow. This fact alone will create a lot of issues I guess. When I take a look at my latest city, there are a lot of buildings that still are not After Dark ready. That’s not a huge problem in a lot of cases, since in a normal city not every building is lid up. But even when a building is closed, there are always some lights I guess. For instance only the entrance. A building with no lights at all just doesn’t seem real to me.

I am wondering why there is no way of simply select after dark and in the near future the snow expansion in the steam workshop and the game itself. I would like to be able to select that I only want to see After Dark certified mods and assets. There are still mods that just won’t work when you have AD, since they have not been updated. There are also mods that need AD installed and won’t work if you only have the base game. A (fairly) simple selection could prevent these problems. If these items get a tag or flag that states if it’s AD or SNOW approved it would be great.
Because, the Snow expansion will do this all over again. At this moment there is literally no asset in the workshop that will work I guess. I have no idea how the snowy buildings are build and how it will work, but I guess all the buildings need to be covered in snow during creation. It’s not that I need every building covered in snow. After playing with a snow covered city, I will build cities without snow, so the buildings that are not upgraded with snow will also be used. But it would be great to be able to select up front what you want. If you want to build a city in snow, you should be able to select the snow option in the workshop and the game which will then only show you snow certified mods and assets. Then you could be sure that everything you select will actually work when using the snow expansion.

*** After writing this I found out that the snow will be created with code and it will be only available on certain specific snow maps. This is not a problem for how I am playing, but seeing all complaints it is for a lot of other people apparently. It would be nice to have a full weather system, but for me that’s not really necessary. If I am building a city with beaches and I create a beautiful atmosphere with tons of summer assets, it would be stupid in my opinion to let it snow while all the summer deco stays. Then that would have to be removed to give an accurate look and feel. I’d rather choose up front that I want a snowy map. And that is the case with the new expansion.
Logically, there will be combined options regarding the after dark and the snow. I hope everyone who will create content for snow, will make sure it’s also working with after dark. What’s next in the future? That will lead to the same problems again. Perhaps it’s wise to really make an expandable system now that allows users to filter on expansions. Now and in the future, while taking care that the main functions will always work regarding which expansion is installed or not.

CONTENT MANAGER
I love the content manager. It’s quite handy that it has different groups for mods, assets, save games and so on. I love the fact that you can unsubscribe a mod from within the manager. I hate the fact that I can’t use the same groups when viewing my subscribed mods in Steam’s Workshop. When your game doesn’t load and you are not quite sure what the name of the mod is that’s probably the cause you only can select to see ALL your subscriptions in one long list. Should be so much more convenient when you could see only mods there too or any of the other groups or even the same list as in the workshop itself with the options of the divided groups like transport trains and high rise residential.
But okay, the problem that I have with the content manager is that it is for the whole game, overall settings. You select a mod for the game Cities Skylines as a whole, not for one map/saved game. Of course this has advantages and it works very well. Especially when you just build one city at a time and especially when you don’t use former cities anymore. But in real life, I guess it would be nice to be able to work on different cities and load your old cities from time to time. This can be done if you use the same mods and assets over and over again. But in real life things are changing. New mods are created, you discover new mods and assets and sometimes you decide to build a new city in a complete different style. When building in a new style, you will want to subscribe to other content. In a perfect world you can unlimited subscribe to mods and assets. In the real world a lot of us have computers that think otherwise. So why load assets that you are not going to use? It’s just a waste of memory and processor power that is well needed to play Cities Skylines in the first place.

Let’s assume that I am building my beautiful city called Sandy Beach, located in an area with palm trees, a lot of sun and always high temperatures. It will never snow in Sandy Beach and the highest buildings have 6 floors or so, so no skyscrapers for instance. My previous City was called Manhattan and contained huge amounts of skyscrapers. I really love them! That city had no beach in sight.

