author: ElMundo
Cities: Skylines – A year featuring Snowfall expansion, nice patches, and tons of mods
It's been almost a year since the release of Cities: Skylines, and the game is seeing its second official expansion – Snowfall. Let's see if the addition of snow is as fun as it sounds, and how the game has changed since the release of After Dark.
- The second official expansion pack – Snowfall;
- Patch 1.3.0 – a host of gameplay improvements and fixes;
- Expanded game area – Patch 1.2.2;
- Lots of mods and add-ons – a summary of the most interesting ones can be found below.
After the release of the new SimCity – not the most successful city builder from Electronic Arts – many have feared that it's going to be a very long wait before we see the next great city building sim. These concerns were fueled even further by Cities XXL, which turned out to be a virtually unchanged copy of the previous installment in the series. Luckily, however, Cities: Skylines appeared soon afterwards, and it became clear that the production from the Finnish studio Colossal Order was exactly what all the urban designers were waiting for. It had great ratings, outstanding playability, and worked like a charm – what more could you possibly ask for?
Today, nearly a year after its release, Cities: Skylines is a title with an established position on the market. The game managed to find more than 2 million buyers, and in September last year we had the opportunity to play After Dark – the first official add-on, introducing a day and night cycle and a number of novelties related to the functioning of a city after the sun goes down. Now, we will have to face off yet another surprise courtesy of Mother Nature – the forecast for today is heavy snowfall with a chance of blizzard.
It's snowing, or "Honey, is the dog sled ready?"
Snowfall is the second official expansion, once again introducing a substantial number of changes to the game. Most of them are related to the presence of the aforementioned white flakes, which will be the source not only of beautiful views, but also many new problems for the functioning of urban space. The biggest ones will obviously involve our transportation system – if your greatest worry so far were traffic jams blocking main roads and back alleys alike then... well, it's only going to get worse. Roads coated with ice and buried under snow will force the cars to move slower, which means that a smaller number of vehicles gets past each intersection – and this leads us straight to an endless congestion hell. There's only one way you can remedy this – by sending an army of road plows on the streets, removing the snow and restoring the roads' full traffic capacity. Of course, the process itself is simplified – we don't get to see how the vehicles push the lingering snow off the road, but the difference in the appearance of the asphalt's surface is definitely noticeable. A very interesting addition is the road maintenance service, which appears regularly on the streets of the city, improving the quality of the road surface and increasing the maximum speed at which vehicles can travel.
With snowfall comes one more concern, namely the low temperatures experienced by the residents of the city. Thus, it becomes a necessity to provide buildings with additional heating, which can be done in two ways. If you plan to give the inhabitants free reign in that matter, you better see to it that the power grid is sufficiently developed – power consumption will be substantially higher than under normal conditions. However, if we decide to tackle the problem with the authority at our disposal, we will have to invest in district heating and modernize our underground pipe network – the sewer and water pipes will be supplemented with heating pipes which distribute the heat to the buildings. And considering that the people are rarely satisfied with "just enough" heat, our boiler stations will be seeing some hot action in the coming days.
T is for tram and T is for traffic, A is the A for acting pragmatic
The game has finally seen the introduction of a long-awaited means of transport, namely trams. However, from an economical standpoint, they don’t always seem like the most cost-effective investment. Although they can pick up more people than the buses, the electrical energy required to power a tram network is substantial, making it a somewhat costly option. Still, an indisputable advantage of the trams is the fact that the tracks can run separately from the streets, which turns out to be a blessing in a situation where we plan to run our tram line along a bustling thoroughfare. In fact, there are more than a dozen new variants of roads with tram tracks embedded, running in one or both directions, which greatly facilitates the planning of a tram route. So, if it's the traffic jams that are bothering us, we just have to modify the road layout – there are streets where the additional capacity gained this way can be quite substantial.
It’s a real shame that the snow is visible only on the three maps added with the expansion – on the others it’s nowhere to be seen. Instead, we get other atmospheric conditions: rain and fog, densely enveloping the urban landscape. We can see that the add-on's main attraction has been applied in a rather selective manner. But every cloud has a silver lining – the maps are really enormous, so before we finish exploring them, we will be well a few dozens of hours of fun into the game. Obviously, the expansion introduces a new set of public buildings – apart from the base for the aforementioned plows and tram depots we can also build a public sauna, improving the health of the city residents, boiler stations that produce and send the heat to the buildings, as well as some new attractions, such as skating rinks, curling tracks, cross-country skiing tracks or parks covered in snow. There's no hiding the fact that Snowfall brings a pretty impressive set of innovations to the table, significantly changing the rules of the game in some aspects.
