Green Cities might look like urban paradise, but beneath the lush vertical gardens, something sinister is percolating. Sure, the draped greenery clinging to the side of the new high density apartment blocks looks attractive, but it’s also reminiscent of post-human imagery; nature reclaiming the land. Zoom out far enough, so that the little cars and people are less apparent, and it’s not a great leap from green city to Twelve Monkeys, I Am Legend and The Last Of Us.
But forget the future for a moment because the now of Cities: Skylines [official site] upcoming expansion isn’t the paradise it initially seems to be. Your attempts to create an environmentally friendly utopia might end with the construction of a new Silicon Valley. The road to hell is paved with reclaimed wood and good intentions.
I’ve been building a new city on Skylines recently and it’s taking on an unusual shape. Usually, commercial zones form the buffers between industry and residential areas in the early stages, ensuring that people have at least a little distance between their homes and their smoggy workplaces. This time, I’m experimenting and the first few people who moved in lived right in the backyard of the pollution-belching smoke-stacks.
Predictably, they got sick. Happiness was low, health was a problem, and I was a very unpopular mayor. The roads were quiet though because nobody had much of a commute to deal with.
Long-term, the plan was always to make some money off the back of those early communities and spend it to build a beautiful beach-front community, with beautiful designer houses and extravagant sky-scraping apartment blocks with only the most luxurious fittings. The people there would be educated and they’d have office blocks to work in. No noise, no mess, no sickness.
Keep up that kind of city for long enough and it’ll probably develop its own Young Adult Novel style social segregation system for the youth. For now, the city seems like it’ll develop just fine and even if the people out in the industrial district aren’t too happy, the overall happiness of the city as a collective is just fine.
Green Cities would fit perfectly into my experiment in division though. You might think cleaner energy and workplaces are wholly positive things, excepting perhaps the price, but even if all of the numbers and info overlays look good, I’m not entirely sure I want to unleash the IT crowd onto my city. Or at least, not onto my ideal city. They can go and create more social segregation in this new place I’m building.
IT specialisations allow for new types of district populated with high-tech offices. They produce lots of tax revenue but don’t require as many employees as traditional industry, and attractive as they are with their garden terraces and shiny solar panels, you know they’re packed full of beanbags, ball pools and marketing departments called Idea(l) Stations. Bowtie-wearing Imaginauts hired straight out of college, with degrees in Twenty-First Century Business Dynamics. That one guy who walks around chewing a stalk of raw cane sugar because “it’s the only way to snack that isn’t compromised”.
Peel back the green curtains and you’re going to see all of this and more, and chances are you’ll still have some manual labour happening elsewhere in the city. The extremes of the IT specialisation should highlight the divisions between one district and the next, and you might not only be able to build San Francisco as it is today, but come some way to seeing the various shapes it moved through before getting there.
The accelerated timeframe of Skylines, which has every city go from genesis to metropolis in the same era, prevents it from exploring the ways in which history provides shape. There are no great technological leaps forward or social changes that alter the course of development. Instead, you’re broadly free to sculpt as you wish.
Some of Green Cities features, including the cleaner energy options, might be prohibitively expensive for a fledgling settlement though, so you’ll build toward them rather than throwing them down as soon as you start. There are even floating water cleansers, that look like something out of science fiction. They sit in the bay, sucking up that brown poopy liquid that Skylines itself specialises in, and leaving behind beautiful blue water fit for drinking and swimming in.
The waterfront might be the most attractive area of Green Cities. There are new floating buildings, connected to the mainland by a pier. This allows for all kinds of attractive cafes and restaurants out on the water, and with all of those beautiful high-rises topped with garden terraces as a backdrop, it’s a reminder of how beautiful the game can look when a handsome skyline is framed at just the right time of day.
And framing is what Green Cities is all about, I think. It’s an asset pack, tied to some new rules around noise pollution (which I’m grateful for) and policies that encourage use of electric cars and other green ways of living. It’s a massive asset pack, for sure, with over 350 new things, and it’s a very attractive one. But it’s adding new options rather than more complex simulation. I very much doubt there’ll be any pushback to my silicon valley, or any real drawbacks to reshaping the city’s economy around it.
