CO Word of the Week #11

[SuspectPizza]

Thanks for this surprise WoW! I love the positive tone, the post stayed on topic and contained a lot of useful detailed information and you didn't shy away from talking about things that aren't working at the moment or might seem a bit 'hacky'. Great job, keep it up!

 

[jvg]

thanks for staying in touch with us through WOW.

simulation sounds great when you write it out!
i want to believe this simulation happens, however, how should we know?
clicking on a building doesnt show any stock, theres also no overlay that shows stock.
in the trade graph, the negative values are my surplus?
cant realy get a feeling of controlling any production chains.
taxes dont seem to realy change anything, maybe i have to delete all industries to let them repopulate? please clarify.
i think alot of systems maybe working (CPU) in the background without any way to analyse through gameplay.

 

[anydaytv]

First, I want to say thanks for continuing these. I think it's a good move and, for me personally at least, appreciate understanding what the developers are thinking and how I might be able to give constructive feedback based on what your vision for the game is.

Additionally, when the companies’ storage capacity goes under 50% they start to import resources from outside connections.

My suggestion here is that I think you should rebalance the storage capacity of High Density commercial and office zones. Currently, their storage capacity is 8 tons, regardless of whether they're level 1 or level 5. Some low density of the same type has as much as 40 ton storage capacity. I think by rebalancing the capacities, you might be able to knock out a few birds with a single stone.

One: as a city gets bigger, you end up with far more cargo traffic than resident traffic, this change would reel that in significantly, and it would also cut down on cargo port traffic (a pretty big issue). It would also invariably have a positive performance impact at higher populations, and finally, it would be more in line with the cargo truck capacity that higher level companies get. Cargo truck capacity is 25 tons, but most of the time, they're seen carrying only 50% of a high density company's capacity (4 tons).

Again, thanks for the consideration

Also:

clicking on a building doesnt show any stock, theres also no overlay that shows stock.

Click on a cargo truck carrying stock from a cargo hub, then click it's destination or owner. The storage is separate from the building itself but occupies the same space. Not sure why

 

[BrandonBTYB]

Two thoughts: You can tell me that a system is working in the game but unless I can see it, as a player, clearly, then it is difficult for me to believe that is it actually working. Hand in hand, if players are mentioning a system that does not seem to be functioning, it may be time to consider that how it is designed is insufficient and needs an overhaul. Please don't write a WoW that says "Yup, this is working" and explain things that might be happen but are not easily discernable in the game itself, it comes across as fairly condescending. The old "you're not a game dev, you don't understand" feeling really comes through on that.

Second, the community is owed a sincere, heartfelt apology for the state the game was released in and the features that were lacking. While I know you are a talented group who care deeply about your game - and that shows through the original Cities: Skylines - a lack of "our bad, we messed up, we are sorry" along with some meaningful gesture of contrition has completely eroded my confidence in CO and PDX. When someone makes a mistake, they should always BEGIN with "I'm sorry" then do the work to make amends. Instead, I feel most WoW's have been "our game is good, we keep telling ourselves our game is good, we just need to do a few things to polish it." And as much as I do not like to say it, your game is not good in its current state and your players deserve the respect of a sincere apology.

 

[Didoland82]

The system tries to always go with the physical transportation of goods, especially when it comes to business-to-business. With citizens the requirement is less strict and they can either go to a place to buy goods or they can basically order them through the teleport (representing online shopping), so to speak. Teleporting is a secondary option but sometimes the agents just can't get to the place they would go to buy their resources and in these cases, the resources are teleported to their household.

And this here is the reason why we need modding support like right now.. so we can change this poor design that basically removes the gameplay experience.

Well thought to implement something like online shopping, but teleporting goods is the wrong answer to that.

