vogon
@vogon

it feels like as the genre of city builders gets more and more elaborate, we get more and more blatant demonstrations that the people who do the systems development of city builders don't really understand much of anything


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in reply to @vogon's post:

it's so fucking funny, going into this I noticed the different density housing demand bars and was like "ah! cool! that's gonna be more interesting than just having one residential demand bar" but it turns out all the thought they put into it is "rich, sophisticated people live in dense cities and everyone else lives in eternal single-family sprawl"

other fun oversights in the housing model include the fact that low-rent housing (which the in-game tooltips directly say is subsidized by the state!) can still become condemned for lack of demand or because people's rent is too high

In fact it seems to constantly be condemned even if there is demand unless you put it right next to the landfill or something, like one goes down a month due to high rent if the neighborhood is at all nice. its maddening

yeah the assets are very similar to the housing projects my city did in the 80's, they look the part for sure, and I guess the rent is lower or something? but it does still fluctuates with the market 🤦

I ended up just putting them between an overpass and the elevated rail which fixed the issue since nobody wants that land, and hey now it looks realistically bleak. I guess it is realistic for improvements to a neighborhood resulting in developers bulldozing cheap housing, that is playing out rn like ten blocks from where I live lol

i think it’s slightly less “the developers don’t understand how cities work and get built” and more “if the game were truly realistic it would be a lot less fun/engaging for most people”

for what it's worth there's like a dozen of these threads from people complaining that they're tired of building single-family sprawl because the game generates infinite demand for it and nothing for anything else, I don't think this bug makes the game any more fun either

I was very excited for it but after seeing its launch state I reckon I'll give it six months before really diving in. They seem to be aware of most of these big issues, though, which is... encouraging?