So I have like 600 or more (no idea really) subscriptions to assets that fit the skyscraper theme of Manhattan, but nothing regarding beaches. What I will do of course it search the workshop for content for my beautiful Sandy Beach. Most of us will not unsubscribe from the buildings that were used in Manhattan. If you want to load the Manhattan game again tomorrow, it still has to work right? But now I’m subscribing to 100s of new assets for Sandy Beach which the game also has to load. Sandy beach takes half an hour to load that way. And in the game I have to force my way through high-rise buildings to find that little beach stand that I want to use. I might even come across nice content for my future city that will contain snow for instance. Do I leave that or do I already subscribe to that so I will be able to use it when the time is there, that I will start creating another new city called Snowy Mountain?
The only solution for now is that I keep my subscriptions for everything, but turn off all the assets that I am not using in Sandy Beach. But when I want to play Manhattan again tomorrow, it won’t work since all the high-rise building are switched off. And I am not going to do that with over a 1000 assets.

Wouldn’t it be more logical to have a content manager per savegame/city? There could still be an overall content manager, which shows all of our subscriptions. In the case I am using in this example, I would find in there all the high-rise stuff from Manhattan, the tropical stuff from Sandy Beach and already the wintery stuff that I am going to use in Snowy Mountain. But after creating a new game, Sandy Beach for instance, it would be great to have a (in)game content manager. When loading Sandy Beach, only the workshop stuff will be loaded that I want to use in Sandy Beach and not the other stuff that I used in other cities or future cities. So this selection of MODS and ASSETS (which have to be loaded) are stored with THE GAME/CITY.
This would also be the solution for another big problem with older saved games, namely that you have no idea what you used half a year ago in that city. For instance I used traffic++ in older city’s and now I am using Traffic Manager + Improved AL. These do not work together. When trying to open an old city with TM+I activated, the game will crash since it was made with T++. When using the Content Manager I could switch off TM+I and switch on T++ again. But then I need to switch that back when going back to my current city. Forget it once and you could be screwed. But this is of course an example with only one mod. I am using over 50 mods and way more than a 1000 assets. How on earth am I going to remember for each and every city that I build which ones I used? A content manager per game/city could help a lot with that, because the list of used mods and assets are stored with the game.
To get back to my example cities… I am playing Sandy Beach right now and in the assets lists I only see tropical stuff without assets that I won’t ever use in that game. Traffic manager + Al is loaded and working. Then I feel like playing a different style and close the game and open my old Manhattan city. The content manager per game won’t load the beach stuff, but does load the high-rise stuff that I used and will load the used traffic++, since that information also was stored in the saved game. This combined with the possibility to check the installed expansions would make it a lot easier to play several cities and would prevent a lot of games to crash.

MODS / ASSETS IN GAME (visibility and subdivisioning)
Then one last thing. I am really grateful with all the beautiful mods and assets that are created, but it irritates me hugely that a lot of them won’t show an example in the game and you’ll see only a white thing as placeholder or even nothing at all. I have seen a lot of people who uploaded assets (and stating that they created the content) who write that they have no idea how to create an example picture in the game. Sometimes even in the workshop. Or this means that it is really difficult or those people did not create the assets in 3D themselves. I cannot believe that someone is capable of creating a difficult structure in 3D, add beautiful textures to that and then upload it in the workshop and then not being able to show a preview of it in the game or even in the workshop. I don’t care if there no preview in the workshop, then I’ll just won’t use it. But when after subscribing there is no preview in the game is annoying, especially when there are 100s of them. I think it should be obligatory to be able to post mods and assets. On the other hand, why is there not someone at the publisher/developers office who’s only job it is to streamline the mods? Or several people from the community that have those rights, I bet there are a lot who want to help out. A lot of mods are misplaced or are using the wrong tags. It’s amazing to see where some assets end up in the game due to this. Then you see a fast-food restaurant in the trees section for instance.
A lot of assets are placed under parks. And however it’s perhaps handy that some assets function as a park, it makes it nowadays quite hard to really find a park if you are subscribed to a lot of assets. I think Cities Skylines needs someone of several people to streamline these kind of things before it’s really getting out of hand. If the game has grown so big which is largely credit for the community, then I believe it should be maintained a little bit better.

Lucky for all of us, the community and the game are still thriving and a lot of content is added on a daily bases, but with the new DLC on its way I think this is the time to start streamlining the mods and assets before it really gets to a point that people lose interest due to problems with saved games and assets that break down.

