CO Word of the Week #2

[techtoolie]

No mention of the Microsoft Store version that lags behind days or a week with patches, which are at this stage, are very important patches with severe bug and performance fixes that affect everyone.

It is insane that instead of playing my 90 euro pre-order Ultimate edition I have to resort to 'creative measures' to play the latest build.

Talking about being inclusive and welcoming; please do better treating all your customers the same, no matter store or platform.

I want to end positive, the patches did already improve the game a lot for me and I am sure in a few weeks the game will ascend to greatness, and hopefully the Steam review score will too.

Maybe you should have waited like me for the bugs to be worked out before you bought! But no, you fell for the "deal" so you have to live with the consequences!

 

[co_martsu]

Those poor orphan cims whose parents perish in terrible fires though :,(

Grounded in realism :'(

 

[Licenturion]

The process of approval is known and we have made the choice to release these patches on Steam the moment they are through QA. We unfortunately are unable to patch the game on a weekend so we are looking to start the approval process earlier in the week to make the gap between the patches as small as possible.

That is exactly what I meant by choosing not to release simultaniously and treating customers different. If Steam is instant anyway, it is possible to treat everyone the same and you choose actively not too. Other developers don't do this. If paid DLC is not released simultanously I will never purchase any in the future.

That said, I am happy you are looking into it.

EDIT: I don't care about Steam only fan-bois downvoting me

 

[Jaxru]

I wish you could hold Shift or something to make the turn limitations per lane instead of the entire road. Often want to stop right turns on lanes on the left. Another thing that I hope comes is to be able to select which road gets yield. Now it prioritize the roads with higher speed limits which places Yield signs on the main road where interchange on and off ramps are connected

 

[lovec1990]

We'll keep the updates coming as soon as we have fixes tested, therefore we are not committing to a specific timeline for the patches.
I'm afraid the feedback should be a bit more detailed for us to be able to help you, such as is there a bug or a balance issue that is making the traffic AI not work for you. Please submit a bug report and we'll take a look!

Thank you for the well formulated feedback! I understand you, the more hardcore audience, would enjoy more challenge and will take this feedback onboard. As you can imagine adding difficulty levels is a bigger task that involves both design and code resources now occupied elsewhere, so no major changes are to be expected any time soon. We will first go through those threads and think about it!

I'm sorry to hear this. We are actively working on it, but it will take time to address properly.

This is a good observation, but as you also pointed out it comes down to the progress we make.

The process of approval is known and we have made the choice to release these patches on Steam the moment they are through QA. We unfortunately are unable to patch the game on a weekend so we are looking to start the approval process earlier in the week to make the gap between the patches as small as possible.

There was a bug with education that was fixed (UI showing wrong count for the college/university eligibility). Have you checked this with the game version 1.0.12?

yes and its much better but i still have a feeling demand for schools is alittle high

 

[alcarcalimo2364]

The word of the week is great. Thanks so much for the updates. Despite some bugs and flaws, I'm really enjoying the game and having a blast building cities.

I'm glad to se garbage being addressed. Hopefully this issue, as well as mail service, gets fixed soon. Also, cargo buildings seem to cause a lot of issues as well and it isn't clear to me if import/exports are working appropriately.

Another thing I'd like to see maybe in a future word of the week is how demand actually works, and what actually drives it. Right now, I find the demand bars really unintuitive. There seems to be a consensus in the community that the demand bars signal what you can build, but not that it is actually the right thing for your city. However, I don't think this really helps guide your development in an organic way. And the infographs don't really help either. For example, you have a graph that shows unemployment, but it doesn't break down which citizens are having unemployment issues: the highly educated, the uneducated, etc..., that would tell you what kind of jobs you need to be bringing to the city. It is hard to understand what balance of commercial, office and industrial I need, especially if I'm trying to balance internal production of goods. As it stands, I feel like the demand bars are not a useful tool, but maybe there is something the community is not understanding about the bars and how demand works in the simulation, which is why I feel a detailed breakdown of the simulation driving demand would be helpful.

 

[Licenturion]

Maybe you should have waited like me for the bugs to be worked out before you bought! But no, you fell for the "deal" so you have to live with the consequences!

Such BS. I paid exactly the same as other people on Epic or Steam. There was 'no deal' and I bought exactly the same product, with the same price, description, screenshots and items.

I just happend to have gotten Microsoft Store vouchers and used them for Skylines 2 and I didn't expect that the game would lag behind in updates, features etc. I bought on that store before and never had those issues. I pre-ordered because I wanted the pre-order items and I wanted to support the developer because I loved Skylines 1 and played that game a lot.