As I mentioned at the beginning, even my sickly workers in the muck-zone don’t have any real impact on the wellbeing of my city as a complete organism. Their unhappiness is drowned out by the happiness of the masses. While I’m not asking my people to protest in the streets when the gated communities around their IT overlords fall into place, I’d like to see some tension between urban progress and those it leaves behind. There’s overlap between social strata, transit, high-tech industry and all the rest, after all.
Perhaps Skylines will never touch on these issues. It is, after all, at its best when it uses the land as a canvas and the city as a set of toys. The simulation is robust enough to make it more than a construction playground, but not so complex that it requires more than a basic awareness of how things move from one place to another.
That’s fine. I want that game in my life and I want it to have more and more variety, so Green Cities is welcome. But I will absolutely be simulating the dark side of my Green Cities as I play, and the more time I put in, the more I’m starting to realise that I’m still in the market for a modern city-builder. Not a replacement for Skylines, but an alternative. One where every choice of asset has a possible consequence down the line, as the city pushes back or recoils.
Green Cities will cost £9.99/12,99€/$12.99 and is out later this year. As always with Paradox expansions, some features will be available for free in a big ol’ patch delivered at the same time.
Want to recreate a real-world city into Cities: Skylines at the fastest and easiest way possible? Tired of placing each prop, tree, building in a detailed city recreation? Well, this guide is for you. Other Cities: Skylines Guides:
Step 1: Creating the CityThe first step would be creating the city itself, which can be done by pressing New Game, and there find the city map that you made with the use of terrain.party heightmaps and overlay images. We'll be using Calapan City, Philippines as an example. Then, when the city is loaded after the loading screen, it should look like this: Afterwards, if you use 81 Tiles mod, you'll be needing to unlock the entire map. After unlocking the entire map, load the overlay image you'll going to use. Of course, depending on the image you used, you might wanna realign the image so it perfectly matches. Step 2: Building the RoadsAfter doing everything in Step 1, here is where Step 2 starts: building the road network. This is going to be easy, just follow the overlay image you downloaded. Just continue building roads until you're done, or when you reached the road limit of course.
If you missed something from the Map Editor, then feel free to do it, such as a missing river, or terraforming error, etc. Step 3: Placing Buildings, Fixing RoadsAfter building all roads as described in Step 2, Step 3 begins by placing buildings in their exact location with the use of OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. But first, you'll be needing to fix the roads you placed by using the upgrade tool. Make sure they match the one on the real-life maps (Fine Road Anarchy might be required if your city has intersections too close to each other). Afterwards, place the buildings in their exact locations. You might need some mods such as Fine Road Anarchy, or Move It! to closely match the building's location in real-life. Step 4: Setting up Public TransportDepending on the city, you'll be needing to set up public transport routes. This includes bus, train, metro, or ferry. The vanilla in-game intercity services do not work well and is unrealistic, so we're going to create a line that goes to the map edge instead. If you use Improved Public Transport 2, then feel free to customize each line you create. Step 5: Taxes, Budget, and MonumentsStep 5, is going to be a short one. Basically, open the Economy panel, and lower all taxes to 1%, so many residents would not complain that their taxes is too high. Afterwards, go towards the Budget tab, and max out all services (not including public transport) to 150% budget, so many Cims will not complain about low service coverage. And if you like, feel free to set up your city's polices. If you have districts, then you can set up unique polices on those areas as well. Step 6: Water CoveragePlace your water pumping stations at the map edge, along with the sewage treatment plants so that way they are not going to be noticed in regular gameplay. Afterwards, place water pipes all over your city. Do this until your entire city has water coverage. Step 7: ZoningAs the title says, the next step would be zoning your city. This includes residental, commercial, industrial, and office zones. You'll be needing some kind of mod like Demand Master so your city gets fully developed. Step 8: Letting the City DevelopThe last step would be, playing the simulation at the fastest speed possible, and just let the city running until your city gets fully developed. And then, that's it, you're done on building a real-world city. Feel free to start recording your own cinematics or sharing the savefile to the Steam Workshop. Here is the full video of my Calapan City build:
Cities Skylines Urban Planning and Development Guide by Vanquish
In this guide I hope to use professional experience and gameplay experience to help players with urban development questions and hopefully improve their city’s efficiency. Also one day will likely start providing gameplay videos on a stream/YouTube channel.