Patch 1.3.0 – new features, same old issues
Together with the latest expansion we get our hands on the newest patch, version 1.3.0, which, in addition to the new atmospheric effects, also adds some interesting novelties. The most interesting among them is by far the editor included in the package, which enables us to change the appearance of individual maps and adapt them to our needs even before the game starts, which can potentially multiply the fun factor. The creators have provided an expanded public transportation panel, allowing us to conduct a full analysis of passenger distribution on specific means of transport as well as entire transportation networks. Additionally, the patch provides us with a number of significant fixes affecting the functioning of the city – from now on we can safely improve the roads that have been built on overpasses, and the buses and trams will pick up their routes from the same position they were inwhen we saved and finished the game instead of being reset to a depot.
Unfortunately, there are still some irritating bugs left in the game, but — let's be honest — such things are sometimes unavoidable in a game with such a large scope. What keeps surprising me is the lack of implementation of the right of way for emergency vehicles – it's something the players have been requesting from the developers for quite a long time and, unfortunately, still awaits implementation. It’s a pity, because on more than one occasion I had lost an important building to a fire (or a citizen to a critical condition) because the ambulance or the fire brigade car were stuck in traffic and couldn't arrive on time. Furthermore, I've often been a witness to situations in which cars executed an U-turn by crossing the green median separating the lanes, and obstructing the traffic in the process. Seems like a triviality, but it can sometimes greatly complicate the handling of a virtual city.
On the other hand, the Finns try to avoid repeating the design mistake known from SimCity, namely too small areas designated for development. Although they were already big in the original game, patch 1.2.2 expands the available space even further. Creating huge, bustling metropolises in Cities: Skylines has now become possible.
Steam Workshop is in full swing!
The real strength of Cities: Skylines, however, lies in the huge community centered around the title, with which the developer team at Colossal Order is actively cooperating. Suffice it to say that the vast majority of modifications has been adapted to the newest version in cooperation with the Finns, virtually eliminating compatibility issues of individual fixes. To show just how dynamic the community focused around the production is, I'll let the numbers speak for themselves: so far the fans have put more than 60,000 buildings and textures in Steam Workshop, created more than 15,000 maps, saved 10,000 games and added nearly 600 mods. Pretty impressive, isn't it?
Among all those mods, there's a lot of interesting propositions for those who want to either spice up or subdue the game. I decided to briefly introduce you to some of them:
Rush Hour – a mod that will allow us to tackle problems stemming from increased traffic. In the game, regardless of whether it’s day or night, all facilities are open and the traffic at night does not decrease as much as one would expect. With this modification, we will have to face the volume of workers and students returning from work or school during peak hours – what awaits us are record-breaking traffic jams and the distress associated with a completely clogged city that will have to be cleared out.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=605590542
Automatic Bulldoze – this mod can really make our lives easier. During the game we often have to deal with the dismantling of buildings that had burned down or were abandoned for some other reason. Thanks to this mod, the process is done automatically, so there's no need to closely inspect the huge area of ??our city in search of vacant buildings.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=406132323
First Person Camera – as you have probably guessed, this modification allows us to observe the game from a first-person perspective, so we can feel like a resident of the city we created. An interesting addition, though it doesn't really contribute anything significant.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=406255342
Traffic Report Tool 2.0 – If we have trouble identifying the streets with excessive traffic, we should definitely install this mod. It will display a color-coded map showing the volume of traffic along a route. Useful when planning the development of the street network.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=408092246
Toggle Traffic Lights – This mod is very useful especially when we have to deal with congested intersections – it allows us to create priority to the right intersections, which can somewhat improve the flow of cars at selected locations. If an ever-clogging city has us on the ropes, we should try using this modification.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=411833858
Flight Cimulator – How about a flyby over the city we created? Such an opportunity comes with the Flight Cimulator mod – a rather simple, but very interesting modification, which admittedly does not provide us with very elaborate controls and realism as far as simulations go, but watching our own metropolis with a bird's eye view is a most pleasant thing to do.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=413366627
Functional Nursing Homes for Senior Citizens – The name says it all: the mod introduces retirement homes for the elderly to live in. It's a win-win situation – our senior residents will receive professional care, and we get the vacant homes they used to occupy. Pure profit, as strange as this would sound.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=554232266
Isometric Camera – finally something for the fans of the classic renditions of SimCity. This mod shows us our entire city in a classic isometric perspective, taking us a dozen or so years back in time in an instant. The visual effect is simply stunning!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?l=polish&id=409359952
As you can see, Cities: Skylines is a game full of options, and its features are constantly expanded not only by the team at Colossal Order, but also the game's huge, very active fan community. The latest expansion is a well-designed add-on introducing some very important novelties to the gameplay, though it's a pity that the snow only appears on some of the maps. A significant number of pressing issues, especially regarding the technical aspects, was successfully tackled with subsequent patches. This gives us hope that this already very good city-builder will only become better, and we will be able to return to this title soon to review another list of interesting additions. Including, of course, even more complex and interesting fan-made modifications.