I woke up early on Saturday and decided that this weekend, I will be simulating something.
This naturally means I'm gonna be installing Cities: Skylines again, because firing up Planet Zoo just makes me feel bad for all the animals stuck in my dogshit wildlife prison.
Cities: Skylines is a game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive that came out in early 2015. It's best known quality is being a city simulator that released after Maxis and EA did a 10 point bellyflop into an empty concrete bowl with the release of SimCity (2013), a release so widely lauded that EA has memory-holed the SimCity almost in it's entirety.
Colossal Order hit it big after a series of traffic management sims called Cities in Motion. With the first CiM, you were put in charge of Roads and Stuff with the goal of making everyone's commute a little less of a living hell. Cities in Motion 2 followed this up by allowing you to build some stuff, too.
Skylines followed this up by being a game about managing everyone's commute but also forcing you to draw the Rest of the Fucking Owl, Too.
Skylines's launch was light on content, but it shipped with Steam Workshop integration. This had two main effects:
1.) The community could quickly bolster content, and they were happy to - gamers descended on this game like a pack of starving wild dogs after the spectacular re-entry flameout of SimCity 2013
2.) Coming back to this game seven years later means you're gonna be downloading Gigabytes of Bullshit, followed promptly by loading Gigabytes of Bullshit directly into your system memory
Pictured: Memory utilization of your average Cities: Skylines save
Now, if you just stick to subscribing to building assets to try and avoid Lick's Disease all you've gotta worry about is no longer having RAM for anything else. But if you're like me, you love to download Things that will maybe add a little more depth, a few more things to do.
Unfortunately, when you download Things, they all want to add their own little widget, or button, or text and firing up the game will bombard you with popups overlaying one another while the game Pings and Beeps and flashes shit trying to get your attention.
What you see on a brand new load.
Going into the various tools will produce More Popups, More Controls. Usually just wherever the Fuck on the screen; organizing them is your job. Remember, you downloaded and THEN turned this on. You're at fault as much as anything else.
It's not just mods that do this either. Here's a bunch of popups from the Industries DLC trying to tell me.. something.
Unfortunately, a lot of gameplay content just adds to the mass of the game, until it's stretching out as wide as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and also about as deep too. Industries, colleges, airports and parks are all handled in the exact same way, designating a Special Goodboy Zone and then filling that zone with the Special Buildings. If there's one thing I miss deeply from SimCity 2013, it's the ability to upgrade and attach new chunks to existing buildings. Instead, you just doodle a splotch on the map and then start filling it with discrete buildings because you are now, in fact, playing 1996's titular RTS Red Alert.
It sounds like I'm ragging on Cities Skylines and, don't get me wrong, I absolutely am. But it's still the best modern city sim on the market today. It's still great to watch your city grow organicially as you slowly sprawl over the map. Mods, while contributing to all sorts of bloat, UI included, really do help add hours of enjoyment to this game in ways other city sims have never even attempted.
Rainfall is a mod that hooks into the window dressing weather that was added early on to the game and actually makes it Matter. Rainwater will accumulate and dump into water sources, carrying pollution and also causing potentially catastrophic flooding. So now you need to make sure you've got adequate drainage and consider elevation when dealing with road networks and expansion.
It also comes with a cool feature, in where you will forget all about drainage when buying new chunk of the map, leading to a future surprise.
Map View will literally generate a cool roadmap of your city that you can then save to an image, which is just super neat. It also lets you view the travesty of my own creation, Foxland.
Foxland is not the name of the city. It is the name of an event, a circus stuffed with 12,000 clowns; each and every one taking a good look at the brochure before proudly proclaiming Yes, This is Where I want to Live.
And much like the ancient city of Babylon, with it's glittering towers of gold, god can not abide a gathering of clowns.
And yet, under what I assume to be gigatons of water, the clowns persist.
Nay, they have Flourished.
