My problems with Cities: Skylines and why I am already regretting the buy

[Murokmakto]

For the last 6 years, Cities XL was my choice of a city building game. My interest was always not really the economical simulation, but to recreate realistic looking cities on my pc. Which Cities XL, in addition to a few mods, was perfect for.
But after 6 years this game slowly became old and I started looking for something new. So the only current (useful) city bvilding sim is Cities: Skylines. When the game first came out, I knew that the base game was not what I am looking for.
With its cartoonish graphics and limited construction possibilities I didnt buy it at first. -At first...
Since there was build in Mod support from the beginning, I said "lets wait for good mods and then I shall see".

So I checked on the game again 2 weeks ago and was astonished. People on youtube are building detailled and realistic cities I could only dream of before.
Example:

Link

So I immediately bought the game to get going. Fortunately, most Cities Skylines youtuber give away a list of mods they use, so finding the right tools was easy.

Now my problems come: I have the game for almost a week now and I haven´t actually played it yet. I am not able to get it running properly without crashing continuously. I have installed about 20 or so mods (mostly things like Rico, road anarchy, prop anarchy,surface painter, move it, etc etc). So its all mods I need to really build a city to my inspiration and detailling.

So far so good. Most of these mods work like they should. Some dont show up ingame whatsoever but maybe I´m just missing shortcuts to bring up a menu or something.. (Almost) no crashes at this point.

Of course I also want to make use of the thousands of different building assets I can download in the steam workshop. So I started downloading a few asset collections I am going to need sooner or later.
To be precise I started with 4: a soviet pack, the south of france pack, italy pack an some really nice buildings from sevilla. Each collection contains probably somewhere around 200 assets. I know that is a lot but I am going to need most of it sooner or later.
I did throw out about 150 things I dont need.

At this point my game is not working anymore. Sometimes it starts, sometimes it does not. I can only run it in Steam Offline mode. But I can only start one map per session. If I start or load another map, it crashes. Sometimes it crashes at the first one.
Sometimes it already crashes if I only have 1 asset out of all activated.

So obviously some assets are not working together with others or creating problems on their own. I would understand that some mods are conflicting with others but building assets?
I do understand that some buildings are not going to work since I dont have all dlcs. Of course a tram depot is not going to work, I only have the After Dark dlc. But I dont understand why random residential buildings are not working.

For a game that has BUILD IN asset creation, I have no understanding why most of them do not work properly. NO, I do not want to check each individual asset I download if it works together with each one I already have. I want to play the game and not screw around for hours getting it to work.

I have no understanding that a game that has BUILD IN MOD SUPPORT is not working when I try to use almost any of these mods. There are dozens of other games where I can just download anything from the steam workshop and its going to WORK. Where I dont have to check compatibility issues and shit and can just download and play.
Also in comparable high numbers. Why is that not possible in Cities Skylines?

Maybe I was expecting too much from this game but If I knew that mods are not going to work properly, I would not have bought it in first place. I am going to try getting it to work for some more hours, but I am slowly loosing my patience.

So much for my angry review, help is always appreciated

 

[Cedara]

<i>So obviously some assets are not working together with others or creating problems on their own. I would understand that some mods are conflicting with others but building assets?</i>

That can happen, yes.

Personally, I have an old graphics card, so I use very few assets and not more than three or four mods at a time, sometimes I only play with the given mods (eg. unlimited money).

 

[metacritical]

You should have posted in Support & Bug Reports and you should also provide these files.

 

[Avanya]

A few things first. The fact that the developers made it easier for us to add mods and assets to the game DOES NOT mean everything on the workshop is quality. Actually it means I can fairly easy take a model which was not at all made for this game and add it to the workshop - you HAVE to do some quality control yourself to avoid getting badly optimized assets, which hurt your performance. (Find the mod MeshInfo and read its description to find those nasty assets - also check texture in MeshInfo).

Your pc specs also determine how many assets you can afford to add. If you're just running the game around or a bit above the minimum requirements, then that could explain crashes after subbing to many new buildings. Youtubers often have some fairly strong pcs, so you might not be able to run all they run.

The fact that all your mods don't show up in the game makes it seem like there's already some issue there - perhaps assets aren't to blame at all. But before we can even determine what the issue might be, you should follow metacritical's advice and provide us with more info.

 

[Teldaril]

Most popular mods list their incompatibilities and bugs. E. g. the 81 tiles mod currently crashes the game if you enter a map, leave to the main menu and enter another map or the editor.

Also it might look like a lot of work, but don't just blindly subscribe to an asset or collection. Open it, look if this asset has dependencies (like the network extension or MOM), look when it was updated last time, look in the comments if someone has problems with it and read the descriptions. These collections are nice to get an overview but a lot of them are full of assets which are faulty or deprecated.

Edit: Also if you just sub to 1000 assets and 20 mods without ever testing in between problems are to be expected.

Just because there is mod support doesn't mean that everything works together. Just imagine 2 different mods which do the same thing. They will interfere each other and most likely crash the game although they work perfectly fine alone.

[...] There are dozens of other games where I can just download anything from the steam workshop and its going to WORK. Where I dont have to check compatibility issues and shit and can just download and play.
Also in comparable high numbers. Why is that not possible in Cities Skylines?

Such general statements are false in most cases. Since we don't know anything about your games and mods this statement is just completely irrelevant.

But just to mention it and quote you:

So I checked on the game again 2 weeks ago and was astonished. People on youtube are building detailled and realistic cities I could only dream of before.

Perhaps the mod interface for these ominous games where everything works were more limited (which might result in less possibilities for mods but also less complications) and CS offers much more possibilities while also be more prone to problems.

 

[Murokmakto]

Hello everybody

I am still working on it. I do it the long way and activate each individual mod to see what happens. Yes, I already found one of the main suspects which was the above named 81 Tiles mod. It seems at the moment that my game is not randomly crashing anymore but I had to go through a lot of mods to find it. I found out afterwards that it says that in the mods description. Although I checked all mods for known compatibility issues before subsribing, I didnt see that box at the bottom. Ok, so far my fault for not reading carefully.

Still there are some mods which dont function properly as they should. As I said before, it is possible that I am missing some keyboard shortcuts to bring up the mod menus or missed something else... I shall see about that.
Most asset issues were due to missing dependency assets (like small props etc). It said nothing about that in most of the assets descriptions, I only found out by the error list when using the loading screen mod. So I downloaded those and at the moment it seems to work.


I was just really pissed and angry when I wrote my bad review before. I had already spend most evenings of the last week trying to get the game running. I was really looking forward to playing it and it just wasnt working and I still havent even started.
I will continue finding the errors and if something occurs that is really unkown to me I will ask for advice. Thank you for your support so long. I hope that I will finally get it to work and also enjoy a new city sim

 

[Teldaril]

[...] I only found out by the error list when using the loading screen mod.

One of the best mods when you plan to use a lot of assets. I would also recommend "Less Steam" which reduces unnecessary traffic with Steam and improves loading times.

Have fun and a nice day.