Cities: Skylines

SighFye surprised me with Cities: Skylines, a game I'd been eying off since its release. I love simulation games such as Roller Coaster Tycoon (Did you know there's a new one on the way? Check it out here), Sim Tower and the Sims.

Cities: Skylines is a fun, addictive and complicated city building simulation game. You must not only build your city to your citizens heart's content but you must also plan ahead. Every decision you make affects your city and it's dwellers. These decisions range from your road layout and where you put houses, shops, offices and industry etc. etc. Also where you place water intake and sewage outtake, landfill, and power sources. To what policies you, as Mayor, will decide to put in. Will you place a smoking ban to better the health of your citizens while slightly decreasing their happiness or will you create a no smoking zone? Will you make green decisions such as wind power or will you pollute with coal? 

All of your decisions affect multiple factors and have ripple effects. For example if you don't provide adequate power to your city, people become unhappy and as people become unhappy you begin losing income.

As I unlocked levels, some of the decisions I'd made had to be changed. Since I'm a perfectionist I kept restarting with the knowledge of the future unlocks and problems I'd accidentally created and would plan ahead accordingly.

Sometimes you will come across problems which counteract each other or you have no idea why they're happening. For example, yesterday I created a forestry industry and there were not enough workers. This was apparently because I had adequate education so the educated citizens didn't want to work there. I researched the problem and people had tried creating areas of people who were well away from schools, however, those people would make the trip to receive an education. I found two things which helped, the first was to put more people to create a higher population with less jobs available and the second was to wait it out because the industry levels up and eventually requires educated workers. At the same time, I had a problem in my low density commercial zones, they were complaining that there were not enough educated workers. What!? How was this so if the apparent first problem was over-educated people?

When you're building away, you put residential zones, commercial zones, industrial zones etc. Build build build, up up up, your city goes.. hurrah! Then you realise by the time you've unlocked and put in adequate education, the people you first put in are too old for school and missed the boat and some of them aren't having children either, they're seniors! So the timing of your zones counts.

As I unlocked and put in offices, high density commercial zones and high density residential zones, I noticed the low density commercial shops were going down. As I'd click them to find the problem, they were complaining that they didn't have enough educated workers. I added in Universities and made sure there was adequate education as in elementary schools and high schools but this didn't help. I ended up demolishing them and changing the zone area to high density commercial which seemed to fix the problem, goodbye local deli, hello large corporate takeovers.

I now have a problem with my roads jamming, another learning curve about planning ahead. The game becomes more and more complicated and in-depth and I just can't get enough. Everything is well thought through and as you zoom in you can see people going about their daily business, kid's playing in the park and the fire brigade putting out house fires. The wind turbines turn and face the wind, the power cables sway in the wind and the trees die if too close to pollution. There's enough different types of houses to satisfy without it looking like houses are just cloned down the street and the small details are great such as backyard swings and garden chairs.

The game is confusing at first, but you easily catch on and as you watch your decision's ripple effects, you soon learn your best plan of attack plus it's a lot of fun being Mayor to your own city.