Chilly Weather in Cities: Skylines

Just as I was starting to consider putting Cities: Skylines aside for a while, a sale offer shows up in my inbox for the After Dark and Snowfall expansions.

Lot of white landscape on the winter maps.

The deal was essentially two expansions for the price of one, not bad especially when you consider that both are fairly recent. After Dark released just over a year ago, and Snowfall last February.

I started a new city after enabling the upgrades, using a map with the Winter theme. A winter map feels like living in Alaska or Greenland. It gets really cold in the winter, snow is everywhere, and you can provide amenities like ice sculpture parks and hockey rinks to beautify your city. The occasional snowstorm will cover everything, including the roads, requiring plows to keep things running.

Those extra requirements make building a winter city more challenging than the more temperature climes. All the other services are still in demand as well, so managing finances to provide it all is more difficult. I found myself expanding much more slowly than I had previously, and paying more attention to the details of my city finances.

There's a temperature gauge to keep an eye on - the colder it gets, the more your citizens will demand heat. At first, I didn't realize that a new heating system was available, so a lot of money and time was spent on extra power production for electric heating. Eventually I discovered the ability to build a heating utility and run heating pipes along water lines, and that made things significantly easier to manage. Adding that heating system isn't cheap, though, and slows growth even more.

Between the two expansions, there's plenty of other additions besides the cold weather. New transportation options like taxi stands, requirements for road maintenance facilities, commercial zones specializing in nightlife, etc, etc. Some existing features have been tweaked as well, such as a smaller footprint for certain buildings (like the high school). And of course there are new unique buildings to unlock.

The new features certainly bring new life to the city-building experience. Plenty of new things to try out, and the cold-weather challenges are fun to work with. Looking forward to more of the same with future expansions.

Cities: Skylines - Wrecking Cities for Fun and Profit

Building something is great. Destroying it can be just as fun.

The government offices. Not much to look at, considering all the pain involved in unlocking it.

Back in the day, SimCity offered a disaster menu to rain down destruction on the hapless citizens of your simulated city. I have many a fond memory of building up a sprawling cityscape, then calling down tornadoes and earthquakes to cut swaths of destruction through it. Cleaning up the destruction afterward is part of the fun, too. In fact, sometimes I'd send in a disaster as a sort of urban renewal device to rework an area I wasn't happy with.

The base Cities: Skylines game doesn't have similar disasters. There's an expansion coming that adds them, but until then, your city is safe from floods and storms. But that doesn't mean there's no incentive to wreck what you've built.

There are a variety of unique buildings available to unlock, based on reaching certain thresholds in city statistics. Many are positive, such as acquiring a large amount of cash reserves or building large areas of residential buildings. Others, though, aren't so good for your city: go into debt, pile up garbage across the city, have low citizen heath, and so on. Sickness and garbage aren't as flashy as earthquakes and floods, but they can bring a city to its knees.

I recently decided to try for the Government Offices unlock, which requires that the average building in the city have 40 units of garbage piled up. That's well above the threshold at which people get angry, so I knew nothing good would happen. Cities: Skylines allows you to control your city service buildings, so I disabled all the garbage collection services. (Which is much better than destroying them, since you don't have to pay to rebuild later.) Sure enough, before long my city was awash in both garbage and unhappy citizens.

By the time the garbage had piled up to the point where the Government Offices unlocked, a lot of citizens had fled the city. Couldn't handle the smell, I assume. That left a lot of abandoned buildings, which coincidentally unlocked the Cathedral - 2000 abandoned buildings maintained across five weeks of game time. Two unique buildings in the same self-inflicted disaster!

The cathedral.

Then came the hard part - recovery. Initially, I just turned all the garbage collection services back on. That cleaned up the city in a few weeks, but didn't do anything about all those abandoned buildings. Land value plummets if there are a lot of abandoned buildings, so before long I was presiding over one massive slum. I'd almost run out of money before I realized that a change of tactics was needed.