 

[co_martsu]

That is exactly what I meant by choosing not to release simultaniously and treating customers different. If Steam is instant anyway, it is possible to treat everyone the same and you choose actively not too. Other developers don't do this. If paid DLC is not released simultanously I will never purchase any in the future.

That said, I am happy you are looking into it.

We're only doing this now with the hotfix patches. Naturally we are going to release planned updates and DLCs simultaneously on all platforms.

 

[∆tlαntic4]

@co_martsu

After the garbage, what will be the next bug that will take priority to be fixed?

 

[IRONBLASTER]

Would be nice too get the option too Upgrade too Ultimate Edition.

SAME,

I'm loving the game and love the gameplay loop, it's fun and enticing. I confide in you all that you all would fix it, the game has love went through it. I personally didn't have much issues, though the dog bugs as others said was eminent and I didn't even know its a bug until you said so yourself.

At the same time, the game still has balancing issues. The game for me pretty much has infinitely increasing grain consumption. The city for a lot of time in-game without the failsafe measures always runs in losses. The high rent issues despite the highest densities still occur.

There's a lot of services which make the game unbalanced. Some production variables are unbalanced. The services as complained by everyone in the discord too, only stabilise until very later in game. The services can be unproportionately expensive at times even with managing budget.

Even as heavy transport player, I love the new game mechanics and how well it works.

The only unbalanced I found was, trams seem inefficient at times and also that the older system of minimum buses and max ones (they seem fine) are based on distance and locked with that.

If I wanna have an inter-village/rural long distance bus, I'm obliged to have a lot of buses despite
The population barely 100 or 200. Give us more control to finetune. It's illogical to run 8 or 9 buses for just that route in most scenarios.


And also pls give better graphs of public commute patterns. For example, my public transport used (with heavy references to my amazing heavy public transport culture and performance, going as far as 80% modal share) 110k users on my 60-65k total populations.


I'd rather love to have a graph which showcases us the pattern of commute, like

1.complete car/private vehicle
2. Park and ride
3. Taxi and ride
4. Complete taxi
5. Complete public transport.
6. Just walking completely

Also as said again, I'm loving the game and I was unsure if I'd like the game, apparently turns out I love the game a lot. I'd preordered standard edition, but I really wanna upgrade to ultimate, pls make others like me have a way at least for ones who preordered standard edition.

And, thanks for making such a great game and being transparent about it, I'm having a blast thanks to you all, it seems a lil lacking in its performance lacking but the game is solid wholesome and fun!

 

[Marov84]

Another week, another patch! If you missed them then you can find the full patch notes here:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-notes-for-1-0-12f1-hotfix-steam.1606507/

The most discussed change in this patch was the removal of a radio ad after it was pointed out to us that it came off as offensive. We want Cities: Skylines II to be welcoming to all, so we decided to remove said radio ad. I was, however, surprised by the tone of the discussion. The best part of the Cities: Skylines community has been how helpful and kind its members are to each other, and we hope to see that continue with Cities: Skylines II. I would like everyone to keep that in mind when you join community discussions. I would urge everyone to leave constructive criticism and remember that if there’s an issue with the game it’s not appropriate to attack a fellow community member or single out a developer or a partner of Colossal Order. We are reading all the feedback and we are more inclined to take polite feedback (including criticism) back to the dev team. You can be a part of a positive community if you so choose.

This week we are really digging into Garbage. It looked like the Garbage feature in the game has bugs that affect the balance of it in an unwanted way. The work started earlier by identifying the following issues:

• Garbage collection bug, that is caused by the garbage trucks just disappearing mid-journey.
• Garbage accumulates too little and City Service buildings that process garbage are out of balance.
• Garbage City service buildings which are just placed get their storages filled with garbage seemingly out of nowhere which then prevents them from collecting garbage from the city.

Now that these bugs are fixed we can look into the balance of the feature as the processing buildings don’t go through the garbage quickly enough and this causes issues with the export. If the city doesn’t handle the garbage internally, excess garbage is exported outside of the city. The downside of exporting is that it takes time and causes traffic leading to unhappy citizens, so it’s beneficial to process the garbage in the city for a faster outcome to please the crowds.

Another issue I mentioned last week was about stray dogs. In the next patch, the amount of them is fixed so that we don’t end up with an insane number of abandoned packs of dogs all over the city. Newlyweds should just welcome their partner’s dogs to the family and not leave them behind. Plans to fix this issue caused immediate debate if we should turn this bug into a feature. I for one would absolutely welcome the idea of an animal shelter DLC with a bunch of policies and all sorts of animals needing rescue in the city!

