

This forced the rich to commute in a way that kept the roads clear of unnecessary passengers. Then I tied them to wealthier population centres with mass transit. I lumped high-rise offices and commerce together. When combined with a much more advanced approach to transit, and a few choice mods, I made sure that non-polluting industries were kept close to poorer neighbourhoods so they could reach their destinations without suffering from the literal toxicity of heavier industry. I painted areas of my urban paradise with a variety of brushes, selecting everything from variable tax rates to industrial policy. Skylines supports this with what may be one of the best features I've seen for a game like this in quite some time. Sprawling across 100 square kilometres, Westfield had different districts with different needs and personalities. And an enormous nuclear fusion plant powered it all.Īlong the way I carved out unique districts with their own policies - some that banned high rises or pets while decriminalising drugs - to create specialised neighbourhoods for every kind of person imaginable. I had several commercial districts feeding into and out of one another, sharing and selling the goods cranked out by my industrial sectors, and topped with an educated and safe citizenry that I kept supplied with fresh water and unlimited clean power. After about 20 hours and a dozen or so restructuring sessions, I built my megalopolis, my crown jewel. My new city of Westfield fared much, much better. It was enough that even the nonsensical system for handling garbage collection eased up enough for me to appreciate the beauty of the game lying beneath. Rubbish piled up much more slowly and manageably, for example. At time of writing, I couldn't find anything to fix motorway congestion specifically, but I could address all its symptoms. Even mere days after release, Steam Workshop had thousands of fan-made downloadables that solved every problem I had with Skylines. Despite its new appearance, that's the same problem that killed SimCity even after the online problems were fixed.Īs frustrating as that was, Skylines does have an incredible edge on EA's 2013 city-builder: mods. Regardless, traffic would always deadlock in arbitrary spots causing everything to fall to pieces. It also had the same problems with dead bodies and a bit later with rubbish.

It had the same level of education as everywhere else - despite my refusal to add a school. It has power, water, police officers, and more, but all of them are provided independently with no roads or power lines or pipes linking the two.ĭespite the separation, my sub-city showed some peculiar traits. With my second city, I divert a lot of extra funds to create a second city core about 2 kilometres away from anything else. But after a while it becomes clear that the whole system is broken.

Cars move around realistically, they go to and fro delivering goods here and there. But as my creations grew and grew and grew, I ran into one of the dumbest and most obnoxious problems from SimCity - poorly managed traffic.

I wanted to push the game to its limits and see just what kind of weird concoctions I could get away with. I wanted to express myself, I wanted to craft and carve so many different types and kinds of places. My brain filled with all the different possibilities.
#Cities skylines pc funding series#
In many ways Skylines picks up where SimCity left off, and it seems to tick off a checklist of features that fans of the series wanted to see.
#Cities skylines pc funding mac#
AvailabilityĬities: Skylines is available on PC, Mac and Linux for £22.99 on Steam. Its foundation appears strong - built as it is upon the now-dead legacy of the once-great SimCity - but the cracks are still there. I like Cities: Skylines, but the more I play, the more flawed it seems. My frustration mounts as I realise that the failure isn't my fault. In a few weeks, everyone is dead, my buildings either abandoned or burning, and I've got to admit failure as my budget spirals out of control. I build cemeteries and crematoria on every block, but it's not enough. My city of Buttingham begins to convulse with disease as its infrastructure fails to keep it running. Cities: Skylines is a competent city-builder that lacks a vision of its own - though it leaves space for its community to fill in the gaps.īodies are piling up everywhere.