First, I’d like to thank Paradox Interactive for being so close to their gaming community and delivering a quality product and continuing to support the community with fixes. I sincerely hope more people who have been jaded by simcity and EA as a publisher will find the light in supporting your business ethic.
Now, on to the game and urban planning & development. I can’t tell you from a professional standpoint that I am impressed at how realistic this game, infrastructure, and urban policies in particular all accurately reflect the challenges we face in real life city/county planning. In real life we have something called ArcGIS as a tool for mapping and geographic analysis, but this game is like a living, breathing, virtual version and it is just so much fun. Most people who enjoy this game will never come to truly appreciate the authenticity you guys have put into this work of art. It’s obvious you all have awesome engineering and political advisors.
I do have a few tips for players who are getting started and will hopefully be able to answer questions relating to urban development that may alleviate some gameplay issues for you.
On the subject of
Roundabouts… (Rotaries).. Do NOT place them right off the highways like I have seen in so many videos! In fact, city physical centers should be the only placement area for such traffic tools when you would like to connect a network of roads without creating a massive center city traffic jam. The best off-ramp road systems for flowing traffic into cities is simply a large one way street with left, rights, and straight options. Lead them from the primary off-highway one-way avenues into a secondary large one way avenue and once funneled there, start giving two way directional options on supporting avenues / roads. Do the same when taking traffic back out. Also consider multiple on-ramp pathways
Wastewater Treatment Facilities – another big mistake I see players making already is that once they get access to the wastewater facility, they fail to remove the old pumps. The engineering purpose of wastewater treatment is to make the byproduct of human water consumption healthier for the environment. It does not treat the area you expose it to that is already polluted! It simply treats any new product in the system flowing through it! It is my recommendation that you start your small towns off with wells instead of pumping stations anyway. You should in theory, only make the switch when you can also have a wastewater treatment facility with it in the same water body.
Traffic / Highway Managment – Guys, the more highway options you give with complex (custom) interchanges, the better traffic in the intercity will be. I would recommend 3 exits per 2×2 tile at max (possibly exiting off either side of the tile border so 3 per 2 tiles). In the intercity, you can make inefficient and more “organic” road systems so long as your zoning makes sense! I will discuss this in the next item. Limit at all possible, funneling large roads into smaller roads. So no six lane into two lane! It makes no sense and only creates issues. If you have a volume that requires six lanes and it still makes traffic intolerable, you probably zoned inefficiently and should go back and consider the zoning Recommendstion outlined below:
Zoning – A big big big issue I see is zoning inefficiencies. Remember this order… Industrial/office, commercia, residential. When you make zoning areas you have to think logical. People go to work and on their way back they shop. They hate the noise and pollution from industrial more than commercial so always keep a maximum distance between residential and industrial. Offices can be mixed with high density residential, but don’t forget to zone a little commercial in the same area. It is actually better to have smaller zoning sections than paint large areas one zone type or another! Diversity is key in efficiency! More about this later.
Parks, Parks, Parks, and some Special buildings – Even in real life urban development, parks are so damn vital to life quality statistics and the same with cities skylines. But don’t think that parks have to be extravagant or overly budgeted. Spacing and common sense is key here. All zone types need parks/leisure so make sure to accommodate them all. Prioritize high density areas with larger parks and lower density with smaller parks. Again, ICS – institute common sense with parks!
