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CO Word of the Week #14

While we’re receiving plenty of questions about Cities: Skylines II features, we have also received a ton of questions on topics surrounding the game. Today we’ll go over some of the difficult ones.

Are you going to address the content creators’ concerns and criticisms?
All constructive feedback that we receive is valued and very much appreciated. Thank you to those of you who tagged us and shared the content creators' videos that highlight feedback you agree with and to everyone who took part in the constructive discussions that followed. For example, Biffa and City Planner Plays released videos with useful and constructive criticism that we have gone over with the team. We’ll be addressing the feedback according to the process described below.

Feedback process_transparent.png


Here are some examples of the smaller changes we have made since release based on your feedback:
- Added line color to passenger ships, cargo ships, and cargo train engines.
- Improved moving in pathfinding. This prevents citizens from reserving homes from disconnected buildings (Or moving into the city at all if it's not connected to an outside connection).
- Increased all emergency vehicle siren sound distances.

And I believe the more interesting part is the larger changes that we are looking into now, based on the community feedback:
- Land Value and Zone Suitability
- Education system, specifically kids and teens
- More transparency in the economic system
- Balancing subsidies and service importing
- Balancing negative happiness modifiers with lack of basic utilities (water, sewage, electricity)

How do you plan to get out of this mess? / What is in the works to fix Cities: Skylines II? / What will you do to set things right for the disaster launch of CS2?
We’d much rather be in a different position than we are in at the moment, but we cannot change the past. We’re working very hard to catch up on the missing modding support, missing platforms, the content for the Ultimate Edition, and improving the performance and fixing bugs this year. The team is divided to work on different tasks so that we’re seeing progress on all fronts and while it might not feel that it’s fast enough I can assure you we are all doing the best we can. Only time will tell if this is enough to turn things around.

There have also been many questions about the patch cadence and why we moved away from weekly patches. Weekly patches are too heavy for us to keep up with and the issues we are working on need more time than just a few hours or days to fix. We’re a small team of 30 developers and we have to plan the work in a way that creates the fastest results. So instead of spending a big part of the week working on the build deliveries and QA rounds, we can use that time to work on the fixes themselves. For the Ultimate Edition, the DLCs already have a rough schedule so we’ll have good opportunities to patch the game at the same time. This doesn’t mean that we never patch the game between the DLC releases. The goal is to improve the game as quickly as possible and when we have a solid patch ready and tested it will be released.

We are aware we have a mountain to climb when it comes to delivering on the expectations but we have our ice picks ready and we are surely used to the cold. We're going to keep on climbing and you'll continue to see that progress in the game.

Why wasn’t modding support available at release?
The biggest regret we have is that modding support is not yet available for the game. We have been working on it since the beginning of the project and the intent was to have it fully ready at release. Code modding support, map, and asset editing were all planned to be fully usable and mods shareable in one place. We still believe that offering modding support makes any game better and that the tools and mods should be available for all players to enjoy at no additional cost.

During the project we faced, and still continue to face, technical difficulties that affect the speed and quality of the development, especially performance. We simply ran out of time as the focus had to shift from modding support to all hands on deck to fix the performance. All this work is still ongoing.

We’ll be communicating more on the status of the modding soon. It’s not an ideal situation but we are committed to keep working on this part of the game because it means so much to you and to us. “A Colossal Order game is a moddable one” is a promise we have made to ourselves years ago and work very hard to keep.

And we’ll top off today’s WotW with a few quick ones:
Q: More animations to come? Construction, firemen, etc
A: Yes, in the future we’ll be adding more animations to bring details and life to the cities!
Q: When will we have cycle paths on CSII?
A: I don’t know when we’ll get around to them, but Cities: Skylines II will have bikes and bike paths.
Q: Will you add more types of buildings or special buildings?
A: Yes, there will be more buildings both free and paid for the game in the future. If there is something specific you hope to see, we’d love to hear it!
Q: Will we get actual quays like the ones in CS1?
A: This sounds like it would fit great with the harbor-themed Bridges & Ports DLC coming later this year!
Q: When will we get props?
A: Adding the props to the menus for free placement in the game has come up as a request quite often. This is not something we are actively looking into at the moment, but will be added to the wishlist!
Q: When will the land value issue finally be fixed?
A: In the next update we’ll have part of it fixed, but the issues that are tied to the economy will take a bit longer to be resolved still.
Q: Will there be more biomes like wetlands/jungle or more desert like Texas?
A: Yes, we plan to add more maps with different biomes and also assets for you to create your own.