This weekend I wanted to start playing Cities at the beginning of Friday evening and I was planning on spending a huge amount of time on it over the weekend. I ended up buying the new game Infra and I have been playing that since I am still not able to load Cities again. I don’t see any other option to unsubscribe to all mods and assets, while everything is completely the same since I last played the game. That unsubscribing and resubscribing will take ages and will ruin my city. Had it twice before and I just can’t find the energy to do it again right now, after spending already about 10 hours trying to fix my game last weekend. I started with CS crashing during loading the latest saved game while the menu and manager and all were working just fine, but now it even crashes while loading the game itself, so before I even reach the menu. And I am not the only one.

I love the game, it gave me huge pleasure for a good price. But I really need mods and extra assets to make the cities how I want to. The base game is way to vanilla now and I couldn’t go back. That’s not a problem, since the mod community is great. I do however think that the best mods should be in the base game. They already exist and I guess it would make the modders proud if their mods would be used. Perhaps there are ways to work together? If the best stuff from all traffic mods is combined in the base game, this would end a lot of problems with the clashing traffic mods. I personally would integrate one or several option(s) to choose for easy traffic and advanced traffic, not to scare first time users who don’t want to be overwhelmed by options. Most mods let you switch on or of functions you want or don’t want to use.

This message is getting way to long. Must end it now. I appologize for the length. To be short: I am happy with the game, it’s officially my most played game ever. I am happy with the mods and the community which makes the game like new almost every day. I am happy with the snow expansion, at least the looks of it. I am in love already. But I am however disappointed in the way the expansions and mods are integrated in the game and not being saved and thus leading to a lot of unnecessary problems and game crashes. With a new expansion underway, I am afraid that the potential amount of problems will grow. Although I must say that from that point of view perhaps it’s not the most bad decision that it will only snow on certain maps and it won’t integrate with existing maps and mods, preventing a lot of potential problems. I do hope there will be a system to switch off unused expansion/mods in a game per savegame. I am wondering how this will be done with snow. Since it only works on snow maps, will the snow plows and other wintery stuff be loaded on not-snow maps too? If not, is that system perhaps a good base for allowing to make the content manager per savedgame option realizable?

 

[akeela84]

Dear CO, this is how flexible the Tram should be:

Recorded in Berlin.

 

[Nace888]

Wow, I read 6 pages of stuff, to feel kinda sad at quite a lot of responses...

But, while I don't think this post will be too terribly long, it won't (hopefully) be short either...

First, I have to say I'm pleased that we're anticipating ANOTHER DLC... If you think about it, this game is not even a year old (if I'm correct), and this would make DLC#2 that we're getting...

DLC#1 was Cities Skylines: After Dark.
-After Dark came with a few things, but it makes things quite challenging and enjoyable!! So if we look at it, we know that it came with...

1) Day and Night Cycle

EVERYONE got this for FREE​

2) Taxis

For those who got it, it added an intensive traffic solution (though sometimes cumbersome) to help our "Cimizens" get around.
If done right, it brings in money, and gets rid of some traffic.​

3) New Specializations

You got new things for your Cims to do at night, you got new crime fluctuations, you got all kinds of stuff.

Regardless if you paid for it or not, you got quite a few things... ( I'm aware this could be exploded into more, but meh I'm tired )


​

As we move onto yet ANOTHER DLC before we've even hit one year, while we don't know much yet, we know it contains quite a lot, and it's actually what people asked for.

DLC#2 is known as Cities Skylines: Snowfall.
-Snowfall will already have aesthetics of SNOW, some cool neat cim-care options, and we know about 2 transit items, TRAMS (WHICH EVERYONE ASKED FOR (myself included)) and snowplows...

1) Trams

The trams are obviously going to be another transit option, and I hope they come with multiple options for placement, and of course
the workshop will work wonders to bring them to light, it's only obvious.​

2) Snowplows

While we all know that this just adds to traffic, I think it'll be nice to see another traffic aspect that we don't see yet... I love knowing there's road care in the options,
and that to me adds a challenge to the already fun game!!!​

3) Snow

It's white, it's fluffy, it's pretty. 'Nuff said.
Honestly though, while it's not a season cycle, what's the one thing I've seen so much asked about?? WINTER!!! There's no reason to get upset, when in reality, the other two seasons (Spring and Fall) are very similar to Summer, and if you think about it, not too much changes, other than aesthetics and weather feel... All 3 of those seasons are somewhat similar. WINTER is very challenging, wherever you go, and I'm glad Colossal Order chose this, because there's more to it. Road safety, heat, it's white and fluffy, and we've all been in it before, I'm sure...​

