I enjoyed the first SimCity and I really enjoyed SimEarth. However, at some point I really stopped enjoying SimCity... and I'm not sure if it's that the game got more obsessively micro-managing or I just grew out of that style of game play entirely.
Classic, SC2K and SC3K were Will Wright games and didn't stress too much on the city micromanaging gameplay. They were plain and simple city builders. Things changed with SC4. Weirdly SCS and the last failed SimCity are probably closer in gameplay design and feel to the older titles than SC4 but the community hated them.
How do these official Sim City games compare to the newer game Cities: Skylines. That appears to be the spiritual successor. I like that that doesn't require an always-on connection, it also seems to have good reviews (87% on Steam) but how does it compare to the official Sim City games?
I'm not big on Skylines. It looks very pretty, but the agent-simulation model has a lot of issues versus how the older SimCity games worked. To work around the quirks of the "every sim is independent" aspect you have to do weird things with city design that feel counter intuitive for various reasons... for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system? Garbage management has issues too.
I will say this though, a more experienced Skylines user should comment. I bought it early on, played it for a little bit and went back to SC3K and SC4... dusted it off again and played for a little bit more but went back to SC3K again. Some of these issues may have been addressed by now.
> for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system?
I think that has more to do with the fact that the game is developed by a European studio (Finnish, IIRC), and in Europe even smaller cities have decent mass transit systems, so it makes perfect sense to them that you should put mass transit in a city of 50K.
Edit to add: Doing a SimCity-style fixed grid layout with two-lane roads is a disaster in Skylines because it's a disaster in real life. There's a reason why real downtown areas are horribly congested. If you set up a proper street hierarchy with arterials, collectors, and local streets, you'll have much better traffic flow, just like in real life. The SimCity games never really cared much for letting you build different types of streets (SC4 came close, but not to the extent of Skylines), and the game itself made you place everything on a grid where every tile matters, diagonals are a waste of space, and curves are close to impossible. But Skylines has several different street types built in, and the game itself uses a more flexible layout engine that doesn't penalize you for doing curves and diagonals.
Also, the traffic AI is just poorly coded, and there are mods to replace it with better, such as Traffic Manager: President Edition. It's not a problem with the agent system; it's a problem with poor AI programming.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that the vanilla AI just doesn't know how to handle traffic lights. Some mods might as well be requirements for playing the game, and TMPE is one of them.
You can get better experiences by adding mods like "Rush Hour", "Realistic Population and Consumption", and "Traffic Manager: President Edition". General consensus though is that Skylines prioritizes "pretty" over "realism", which I'd agree is generally true. It's still the best current city builder, doubly so with mods.
> for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system?
There's 2 reasons for this I'd say. The first and most significant, is simply people suck at planning traffic layouts, and this game is much more punishing than other city builders exactly because it simulates every citizen. One bad driver merging can back up literally thousands of other vehicles, which propagates it's way to other exits and intersections, just like real life.
This is made worse by citizens just being shitty drivers (even more so than reality) and not following traffic logic very well (merging across 3 lanes at the last second over and over!) and the inability to customize intersections. Traffic Manager: President Edition is an amazing overhaul of this system. The UI is a bit clunky, but you can set individual turning lane rules, timed traffic and pedestrian crossing lights (even timing rules that span several intersections!). Adding well timed traffic lights has turned huge messes of downtown areas of mine into very reasonable looking traffic, without needing to rework the roads or buildings.
The top post on the game's subreddit is a guide by a traffic engineer [0] and their city has an amaaaaaziiiing traffic flow.
But secondly, it's still a game and so it can't perfectly capture real life. A big part of why traffic is so much worse than real life is the time scale. A real world city may have 50x more people going to and from work than Cities Skylines, but they also have 50x longer to get there. I can't find specific numbers, but if a citizen doesn't reach their destination in just a few minutes they are either reset or may lose that job (or both). I know people who have a 90 minute commute, this is longer than an entire Skyline's citizen's day.
The traffic system by default also isn't tied into the day/night cycle (day/night was added to the game in a later patch and fleshed out more with an expansion). So citizens leave for work/school at all times of day making the traffic feel more active than it should be. The Rush Hour mod fixes this, for example, and at 9am you'll have disgusting backed up traffic and 3am an ambulance can cross your city in seconds because streets are barren.
Still, a good rule of thumb from C:S communities is to multiply your population by 10x and that's how large of a real-world city matches yours. (For example my 250k city runs more like a real-world 2.5million city).
> Garbage management has issues too.
My biggest problem here is that services like garbage and police don't seem to give a crap how close something is to them. My current "city" is a mountain valley with a busy downtown and dozens of little satellite towns in the mountain ridges. Constantly I run into problems like a fire in a small town, but instead of sending a firetruck from the local station, one comes in from downtown, and all the local trucks are sent to deal with some downtown emergency. It seems to get worse as time goes on, and leaving my city up and running for over a day or so leads to a complete failure of my garbage system as trucks service houses which are miles away, yet adjacent to another landfill (which is also servicing houses miles away rather than nearby).
The Rush hour mod has a setting to make Cims only search for jobs and goods locally, which works great but doesn't seem to affect the services in any way. I'd love some way to enable that, or set a max-distance-from-base for service vehicles, or not allowing cross-district service usage. Anything really.
If you enjoy SimCity then definitely check out skylines. It's maybe not as realistic in some ways, and I think it's too easy, but there are lots of mods available so the possibilities really open up.
I was a Maxis geek as a kid, playing everything they put out right from SC2K. SC4 killed it for me when I began to get good at it, and ran into the infamous traffic bug. Above a certain population level, there was an inevitable scenario of traffic chaos, no matter the mitigations you attempted.
Funnily enough, Cities:Skylines also runs into trouble with big cities and traffic. It's hard to make a game about civil engineering playable for people who aren't civil engineers