It's a good thing you can pause the game, because there were a lot of abandoned buildings to clear out. I spent the better part of a half hour scrolling across the entire city, bulldozing building after building. Then I had to go back and make sure that the now sparsely populated area was connected properly to power lines, since destroyed buildings no longer transmit power to their neighbors.

It took a while for the land value to recover, so I was busy for quite some time micro-managing the cost of city services and destroying new abandoned buildings when they popped up. Ended up having to take out loans to keep the city finances afloat. Fortunately, people started to move back in before too long, so I could cover the loan payments and slowly start building the city back to its former glory.

Those unique building unlocks are a one-time thing, so if I hadn't managed to pull my city out of its downward spiral, I could have started a new one and still kept my building options. I'm glad I saved this one, though. Adds a little extra sense of accomplishment to the process!

Cities: Skylines

City building is addictive. So, so addictive.

My first city - right on a riverbank.

Cities: Skylines is the latest in a long line of city simulators that I've played way more than is good for me. The original SimCity found its way onto the Macs at school when I was in high school back in the early 1990s. If I remember correctly, playing it was even a legitimate way to spend study hall time. SimCity 2000 was a mainstay on my computers in college. I've played a few of the Anno series, Cities in Motion, and probably several more than I can't think of right now.

They love their soccer in simulation-land. You can even zoom in close enough to see the players on the field.

I skipped the 2013 release of SimCity, largely because everything I read or heard about the game made it sound poorly designed. Requiring a connection to a central server and emphasizing interaction with other players makes sense for an MMO, but not a city-builder. The space you had to work with in building your city was limited, too. Some of that was addressed in later releases, but by then I'd already decided not to bother with the game.

Once you get harbors in place, the boats start coming in. Good for cargo and tourism.

When Cities: Skylines came along in 2015, it was widely hailed as the game that the community had been expecting from SimCity. I picked it up a few weeks ago and have played it for about 10 hours so far. From what I've seen thus far, everything I'm looking for in a city builder seems to be present.

The power generation block. Wind, solar, nuclear...plenty of options.

The weakest part of Cities: Skylines, in my opinion, is the very beginning. When you start a new game, you're given a list of potential areas to choose from. There's some information about what's in each, but not much to tell you what it means. Once you pick one (probably at random), you're looking at an empty landscape without much direction. There are some tips telling you what the various menu options do, and suggesting which ones you might want to start with, but it doesn't give a lot of detail. I've played so many city building games that I more or less understood what was going on, but someone new to the genre might have a tough time.

Once of several unique buildings you can unlock. This one is a massive office tower.

Once you get going, just about everything that Cities: Skylines does is great. As you build up your city, new building choices and other options are unlocked based on the city's population. You also get a cash grant at each milestone, so you can actually afford to try out the new things. The initial plot of land you have available is fairly small, but as you progress, you can buy up additional land around that initial area. I'm sure there are limits eventually, but you can build up a good-sized metropolis without any trouble.

Downtown at night, with that same office tower in the middle.

There is a lot of depth and complexity available in Cities: Skylines, but I haven't felt like I was required to use it. For instance, it's possible to customize the budget by allocating more or less money to the various city services, and those settings can be different during the day and night. I've barely touched those sliders and my city is working just fine. I'm sure it could be more efficient if I got into the details, but the game isn't forcing me to go there if I don't want to.

A wider night shot.

The developers did a good job taking advantage of current technology with Cities: Skylines. I've not had to worry about performance (some older games used to slow down terribly with larger cities), and the graphics are beautiful. You can zoom out to get a birds-eye view of everything you've built, or zoom in to look at individual cars and buildings. If you're interested, all the details of any object can be accessed with a simple click - where a car is headed, what a factory is making, how many people live in a house. Mostly I don't care about detail at that level, but it's nice sometimes to poke around in the inner workings of my city.

I've still got plenty of time left with Cities: Skylines, but even with just a few hours of play I can tell that it's a well-designed game. Looking forward to seeing what else I can construct with it.