Keeping the wood example, the correct chain in this case should be:
FORESTRY EXTRACTOR -> SAW MILL -> PAPER MILL -> BOOKSTORE -> MAIL SORTING FACILITY -> CUSTOMER HOUSEHOLD
Should any of this links have been broken for any reason or the transportation be stuck at any point, the goods should never reach the customer households generating an informed issue that the player should figure out and fix.

Teleporting is either killing the gameplay, or simply a plain scapegoat to address the economy not working properly.

You can take this as a suggestion to improve the simulation, or just let the modders do it.

 

[pletch99]

I am glad that you are continuing to communicate. It would be nice to have some sort of regular update on bug fixing. While a Trello board would be great, even a list of say the top 10 bugs and a status would be good e.g. under investigation, recreated, fix in progress, fix ready for release. That would give us an insight on what we can hope to see being fixed and what your development team is prioritizing.

There are many game mechanics that I would like to see an explanation for:
1. what are the criteria for hotels developing? I have a 300k city, all the stats show it is attractive to tourists and I have plenty of transport connections, yet I have only one hotel.

2. what are the criteria for residential demand? In my 300k city I now have zero demand for medium density residential, but high demand for high density and low density residential. The problem with this is that much of my city now shows as unsuitable for residential which I think is related to land value. The result of this is that in much of my city I can only build high density residential. There are some areas which are now showing as unsuitable for low density residential, where I previously built low residential housing. This means that when properties become abandoned I cannot rebuild and I have gaps in low residential suburbs.

3. What impact does changing taxes actually have? I'm really struggling to see any impact at all beyond my citizens being happy or unhappy with tax.

4.How is parking demand worked out. I have car parks that remain mostly empty despite being close to places my citizens travel to, while others in similar locations remain empty.

 

[CapnBludd]

Last Monday I said we would be taking a break from these weekly posts due to the lack of concrete news and that we would come back when there’s something to share regarding updates to the game. On Tuesday I received a call from Sweden. It seems there was an overwhelming amount of feedback from you wanting to hear from us developers weekly. Thank you for all the lovely messages, we really appreciate it! So let’s get into it:

Patch 1.0.19 came out last Wednesday and you can find the full patch notes here. More bug fixes will be patched into the game with the first modding support features - code modding and Paradox Mods - as soon as they are ready for Public Beta. Now that’s a Word of the Week I can’t wait to write! Steadily working on the game and bringing improvements to it is now the best way to showcase our commitment to Cities: Skylines II and you the community.

We have been wondering what type of information would be relevant for you to hear about and that we can share freely while waiting for confirmation on the updates for the game. Therefore I asked @co_avanya to provide a list of questions we have received since the release that take a bit more time and effort to answer than a quick reply on social media. Together with the team, we looked at your questions about how the Industry and Goods simulation works, and here are the answers.

How do importing and exporting actually work and what are the thresholds for exporting goods?
The city can import and/or export goods when sufficient connections to the outside connections have been created. Some city service buildings also require resources to operate. These buildings can import those resources from outside connections if the companies in the city can't provide enough of that resource. The city’s companies can also import or export resources as they see fit, which depends on many different factors. The threshold for exporting goods is whether the company is able to make more money by exporting those goods or if it earns more profit by selling them to companies in the city. Additionally, when the companies’ storage capacity goes under 50% they start to import resources from outside connections.

So what is the flow of the resources in the city?
Industrial and commercial companies move into the city with starting resources, while storage companies start empty. That way the new companies don’t need to wait for the first resource transportation before they can start operating. The companies won’t get more “free” resources after that so they need resource deliveries to operate. Companies need one or more input resources to work and they can get the needed resources from the city’s industry factors or outside connections. The companies use the employees to generate production and refine the input resources into new resources (output) which can then be shipped to outside connections, other manufacturing companies, warehouses, commercial companies, offices, or directly to households. The new resources will be shipped either directly by trucks or by transporting them to cargo terminals. Cargo terminals can transport resources within the city as well as to outside connections.

