Code mods are great, maps and assets are in there but not officially, so compatibility going forward probably isn’t great for those. Full modding support is being worked on and is one of their highest priorities, so I’m not surprised there wasn’t much discussion about it. Asset mod support is “before summer” so they’ve got another month according to their last statement on it. PDX Mods has some bugs but overall it’s actually pretty slick and functional, and they’ve made a few highly requested improvements to it already.

Without even reading it.

A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.

The base game is quite playable as is. I’m happier with the cities I’m building in CS2 than anything I ever built in CS1, even with a dozen mods and 35 gigs worth of custom assets. It looks way better and the cim behavior is as good or better than CS1 + traffic manager. There are issues with land value, but it really doesn’t impact gameplay that much.

I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m honestly baffled by just how negative the reaction to this game has been.

Will definitely file these methods away for the future. Microsoft just keeps getting skeezier and they didn’t do this shit the last time I had to install Windows. This new laptop is the start of a transition to as close to 100% Linux as I can get.

Bought a Win 11 laptop recently (it’s now a linux device), and on first boot up there was no way to gracefully decline using a Microsoft account to sign in. Luckily, I was in a hotel and couldn’t connect to the wifi without going through a login page, so the lack of internet connection allowed me to set up a local account. In any case, if you’re forced to log in with an MS account, OneDrive starts syncing right away. You can disable it, but maybe not before it’s already done some damage.

Your mistake was trying to do literally anything yourself. Just sit down and let daddy Microsoft take care of everything for you.

The population is in the screenshot. The guy on reddit who does the benchmarks has better hardware than I do and uses a slightly bigger city, and he gets 60+ fps average depending on settings.

I’ll quote you again…

best existing hardware its not running without scratches the 20 fps line from below on lowest settings

Maybe just, like, don’t make shit up. K? You’re making me take CO’s “toxicity” statement a little more seriously.

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

Yeah, I love the game, but I’ll absolutely admit it was released too early. The simulation is broken in multiple ways, but it appears to be fixable as evidenced by progress in patches and some mods as well. Then again, personally, I’m glad I have the opportunity to play it now rather than waiting another year, even in the state it’s in. The cities I’ve been building are very satisfying, and like you said the road tools are a dream.

best existing hardware its not running without scratches the 20 fps line from below on lowest settings

My mid-high tier hardware from 5 years ago runs it maxed out with LOD and anti-aliasing turned up higher than the default “high” preset at 20-40 fps.

Expectations that people made up in their heads. If you followed any of the pre-release media, you knew exactly what you were getting, including the performance issues.

I’m creating cities that look way better than anything I was able to make in CS1 even with all the DLCs, dozens of mods and hundreds of custom assets. Saying this game sucks is a dead giveaway that you’ve never actually played it. There are problems, sure, and CO’s communication has been… awkward. But, the game itself is quite playable and enjoyable.

0:28 is the deciding factor, clearly.

I literally only voted on one thing by accident because the button made it look like I was going to go to another page to choose my vote in that category. Turns out I was just voting for the game I was looking at immediately and irrevocably.

Forgot about that, lol. What a train wreck that game was.

The real time agent simulation is easy for something like Banished, Foundation, Tropico, or Timberborn where your population isn’t going to get out of the low thousands if you even play it long enough to get there, and there’s no choice between walking/driving/any form of transit or any combination of them, and the network that path-finding is performed on is substantially simpler. There’s a lot of simulation going on behind the scenes in Skylines (which IMO is worth the performance hit), and the graphics are technically superior to most games in the city building genre. The main thing, though is just that Skylines is doing things that basically no other game does, or doing them at a scale that no other game does.

It was a much more accurate traffic simulation than anything that came before it, save for maybe SimCity 2013, but that wasn’t worth shit when you only had a single tile smaller than a Skylines tile to work with. The Skylines 2 traffic simulation is improved quite a bit as well - still has its quirks of course.

I have a 3070ti and over 100 hours in game so far, and I’d consider it the best city builder I’ve ever played in 33 years of obsession with city builders. All my graphics settings are maxed out at 1440p and I get about 20 fps average in a 100k population city. I could turn the settings down and get 30+ probably, but I’d rather have it look good, and it’s not any kind of action game so I really don’t give a shit unless it turns into a literal slideshow.

I’m guessing they’re referring to Squadron 42.

Yeah, I’ve always had hardware that’s a step or two below top of the line for its generation. I had to go through two upgrade cycles before I could max out Far Cry. I had to buy more RAM to turn up the draw distance in Mafia. Hell, I remember my computer chugging when I built too many units in C&C Tiberian Sun…

I’m just struggling to imagine where you would put a business except for next to a road, regardless of whether there are cars on that road or not.

