I had some conversations with AfricanLived yesterday in two different threads about one of the reasons I am not on Daily Kos much anymore. Aside from real life, my day job, getting back into the gym, etc etc… one of the reasons is I’ve gone back to a game I used to play and have utterly relapsed back into full blown addiction. I’ll probably be back here once the primaries are over but for now… I’m happy elsewhere.
He (another victim player) and I were discussing some of the details about it until we realized we were threadjacking but afterwards I got a few messages about what we were talking about so, heedless of the life-altering priority-destroying affliction this will no doubt unleash on others, I thought I’d take a minute to share.
The game is called Cities: Skylines. An amazing city-simulator built by Colossal Order, a very small Finnish boutique development shop. (Here is a cool interview wit their CEO Mariina Hallikainen and a video with her and her purple-haired lead developer explaining their approach and talking about their commitment to allowing users to create their own content (“modding”))
Full Disclosure: I have nothing to disclose whatsoever. I do not own, know personally, work for, nor have investments in this company, these people or anything related to the company or game. At all. In any way. I am a mere user, fan and addict.
So the game is straightforward city building/management. If you’ve ever played SimCity, its kind of like that. Or more accurately, its kind of like everything SimCity could have one day been but never achieved.
You start with a “map” which is a wide open square of terrain, maybe with a coast line — maybe not, probably with a train line running through or near your initial plot and ALWAYS with one main entrance of the major highway. This highway is your connection to the outside world. That world is not your concern, you only worry about YOUR city. And that’s all you get at first. A highway exit and open ground. Go.
Let me stop for a second right there to point out, while the game comes with a dozen or so maps, these are also open to user creation and people have gone CRAZY from making cool beach areas, mountain tops, two-tier cities around waterfalls, etc. There are (without exaggeration) currently 14,757 maps available for free download. One of the cool things people do is use Google Maps and USGS topographical data to “port” in actual city terrain. You want build (or rebuild?) my hometown of Baltimore? Here is the map. Free to download. Rebuild it along the Patapsco River as-is with the Inner Harbor, the Key Bridge, the Port of Baltimore, etc… or make it better! New Orleans? Paris on the Seine? Budapest straddling the Danube? Iowa City, Iowa? ...okay.. I really don’t know why you’d want to play an Iowa City game, but hey…. its there if you want it.
You build some basic roads, zone areas for residential, commercial and industrial, build and connect the electric (wind, coal, gas, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc), water and sewer services and start watching it grow. Once you have residents you are going to need schools, health care facilities, trash pickup services (and some place to store/burn/recycle that trash), police and fire stations and parks. If you don’t give your people parks and leisure areas they will not be happy. (in downtown areas you use plazas and statues)
All this while managing a budget (you can take out loans to help you start put then you have to manage the payments or choose to pay it off early) and watching capacity. Are you generating enough electricity? Do you have enough seats in your elementary schools? Yes? What about high school? Your hospital has plenty of capacity but its on the opposite side of the city from your residents (out of ambulance range) so they aren’t using it and are not happy that they don’t have anything closer and will start getting sick. And you can’t afford to build a college yet anyway so don’t worry about it.
And then it just keeps getting crazier. As business develop and grow they want more educated workers so if you didn’t invest in education they will start complaining and then close up shop. (You might want to figure out a way to pay for that University after all) If there aren’t enough jobs overall people will start leaving the city. If there isn’t available housing when the children turn into young adults and then turn into adults they all leave the city causing your population to shrink, your workforce to collapse and once your current adults retire your businesses will start screaming for workers.
People will also start dying, which means you need cemeteries or crematoriums. And I mean NEED because if you don't manage this correctly people die and the corpses will just lay there. Nothing clears out a nice high-income (high-tax revenue) multistory apartment complex in one of your best parts of town like leaving 2 or 3 corpses laying there for weeks because your cemetery is not sending out enough hearses to keep up.
So once you have all this worked out and you are growing and expanding...more roads, more industry, more housing, more offices, etc… you get: more traffic. Holy hell do you get more traffic! So… time to install and design bus lines. And this is not easy. You have to plot the lines and each station. It has not been a rare occurrence in the Wisperian household for my wife and I to spend 3+ hours at a sitting balancing the need for efficient straight-forward express lines between residential areas and office parks against the need for more stops to increase coverage and availability. Not enough stops means not enough riders… too many stops and the people will figure out that driving is actually faster for them. And then comes underground subway stations and routes…transfer stations..do they run both day AND night?