Here is an example of wood’s possible production chain. There are three options where to get the wood in the first phase: forestry extractor, outside connections, or a storage that includes wood. One of these options sends the wood resource to a sawmill. The sawmill uses the wood to produce timber. Timber can then be sent to a paper mill which uses timber to produce paper, which in turn can be exported, sent to a warehouse, or sent to a bookstore. A bookstore then stores the paper until a customer comes in and shops there. The bookstore's storage on paper is reduced and the customer’s household gains resources. Households only have resources and do not count individual resource types. This means that they do not look at how much "paper" they have, just only how much resources they have.

View attachment 1079167

An important part of a successful production chain process is resource transportation. The physical resources (goods) are always carried by truck in the end and they’re deducted from the storage when a pickup is scheduled, so trucks don’t travel in vain. When a building spawns a delivery truck to send out its output resource, the storage should go down, but there’s currently an issue with the synchronization, so the resource is deducted before the truck spawns. We’re aware of this issue and looking into a fix, so things are synced up correctly. It’s also worth noting that if the vehicle carrying the resource is stuck then it will despawn and those resources are sent back to the owner's building where it will try to send a new vehicle to forward those resources.

The system tries to always go with the physical transportation of goods, especially when it comes to business-to-business. With citizens the requirement is less strict and they can either go to a place to buy goods or they can basically order them through the teleport (representing online shopping), so to speak. Teleporting is a secondary option but sometimes the agents just can't get to the place they would go to buy their resources and in these cases, the resources are teleported to their household.

What about if the city has a deficit or surplus of some product?
During the deficit, there should be more companies spawning that can produce the resource that is in deficit. If some product is in deficit, it means that the citizens and/or companies are consuming more of that resource than the city is producing. In that case, the city is importing that product more from outside connections which can create more traffic. During surplus, the opposite happens, where the city is producing more of the resource than the citizens or companies are using so the extra products are exported to outside connections.

That’s it for today's Word. Did you enjoy reading more about the inner workings of the game? I’ll come back next week with a new Q&A. We have a handful of other topics in mind that we can cover, and you are of course very welcome to share any game topics or questions you are wondering about. Until then, have a lovely week!

Sincerely,
Mariina

More of this kind of information would be great. Keep it coming 8')

 

[S.C. Watson]

co_martsu & co_avanya please watch this video. Biffa does an excellent job of constructively going over the issues are plaguing the game in its current incarnation.

 

[teckmonkey]

Thanks for the update! Anything that the provides any kind of insight into how the simulation is supposed to work is very appreciated.

In a future WotW, would it be possible to talk a little bit about how land value is calculated and how that affects assets and vice versa? I've made a table of some assumptions I've made for residential zoning based on how it's works in real life. Some of these can happen in different orders or multiple times, but generally it's the first row to the last.

Residential Zoning​

Real Life	In Game
A homeowner or a building owner makes improvements to their property or the value of the land has increased due to appreciation or other economic factors.	The building levels up after hitting certain dollar thresholds. These thresholds are indicated by the taxation levels based on the education level of the cims. These "taxes" are actually the day-to-day expenses of living in the city in addition to the actual rent of the buildings. Any monies left over at the end of the month goes towards increasing the building's XP.
The local municipality does a property value assessment.	Whenever a building is constructed, abandoned, or levels up, and external factors like pollution, access to city services, and/or other factors I'm not aware of change, the land value is recalculated.
The assessment affects the property tax the building owner has to pay. They in turn increase their rents to make the mortgage payment.	When a majority of the cims aren't able to cover their rent and/or whatever tax is assigned to that cim's education level, a high rent warning is generated.
People are either priced out of the neighborhood or figure out some way to pay the higher rent by getting a better/another job, roommates, etc.	Cims either make more money through a better job or become homeless and/or eventually leave the city.

Is this, in general, a correct assumption for residential zoning? I would assume it's mostly the same for industrial and commercial but based on workers, resources and profits.

Thank you again!

