Hey I just discovered this yesterday and I watched the streams on youtube. The game looks like it will be amazing!
Sorry if already posted! I couldn't find any threads about this at least going back a few pages.
From what I've seen, the most glaring game element that is the most limiting and unrealistic is the small 4 x 4 limit for zoned buildings. Since a small road is 2 squares wide, the squares are twice as small as most city builders, making it really 2 x 2 if you compare to other city builders. In order to have realistically diverse lots, I think zones should be able to be at least twice as big on each side, 8 x 8, and a good max size would be 16 x 16. From the released gameplay, this clearly causes visual repetition, and very unrealistically small sized plots for villas and especially large high density buildings. For villas (high level low density residential) the house takes up the whole plot with no yard; I've never seen such a big house on such a small lot in my life. There are no skyscrapers in the real world (buildings higher than ~200m) that occupy such a small space, it's just not practical. With "Skylines" being in the title, I would think there would be an emphasis on being able to grow nice diverse and realistic skyscrapers and skylines. There are also countless low density buildings that should take up more space (villas/estates, malls, low density office buildings, farms, most industrial factories and warehouses).
There are some pretty easy solutions:
1) Obviously you should be able to have buildings that are longer on the street side i.e. 8 x 4. This could be done without changing any game mechanics.
2) It seems to me that it would be pretty easy to adjust the current 4 deep zone mechanics.
-There could be different plot size limits for different zoning (bigger for high density), but this doesn't solve the problem of low density plots that are too small.
-I think simply making the zones 8 squares deep would be easy and acceptable- this present the problem of overlapping zones, but they must already have a solution for that because you can already overlap zones (actually I haven't seen what their solution is in any of the videos).
-They could make a zone editor tool where you can paint in bigger zoning areas (more squares to put zones in) up to a limit (probably 8 deep). This would probably be the hardest to implement with the current system, but probably the most satisfactory solution.
3) They could combine zones that come from different roads. So two back to back 4 x 4 zones could equate to one 8 x 4 zone. This is pretty much how SC4 and SC2013 do it. This wouldn't be hard to implement, but since the current system allows for a lot of gaps it would be a bit messy without the ability to manually extent the zones more than 4 deep.
Sorry if already posted! I couldn't find any threads about this at least going back a few pages.
From what I've seen, the most glaring game element that is the most limiting and unrealistic is the small 4 x 4 limit for zoned buildings. Since a small road is 2 squares wide, the squares are twice as small as most city builders, making it really 2 x 2 if you compare to other city builders. In order to have realistically diverse lots, I think zones should be able to be at least twice as big on each side, 8 x 8, and a good max size would be 16 x 16. From the released gameplay, this clearly causes visual repetition, and very unrealistically small sized plots for villas and especially large high density buildings. For villas (high level low density residential) the house takes up the whole plot with no yard; I've never seen such a big house on such a small lot in my life. There are no skyscrapers in the real world (buildings higher than ~200m) that occupy such a small space, it's just not practical. With "Skylines" being in the title, I would think there would be an emphasis on being able to grow nice diverse and realistic skyscrapers and skylines. There are also countless low density buildings that should take up more space (villas/estates, malls, low density office buildings, farms, most industrial factories and warehouses).
There are some pretty easy solutions:
1) Obviously you should be able to have buildings that are longer on the street side i.e. 8 x 4. This could be done without changing any game mechanics.
2) It seems to me that it would be pretty easy to adjust the current 4 deep zone mechanics.
-There could be different plot size limits for different zoning (bigger for high density), but this doesn't solve the problem of low density plots that are too small.
-I think simply making the zones 8 squares deep would be easy and acceptable- this present the problem of overlapping zones, but they must already have a solution for that because you can already overlap zones (actually I haven't seen what their solution is in any of the videos).
-They could make a zone editor tool where you can paint in bigger zoning areas (more squares to put zones in) up to a limit (probably 8 deep). This would probably be the hardest to implement with the current system, but probably the most satisfactory solution.
3) They could combine zones that come from different roads. So two back to back 4 x 4 zones could equate to one 8 x 4 zone. This is pretty much how SC4 and SC2013 do it. This wouldn't be hard to implement, but since the current system allows for a lot of gaps it would be a bit messy without the ability to manually extent the zones more than 4 deep.
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