While on the topic of DLCs, we will not release new paid content for Cities: Skylines II before the outstanding performance issues are fixed to our standards. As a small team, we must focus on the task at hand to avoid spreading too thin. We are also very much looking forward to starting to go through your suggestions for Cities: Skylines II, such as adding some beloved quality-of-life improvements already familiar from the predecessor that were missed in the sequel due to priorities and time constraints.

My pledge to you is that Colossal Order will keep working on Cities: Skylines II so it will reach its full potential. To reach that potential we also need to talk about modding. Next week I’ll be focusing on the status of the Editor and what it will have when it’s ready for release. Check out this video to get an idea of what’s coming!

Sincerely,
Mariina

Hi Mariina

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Cities Skylines II will be fixed soon. I feel sentimental towards you and even though the game had a lot of technical and optimization failures (including bugs), I am still optimistic. The game will certainly reach a satisfactory direction sooner or later. I have not the slightest doubt here.

When it comes to the Animal Shelter DLC, I'm all for it . Dogs, cats, horses and other amazing animals are an important part of human life. The world would be empty without them. At the moment, they are just visual-aesthetic objects that, apart from being, have nothing more. Animals add variety to the world, but they also bring a lot of happiness and are a cure for all evil. They have therapeutic and other properties. It would be nice if the dogs from the game could not only stand, but could also sit, lie, bark and fawn on. They should have more features and interactions with the environment like Cimy. This is a more natural order of things. In turn, stray animals and animals wandering alone around the city should be caught by dog warden. Veterinary clinics could treat sick or even abandoned creatures. Animal shelters, on the other hand, would be a safe house for them, but residents could also adopt them at any time, or even after the owners' death.

It would be worth including in this DLC care for elderly people and orphans (combining them with the animal shelters DLC) with the possibility of building houses for the elderly, orphanages, houses, houses for single mothers, etc. And one more thing, I miss kindergartens for children; ).;

To liven up the world, I would add a greater variety of birds, but also sea mammals and other animals. Water bodies such as lakes, rivers and seas should be home to marine animals.

Don't worry about criticism. She only strengthens. I'm with you.

Take care Mariina

 

[sssloading]

How about the unity crash? You never mentioned it, fixing the garbage issue has a higher priority. I feel like I'm in the group of players that got abandoned.

I tried everything, undervolting the CPU, lowering the GPU power limit, disabling e-cores, disabling XMP, reinstalling the GPU driver with DDU, but my game still crashes with the unity message randomly within 10 minutes.

I have a 13900k and a 4090, but I have to play the game on GFN with only 3080. It's a shame.

 

[Nanuki]

Thank you for the well formulated feedback! I understand you, the more hardcore audience, would enjoy more challenge and will take this feedback onboard. As you can imagine adding difficulty levels is a bigger task that involves both design and code resources now occupied elsewhere, so no major changes are to be expected any time soon. We will first go through those threads and think about it!

Hey Martsu,

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions at this stage of the process.
I'm a bit confused by the statement above. This may have happened because you don't know the exact content of the two forum posts that were posted.
It's about the fact that in users' experiments the cities were cut off from the outside world and these cities still function. In another test, a user completely avoided using electricity in the city. The only consequence was that 50% less output was produced in the factory

Don't get me wrong, I like Cities Skylines 2 and I've been looking forward to it for a long time. Your trailers and everything that was released in advance made me really excited. Now the game has been released and there is no deep simulation at all. I'm disappointed by it and apparently other users are too. I'm not a "hard-core player" just because I expect that at least intentionally bad actions lead to consequences.

Again. Maybe your statement above was created because you didn't know the content of the forum posts. Therefore, could you take the time to reconfirm that the game works as expected and is balanced in the point I mentioned?

 

[Liringlaas]

Thank you for this message! I hope you're doing well despite the current things going on, and while I already love the game, being lucky to have a good config, I know you're gonna make things better. Good luck to all of you at CO.

 

[alessandroempire]

The regions pack is coming with the modding tool I guess?
So next week we can also know when the region pack comes? (though it's secondary to fixing all bugs IMO).

 

[co_martsu]

Are you guys currently working on a timeline basis or will the next step in development be reached only when the game's current problems are deemed to be sufficiently addressed/fixed?

Is the integration of paradox-mantained workshop/mod platform being done in parallel or will it be the next development step?

