SimCity vs. Cities: Skylines - Who Wins?

[Shamus Young]

SimCity vs. Cities: Skylines - Who Wins?

When you compare the preeminent city-building game in SimCity to upstart newcomer Cities: Skylines, the winner should be obvious, right?

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[Kenjitsuka]

Heard a lot of good buzz about this!
Never played a Simcity type game, but I like building bases in RTS-es.

So, maybe I'll give this a whirl and get pleasantly addicted!

Good article, Shamus, and nice to see your face in your forum picture. Hiya!

P.S.
CAPTCHA: Hulk Smash.

Huh, that does remind me... can you drop Godzilla or a disaster on your city when bored?!

 

[Eri]

With so many good things I've heard about this game, It is very hard to resist buying it.

I'm trying to work through some others games but I think it is inevitable that I buy this.

 

[Rituro]

With so many good things I've heard about this game, It is very hard to resist buying it.

My resistance broke when, shortly after launch, three of my favourite Twitch streamers abandoned their usual schedules to play it. I bought in the day after. I regret nothing.

 

[rofltehcat]

Time consumed: 43 hours up to now in Cities Skylines. 0 in SimCity. Considering I really don't have all that much time currently I guess this counts as a "win" for SimCity.

 

[Lightknight]

This is exactly the sort of article I wanted to see. Something contrasting a big money monster like EA failing with a smaller studio doing things right.

 

[medv4380]

There is only one aspect that SimCity did better than Skylines, and that is window dressing. SimCity certainly does have the best window dressing. SimCity has random zombie attacks, meteors, Nuclear accidents. All are missing in Skylines. The closest Skylines has is misplacing a dam resulting in a flooded city. Really more of an engineering accident caused by the player than Godzilla coming to burn your city, and eat your trash. Skylines doesn't even have a tornado to show up and break a few buildings.

However, all the window dressing in the world doesn't make up for a broken base game. I'm sure a number of the missing features can even be modded in over time if enough people wanted them in.

SimCity would have been much better had it had large areas to edit, and one way roads. One of the Tips SimCity gave to improve traffic flow was to have multiple highway connectors. How do you construct a highway connector without one way roads? You can usually see one proper connector just outside of the editable zone, but you could never make one yourself. Extending the highway without an avenue, sure if you want to eat up this tiny nothing square you have to edit. However, in skylines you can actually do that.

Heck the best feature I've seen is actually the bus stops. You don't even need to use the buses. Just place one bus stop at one point and another, and it'll show you the actual route the routing AI will pick. Gives you a good idea on how to fix traffic issues.

 

[StorkV]

Cities: Skylines wins!

 

[Barbas]

(Snip).

Free Easter egg.

This was great. Some might call it going for the low-hanging fruit, or picking on the kid who picks the stucco off the classroom walls, but I think this serves well to illustrate the difference in quality that can result from two very different approaches to development. It reminds me that the conclusion of The Pentagon Wars would have turned out a lot differently if it had been left to the small handful of men in that one room, at the drawing board with, their shirt sleeves rolled up.

 

[syl3r]

yeah, skilines is realy that much better.
but its not perfect, just keep that in mind!
tourism is currently completely underdeveloped. you can plop some unique buildings so maybe some touris might come, but there is no system that exploits tourism like casinos would do.

that "techstructure"/specialization in simcitys is the ONLY feature im missing in skilines. but i can live with that. everything else ist just soooooooo much better then sc. especially if you add great mods that comeo ut constantly

 

[SomeLameStuff]

Heard a lot of good buzz about this!
Never played a Simcity type game, but I like building bases in RTS-es.

So, maybe I'll give this a whirl and get pleasantly addicted!

Good article, Shamus, and nice to see your face in your forum picture. Hiya!

P.S.
CAPTCHA: Hulk Smash.

Huh, that does remind me... can you drop Godzilla or a disaster on your city when bored?!

There's currently no disaster options, unless you make your own. Like flooding your entire city with a badly placed dam.

 

[PH3NOmenon]

And yet...

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with what's in the article. And when the two are compared, Skylines is a clear and massive winner. And yet...

I find myself thinking SimCity was more enjoyable than Skylines is. It just doesn't seem to "click" for me. I *hate* that I can't make perfect circles with the road tools in a non-fiddly manner. I don't like how there's no city specializations. Casino's and tourism were cool options, though the traffic model of SimCity was woefully inadequate for them. I don't like how the buildings look, the lack of variety in models make cities look boring, whereas in SimCity they looked vibrant. I liked the happiness/wealth dynamic of SimCity more than the happiness level system Skylines uses. I miss being able to add-on to services. Adding extra patient wings or ambulances to clinics was a decision that just felt good. I don't like the unlocking system in Skylines as much as I liked the reward system in SimCity. My city in skylines had 9 garbage dumps because I hadn't unlocked the incinerator yet because I didn't have the population for it, locking away basic services behind milestones seems silly, even if the milestones are easy enough to get. I don't like how airborne pollution doesn't seem to drift on the wind (though I might have missed this if it does). I miss disasters. I think the water physics in Skylines are out of place and I wouldn't miss them at all if they were absent.

