The Sad Truth about Cities Skylines

[jboord44]

I've been in love with this game for months now. I can't express how much I have enjoyed the creative freedom that this game affords you. It's a true City Simulation, and the cities youre able to build are staggering.

But I've come to a very sad realization about this game that everyone already knows about on some level, we just move on because there's not really anything we can do about it. That realization is that once your reach what I consider to be the small number of about 100k cims, your game becomes very different. FPS drops. Simulation speed slows to a halt. If you dare push towards 200k citizens, your game will ultimately become unplayable at some point. Everything just breaks down.

I had a perfect city going. It was beautiful. I had hours and hours into this thing, it was my masterpiece. At 100k cims, I had the typical issues like no more high sim speeds, and a small bit of fps drop in spots. No big deal, I can forge on with that. But at 200k citizens, the wheels came off. Power started going out in weird places, sewage icons started appearing everywhere even though I had more than enough capacity. Water starts dropping off in patches for no reason. Police Icons appeared on about half of my buildings even though I had tons of stations and no major traffic blockages. The game just goes haywire, and it is really sad.

The truth is there's no way to really polish off a beefy city. Once you hit the really really fun parts, you're forced to abandon tons of hard work, and due to the limits of technology and what not, I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it.

And the aboslute worst part about it is that all it really takes is one decently sized high-density residential area. That alone can hold like 60-100k cims!! It's ridiculous. You make your main downtown area and youre already about done. Im at the point now where I'm gonna just start building all my smaller towns/suburbs first, fill in the surrounding map before making my urban areas just so that I can enjoy building, because doing it the other way causes the inevitable chaos to be immediate.

After this debacle in my masterpiece city, I'm left with questions that maybe some of you can help me with. Are there solutions to this? Is it just population or do the number of assets cause problems too? Is there anyway to control population? I haven't tried realistic population mod yet, if that even cut it in half that would be great.

Is there anyway to get development without population? That would be a neat trick to try to avoid some of these messes. If anybody has any experience to share or any inisights at all, I'd love to hear them, because for the first time since buying the game I'm a little bit discouraged.

Thanks

[grapplehoeker]

Regardless of population numbers, you should never see any problem occurring with power, water or sewage. None of these three involve Cim interaction other than generating or using and you should be able to plop sufficient power and water produers as well as sewage handling to cater for that.
What you do need to watch for is reaching your agent limit.
If that happens (again, it is not dependent on population count), then you may certainly see issues with other services such as the emergency services, deathcare and garbage. If you have not reached your agent limit, then any service provision problem you experience is due to lack of coverage.

[jboord44]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Regardless of population numbers, you should never see any problem occurring with power, water or sewage. None of these three involve Cim interaction other than generating or using and you should be able to plop sufficient power and water produers as well as sewage handling to cater for that.
What you do need to watch for is reaching your agent limit.
If that happens (again, it is not dependent on population count), then you may certainly see issues with other services such as the emergency services, deathcare and garbage. If you have not reached your agent limit, then any service provision problem you experience is due to lack of coverage.

Ok, so what exactly is agent limit?

[Nippur]

Yeah, I wanna know too

[jboord44]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Regardless of population numbers, you should never see any problem occurring with power, water or sewage. None of these three involve Cim interaction other than generating or using and you should be able to plop sufficient power and water produers as well as sewage handling to cater for that.
What you do need to watch for is reaching your agent limit.
If that happens (again, it is not dependent on population count), then you may certainly see issues with other services such as the emergency services, deathcare and garbage. If you have not reached your agent limit, then any service provision problem you experience is due to lack of coverage.

Cuz I kinda get the sense that the problem I described still stands, it just has a different cause. But from the sound of it, I sense that there's basically just a problem that comes when your cities get too big, and be it population or items on screen, whatever it is, the sad truth remains, and that truth is that there is a cap on your dream city. But again, technology has its limits I guess so what can we really do other than move forward.

[DonVitoCorleoneof239]

While simcity 4 is dwarfed by this game- at least having the regions seperated parts of the city from being in teh same instance while still "being part of it" in the region view.

Well at least visually- sure didn't have an effect on the game until NAM.

I just hope as 81 zones did for the current game- others will come out that will further add to the playability.

I think the devs are away and by far more responsive than the latest sim city.

[MarkJohnson]

There are many types of agent limits in the game. An agent is all of the things the game has to keep track of in the game, mostly cims. The object of an agent based simulator is getting your cims from point A to point B in a timely manner or you have issues.

