Note by @jeder

was watching a video about ingame "cities" and they brang up cities skylines as an example of a game that actually simulates them / the cities are built not just for the player but for the "people"/agents within

maybe its just me, but cities skylines feels like its scaled down in an irregular way: a "city" of 50,000 has everything and the game even calls it a megalopolis or smth like that in the achievement thing

but when i look at what it takes to get to that point, it's a large downtown with a bunch of highrises inbetween, like a soviet-built town, that would definitely not have trams, intercity buses, trains and airports all in one town

so in a way cities skylines feels even less real than the "cities" (which are like 10 buildings and a bunch of npcs) of genshin or skyrim or whatever, because with those you can say the game is not focusing on that and they're just a tool used to deliver the story to the player, while c:s advertises itself as a city building game... that's bad at cities

also a pet peeve of mine with cities skylines is how american-centric it feels

there's no mixed use buildings (come on, even sc2013 had that in their high-ass megaskyscrapers thing)

there's no self-sufficient low-density buildings like irl where a typical home in a village would have its own garden with vegetables and fruit, some cows & other cattle, etc

i feel like the whole concept of agent-based simulation doesn't make sense unless you have those agents do stuff

like let them occupy the free land for their cattle

give them points of interest they'll travel to

give them some basic needs so that their daily schedule isn't home -> workplace -> home without any e.g. lunch breaks or grocery shopping or whatever

@lina Cities Skylines is not a city simulator, it is a flow simulator that happens to have buildings in it

SimCity was a far better simulation of the operation of a city. For example, if you increase police spending in CSL, you just get better police. If you increase police spending in SC, you get more oppressive police. Your actions have consequences for the residents, rather than just shifting things around.

CSL doesn’t really do much in terms of actual planning, and this is especially true since by default, the game offers very little public transport — you need to buy DLC to enable bike lanes, trams, and more public transport and walkabilty options. And even then, no matter how many mods you add to CSL, all my cities end up looking like Denver, Colorado.

Compare to fictional videogame cities, like even those in Skyrim for example, they look lived in as part of storytelling, even if they only exist as point to serve the player

@yassie_j @lina my favourite was when people wanted them to add mixed zoning in the sequel and nothing happened

@jeder @lina they DIDN’T add that? My god. That’s so annoying. Have they added bike lanes now?

@yassie_j @jeder cs1 does have bike lanes but i have a copy with goldberg steamemu and all dlcs (read: pirated) so might be dlc-only

or are you asking about cs2 specifically

@lina @yassie_j that was about cs2

@yassie_j @lina 5 months ago: if nothing changed since then, then nope it's still not there

@jeder @lina this game has been out for 1½ years now and they STILL don’t have bikes???

@lina @yassie_j crazy rushed