CO Word of the Week #6

[co_martsu]

Last week in my comments on the forum, I tried in my very (and sometimes too) direct way to say that we made different design choices with Cities: Skylines II compared to its predecessor, and we understand that some may prefer one over the other or wish we had gone in a different direction. My poor choice of words did not make it clear that this of course does not apply to any bugs or issues you’re experiencing with the game. Naturally, this led to frustration for a lot of you, and I apologize for this. We know that we still have a lot to do before Cities Skylines II meets the performance standard and polish we are aiming for and that you expect, and you can be sure we are hard at work to reach these goals.

One of the best parts of Cities: Skylines is its active community. As devs we want to be present on the forums, listening to the feedback and answering questions. Our goal is to create the best city builder ever made, and your feedback is extremely important to us in reaching that goal. All of us in the community have different personalities and cultural backgrounds, our preferences and opinions vary and priorities differ. We know as devs we can’t please everyone, but each and every one of you makes our community richer. Cities: Skylines II is about creativity that can spark interesting conversations and new ideas. The community, and modding, are what make a Colossal Order game! And I promise, we’re working as fast as possible to get the modding support into the game.

In the meantime, we released gameplay bug fixes last week. Most notably we touched upon mail service and storage transfer, and fixed bugs related to the pathfinding. You can find the full patch notes with all the fixes here. All the fixes for the simulation may require a bit of time to take effect. However, please report if you still experience the issues and we’ll take a look!

The next patch (the last one this year) is coming out next week before we start our holiday break on the 18th of December. The patch will have the performance improvements I mentioned previously and the gameplay bug fixes we can manage to squeeze in. The focus is on the characters and a dentist has been consulted. There will also be improvements in the level of detail models for selected assets, as well as geometry improvements for better performances and reduced memory usage. Asset-related work will continue next year, but we should already have a good amount of improvements ready before the holidays.

On the gameplay side, we’re looking into the airports having problems with the export and we are working to fix some statistics. We have received reports of more stray dogs, now at the train stations. I can’t believe how terrible the citizens are at taking care of their pets! While I won’t promise we’ll have all of the dog-related issues fixed before the holidays, we are aware of the poor pups being left behind and will make sure their owners learn responsibility eventually. Please keep the feedback and the bug reports coming, we’ll go through all of them!

In the next CO Word of the Week, we’ll go over the final patch of the year and what we plan to work on next year.

Sincerely,
Mariina

 

[co_martsu]

Thanks,
btw, who cares about dogs when all of the post is still stuck in the cargo train stations?

Dogs are cute! And you might be surprised how much problems they can cause when stranded all over the city. When it comes to the post if there are still issues we'd love to get a bug report with a save game so we can investigate (apologies if one exists already, haven't checked the bug reports personally in a while).

Another wonderful update! Thanks to the entire CO team for working so hard.

I know it's easy to get sucked into reading all the forum posts and trying to respond as best you can, but I do recommend doing that less often. Some people are impatient or hard to please and will respond negatively no matter what you say and how much you try to help. (I personally had to eventually quit my own forum as a mod because of the negative people and I don't want you to go through the same thing.)

Personally, though I see the flaws in the way the game currently works, I have still already played for more than 60 hours since launch and I'm still having fun. What's more, I can see the basis you have created here for an incredibly deep game that can be expanded upon and improved for many years. Thank you for all you do!

Thanks for the support! Luckily we have moderators on this forum (thanks to our publishers resources!) and if I may be so bold and ask everyone to behave in a constructive way? We are the community and we can decide to bring positivity around us if we want to And why would we choose negativity when all the troubles can be handled in a civil manner, or even in a positive way?

Hello Mariina, it takes a lot of resilience, dedication and passion to keep bringing these Word of the Week posts, actively read our comments and interact with us, especially in this negative environment. We might not say it enough but we truly appreciate your direct communication with us despite the risks you're taking as a CEO.

And on that note, I will unfortunately have to contribute with some "negativity" as well because, unless we misinterpreted your previous statement, "When it comes to the gameplay and simulation we set goals for the game and we have reached those goals.", this is deeply concerning. I don't mean it as an offense, but I genuinely think that you have no idea how problematic the very core gameplay elements are, which cannot even be classified as bugs. In fact, what I'm about to say will probably shock many. Please try yourself the following (patch 1.0.15f1):

1. Start a new city
2. Provide ONLY electricty, water and sewage.
3. Build ONLY residential, commercial and industrial.
4. That's literraly it. Very high profit. Average happiness 70%. Some buildings will even reach level 5. Others will also get over 100% efficieny. It just works.
*Bonus points for using gravel roads only (to have virtually zero parking spots and bad traffic to see how all of this has no negative impact).