We will only continue with new features and content development after we are satisfied with the results on the performance improvements.

We have some developers, who don't have an active performance related task, working the editor and Paradox Mods integration.

 

[Lordinouille]

Thank you for the message, it's good to be heard and see that you are successfully targeting real issues.

I would like to know when/if it is scheduled to rework the sim speed. I know that sims are generally complex and multivariate, but on my first city I have reached 300k inhabitants and of course, the industries and road systems that go with it. When everything is summed up, the sim is phenomenally slow, which is a shame since I would like to reach 1M inhabitants.

I have no experience in game dev optimisation, however, I would gladly drop visual calculations such as cars, trains, and inhabitants for lower definitions or even none if that could increase the sim speed and help me reach more citizens. By that I mean, focus purely on the calculations, no more entities running and driving everywhere, just the result of their movement in the economy. I feel like, in the actual state, it is numerically impossible to reach the 1M citizens as the inhabitant amount grows exponentially slowly (not due to new citizens/h) but because 1 in-game hour takes exponentially more time to pass. (On a 2080ti, and i7-8700k, 32GB RAM)

If in the parameters you could put a fully sim performance-focused mode so players who want to push the game further can for a while, and get back to normal mode after to see the results, it would simply be amazing. Out of all the issues I have encountered with garbage, deaths, and no more medium-density demand for years, I think the sim speed could fix it as it will show significant variations with small changes (Which is hardly the case for me now).

I know you are all doing your best and I know how hard debugging while live can put you under pressure, I'm looking forward to your new patches and wish you all the best!

 

[co_martsu]

The word of the week is great. Thanks so much for the updates. Despite some bugs and flaws, I'm really enjoying the game and having a blast building cities.

I'm glad to se garbage being addressed. Hopefully this issue, as well as mail service, gets fixed soon. Also, cargo buildings seem to cause a lot of issues as well and it isn't clear to me if import/exports are working appropriately.

Another thing I'd like to see maybe in a future word of the week is how demand actually works, and what actually drives it. Right now, I find the demand bars really unintuitive. There seems to be a consensus in the community that the demand bars signal what you can build, but not that it is actually the right thing for your city. However, I don't think this really helps guide your development in an organic way. And the infographs don't really help either. For example, you have a graph that shows unemployment, but it doesn't break down which citizens are having unemployment issues: the highly educated, the uneducated, etc..., that would tell you what kind of jobs you need to be bringing to the city. It is hard to understand what balance of commercial, office and industrial I need, especially if I'm trying to balance internal production of goods. As it stands, I feel like the demand bars are not a useful tool, but maybe there is something the community is not understanding about the bars and how demand works in the simulation, which is why I feel a detailed breakdown of the simulation driving demand would be helpful.

Thank you for the feedback! I'll see if we could get a designer to explain the thoughts behind these in a post of some sort, maybe even in a stream!

 

[coasterfreak0471]

In my opinion, I'm much more concerned about having the core aspects of the game being worked on and fixed/improved on rather than having the game run buttery-smooth or perfectly. A game that "looks amazing" but can't get the core functions of the city right (leading to unhappy citizens and failing economies) is not a great combination. The game runs quite well for me (even though it is on "higher-end hardware"), but now with the latest update, there are many things the developers need to continue working on for the functionality aspect of C:S2 (looking at you, garbage, mail, exports, and traffic AI). A city that runs well on a GTX 1060 but can't function past 50k population leaves much to be desired for playing long-term. I do understand the need to get the game working properly for a large part of the player-base, but the core gameplay for those who can play shouldn't be overlooked or "placed on a back burner" (figure of speech for "dealing with it later"). With that said, I'm grateful for these weekly updates and am very optimistic for the future of the game, even if new, future content has officially been delayed.

 

[homerCCCP]

A hard mode would be nice, removing some if not most of the fail saves (Those that reward playing the game wrong).

However, imo the biggest issue are not the fail saves. They save the situation when you are doing stuff completely wrong. But we really need in any mode (easy or hard) way more feedback on what we are doing and way more impact. Even easy mode I should see low happiness when companies permanently go bankrupt. However, what ever you do, you will never have a bad happiness. It should more vary between 0 and 100%, not between 60% and 80% (This is not due to fail saves, a total fail is at 0% happiness, but it is not where most games will end, but there should be better cities at 80% and worse cities at 40% etc)
I think there is a lot of tweaking required. Also I wonder why we only have one type of industry zoning. It would be good to distinguish between storage and manufacturing with both having their specific demand.