Services – make sure you have a major service building for each service type per 2×2 tile. You can fill in the gaps not covered in their zone coverage between tiles with the smaller version of each service type. I.E. One major police station per tile with maybe a small station in between the two tiles to maximize coverage. In some cases if there is still a lack of coverage well within distance of one of these services, immediately look to road network infrastructure for issues then consider increasing budget to increase coverage for that service.
Education – Much like regular services, spacial awareness counts! With that said, education is the lifeblood of everything you do beyond a tiny population and the first couple milestones. Typically you want 2-2-1 ratio In a game like this. That is two elementary and two high schools for every one college. Not everyone will get to college, but you need to provide everyone with the two basics. Invest in education early, not late and your city will improve and become more profitable a lot sooner! Otherwise you will be catching up later when other more complex issues arise. Education drives industry, commercializations, and overall upgrading of these zones and services!
Districts / Special Districts – in real life local governments have the ability to pass special levy / taxes on zones of interest, especially if a Capital Project will cost the entire regional government a lot of money to rehabilitate particular infrastructure. What does this mean? Well, in lamens terms if you have to build a particular service like a major utility project to cover people who directly benefit in that one region, you should create a special district for those people who benefit from it and tax accordingly. People are more likely to accept levy and taxation increases if they directly benefit from the service!
Tourism / Transport – last (for now) is tourism and transport! Guys and gals, make sure to accommodate tourists with essential infrastructure. Proper spacing for bus stops/ routes and the same for train/metro are obvious, but don’t’ forget to consider commercial zoning when doing this. Tourists will bring money but only if you bring them to the businesses! Options, options, options are what win the day. The easiest way to accomplish this is by section ing off small parcels at the end of each residential zone with commercial and then having a central commercial district as well, between multiple residential communities. Like this |Small commercial| residential | large commercial | residential | small commercial
The base game of Cities: Skylines is really good. Throw in the official DLC and you've got a great management simulator. Adding in community-created mods into the mix takes things to the next level. We've compiled a list of some of the mods we use on the PC version of Cities: Skylines. If you've played through the game a number of times and wish to look at adding something new to the experience, take a gander at our recommendations.
Automatic Bulldoze (v2)
This mod is actually a spin-off of the original Automatic Bulldoze mod, which is no longer supported by the developer. Luckily, Mexahuk took over and released a new version in the Workshop to allow mayors to continue taking full advantage of the automated removal of buildings. Why is this mod so important? When running a large city with thousands of people, it becomes a chore to spot and remove abandoned buildings. This handy tool takes care of it.
Precision Engineering
Colossal Order improved the road tools in the most recent free update rolled out with the Mass Transit DLC, but it hasn't gone far enough to replace everything Precision Engineering brings to the table. The mod adds angle and distance measurements when laying down asphalt, as well as height (relative to ground level). It actually works well with the latest version of Cities: Skylines, though there is a slight overlap.
City Vitals Watch
This is one of my favorites. City Vitals Watch gives you a glance-friendly overlay of all important statistics regarding city management. There are level indications for electricity, water, sewage, employment, trash, and more. This saves clicking on each services tab to see just how departments are performing.
Rush Hour
This is the big one. I don't recommend playing Cities: Skylines without Rush Hour enabled, it's that good. Unfortunately, the mod has yet to be updated to take advantage of natural disasters, let alone Mass Transit, but we're hopeful the developer will return to bring us up-to-date magic. Here's just a taster of what Rush Hour brings to the table:
The last highlight we've covered is the main feature of Rush Hour, which offers more challenges to even more experienced city planners. Prepare your road network!
Traffic Manager: President Edition
Traffic Manager: President Edition adds a number of new features to — unsurprisingly — help better manage traffic. With this mod active, it's possible to toggle traffic lights and yield/stop signs at junctions, set up timed signals, modify speed restrictions, and even disallow vehicles on certain roads. My favorite feature is the ability to connect lanes to switch up which lanes vehicles need to be in to use a junction exit. Also, with this mod installed and the setting enabled, it's not required to install a dedicated no vehicle despawn mod.
