Development Diary #10: Game Progression

[safe-keeper]

Wish you had shown us more of the tech tree, and, heck, I wish it was even more free (who's to say a town can't have a river connection before it builds a rail line, for example?), but again, I absolutely love this change in itself. Can't wait to see all the different combinations of city types people are going to make on the same maps.

 

[Merlinium58]

Firs, you don't get airports before trains. Second, those are the flaws I mention.

But population being the driver of progress makes far more sense than completely arbitrary XP that you get from... people being happy.... Or from plopping special buildings.

Did you not see the same video I saw?

Airports, can be the first mass transit you unlock, if you can afford it. The only part you need trains for is the international airport. This is the reason they went this route was to have the ability to choose which mass transit you wanted, and when.

 

[safe-keeper]

I do not really agree. Also in real life, there is no rule that you need x inhabitants to get a train station, an airport or similar. Also in real life, it's about what the city wants / needs most and what it can afford to have. Often, the "what it can afford" scales with the population, but not necessarily.

There are small communities that have one huge company or service (e.g. a nuclear power plant or any other big company) that provide the income and they may have requirements for them to be there. Like a train station, although the population size would not justify having a train station (I actually work at a small town with a very similar situation). So CS2 now gives you the opportunity to develop under a similar premise. Also, this approach clearly allows more diversity on how to build up your city / map, so I like it very much.

Not to mention that sometimes the service comes before the city. Some planners decide Site X is a good location for a new cargo terminal, mine, factory, dock, etc. with, say, a road or rail connection, and then once that service exists, a town springs up around it to house workers who will in turn want shops, schools and day care centres, etc. close to where they live. In fact, it'd be cool if we could do this in CS2 --start with a service already on the map, connected by road, rail, or dock, then let players start building their city.

 

[j4lambert]

Will there be an opportunity for there to be additional development points earned for the creation of monorails and maglevs in future expansion packs?

 

[LordTridus]

This is the first dev diary where I've looked at it and gone "eh? maybe we can mod that out." It feels overly gamey, like I don't really want skill trees in a game like this. And when you're throwing around skill trees with point costs and XP, it feels like trying to make an RPG out of it.

I get that population based unlocks have their own issues, but this just feels off to me, like I'm going to need to grind for happiness before I can build a bus station.

 

[Askorti]

Did you not see the same video I saw?

Airports, can be the first mass transit you unlock, if you can afford it. The only part you need trains for is the international airport. This is the reason they went this route was to have the ability to choose which mass transit you wanted, and when.

My bad, I thought it was referring to CS1 and not CS2.

 

[Promethian]

Behold my random thoughts.

The first milestone gives 4 or 5 points. Last gives 30. I suspect the last is overkill for getting all the unlocks so there is some leeway for them to add more unlocks or for modders to add more.

Early unlocks in the trees are 1 or 2 points. The most expensive things are 8 points.

It seems designed to let us get a spread of first unlocks in multiple categories or to get a mid tier unlock right away. We can also reasonably beeline to an end unlock probably within the first 2 milestones and definitely within the first 3.

Tourist attractions at the end of a pretty heavy tree stood out to me. I suspect tourism is going to be highly profitable. Especially with the better econ sim, tourists will let us move more products without having to build up more residential infrastructure. I bet certain products are also favored by tourists so setting up those production lines will be big with this strategy.

 

[dj97]

Citizen Simulation & Lifepath was moved to the 28th so we could include the latest updates to the citizen models in the screenshots and feature highlight video.

Probably the best reason to delay a dev diary. I'm more excited now.

 

[unknownenlord]

Why does geothermal need batteries?

I don't think they do?

 

[Promethian]

Why does geothermal need batteries?

I don't think they do?

Prerequisites are a way of increasing the cost of something without putting the cost directly on it. By putting it after batteries they make combining geothermal and solar for your power solution more attractive. You can decide whether that is good or bad.

I also suspect trying to power purely by geothermal will pollute aquifers heavily and they ran into problems with that in playtesting. Common pitfalls players fall into that the devs don't intend is something good devs are always on the watch for and often the solution is small things like putting the pitfall after a cheap prerequisite so the players think about it a bit more.

 

[unknownenlord]

Prerequisites are a way of increasing the cost of something without putting the cost directly on it. By putting it after batteries they make combining geothermal and solar for your power solution more attractive. You can decide whether that is good or bad.