Which brings me to this... All the fussing and fighting, I can see what y'all would be upset about, but in reality, this game is AMAZING, and the team (as small as they are) are doing WONDERFUL with the stuff they've gotten!! In an interview (yes CEO-Mariina I heard it LOL (especially Stable Sims)), the fact that there's a SMALL team makes for more comfortable working conditions, which means we'll get better results, even if it takes longer... I personally would rather work with a few people than 70. I'd rather have fun with those few people, than try to have fun with 70 and it backfiring in my face. It makes sense to me.


HONESTLY, the thing that upsets me the most is just how INTENSIVE this game is on my computer, and whether or not I can run it... It's very stressing on my computer, so I don't play as much as I'd like, but when I can, I PLAY!! That's what we're all here for, is to play an AWESOME game made by a truly AWESOME team!!! Not only that, but I can say the modding community is amazing, and y'all bring so much stuff to the game!! It might be why my game lags slightly, but most of it is the requirements and how intensive it is!!! D:

The fact of the matter is, be happy with what we're getting!! I'm pretty sure Mariina and her team have had to go through lots of research to decide what's here now, what will come, and how it will get there!! If I had my way though, I'd greatly ask that the game be less intensive, X3

Oh, and MONORAILS!!!!! PLEASE MARIINA AND TEAM, MONORAILS!!

All in all, I'm happy with my game, and the fact that there will be a new DLC, as I'm sure I'll be purchasing it as well, I can't wait to see what else the team comes up with!!

Okay, /endrant

Btw, I'm glad I joined! XD


[btw edit sorry: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CORRECT ME IF I'M INCORRECT ON ANYTHING!! I just felt this needed to be said! XD]

 

[Kain2K]

1) Day and Night Cycle

EVERYONE got this for FREE
​

2) Taxis

For those who got it, it added an intensive traffic solution (though sometimes cumbersome) to help our "Cimizens" get around.
If done right, it brings in money, and gets rid of some traffic.​

3) New Specializations

You got new things for your Cims to do at night, you got new crime fluctuations, you got all kinds of stuff.

Regardless if you paid for it or not, you got quite a few things... ( I'm aware this could be exploded into more, but meh I'm tired )​

No, just NO!

1) The day and night cycle is meaningless. It is to fast to have any real impact on gameplay, and to slow to function properly where it does. If you ever lowered the budget for schools during night, you will see that your citizens become unhappy during night, because lowering the budget means lowering the coverage of your schools, which means fewer people will get the happiness from them. And it is the same with all services that provide happiness by means of coverage. In itself it was a nice idea, but it is only cosmetic, and where it is not, it becomes bothersome (night budget sliders), or plain stupid (*cough* solar plants *cough*).

2) Yeah, nice feature. You have no way of seeing how many of those depots you need, neither do you see a display of the coverage they provide. Another one of those nice ideas that were not really thought through.

3) The new specialisations are nice on paper. Problem is, they do not make sense in the way CO implemented them. Look at a real city. How many cities do you know, where in one district are either only buildings that are mainly meant for tourists (namely hotels) or buildings that are mainly meant to provide means for freetime activities like discotheques, or arcades, or casinos, clubs and so on. And in how many of this large districts, you do not have one damn shop? What I mean is, the nature of the specialisations is on an exclusiv or (XOR) basis. This means you can have either only leisure departments, or tourism buildings (hotels), or generic shopping areas, but no combination of those. This is just unrealistic. Most cities have a few streets where are mainly hotels or leisure departments. Mainly, not only. Where there are many hotels there are restaurants. Where there are discos there are a few restaurants, where there are day time leisure departments there are shopping possibilities in close proximity. Even in residential areas these things are always mixed. There is no city where different kinds of commercial departmens are not mixed.

So again, the idea is good, but the execution is somewhat... flawed.
Instead of district specialisations they should have provided these things as a zoning tool like the offices.
Oh, and do I need to mention that the new specialisation buildings only have one tier? So you either have big skyscraper hotel like thingies that mostly look the same or you have small buildings that will never reach the sky and mostly look the same.