Thank you for all the questions, as well as the constructive criticism and feedback, it is valued and appreciated. Keep it coming! We’ll be back next week with something different: words from the art team!

Sincerely,
Mariina
 
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co_martsu said:
While we’re receiving plenty of questions about Cities: Skylines II features, we have also received a ton of questions on topics surrounding the game. Today we’ll go over some of the difficult ones.

Are you going to address the content creators’ concerns and criticisms?
All constructive feedback that we receive is valued and very much appreciated. Thank you to those of you who tagged us and shared the content creators' videos that highlight feedback you agree with and to everyone who took part in the constructive discussions that followed. For example, Biffa and City Planner Plays released videos with useful and constructive criticism that we have gone over with the team. We’ll be addressing the feedback according to the process described below.

View attachment 1086522

Here are some examples of the smaller changes we have made since release based on your feedback:
- Added line color to passenger ships, cargo ships, and cargo train engines.
- Improved moving in pathfinding. This prevents citizens from reserving homes from disconnected buildings (Or moving into the city at all if it's not connected to an outside connection).
- Increased all emergency vehicle siren sound distances.

And I believe the more interesting part is the larger changes that we are looking into now, based on the community feedback:
- Land Value and Zone Suitability
- Education system, specifically kids and teens
- More transparency in the economic system
- Balancing subsidies and service importing
- Balancing negative happiness modifiers with lack of basic utilities (water, sewage, electricity)

How do you plan to get out of this mess? / What is in the works to fix Cities: Skylines II? / What will you do to set things right for the disaster launch of CS2?
We’d much rather be in a different position than we are in at the moment, but we cannot change the past. We’re working very hard to catch up on the missing modding support, missing platforms, the content for the Ultimate Edition, and improving the performance and fixing bugs this year. The team is divided to work on different tasks so that we’re seeing progress on all fronts and while it might not feel that it’s fast enough I can assure you we are all doing the best we can. Only time will tell if this is enough to turn things around.

There have also been many questions about the patch cadence and why we moved away from weekly patches. Weekly patches are too heavy for us to keep up with and the issues we are working on need more time than just a few hours or days to fix. We’re a small team of 30 developers and we have to plan the work in a way that creates the fastest results. So instead of spending a big part of the week working on the build deliveries and QA rounds, we can use that time to work on the fixes themselves. For the Ultimate Edition, the DLCs already have a rough schedule so we’ll have good opportunities to patch the game at the same time. This doesn’t mean that we never patch the game between the DLC releases. The goal is to improve the game as quickly as possible and when we have a solid patch ready and tested it will be released.

We are aware we have a mountain to climb when it comes to delivering on the expectations but we have our ice picks ready and we are surely used to the cold. We're going to keep on climbing and you'll continue to see that progress in the game.

Why wasn’t modding support available at release?
The biggest regret we have is that modding support is not yet available for the game. We have been working on it since the beginning of the project and the intent was to have it fully ready at release. Code modding support, map, and asset editing were all planned to be fully usable and mods shareable in one place. We still believe that offering modding support makes any game better and that the tools and mods should be available for all players to enjoy at no additional cost.

During the project we faced, and still continue to face, technical difficulties that affect the speed and quality of the development, especially performance. We simply ran out of time as the focus had to shift from modding support to all hands on deck to fix the performance. All this work is still ongoing.

We’ll be communicating more on the status of the modding soon. It’s not an ideal situation but we are committed to keep working on this part of the game because it means so much to you and to us. “A Colossal Order game is a moddable one” is a promise we have made to ourselves years ago and work very hard to keep.