I also suspect trying to power purely by geothermal will pollute aquifers heavily and they ran into problems with that in playtesting. Common pitfalls players fall into that the devs don't intend is something good devs are always on the watch for and often the solution is small things like putting the pitfall after a cheap prerequisite so the players think about it a bit more.

I am wanting to be heavily reliant on geothermal and import the remainder,
I have no plans for Solar Power at all so a bit annoying.

 

[Pseudotalented]

I wonder if we're awarded with XP by increasing population and its happiness level, or by plopping service buldings and building roads, do we lose XP if population declines or if we demolish roads?

 

[tamsi99]

This is the first dev diary where I've looked at it and gone "eh? maybe we can mod that out." It feels overly gamey, like I don't really want skill trees in a game like this. And when you're throwing around skill trees with point costs and XP, it feels like trying to make an RPG out of it.

I get that population based unlocks have their own issues, but this just feels off to me, like I'm going to need to grind for happiness before I can build a bus station.

I fully understand your feeling here. I am myself a person who isn't interested in any kind of "achievements", "skill points", "expansion points", "levels" and all that gamification elements like "cards" you can collect in games and so on. Maybe I am way too old(-fashioned) or simply the wrong type for that.

So, seeing those "XP" points permanently popping up in the game feels indeed annoying to me. Hopefully there is a setting to disable that (just the visualization, not the concept).

Still, I believe that it is a great decision to move away from a static and pure population based progress concept. So CO had to find another element that determines your progress. CO decided for points that you collect while developing your city, which makes sense to me. Because you can accumulate points in many different ways, even without increasing the population. It seems all you need is a little happy village and time, which would give you progression to unlock other things.

Again, I hope we can disable certain visualizations when earning XPs, so it doesn't permanently pop into our faces, but the concept as such makes sense to me.

 

[Chief of Staff]

Looking good to me. I am glad to see that things are no longer so arbitrarily tied to population milestones, as there are so many examples of towns and cities in the real life world that have certain services or assets but whose population would have rendered it ineligible otherwise under the rule of Cities: Skylines. In my opinion, this is a good move, but I think it is too soon to assess whether it will positively contribute to gameplay value. Only times will tell. As a certain Paradox developer once said, gameplay > realism.

I do, however, have a question: are the milestones and development tree moddable? If so, just how moddable are they?

We need a development diary on modding!

Anyway, having seen this diary, I am now looking forward even more to playing this new generation of Cities: Skylines.

 

[Promethian]

Rewatching the video I am noticing the sound effect on the xp pop ups. If they don't give us an option to hide both the pop up and the sound this will get a mod within 3 days of release tops. I wouldn't be surprised if the front page of the workshop is all "hide xp" mods day 1.

 

[co_avanya]

Pretty much only one comment but breaking it up into my usual bullets so it's not as terrifying of a wall of text:

• [Love] - I love milestone awards that feel thematic, like hitting a certain level of high tech workers & unlocking a science center, or applying research trees in a manner that still lets us have creative freedom but also have that sense of evolution and progression, or maybe if the ability to do certain things is somehow tied to happiness / approval.
• [Loathe] - I loathe when more city-critical or creatively-constraining things are locked behind these achievements, though, like maybe I want my small town to be based around locked light rail, or maybe I want to grow a city from scratch around its locked oil reserves, or applying some mix of locked policies from the get-go. The Dev Diary mentions being able to build up a small town beside a space center, which seems to address this... but I'm not sure I'm seeing that in what's being shown.
• [What I See] - I'm not yet sure how I feel around what's proposed & whether it falls more on what I love or what I loathe. From what I can see it's feeling like something I'm going to find myself bypassing with an immediate Unlock All at game start, which I kind of feel bad doing because I'd feel like I'm missing out on some bits that I might enjoy, but I totally recognise maybe this is just a Me problem.
• [Ideal] - I think what I'd perhaps be most amenable to is not-so-much locking new things behind the development tree... but maybe unlocking upgrades within the tree? So maybe my scrappy little town gets its Space Center where our cutting edge scientists conjecture that the Earth might revolve around the Sun. And I need to use Development Points to grow its capabilities until it's eventually launching interstellar ships throughout the galaxy.
• [Map Tiles] - (and about those Expansion Permits: I'll also point again to my concerns with map tiles over in the Dev Diary 7 on Maps)
• [Bypass] - I'd definitely appreciate if the game included bypass options to let players tailor the game to how they want to play. So maybe we could toggle on the whole map at once, or maybe unlock all buildings from the get-go but keep upgrades locked, and maybe also an option that keeps more thematic achievements (like unlocking a Mayor's House at some threshold) still locked.