Don't misunderstand me. After Dark had great ideas, but CO missed to implement them properly. That's why so many people are disappointed. Not to mention all the things that were broken before AD (crime, tourism, etc.) and are still broken. I blame Pdox for having a backlog of CK2 bugs and balancing issues for which you would need to clear a forest if you want to print them all on paper. But at least they fix the most pressing issues within a few weeks. CO ignored them or labeled them as "Working as designed". Well, this could also mean that they meant the new features to be shitty, but I really don't think so.

 

[NinoRivera]

Spanish translation Snowfall 1º dev blog

Cities: Skylines - Diario de desarrollo 1: Prepararse para Snowfall

 

[vukica]

this is not a dev diary, this is just an ordinary ad.

 

[Sotrax]

Dear CO, this is how flexible the Tram should be:

Recorded in Berlin.

Home sweet home.
Berlin not only invented the electrical tram, they mastered it! Once the biggest network in the world, now one of the most modern. Even tho I am a Busdriver in this mad town I frikkin' love the tram. This is how it should be in the game. Flexible!

And it's not limited in the dense city.
Have a look at this! Especially at 6:40 - green rails, parallel to a steet in the outskirts.

 

[Will Steel]

Winter being locked to maps and map types is a letdown. Still, nice to see the game is still being worked on, I hope I will be excited by other features as they are announced...I hope...

 

[Will Steel]

Slums are growing in the less developed countries (e.g. India).

I am going to disagree with your misinformed stereotype here. Slums grew in India during '60s, '70s and '80s (and early '90s, before end of autarky policy). Since then they are being cleared away and in most areas, completely eradicated. They are not growing at all today, or for past 2-3 decades.

...as if what you call "developed" countries don't have slums or areas for the poor with bad standards...

 

[Imsvale]

Very long cycles make shorter game sessions unsatisfying and having to switch different services on and off with the seasons feels a bit like whack-a-mole, which also is quite unrewarding.

Why switch on and off? Generalize the service, call it road maintenance. That'd be relevant throughout the year. Clearing snow, fixing potholes and whatever else you can think of. If you want more depth: Laying new asphalt, temporarily closing the road, and without maintenance, traffic slows down. It's a whack-a-mole thing for the city service itself (which fixing roads is anyway), instead of the player. Can start by making cosmetic potholes appear and road maintenance service going off to fix it, if a deeper simulation takes too much effort for now.

Adjustable season duration for those who still have issues. You might argue how can you have seasons that don't follow the calendar. Well, it seems to work for the day/night cycle. Or find a way to make it work with the calendar, that'd be a nice bonus.

Going with the map theme logic for winter seemed like the best choice for Skylines, so that the basic concept of the game does not change (because some people like it as it is, and it would not be nice to go change the game drastically) but we rather build on the existing logic and expand things on the existing saves carefully, so no ones grand city is ruined. I assure you, not making seasons for existing saves was not a decision made lightly, but it has been carefully investigated.

Well obviously you'd have an option to turn seasons on or off, whether it freezes the city in its current state or goes back to default summer. You can have seasons and still keep the permanent winter/fall/spring/summer for those who want that.

 

[Steve B.]

Spot on unfortunately!!
I'm a great fan, I want CS to do well, but AD had features all over the place and virtually none implemented well

I agree for the most part, but for me the bicycle paths were worth the money.

 

[ForceInfinity]

I have to say I personally feel... like there was a huge opportunity missed with this expansion. I guess I have a few concerns or issues. As I don't like just whining, I'll offer up a couple of suggestions (although I suspect the ship has long since set sail), but food for thought all the same.

I don't like the idea that the seasons had to be on a fixed theme (I thought we went over this heart-ache on the last expansion). I get that you don't want to simulate seasons, but could've done this like SimCity's disasters. By that, you could've used a RNG to determine whether or not to make the snow strike, or you could enable a user to trigger it manually. You could even have a budget slider where increased budget would lead to advanced warning about an incoming snow storm or something.