Keeping the wood example, the correct chain in this case should be:
FORESTRY EXTRACTOR -> SAW MILL -> PAPER MILL -> BOOKSTORE -> MAIL SORTING FACILITY -> CUSTOMER HOUSEHOLD
Should any of this links have been broken for any reason or the transportation be stuck at any point, the goods should never reach the customer households generating an informed issue that the player should figure out and fix.

I respectfully disagree. If I buy something from Amazon, they have their own logistics to ship it to me directly. There is no interaction with the post office when an Amazon delivery driver in their own car or Amazon's own truck drops it off at my house.

 

[avguy2]

Not sure what people are celebrating here. What insights does this rather basic overview over the import/ export system add that we didn't have before? Also why doesn't the game give players all the information of the systems in the first place?

@Didoland82 I agree, teleporting goods for households does seem like an easy fix solution for whatever issue there was with the simulation or maybe it was to save the devs time. In any case it's not a real feature ("online shopping") because if it was there would still be trucks to deliver the packages.

 

[Infixo]

"Households only have resources and do not count individual resource types."
How do they decide what to purchase? How does the need for these products occur?

Resources have „base consumpttion” assigned. It basically says how much is consumed by a cim in day. Based on that, the consumption for a household is calculated for each resource. There are factors that modify that base consumption, like age and wealth. Then a household decide which resource to buy. It uses those calculated consumptions as weights for a random roll. It then sends one of its members to purchase that resource.
The resource is consumed and then the process is repeated, another resource is chosen randomly using those weights.
In the long run, the resource that is supposed to be consumed more, is chosen more often, and statistically it reaches the desired consumption levels.
The bigger the city, and more households, the more stable and predictible it becomes.

 

[Infixo]

Maybe I spent too much playing or modding, or maybe it is because I read all the Dev Diaries and Wiki, but this WotW doesn’t contain any new information about the mechanics, and it is still very high level and generic.
We are missing the actual precise details. Like numbers. This WotW describes a huge part of the economy and contains literally 1 number, 50% is when companies start to import. Such a complex process as import, export, flow of goods, production, logistics, and you gave us 1 number.

 

[Troyen]

Im curious why this design choice was made but I guess an educated guess would be efficiency. I think it would have been cool to have households purchase and keep track of food, paper, etc. and have their utilization of those resources drive their buying decisions in the future. But again, that sounds computationally intensive.

Yeah, it's very likely performance related.

Tracking that per-household in a 1 million pop city means you're tracking a different basket of resources for something like 400k different households (since household size can vary from 1 to ...4? 5?). It not only would be a substantial amount of extra data in RAM, but there's some practical awkwardness with the time dilation and random placement of stores. If I need groceries, clothes, and a book, I can usually find all three in close proximity and make an afternoon shopping trip. Malls aren't really quite so structured in game, so you'd also be creating a bunch of individual trips for goods that zigzag everywhere since you have no control over where the individual companies set up. And honestly, from the player PoV, ensuring each household is buying every good in appropriate amounts is not something 99.999% of players are going to be paying a lot of attention to. If you can approximate it with a weighted purchase script like they are doing in-game, then in the long run goods are still purchased in the right proportions and you save the player a ton of calculation overhead for a system they're likely not even going to notice exists.

A colony builder will track individual good consumption, but your average colony game considers a population in the thousands to be a lot (and performance also tends to suffer at that range). A large metropolis is trying to simulate over a million pops, so you lose some individual details as you scale up.

 

[Troyen]

I wonder - why my Factorio base does not require teleporting goods of any sort to properly function?