Thanks!!

Unlock All is available as an option when you start a new city or load an existing save. So you can absolutely choose to skip the progression gameplay if you don't enjoy that. But let's look at the two city examples you mention.

I want my small town to be based around locked light rail
Public transportation unlocks at Grand Village (8,300 XP) which is pretty easy to reach. If you haven't spent any of your Development Points yet, you have unlocked 18 points when you reach this milestone. Trains will cost you 1 Development Point, tram 2 points, and if you want subway too, that's another 4 points for a total of 7 points. This still leaves you with a lot of points to spend on other things you might want - I tend to always grab roundabouts (1 point) and the wastewater treatment plant (2 points) when I play - and lets you unlock rail pretty early in your city's life, so you can build it focused around light rail.

I want to grow a city from scratch around its locked oil reserves
This one takes a little longer as oil is unlocked at Big Town (46,700 XP), but all you need here is to reach the milestone and of course, expand your city to anywhere with oil deposits. You'll have an established town by this point and, if you plan to focus it around oil and oil products, you can already have focused your city's industry on related products and set up the infrastructure to make the expansion into oil extra successful.

Wish you had shown us more of the tech tree, and, heck, I wish it was even more free (who's to say a town can't have a river connection before it builds a rail line, for example?), but again, I absolutely love this change in itself. Can't wait to see all the different combinations of city types people are going to make on the same maps.

Rail does not need to be unlocked before water transportation options. You can go straight for water if your city should have a harbor before a train station.

Will there be an opportunity for there to be additional development points earned for the creation of monorails and maglevs in future expansion packs?

We aren't quite ready to discuss potential future content yet, but the system certainly has room for new additions in the future.

Looking good to me. I am glad to see that things are no longer so arbitrarily tied to population milestones, as there are so many examples of towns and cities in the real life world that have certain services or assets but whose population would have rendered it ineligible otherwise under the rule of Cities: Skylines. In my opinion, this is a good move, but I think it is too soon to assess whether it will positively contribute to gameplay value. Only times will tell. As a certain Paradox developer once said, gameplay > realism.

I do, however, have a question: are the milestones and development tree moddable? If so, just how moddable are they?

We need a development diary on modding!

Anyway, having seen this diary, I am now looking forward even more to playing this new generation of Cities: Skylines.

Modding is a topic for the future as I'm afraid we aren't ready to share our plans yet.

 

[JJxvi]

Uh, it's clearly a tech tree, not a skill tree...

 

[safe-keeper]

This is the first dev diary where I've looked at it and gone "eh? maybe we can mod that out." It feels overly gamey, like I don't really want skill trees in a game like this. And when you're throwing around skill trees with point costs and XP, it feels like trying to make an RPG out of it.

I get that population based unlocks have their own issues, but this just feels off to me, like I'm going to need to grind for happiness before I can build a bus station.

And it's not gamey to have to reach X people to be allowed to build new services, in a pre-determined, arbitrary order?
This is great because it allows you to unlock the things you actually need, while at the same time not forcing you to grow your city to get new services, another thing I disliked with CS1.

And if you don't like it, just activate 'unlock all' like in the first game. I don't see the problem.

 

[akeela84]

This is the first dev diary where I've looked at it and gone "eh? maybe we can mod that out." It feels overly gamey, like I don't really want skill trees in a game like this. And when you're throwing around skill trees with point costs and XP, it feels like trying to make an RPG out of it.

I get that population based unlocks have their own issues, but this just feels off to me, like I'm going to need to grind for happiness before I can build a bus station.

I doubt that it will be modeable. It will most likely be like the policies in CS 1.

 

[Anna_Gein]

Everything looks so cool. I am so hyped about this game.

I love the idea of advanced features potentially unlocked without reaching high pop level. Few things pleased me more than building nice little cozy towns in Cities Skyline.