Player Reached Development Limit in Cities: Skylines
Cities: Skylines has some limitations. The city simulation needs extremely powerful computers, plus it has limits on building number.
Cities: Skylines is a city builder that has had a huge impact on the genre. Over the years, it has served not only for entertainment purposes, but also as a scientific tool. While it is undoubtedly a very good title, it is not without some flaws. One of them is the rather stubborn limitation on building large metropolises.
Building limit a real problem?
You may not realize it, but in Cities: Skylines you can put up a maximum of 50,000 buildings.
- When you reach this limit, you simply lose the ability to expand your city.
- Importantly, small items like bridge columns are also counted, so with larger projects it is relatively easy to "hit the wall."
This is especially persistent with maps where most of the surface is covered with land. As a result, developing them fully is virtually impossible. This is brilliantly illustrated in the video below, which shows a city with the limit of buildings reached (the population on the map is 522,636 - of course, in this regard, it is possible to achieve much more). You can clearly see that a large part of the area remained empty.
Of course, the community has managed to create mods that enable us to circumvent several restrictions placed by the game - including the number of fields on which we can build. The limit of structures, however, could not be increased.
RAM is another source of trouble
Another problem faced by Cities: Skylines players, is tge huge demand for RAM.
- The bigger the city we build, the more computer resources it consumes.
- However, this is not particularly shocking if we realize that the title simulates the movement of vehicles and pedestrians in real time.
Interestingly, the game gives little subtle signs when our computer starts to run out of resources. At some point, it simply stops accelerating time. No matter what speed you choose, the gameplay will continue at the same standard pace.
Theoretically, you can try to lower the graphics level, but I know from experience that this will not do much good and you are unlikely to regain the ability to accelerate time. Actually, the only salvation here is the already legendary mod called Traffic Manager: President Edition. This is because it enables you to clear all traffic on the map. Of course, this is a temporary solution, because the game will quickly start generating cars from scratch.
- The largest projects created by players require up to several tens of GB of RAM to operate.
- Therefore, if you care about creating huge metropolises, it will be rather difficult to do so without 64 GB.
- Of course, if you are creating smaller cities with a population of about 50,000, then 16 GB of RAM will easily suffice.
As you can see, Cities: Skylines has some problems that make gameplay unpleasant for those wanting to create more advanced projects. It is possible that the upcoming sequel will change something in this aspect. We are counting on this not only for us, but also for the a community of thousands Cities: Skylines fans.