Everything else simply doesn't seem to matter. Parks, public transport, schools, hospitals, parking lots, taxes, policies, logistics, universities, police, loans, telecom, tourism, mail, attractions, traffic etc. are nothing but decorative happiness & efficiency bonus/malus that are just not needed to keep the city going. Sure, without them growth will be slower, a lot of warning icons will pop up but they can be ignored since happiness and profitability will remain high anyway. Not even road layout seems to matter because vehicles will just despawn and teleport to destination if traffic gets slightly menacing.
This whole game can be boiled down to essentially 4 factors: water, electricity, sewage and employment. This is the peak management challenge of the entire game. As long as you have these 4 elements the city is objectively infallible. Cims and and businesses seem to be hard coded to keep moving into your city no matter what. This is not even easy mode for the casual player, this is God mode. If you let the simulation run for a really long time, maybe at some point the city will probably collapse, but by then so much profit has been accumulated that it's like playing with unlimited money. Were these really the achieved set goals when it comes to gameplay and simulation?

Again, I vehemently encourage you and the rest of the dev team to play the game following the instructions provided above, and after that, please let us know if you further confirm that the gameplay was really intended to be so abnormally unchallenging. Failsafes, railguards, poor game design/balancing or whatever the causes are, seem to be so invasive that are almost completely suppressing any resemblance of deep simulation. Hopefully this will help you understand why we often (sometimes unfairly) read terms like city painter, fake economy and fake simulation all over Reddit posts, Youtube, Steam reviews, this forum and elsewhere. Now that the bad reviews related to bugs and performance are slowly fading away, a new storm of negative reviews about how superficial, shallow, bland and devoid of any challenge the current gameplay and management system of this game is will arise.

I know that there is a lot of work to do but I truly hope that what we're seeing now, even with all the known bugs fixed, is not going to be the final gameplay and simulation. Thank you for taking your time reading this and take care!

Thank you for a feedback that despite the critique toward the game your message is not actually negative but rather helpful! We've already been looking into the feedback about the balance and simulation challenge. While I don't have any definitive answers right now, these are most certainly aspects of the game we will address in the future after the more pressing issues interfering with the simulation are fixed.

 

[co_avanya]

Thanks,
btw, who cares about dogs when all of the post is still stuck in the cargo train stations?

If you haven't already, it may be worth rebuilding the cargo station. If that doesn't do the trick, definitely make a report on the bug report forum and attach the save, so we can look into it.

 

[co_avanya]

I'm facing stutter (did not occur before) after updating the game to patch 1.0.15f1, even when I start a new map. Any help?

We'll need logs to look into this, so the best way for us to help you and investigate this is by making a report on the bug report forum and attaching the Player.log and zipped Logs folder found here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\LocalLow\Colossal Order\Cities Skylines II

 

[co_martsu]

I hope you can get around to the free XP on loading bug. That being said, keep up the good work!

This is not a high priority ticket at the moment I'm afraid.

Any update on high rents for low density housing?

High rents for low density housing is related to the land value and the team is looking into it, seems like there's something off causing problems on other zones types as well. We are looking into it and after this issue is fixed it will likely resolve quite a few bugs. Unfortunately it also means more work and investigation is required to fix it so I thank you for your patience!

During the holidays, will we get a different CO of the Week, where you will discuss about Tampere and the culture there? Festive holiday seasons and foods there would be a nice break for CO of the Week.

We plan to be out of the office for 3 weeks and I personally will take all necessary actions to avoid the internet (isolated cabin in the woods maybe). However I'm sure @co_avanya has something planned for the social media channels. Maybe we can ask a collaboration with Visit Tampere

I hope that means what I think it means!

Are there plans to optimise or change the behaviour of the pathfinding?
While I enjoy the freedom now it's a lot more chaotic. And I don't even talk about all the illegal turning, but also how the path is calculated and how far (or near) they'll change lanes and stuff like that. Car's almost never change lanes at intersections now but it's common here that a road is splitting up, two lanes coming and then four lanes at the next intersection. At the moment it's not possible to picture that in the game.

(Red would be the way to go but cars will only take the green path)
View attachment 1059018

There are quite a few options to build different types of intersections so the pathfinding might not behave optimally in all cases. To this specific one I don't have an answer but the team is fixing issues as they get reports.