And we’ll top off today’s WotW with a few quick ones:
Q: More animations to come? Construction, firemen, etc
A: Yes, in the future we’ll be adding more animations to bring details and life to the cities!
Q: When will we have cycle paths on CSII?
A: I don’t know when we’ll get around to them, but Cities: Skylines II will have bikes and bike paths.
Q: Will you add more types of buildings or special buildings?
A: Yes, there will be more buildings both free and paid for the game in the future. If there is something specific you hope to see, we’d love to hear it!
Q: Will we get actual quays like the ones in CS1?
A: This sounds like it would fit great with the harbor-themed Bridges & Ports DLC coming later this year!
Q: When will we get props?
A: Adding the props to the menus for free placement in the game has come up as a request quite often. This is not something we are actively looking into at the moment, but will be added to the wishlist!
Q: When will the land value issue finally be fixed?
A: In the next update we’ll have part of it fixed, but the issues that are tied to the economy will take a bit longer to be resolved still.
Q: Will there be more biomes like wetlands/jungle or more desert like Texas?
A: Yes, we plan to add more maps with different biomes and also assets for you to create your own.

Thank you for all the questions, as well as the constructive criticism and feedback, it is valued and appreciated. Keep it coming! We’ll be back next week with something different: words from the art team!

Sincerely,
Mariina
Click to expand...
Hello CO,
I am completly onboard with this WotW, and to my fellow gamers i need to say this to notch game compared to some other may have cost you some cash but still cheaper than many others. And please don't forget whom has been pushing hard for A CSII version and release... yes we have. So try to understadn de pressure the DEV's had/ or have to face both from the community and their own CEO/ publishing party to deliver this game. It will become better and it will finds those whom left back at the game with pleasure. I have faith the team @ CO will not let us down. Think about it this game could easily be 99 euro+ plus with all the features we want to see. Tbh i have not played for some time but firing the game up last night things on my PC have improved ( I-5 8400, Nivdia 1650 4 gb, 64GB Ram). I guess if you bought an Nvidia RTX 40x0 for this game just be aware that i might be more on Nvidia than the developers as i have seen perfomance vary from driver to driver on my card. My best guess is that on the RTX 30-series and RTX 40-series the perfomance changes and or problems might well be driver related as they get more and more bloathed for other type of games. No Salt, but could it be? Your thougths?
 
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co_martsu said:
While we’re receiving plenty of questions about Cities: Skylines II features, we have also received a ton of questions on topics surrounding the game. Today we’ll go over some of the difficult ones.

Are you going to address the content creators’ concerns and criticisms?
All constructive feedback that we receive is valued and very much appreciated. Thank you to those of you who tagged us and shared the content creators' videos that highlight feedback you agree with and to everyone who took part in the constructive discussions that followed. For example, Biffa and City Planner Plays released videos with useful and constructive criticism that we have gone over with the team. We’ll be addressing the feedback according to the process described below.

View attachment 1086522

Here are some examples of the smaller changes we have made since release based on your feedback:
- Added line color to passenger ships, cargo ships, and cargo train engines.
- Improved moving in pathfinding. This prevents citizens from reserving homes from disconnected buildings (Or moving into the city at all if it's not connected to an outside connection).
- Increased all emergency vehicle siren sound distances.

And I believe the more interesting part is the larger changes that we are looking into now, based on the community feedback:
- Land Value and Zone Suitability
- Education system, specifically kids and teens
- More transparency in the economic system
- Balancing subsidies and service importing
- Balancing negative happiness modifiers with lack of basic utilities (water, sewage, electricity)

How do you plan to get out of this mess? / What is in the works to fix Cities: Skylines II? / What will you do to set things right for the disaster launch of CS2?
We’d much rather be in a different position than we are in at the moment, but we cannot change the past. We’re working very hard to catch up on the missing modding support, missing platforms, the content for the Ultimate Edition, and improving the performance and fixing bugs this year. The team is divided to work on different tasks so that we’re seeing progress on all fronts and while it might not feel that it’s fast enough I can assure you we are all doing the best we can. Only time will tell if this is enough to turn things around.