Prop & Tree Anarchy
This is a super simple mod that simply allows for the placement of trees and props in-game under water, on roads or within building footprints. While this can lead to strange encounters where traffic moves through foliage stuck on roads if not removed, it's an incredible piece of kit that allows for a more realistic-looking city. Here's a helpful hint: use the More Beautification mod below with this one to get the most out of Prop & Tree Anarchy.
Network Extensions 2
Should you happen to find yourself with a lack of roads to choose from, Network Extensions 2 is your golden solution. This mod adds a number of new road types, including highways, residential roads, and even some dedicated public transport types.
Move It!
This mod does exactly what it says in the name. With it installed it's possible to move all manner of things, including buildings, trees, props, and nodes (for roads, quays, etc.).
Other Must-have Mods
Here are some other mods that are worthy of honorable mention, so be sure to check them out alongside our main feature list to see if any catch your attention.
Cities: Skylines is a city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. Players work to maintain various elements of the city, including its budget, health, employment, and pollution levels. Players are also able to maintain a city in a sandbox mode, which provides unrestricted creative freedom for the player.
Cities: Skylines is a progression of development from Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion titles, which focused on designing effective transportation systems. While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title. The developer's goal was to create a game engine capable of simulating the daily routines of nearly a million unique citizens, while presenting this to the player in a simple way, allowing the player to easily understand various problems in their city's design. This includes realistic traffic congestion, and the effects of congestion on city services and districts. Since the game's release, various expansions and other DLC has been released for the game. The game also has built-in support for user-generated content.
The game was first released for the Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems in March 2015, with ports to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles being released in 2017 and for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018 developed by Tantalus Media. The game received favourable reviews from critics, and was a commercial success, with more than six million copies sold on all platforms as of March 2019.
Gameplay[edit]
Cities: Skylines allows for construction of cities and a variety of transportation options.
Players start with a plot of land - equivalent to a 2-by-2-kilometre (1.2 mi × 1.2 mi) area[1] - along with an interchange exit from a nearby highway, as well as a starting amount of in-game money. The player proceeds to add roads and residential, industrial, and commercial zones and basic services like power, water, and sewage as to encourage residents to move in and supply them with jobs.
Cities Skylines Road Editor Software
As the city grows beyond certain population tiers, the player will unlock new city improvements including schools, fire stations, police stations, health care facilities and waste management systems, tax and governing edicts, transit, and other features to manage the city. One such feature enables the player to designate parts of their city as districts. Each district can be configured by the player to restrict the types of developments or enforce specific regulations within the district's bounds, such as only allowing for agricultural industrial sectors, offering free public transportation to residents in the district to reduce traffic, increased tax levels for high commercialized areas, or even with the Green Cities DLC, placing a toll on fossil fuel vehicles entering a district while excluding hybrid and electric vehicles, akin to the London Congestion Charge.[2]
Buildings in the city have various development levels that are met by improving the local area, with higher levels providing more benefits to the city. For example, a commercial store will increase in level if nearby residents are more educated, which in turn will be able to allow more employees to be hired and increase tax revenue for the city. When the player has accumulated enough residents and money, they can purchase neighboring plots of land, allowing them to build up 8 additional parcels out of 25 within a 10-by-10-kilometre (6.2 mi × 6.2 mi) area.[1] The parcel limitation is to allow the game to run across the widest range of personal computers, but players can use Steam Workshop modifications to open not only all of the game's standard 25-tile building area, but the entire map (81 tiles, 324 square kilometers).[3][4]
The game is rendered using tilt shift effects to give an impression of scope for the simulation.
The game also features a robust transportation system based on Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion, allowing the player to plan out effective public transportation for the city to reduce traffic.[1] Roads can be built straight or free-form and the grid used for zoning adapts to road shape; cities need not follow a grid plan. Roads of varying widths (up to major freeways) accommodate different traffic volumes, and variant road types (for example roads lined with trees) offer reduced noise pollution or increased property values in the surrounding area at an increased cost to the player.[5] The road system can be augmented with various forms of public transportation such as buses and subway systems.