This is why traffic in america is miserable, the traffic engineers fail to recognize that you can’t just put businesses right next to roads as that will cause stupendous amounts of choking every time someone wants to pop in for some mcdonalds.

Yeah, fuckin’ Americans, putting their McDonald’s right next to roads… I mean, just look at this. What a disgrace.

I’m guessing your first language isn’t English, in fact judging by your comment history, I’d say you’re Dutch. Anyway, those words are adjectives in English, and using them as nouns is often perceived as impolite. You’d want to say “I made a transgender character” instead.

I can get behind the whole: “i’m playing games to escape from the world, stop dragging the real world politics into games” sentiment, but!

If you’re playing games for escapism, play a simple puzzle game, or a racing game, or maybe Minecraft. Flight Simulator. Tetris. Rocket League.

Any game that attempts to build a believable world is going to get political occasionally, because a believable world has class politics, war, struggles between technology and the natural world, etc. etc. etc. Even a game like Ratchet & Clank doesn’t shy away from the politics inherent in its world-building. Truly incredible how “Gamers” have gone from an edgy subculture that reveled in right-wing panic to a seething mass of bloated man-babies who can’t even handle being confronted with ideas.

I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are.

If you’re a hardcore heteronormie, congrats, the default behavior of the game conforms with your worldview. Simply choose a male or female body, and don’t even touch the pronouns. They’re automatically what they’re “supposed” to be.

I, for one, am very upset at seeing politics in muh game that includes mercenaries, piracy, loan sharking, corporate espionage, religious extremism, terrorism, war crimes, gang warfare, drug addiction, poverty, shoplifting, mass shootings, genetic engineering, environmentalism, atheism, corruption, philanthropy, smuggling, …

Correct, but we aren’t talking about them.

Uh… you were talking about them. Those are the two examples of bugs that you provided. I literally wouldn’t have made the comment if you hadn’t brought them up.

such as restoration bonuses buffing enchantments, the various duplication glitches, and basically everything involving horses

Like if you had said these originally, I wouldn’t have even argued with you. I never personally experienced those bugs, probably because I don’t play games like I’m a QA tester, but I know many people did.

Not really - plenty of other games use Havok physics and don’t suffer from the same issues, or at least not to the same degree. Perhaps there’s a reason other developers using the Havok physics engine don’t make games with huge quantities of dynamic objects loaded at once.

I’ve definitely fallen through the world in several of the games listed there. But anyway, specifically, I said persistent physics objects. You can drop a cabbage in Whiterun, walk to Solitude and back, and the cabbage is right where you left it. In, say, GTA, you get out of your car and look away for 5 seconds, turn around, and it’s gone. Most games work more like GTA, where a limited number of objects even have full physics simulation, and those that do are only in memory if you’ve looked at them in the last x seconds. Otherwise, they unload and are lost forever.

Now, whether it’s even worth having so much physics-enabled clutter is another question. It certainly contributes to immersion, but is it more trouble than it’s worth?

clipping through collision boxes and falling through maps

These are famously common bugs across games in all genres running on all kinds of different engines. I’d go so far as to not even call them bugs because computers simply don’t have the power to calculate collision down to the picosecond/picometer. Every game that’s ever been made has sacrificed precision in physics for performance.

Perhaps the reason it’s more noticeable in Bethesda games is because they typically have way more persistent, physics-enabled objects. That’s actually a strength of the engine, and something no other developer really even attempts.

Also Paralives.

Yeah, I have thousands of hours in Bethesda games. Something about sneaking around murdering bandits, mutants, mythical beasts, heavily armored soldiers, etc. especially sniping them with a bow in Skyrim and watching everyone run around like “who shot Steve in the face!?”, that was just… chef’s kiss. That and finding something interesting around every corner, and just the visual aspect of it. It’s hard to explain but there is a certain Bethesda magic that no other game really captures. Plus the modding…

Looks like it borrows heavily from some of the best of the open world action/arpg genre - The Witcher, RDR2, Assassin’s Creed, Elden Ring, and BOTW, even a touch of Shadow of the Colossus in there. If it’s as polished as any of its inspirations, it’ll be a banger.

I’m sure you’ll be able to eventually… just wait for the appropriate expansion & a sale.

If you’re talking about the announcement trailer, it’s not gameplay footage.

Heh, I beat that one a few years ago finally and I mentioned it to a friend of mine and he said, slightly confused “dude that game’s like 6 years old.”

Did a second playthrough of XCOM Enemy Unknown, and now I’m on to XCOM 2, which I never got into more than a few missions.