That was a bit of a rant, but I guess my main point is that SimCity was the better "game" (please note the quotes and italics). In game-terms it felt better and more polished. In simulation terms though SimCity is a pile of utter and complete garbage where-as Skylines is actually a dream. I guess this is unfair criticism on a genre that's called "City Simulators".

I'm aware that all this owes, in huge part, to my aversion to modding. I don't want to go trawling through imbalanced or buggy user-made content to find what works. I want to play with what professional game designers deemed good. I freely admit that's an issue with me and not with Skylines.

All in all, Skylines sharpened and honed my hatred for EA for destroying SimCity to a razor edge. If SimCity had had even a slightly competent simulation engine, then it would've been the better game. As it stands, Skylines stands head and shoulders above SimCity simply because SimCity's foundation was made from butter. And not even good butter, but the discount I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter junk.

 

[Parshooter]

Shamus what about Chirpy?

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

its amazing how utterly destroyed simcity is by this game, hell they even delivered on the stuff people asked of simcity on day one, such as an offline option (which shouldve been absolutely freaking obvious) and mods, the mod scene for the game is also growing extremely fast, it now has well over 21 thousand mods on the workshop

 

[Darkness665]

The servers had DRM problems but that wasn't the only issue. I thought this was widely known, but maybe not. Much of the simulation (percentage unknown) was done on the servers. A bunch of, most likely, Java code that ran on the servers so the various player cities could connect to each other. When the brown stuff hit the swirling dispenser somebody realized they needed to fix it. Six months later (-ish, I never got the game) they had an update that moved the simulation off their servers. I did read a blog regarding the situation.

So two things were coming at them in swarms they didn't plan on. First, the DRM and in typical EA fashion they completely bungled it. Not only did their CEO proudly pronounce his supreme idiocy but he enforced the same in that he only green-lit multi-player games. Luckily he is gone, sadly I anticipate Project $10 to arrive at Unity soon.

The second was typical server mismanagement at AAA game companies. It all sounds great if you plan on using Vendor X server and Vendor Y Java implementation with M many servers ready to go with N network connections. But seriously AAA game companies cannot do the math to get the right setup nor will they ever spend the effort (resources, cash, infrastructure, QA) necessary to simulate 200,000 players logging on in the same exact time window. Why wouldn't they? Pre-installed games only escalate the problem.

Now, note that many companies have the first day blues on their servers. One special event in my memory was watching apple not being able to handle the load on a Xmas evening. Everybody had their new iWhatever, had their shiny iTunes Xmas gift cards in their hands and - boom - server overload.

The link to the bad path finding is hilarious so thank you very much for that. I might have to look into getting it when Origin does a cheap deal for it. Just so I can set up failure modes.

Well stated, Shamus. With the caveat that the princes screwing the pooch might have been made clearer earlier versus the team - you did cover it at the end. That is most likely just me disliking EA management to the extent that I do.

 

[Bedinsis]

Shamus what about Chirpy?

Check out his web site. He has made his feelings quite known there.

(Spoiler alert: he didn't care for it at all)

 

[LordLundar]

There's currently no disaster options, unless you make your own. Like flooding your entire city with a badly placed dam.

Or putting your water intake plant downstream from your waste treatment plant.

 

[SomeLameStuff]

There's currently no disaster options, unless you make your own. Like flooding your entire city with a badly placed dam.

Or putting your water intake plant downstream from your waste treatment plant.

Get the mod that makes fire spreadable and watch your entire city catch fire =P

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

My Steam review for this game was one sentence long.

"Everything you wanted that awful Sim City game from 2013 to be, Cities: Skylines is."

This is a seriously fun game, and exactly what I wanted in a city builder. I wouldn't mind if Skylines added disasters at some point, which is the one area where Sim City did deliver. But it's not a deal breaker by any stretch. Frankly, I hope they add it as DLC. If anyone ever deserved to make a few extra bucks, it's the company that made Cities: Skylines.

They earned a fan with this game. It's fantastic. In the week since I bought it, I've logged over 50 hours already. And I've no sign of stopping anytime soon. Plus with all the mods, I can keep playing new fun scenarios that cater to what I want in this kind of game. It's safe to call me very impressed.