I don't think dogs are a priority. Why are you focusing on that? Better to fix the problems with economy as we are getting high profits which makes the game boring. 100k citizens and more than 25 million profit per month? And that wasting a lot of resources on non-necesary buildings. Roving those it makes probably more than 40 million.
Why are roads, rails and any other transport lines so cheap to build? Tunnels and bridges should be very expensive, they aren't. Terraforming is free?

Thanks for the feedback. Dogs are an easy topic to discuss, because most people love animals. It's something lighthearted and fun to bring to the text and it actually also causes issues in the city so it needs to be fixed. It doesn't mean we'd only work on saving the stray pups. I apologize if my tone feels too casual. I can assure you we're taking the work we do very seriously.

 

[co_martsu]

Is there any chance we'll receive either more information presented to the player re: goods and service flows or a release of information about how the game functions? We have people doing deep dives in the code to try and figure out what drives rents or why certain businesses are consistently low on customers - it would be really helpful to be able to have more clarity on these issues directly from the developers

I'll give a more general answer to this as I don't currently have the most up to date information on the specific topics you mention. First we must see that there are no bugs interfering with the simulation and make sure the balance is correct. Then there's the question of how the information is displayed to the player. It seems we have work to do on that front as players are struggling to understand the cause and effect of some systems. We're going through bug reports and feedback to ensure we tackle the issues needing attention.

 

[co_avanya]

We plan to be out of the office for 3 weeks and I personally will take all necessary actions to avoid the internet (isolated cabin in the woods maybe). However I'm sure @co_avanya has something planned for the social media channels. Maybe we can ask a collaboration with Visit Tampere

*makes notes*
And yes, we have a little something planned for our social media accounts, but the CO Word of the Week will take a break over the holidays.

I know many people like dogs and many have them so it makes sense to include them in a game like this for immersion but do they actually have any influence on gameplay at all?

Pets don't affect the gameplay, they're just there to keep your citizens company and apparently get abandoned by them.

Is there any chance we'll receive either more information presented to the player re: goods and service flows or a release of information about how the game functions? We have people doing deep dives in the code to try and figure out what drives rents or why certain businesses are consistently low on customers - it would be really helpful to be able to have more clarity on these issues directly from the developers

Just adding to @co_martsu's response to this, you realldy can't be too specific on what information you're missing. We're seeing some interest in a peek behind the scenes at how the simulation works, but we're also seeing some feedback on information that would be very useful to have in game. There could be potential for a future dev diary (if I get to steal the correct people away from their usual tasks), but if the information needs to be available in the game, then a dev diary isn't the way to go. So we'll have a look at all the feedback and see what makes the most sense.

 

[co_avanya]

I appreciate the continued announcements and updates on the development process of the game, as well as the clarifications coming from last week's discussions. I could definitely use an insight blog or something that explains why industrial buildings have such high land value compared to low density residential. I can't rezone an area that just had industrial zones built because land value goes up so much that the network suitability is instantly deep red with just five or so industrial buildings (land value takes FOREVER to lower or "reset" in an area, too). Only warehouses will build in those "unsuitable" areas, and yet my demand for low education jobs (mainly filled in industrial plots) keeps going up! The only problem is that once I zone too many industrial plots in "unsuitable" areas, the amount of warehouses present drops industrial demand to zero and STAYS THERE because of "unoccupied buildings" caused by warehouses not employing people. How else am I supposed to deal with industrial demand when warehouses/land value keep messing with my ability to provide jobs??? I would really appreciate something that explains the game logic for why land value for any industrial building is so high and how players can keep it low in the future for more expansion of one's industrial areas. I do NOT want to have to keep moving industrial farther and farther away from my population just because land value is the main (or only) issue.

I heard several times that ground pollution and land value were what made a network unsuitable for industrial (even though ground pollution is something generated by ALL industrial, so that didn't make sense), and yet most of my existing network lacks pollution, so I'm almost certain it's the high land value that makes it so warehouses only spawn in what was supposed to be my main industrial complex. How am I supposed to keep industrial happy by keeping fire chances low, crime low, AND getting workers to their shifts if their target workplace keeps moving farther away every month?

We're looking into the situation with land value, but I'm afraid we don't have anything concrete to share yet.

I would like to see some kind of info view that can show high flow between destinations. We obviously can’t do traffic surveys. All the arrows on the roads in the last game wasn’t always the most clear but it did help in some ways. Knowing where citizens travel to and from in high quantities will help with so much development of a city.
Thank u

The Traffic Volume shows you which roads get the most traffic. You can find it in the traffic info view and check the box for Traffic Volume to switch from the Traffic Flow view which is enabled by default.