Factorio isn't really a fair comparison. A cim buying goods has to pathfind to the store and back. Your factorio base in comparison has far less pathfinding going on. Items on a belt don't pathfind at all, they follow the belt chain to its conclusion. Logistic bots fly in a straight line until they need to recharge. Trains are the only system where your transportation goods are running a pathfinding algorithm, and while you can build complex train networks, it's still not quite the same scale. My lategame SE base has a bit over a thousand train stops across all surfaces. Even ignoring that trains don't have to pathfind across surfaces, that's far fewer start and endpoint destinations than even a 5K pop city, not to mention way fewer routes to navigate between those endpoints. That's discounting all the path weights like speed limits, intersections, public transport, district policies, etc. that are in play in a city-builder but not in factorio.

If we take the quote at face value, it sounds like teleportation is a last resort safeguard:

Teleporting is a secondary option but sometimes the agents just can't get to the place they would go to buy their resources and in these cases, the resources are teleported to their household.

So cims do try and go buy goods if they can. If the path breaks and the agent gets stuck, only then are goods teleported.

Much like how your train network can experience disruption when you're reworking a rail intersection, the pathfinding in CS2 has to account for players changing the road layout in the game after the agent is already en route. I'd claim a player modifying their road network happens way more frequently than a player tweaking their train network. Even if all construction occurs when the game is paused, a bunch of agents may have their path invalidated. Agents do try and recalculate their path, but sometimes network changes leave them too far away from any valid node, in which case they despawn (and I assume the goods teleportation would kick in). The penalty for not having this "failsafe" is the city simulation suffers dramatically when actually building the city, which generally doesn't make for enjoyable gameplay.

I guess they could return the cim to their house and have them try again, but given they're also trying to simulate "realistic" daily traffic peaks and rushes, you may end up invalidating someone's shopping trip for multiple days in a row, which can cause other simulation side-effects. There are more knock-on effects than just having your logistics train show up late because your unmodded assemblers don't care if they were idle or not.

 

[JerseyLeo]

I'd like to see, instead of a company spawning a truck, trucks being a resource of their own with industry spawning truck depots. It could help factor in whether a company uses rail or truck to move goods.

 

[dumpster299]

This post sounds like a description about how it's supposed to work, not how it actually works.

Like I know that people are supposed to go to elementary, then to high school, then to higher education. But we all know it's not working as designed, because if it was then I'd need more high schools.

Quoting the design docs because Paradox said you had to post something if you want money isn't the communication we want.

You have a bug tracker, right? Have any been resolved in the week? Can you even give us a title from the item? All I want is two sentences like "We were looking at the issue where trucks were using pedestrian roads too much. We're currently experimenting with a higher pathfinding penalty for going from a normal road to a pedestrian road to discourage vehicles from using them as shortcuts".

All I want is something concrete that's not something you could have written before release.

 

[Licenturion]

Just for people intererested on the Paradox side of news. This is the comment from CEO of Paradox on CS2 in the investor report.

 

[Stevo Wallis]

Yes, I’d like more info on bug updates too. That’s the pressing issue at the moment. A list of what’s currently being looked at would be nice.

 

[Didoland82]

I respectfully disagree. If I buy something from Amazon, they have their own logistics to ship it to me directly. There is no interaction with the post office when an Amazon delivery driver in their own car or Amazon's own truck drops it off at my house.

I get what you're saying and that's true. But I guess you missed my point which is: no matter what the chain supply is, it should not be teleported, because not even Amazon can teleport stuff to your home LOL. It is just a level of realism & challenge I would like to have to make the game enjoyable. It should have been like that, with the option to make it easier for those who just want to paint cities, not the other way around.

 

[avguy2]

Maybe I spent too much playing or modding, or maybe it is because I read all the Dev Diaries and Wiki, but this WotW doesn’t contain any new information about the mechanics, and it is still very high level and generic.
We are missing the actual precise details. Like numbers. This WotW describes a huge part of the economy and contains literally 1 number, 50% is when companies start to import. Such a complex process as import, export, flow of goods, production, logistics, and you gave us 1 number.

This. I'm very surprised people act like this WOW was some novel revelation that gave useful insight in the workings of the game mechanics. Of course knowing more about the specifics might reveal more things that aren't quite working.