The main agent limit is Traffic agents. The game has 64k (65,535) traffic agents it can track. This limit is automatic self-controlling and the game will do things like, despawn vehicles that won't make their destination, teleport workers that can't make their destination, not spawn traffic if it can't make it's destination before spawning, not even spawn traffic in mature areas so as to keep agents low in larger cities.

This will be your biggest challenge. You need design your city to have good mass-transit to keep vehicles off the road. Good industry/commerce interaction to keep vehicles off the road and keep import/exports as low as possible.

There are other agent limits, like road limits, tree limits, pathing limits, etc.

There's a mod called CSL show more limits. It will show most of the agents in the game and their limits.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=531738447

It's not enough to have a beautiful city, but maintain balance of agents in your city.

EDIT:

oops, I forgot the most import limit to the game, and that's your computer. Your computer has a limit to how many agents it can track itself. To build outside the 9-tiles this game is designed, you'll need a good CPU. I highly recommend a quad core as dual cores just don't have the power.

[NoirMoutton]

You don't mention your computer specs or how many assets/mods/custom maps you're subscribed to (if any) Also be interesting to find out if you are playing 25 or 81 tiles. If you are then you can't complain- CO do not recommend pushing the game so hard.

[Sollaro]

Sorry man dont agree with you I have a city that has 409k sims and I am still going strong! I Screen shots on my page if you want to see! I also have 1000 plus assets and mods running! Your computer is whats hold you back not the game! I have 4th gen i5 and nvidia 950 12 gb ram and thats not an even powerfull PC..

[Dertyde94]

@Sollaro well you are very lucky then, I have slowdows at 50k-60k making the game just uninteresting :( and I have an i5 4460, GTX 960 16GB RAM, so I'm wondering: is it the game, some mods or maybe transports? (my train stations are full of people)
Nice city by the way!

[NoirMoutton]

Sollaro you're missing my point. It's not about how anyone else choses to play the game- thats their business- so long as they are rational and apply common sense. If anyone chooses to play beyond the devs recommendations/support and at the limits of their PC tthen things can and do (eventually) start to go "wrong"/play up. That individual must accept responsiblity for the problem and not blame the game/devs. Common sense! I play81 tiles with 1900 assets/mods/custom maps on an Acer VN7 591G with 16GB RAM. When building a really big city things can slow down but I don't blame Colossal Order- I've made an informed choice and take the risk. It's my responsibility!

[Ualdriver]

/\
If you won't to avoid the problem, just use 25 tiles. I have lower specs than you and a higher population of 185k, and I'm still able to do slow and medium game speeds. With 81 tiles, your CIMs have to travel farther and thus stay on the road for longer periods which means that there's more people driving

[simonmd]

The thing to remember about CS and indeed, most if not all similar games is the fact that we still are not at a stage where the average or even high end home PC can replicate accurately something as dynamic and complicated as a city.

What we have here is a 'large town' simulator. It's simply beyond the capabilities of 2016 hardware to model millions of different 'agents' in a realistic manor as well as depicting them in a graphical setting like a game.

I myself got a true indication of just how 'small' Skylines is when I tried to make a London Map last year. Even after reducing the scale so the map itself was at least 30% smaller than a true 1 to 1 scale to make it reasonable to play, I could still only fit in the city center, Westminster to the East End in the full 25 unlocked squares area.

Even so, the entire thing ground to a halt before I could fill it and we are talking not even 20% of London's area being covered.

This isnt a dig at the game, what it does is remarkable, it's the fault of our own hardware that means a 'True' City Simulator is still impossible.

Maybe Cities Skylines 2026?

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by simonmd:

a realistic manor

Haven't seen that one. Please post a link to this new asset ;)

[simonmd]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Originally posted by simonmd:

a realistic manor

Haven't seen that one. Please post a link to this new asset ;)

Here you go smart alec
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=472592622&searchtext=manor

[kristynGetty]

Simon and everyone there is a feature in a game economy where 20 million AI can be simulated with out causing the players CPU problems. So it can be done but this is online and not sure if it can be the same just on one person PC? You could always mix different types of AI technique like have some Ai that is just data like in Simcity? It would require i think a major upgrade to have this?

Cities XXL can go up to 50 million citizens but their citizens are not real so perhaps this could help with out affecting live population?