There have also been many questions about the patch cadence and why we moved away from weekly patches. Weekly patches are too heavy for us to keep up with and the issues we are working on need more time than just a few hours or days to fix. We’re a small team of 30 developers and we have to plan the work in a way that creates the fastest results. So instead of spending a big part of the week working on the build deliveries and QA rounds, we can use that time to work on the fixes themselves. For the Ultimate Edition, the DLCs already have a rough schedule so we’ll have good opportunities to patch the game at the same time. This doesn’t mean that we never patch the game between the DLC releases. The goal is to improve the game as quickly as possible and when we have a solid patch ready and tested it will be released.

We are aware we have a mountain to climb when it comes to delivering on the expectations but we have our ice picks ready and we are surely used to the cold. We're going to keep on climbing and you'll continue to see that progress in the game.

Why wasn’t modding support available at release?
The biggest regret we have is that modding support is not yet available for the game. We have been working on it since the beginning of the project and the intent was to have it fully ready at release. Code modding support, map, and asset editing were all planned to be fully usable and mods shareable in one place. We still believe that offering modding support makes any game better and that the tools and mods should be available for all players to enjoy at no additional cost.

During the project we faced, and still continue to face, technical difficulties that affect the speed and quality of the development, especially performance. We simply ran out of time as the focus had to shift from modding support to all hands on deck to fix the performance. All this work is still ongoing.

We’ll be communicating more on the status of the modding soon. It’s not an ideal situation but we are committed to keep working on this part of the game because it means so much to you and to us. “A Colossal Order game is a moddable one” is a promise we have made to ourselves years ago and work very hard to keep.

And we’ll top off today’s WotW with a few quick ones:
Q: More animations to come? Construction, firemen, etc
A: Yes, in the future we’ll be adding more animations to bring details and life to the cities!
Q: When will we have cycle paths on CSII?
A: I don’t know when we’ll get around to them, but Cities: Skylines II will have bikes and bike paths.
Q: Will you add more types of buildings or special buildings?
A: Yes, there will be more buildings both free and paid for the game in the future. If there is something specific you hope to see, we’d love to hear it!
Q: Will we get actual quays like the ones in CS1?
A: This sounds like it would fit great with the harbor-themed Bridges & Ports DLC coming later this year!
Q: When will we get props?
A: Adding the props to the menus for free placement in the game has come up as a request quite often. This is not something we are actively looking into at the moment, but will be added to the wishlist!
Q: When will the land value issue finally be fixed?
A: In the next update we’ll have part of it fixed, but the issues that are tied to the economy will take a bit longer to be resolved still.
Q: Will there be more biomes like wetlands/jungle or more desert like Texas?
A: Yes, we plan to add more maps with different biomes and also assets for you to create your own.

Thank you for all the questions, as well as the constructive criticism and feedback, it is valued and appreciated. Keep it coming! We’ll be back next week with something different: words from the art team!

Sincerely,
Mariina
Click to expand...

With the current issues PC players have been having and the uproar by content creators about the launch - how does this affect the console launch schedule? It's been very quiet since the original launch date when my PS5 pre-order was quietly cancelled. Everything I see still states Spring 2024, is this still realistic?
 
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co_martsu said:
Thanks for all the positive feedback on the content of the word! Kind reminder here that please be respectful to each other even if you would disagree. Let's have conversations, not fights.

When it comes to staffing and working at Colossal Order I can surely write more about it. Maybe in a future Word of the Week!
We have a few metrics we think indicates that our devs like it here, like the fact that they are not leaving (we have less than one person resign per year, and that's a really low number even for a small company). We opened the senior positions because we want to strengthen the team in those areas without having to rely on outsourcing. These positions have been very difficult to fill, and now we are fortunate to get some visibility and help from Paradox in our quest finding the right people. The competition for the experienced developers is brutal, and working on a simulation game in Tampere, Finland, is not everyone's cup of tea (can't see why, it's the best thing!). We're super lucky to have our small dedicated team that loves what we do and they will keep working regardless of what happens in the recruitment.
Click to expand...
Speaking of staffing... can you update us on where Avanya is? She hasn't posted or reacted in like a month. We like her, and she's been a part of CS community for years. Is she OK?
 