Cities Skylines Road Editor Youtube
Modding, via the addition of user-generated content such as buildings or vehicles, is supported in Skylines through the Steam Workshop. The creation of an active content-generating community was stated as an explicit design goal.[2][6] The game includes several premade terrains to build on, and also includes a map editor to allow users to create their own maps, including the use of real world geographic features. Mods are also available to affect core gameplay elements; prepackaged mods include the ability to bypass the aforementioned population tier unlock system, unlimited funds, and a higher difficulty setting.
Development[edit]
Finnish developer Colossal Order, a thirteen-person studio at the time Cities: Skylines was released,[7] had established its reputation for the Cities in Motion Spring to my step song download. series, which primarily dealt with constructing transportation systems in pre-defined cities. They wanted to move from this into a larger city simulation like the SimCity franchise, and in preparation, developed Cities in Motion 2 using the Unity game engine to assure they had the capability to develop this larger effort.[8] They pitched their ideas to their publisher, Paradox Interactive, but these initial pitches were focused on a political angle of managing a city rather than planning of it; the player would have been mayor of the city and set edicts and regulations to help their city grow. Paradox felt that these ideas did not present a strong enough case as to go up against the well-established SimCity, and had Colossal Order revise their approach.[8]
The situation changed when the 2013 version of SimCity was released, and was critically panned due to several issues. Having gone back and forth with Colossal Order on the city simulation idea, Paradox used the market opportunity to green light the development of Cities: Skylines.[9][8]
One goal of the game was to successfully simulate a city with up to a million residents.[7] To help achieve this goal, the creators decided to simulate citizens navigating the city's roads and transit systems, to make the effects of road design and transit congestion a factor in city design.[7] In this, they found that the growth and success of a city was fundamentally tied to how well the road system was laid out.[10] Colossal Order had already been aware of the importance of road systems from Cities in Motion, and felt that the visual indication of traffic and traffic congestion was an easy-to-comprehend sign of larger problems in a city's design.[10]
To represent traffic, Colossal Order developed a complex system that would determine the fastest route available for a simulated person going to and from work or other points of interest, taking into account available roads and public transit systems nearby. This simulated person would not swerve from their predetermined path unless the route was changed mid-transit, in which case they would be teleported back to their origin instead of calculating a new path from their current location.[7] If the journey required the person to drive, a system of seven rules regulated their behavior in traffic and how this was shown to the user, such as skipping some rules in locations of the simulation that had little impact while the player was not looking at those locations.[10] This was done to avoid cascading traffic problems if the player adjusted the road system in real time.[7] The city's user-designed transportation system creates a node-based graph used to determine these fastest paths and identifies intersections for these nodes. The system then simulates the movement of individuals on the roads and transit systems, accounting for other traffic on the road and basic physics (such as speed along slopes and the need for vehicles to slow down on tight curves), in order to accurately model traffic jams created by the layout and geography of the system.[7] The developers found that their model accurately demonstrates the efficiency, or lack thereof, of some modern roadway intersections, such as the single-point urban interchange or the diverging diamond interchange.[10]
Release[edit]
Cities: Skylines was announced by publisher Paradox Interactive on 14 August 2014 at Gamescom.[11] The announcement trailer emphasized that players could 'build [their] dream city,' 'mod and share online' and 'play offline'[6]—the third feature was interpreted by journalists as a jab at SimCity, which initially required an Internet connection during play.[2][12]Skylines uses an adapted Unityengine with official support for modification.[13] The game was released on 10 March 2015, with Colossal Order committed to continuing to support the game after release.[2]