My other area of concern is that with this expansion, we're going to add yet more pressure to the number of vehicle agents allowed in the game. Snow plows are going to add vehicle agents onto the map that are going to be sticking around a while. If they behave in a manner similar to hearses, garbage, etc, you could run into a situation in large cities where the snow plows won't deploy because you're capped on the vehicle limit. I get that this might be some ingenious way to for someone into mixed zoning/use of mass transit, but if we're adding more vehicles into the game, we are going to need that cap increased I would think. One solution would be to allow the agent count to be higher, or at least make it mod-able. I know there's resistance to this, but at some point, we should start allowing for this.

I'm largely ambivalent to the trams or other stuff that was currently announced

 

[Cameroniswilfred]

On one hand, I'm SUPER excited for trams (like so excited my eyes are popping out of my skull), and think everyone should stop being so mean to the Dev's and just let them make me my trams!

But on the other hand, wow... I actually just realised that the seasons wouldn't cycle between snow and not-snow... My brain skipped through that part because I was distracted by hearing the tram bells in my ears...

Dear Dev's - Would it really make things that much more difficult to do? It seems like everyone is in agreement that we want seasons? Pretty please? Otherwise I just know I'm gonna have to download mods all over again that will break my save games just to fix this problem.

 

[co_martsu]

On one hand, I'm SUPER excited for trams (like so excited my eyes are popping out of my skull), and think everyone should stop being so mean to the Dev's and just let them make me my trams!

But on the other hand, wow... I actually just realised that the seasons wouldn't cycle between snow and not-snow... My brain skipped through that part because I was distracted by hearing the tram bells in my ears...

Dear Dev's - Would it really make things that much more difficult to do? It seems like everyone is in agreement that we want seasons? Pretty please? Otherwise I just know I'm gonna have to download mods all over again that will break my save games just to fix this problem.

Trams <3 I hope you will like them And we'll have a new dev diary coming your way soon!

Unfortunately seasons are not happening as a cycle I'm afraid.

 

[Simulant]

And we'll have a new dev diary coming your way soon!

That sounds good. Please consider to include a bit more info about the simulation aspect of the game. It's really unsettling for a big part of the community that besides nice visual aspects we don't hear anything about expanding depth and managment of the game. Trams, snowploughs are purely visual if they operate in the same logic like buses for the trams and police cars for the ploughs. Just another kind of LEGO. What I'm really interested in are features that really seem to matter in terms of city-management and complexity of the budget. So far the simulation is a nice looking blur, I'm afraid.
So - bring the dev diary on. But please please don't make it look like another teaser trailer selling visual candy. Thanks!

 

[MrJohnJohnny]

Sorry but this is not the kind of reply one would expect after reading the last six pages of feedback pointing out the fundamental flaws in your game. Sure not all of it is constructive or helpful, but still some of it is very valuable and makes a damn good point that should be considered. I am with those who think that development is currently definitely not going in the right direction. At the moment I feel like even though you do say you take feedback into account honestly to me it does not seem so. That is a shame, really.

Without a doubt you are a fantastic team. I was positively surprised with the way you were connected with the community following the game's announcement. But since release something has changed, there is not as much communication going on. There is no clear future plan or road map, I myself don't even understand your vision anymore. I hope this will change for the better. If not, honestly that is your loss. It's a big business, someone new will just come along after we've all once more witnessed how successful a game of this genre can be.

So what I was trying to say is take a good look at the last six pages and many more topics that recently popped up on the forums. The community has voiced their thoughts and concerns but it is of course up to you as the developers to decide whether or not to listen to them (I do understand you have a publisher "above" you and I hope they are aware of the opportunity). And don't understand me wrong, I love this game. But as many others have stated before it becomes bland and feels shallow after some time. My intent was to tell what would make the experience better for me as a customer so that I would keep buying your products.

Please note this is MY personal opinion, others may disagree. But one thing is certain, I will not buy another appealing cereal box with just an empty bag inside.

 

[Reisi007]

The most positive feedback I could give:
Allow different sized public transport vehicles (small bus, normal bus, big bus)
Allow easier selection of specific lines (==> 4 bus lines going the same way, get one of them)
Allow better (?longer?) Off street stops.
Trams (YAY)
METRO over ground (aka high speed trams)

Good thing:
Trams and improvements for managing public transports are part of this Update. So not all bad, just worried if my expectations fits...