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I also miss her comments and contributions. As a community manager, you have the most thankless job of all, don't you think? You have to justify the actions and decisions of your colleagues, you're not responsible for anything, and you still get all the shitstorm. I wouldn't want to do this job for two weeks. I have the greatest respect for her work. Understandable if she needs some time off. Maybe she wants to devote herself to other tasks.
 
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CensoredLOL said:
Speaking of staffing... can you update us on where Avanya is? She hasn't posted or reacted in like a month. We like her, and she's been a part of CS community for years. Is she OK?
Click to expand...
Thank you for your kind words and concern. <3 I'm still around, but I've had to take a step back from replying on the forum for a while to focus on other tasks (like collecting and summarizing feedback for the design team). I've still been lurking here and I'll be back to replying regularly again at some point. ^^
 
This should have been word of the week #1 but hey 4 months in and finally some real info.
I still want to know,
1. What caused, and who decided that the game should release a year early.
2. Why was this not released as "early access"

And lets not deny the only reason we are here in this forum is that we all loved the original Cities Skylines, and we all want the sequel to succeed. I am under no illusion that the game will be in the shape that was advertised until many months from now. Stepping up and talking about what went wrong is a huge step in getting peoples support again.
 
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el56 said:
Nonsense, @anydaytv had it right. I've created a number of companies over the past two decades. All are doing well, while I've seen many "visionaries" crash in front of me. Or they never get started. Or they make great pitches but burn their investors.

A vision without an idenitifed market to serve and a problem to solve goes nowhere. This really is MBA 101, and is in every business plan; all three are needed. The vision offers an innovative (or derivative) solution to that problem, but first the problem has to be defined and there needs to be enough people with the problem to make the solution profitable. Building a widget with no existing market or a solution to a problem that doesn't exist is a path to failure. Sure, exceptions exist, but are swamped by the crashes.

In the case before us, CO saw both a market (the masses of people happy with and loyal to CS:1) and a problem to solve (a decade-old codebase that was reaching the limits of extendability). CS2 is indeed the vision of how to do the upgrade, but that vision could not exist without first awareness of the market and problem. How well CO's vision (and more importantly execution of that vision and how it met expectations) solves the problem is what we're addressing here.
Click to expand...
You said a lot but didn't understand what you were replying to and missed the mark. Ended up agreeing with me with different words.

Oh, and C:S2 is a vision of what CO wanted to do in the first place but didn't have resources and time for it with C:S1. Not a vision on upgrade.
 
co_martsu said:
Q: Will you add more types of buildings or special buildings?
A: Yes, there will be more buildings both free and paid for the game in the future. If there is something specific you hope to see, we’d love to hear it!
Click to expand...
That's so nice! We need more types of public services' buildings. For example: train stations - it looks very odd to have identical stations in the centre of big city and in the small village. My main city station using 6 platforms is too small for over 10 lines from different directions. It's getting stuck and trains are waiting before the station because all platforms are occupied. This is also connected with another issue: trains are waiting for too long before they depart.

But the most urgent issue to resolve is simultion speed. While the city grows, simulation speed decreases. With 400k population it looks like slow-motion and speed buttons do nothing with it. This problem is not connected with hardware (my computer definitely exceeds recommended hardware requirements, not mentioning minimal requirements) and running game uses 40-50% both CPU and GPU. This is not related to graphic settings either. Playing with lowest or highest - no difference.
 
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Tonton_SodomaX said:
Gender identities (eg binary, cisgender, transsexual etc.), gay villages, lesbian bars, LGBT tourism, pride centers... I'm sure it would be very successful.
Click to expand...
I wonder if there's a way to incorporate an adoption system within the welfare office, city hall or in a new service building, allowing LGBT+ families to form. Sounds like something for a distante future, but I like the idea
 
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Quite the contrary, I think that it would be rather well appreciated by the community, and that it would lead, why not, an LGBT+ audience to discover this kind of game.

But nevertheless I respect your opinion :)
 
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