Tantalus Media assisted Paradox in porting the game to the Xbox One console and for Windows 10, which was released on 21 April 2017; the version includes the After Dark expansion, but no other expansions.[14][15][16][17][18] Tantalus also ported the game and the After Dark expansion for PlayStation 4, expected for released on 15 August 2017. Codigo de registro para photostage. Both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions received physical release versions distributed by Koch Media.[19] Tantalus also ported the game for the Nintendo Switch, which was released on 13 September 2018 and included the 'After Dark' and 'Snowfall' expansions.[20]
The game was built from the ground-up to be friendly to player-created modifications, interfacing with Steam Workshop. Colossal Order found that with Cities in Motion, players had quickly begun to modify the game and expand on it. They wanted to encourage that behavior in Cities: Skylines, as they recognized that modding ability was important to players and would not devalue the game. Within a month of the game's release, over 20,000 assets had been created in the Workshop, including modifications that enabled a first-person mode and a flying simulator.[21] As of March 2017, over 100,000 user-created items were available. Many of these fans have been able to use crowd-funding services like Patreon to fund their creation efforts. Paradox, recognizing fan-supported mods, started to engage with some of the modders to create official content packs for the game starting in 2016. The first of these was a new set of art deco-inspired buildings created by Matt Crux. Crux received a portion of the sales of the content from Paradox.[22][23]
An educational version of Cities: Skylines was developed by Colossal Order and the group TeacherGaming and released in May 2018. This version includes tutorials and scenarios designed for use in a classroom, as well as a means for teachers to track a student's progress.[24]
Expansion packs[edit]
Cities: Skylines offers several DLCexpansion packs. Below is a list of major expansion packs provided by the developers.
Reception[edit]
When the game was first announced, journalists perceived it as a competitor to the poorly received, 2013 reboot of SimCity, describing it as 'somewhat .. the antidote to Maxis' most recent effort with SimCity'[53] and 'out to satisfy where SimCity couldn't.'[2] A Eurogamer article touched upon 'something of a size mismatch' between developer Colossal Order (then staffed by nine people) and Maxis, and their respective ambitions with Skylines and SimCity.[2]
Upon release, Cities: Skylines received 'generally positive' reception from critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[44]IGN awarded the game a score of 8.5 and said 'Don’t expect exciting scenarios or random events, but do expect to be impressed by the scale and many moving parts of this city-builder.'[49]Destructoid gave the game a 9 out of 10 with the reviewer stating, 'Cities: Skylines not only returns to the ideals which made the city-building genre so popular, it expands them. I enjoyed every minute I played this title, and the planning, building, and nurturing of my city brought forth imagination and creativity from me like few titles ever have.'[48]The Escapist gave Cities: Skylines a perfect score, noting its low price point and stated that despite a few minor flaws, it is 'the finest city builder in over a decade.'[52]
Much critical comparison was drawn between SimCity and Cities: Skylines, with the former seen as the benchmark of the genre by many, including the CEO of Colossal Order.[54] Generally critics considered Cities: Skylines to have superseded SimCity as the leading game of the genre,[55][56][57][58] with The Escapist comparing the two on a variety of factors and finding Cities: Skylines to be the better game in every one considered.[59] However, some critics did consider the absence of disasters and random events to be something that the game lacked in comparison to SimCity, as well as a helpful and substantial tutorial.[60] Disasters were added to the game in the aptly-titled Natural Disasters DLC, as well as specialized buildings for detecting and responding to them.
Commercial reception[edit]
Cities: Skylines has been Paradox's best-selling published title: Within 24 hours, 250,000 copies had been sold;[61] within a week, 500,000 copies;[62] within a month, one million copies;[63] and on its first anniversary, had reached 2 million copies sold.[64] By its second anniversary, the game had reached 3.5 million sales.[65] In March 2018, it was revealed that the game had sold more than five million copies on the PC platform alone.[66] On the game's fourth anniversary in March 2019, Colossal Order announced that Cities: Skylines had surpassed 6 million units sold across all platforms.[67]
The city government of Stockholm, where Paradox's headquarters are located, used Cities: Skylines to plan a new transportation system.[68] The developer of Bus Simulator 18 planned out the roads and highways of the game's world map through Cities: Skylines before recreating it within their game to provide a seemingly realistic city and its facilities for the game.[69]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
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