And that still doesn’t solve TRAFFIC. Once those industrial centers get humming along they are constantly receiving supplies and shipping out goods. And they do this with trucks. LOTS of trucks. If they don’t have direct access to the highway, all those trucks will be plowing right through your commercial downtown areas and rolling through your residential school districts. All day. Every day. So now your building overpasses and re-engineering cloverleaf exits. Dropping in a cargo rail station and running track to it up over your main boulevard. (If they can ship by rail they will use less trucks!)
But I’ve still only scratched the surface. We haven’t talked about nightlife districts, prison populations, taxicab services, tourism, pedestrian paths and downtown walkability. We didn’t cover monuments or things like how noise pollution undercuts property value causing people to move out of nice neighborhoods since you built too much commercial property nearby or one-too-many wind turbines which make a lot of noise.
I could tell you about the time I had a landfill put so much pollution in the ground it seeped over to where my water intake system was and suddenly 80% of my city was sick, my hospitals got over-run and then people started dying. Fast.
Did I mention airports and harbors? Developing riverfront commercial property? Tax breaks and growth policies? Oooh… did I tell you that you can legalize marijuana or put in a policy mandating recycling and requiring smoke detectors in all homes?
I’m telling you… this stuff NEVER comes up in World of Warcraft or Call of Duty.
You will never be playing a Night Elf Druid and sit in Stormwind thinking “Dammit...I need more merge lanes on my new t-bone highway exchange or else the traffic is going to back RIGHT UP into the roundabout and screw all of downtown during rush hour” or “Yes! I know we need another college but not only am I strapped for money right now the only place i have to put it has no subway station and that will completely HOSE the traffic in every neighborhood on the East side of town!” That doesn’t happen. Ever.
And by the way, your city is completely customizable and livable. By customizable, I mean you can change, tweak and name EVERYTHING. Adding mass-transit when my wife is playing with me takes EXTRA time since she has to name every line, some stations and hand-pick the color of each one. The game will default to “Metro Line 3” and be ready to roll but oh no! The line is to service the timber industry area so it needs to be green, it gets named the “Timber Line Loop” and the stations get names like “Timber Ridge North”, “Black Bear Station”, “Sawmill Circle”, etc. Because, of course they do.
And I mentioned modding for the maps but the REAL modding comes with the things people create that you can plug right into your game. New parks, intricate highway interchanges, bus depots, cool looking apartment buildings, quaint hokey organic farms. Plus, people spend an inordinate but jaw-droppingly amazing amount of time recreating actual buildings. You want the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur? You can have them. The Rudolfinum auditorium in Prague? Its there. I have that in my city. Here… take a look. There are currently 69,227 different things you can download into your game; all free. I told my wife my next city is going to be agriculture-based and I’m downloading a bunch of vineyard mods so when I zone it for “farm” it actually builds vineyards rather then orchards and pig farms. I’ll get a map with an ocean shoreline and mountains on the other side and buildup some kind of cool Napa/Sonoma looking thing. Should be fun!
I downloaded a Starbucks store so now all my commercial districts all have at least one. Seems legit, right? I also saw a Tesla Model S car so I grabbed it. Since it was the only “car” I added, when I walk through my city I notice that about 40% of all cars are Teslas. I guess I have a very wealthy little town.
And when I say “walk through” I mean it. You can zoom in to sidewalk level and go through your town, day and night (which is cool to see parks and monuments lit up or restaurant areas all bright and busy). You can hear the ambient noise levels, planes passing overhead, livestock if you are in a farming area. You can also click on any person, car, train, bus etc and “ride along” so you can see what route they take, how long their commute it, how much traffic they encounter, etc and then make changes accordingly.
I’ve rambled enough and at this point I’m jonesing to get back into my city.
So I’ll leave you with a guy (not me) giving a tour of his very impressive city:
Have fun. And I preemptively apologize to everyone and everything else in your life that will now be woefully neglected.