Cursed Utopias | Cities: Skylines Review (2023)

Cheers for this PS. I've never been hooked by city builders after sim city 2 without some kind of gimmick or vibe (Its a city builder, but you're beaver people!) but I know people who are and might enjoy this.

I think if you want ugly inefficient cities you would need less control and have AI to play as a bunch of independent actors, competing state and federal agencies, gerrymandering politicianz, NIMBYs, homeowners association, crazy loons, who are gonna build whatever they want, corporate lobbyists, genius architects with visions of grandeur, outdated unscientific views, etc. And most of the game would be trying to get them to listen, to meet, to agree on anything.

I do enjoy your long form videos but these projects are absolutely well welcomed! I'm eager to try Cities 2 when it arrives. I like the idea of smaller videos and different genres!

Since you said you liked open-ended games, may I recommend Kenshi? It's one of the best RPGs I've ever played.

Since you mention other paradox games, I want to tell you I personally would enjoy a lot some essays on my dopamine mappies, but I understand they are niche enough to not make them very appealing for essays.

I hope you know that using Rimworld music in the background activates me in a primal way

Damn I didn't see that this was released. Good shit PS

a good way to combat those late-game budget surpluses could be to increase maintenance based on the average income. As more people get educated and become blue-collar workers, less of them are willing to do manual labor for low wages (especially considering that dense or wealthy areas are generally more expensive to live in).

Railroad Tycoon 3 (2003... fully playable in modern systems and also compatible with linux with stock Wine)
had a more believable Stock Trading simulator built into the game... that game's "economy simulation" will keep you on your toes at all times, there's no point in the game where you feel like you already won the campaign mission

One big thing that made me stop playing the game (granted, after hundreds of hours) was the lack of feedback on what's going wrong. Usually, the game doesn't really let you fail too hard, so that's not a huge issue, but when you get bored with the base game and try to use some ground rules or mods to push up the difficulty of the game, the problems that occur often don't have an obvious cause that can be identified to be solved. Like I notice my income take a sudden dip into the negative. Is that just a temporary effect from a pensioner death spiral etc, or have I done something to make my city economically unsound in the long term?

This makes challenge runs more annoying than interesting to play and severely limits evergreen replayability.

Well, congrats Private Sessions. Im downloading Cities: Skylines now. Here's hoping I can make heads or tails of the tutorial. Great video, as always!

Hmm love the music! Brings me back!

Luv me strategy games.
Luv me city builders.
Simple as.

I loved simcity 1, 2000, the snes one, 3000, 4, etc but I couldn't get into skylines. I think the two main sticking points for me was that is is more of a 'city painter' than a 'city game' and that the dlc were too compartmentalized. It didn't feel like a cohesive whole.

Im sick, this long video with the calm voice helps. Thank you.

I build a circular city like you might see in a Sci-Fi and uploaded the timelapse onto my channel, the game just can't handle zoning curves.

have you watched any of the stuff Donoteat01 has made?

@Private Sessions Your long format is great, I wish your videos were playlists instead to make them easier to bookmark / resume.

Hey man, i just want to say my condolences for cs2.... lmaoooo holy shit. I remember you hyping up the game on streams with pat and yalking about how what theyre doing looks really cool... its a shame that gaming in 2023, no matter what company it is, is succeptible to the same bullshit throw the product out, gaslight and lie to customers, and hopefully fix it later.

Just remember everyone, its a city builder not an fps like cs go :) it doesnt need to be 60 fps dies of cringe

Sweden not Finland

I’m into strategy games

I guess I'm also dissapointed a bit in what was possible. You can't make the giant parking lot, urban sprawl, city or the walkable only, mass transit city or a small rural town or anything else bizarre. You can only build a "simcity" city, but with some good ideas taken from the simcity reboot and that works really well.

Lemme get that algo rythm

With regards to needing to build/plan road bypasses, etc - although it's a much different game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (when playing with construction enabled) really does make you think ahead for some of that. It's not turn-based or anything, and frankly, only folks that want to love it will love it - it's a bit jank even as it nears full release. (Many folks compare W&R:SR to C:SL, but in my mind they are incomparable).

I had something smart copied ready to paste here. It's not letting me paste. It was something about cheesecake and cats, i forget now.

I never see anyone take this perspective on citybuilders, but it's something I always come back to whenever I play one.

One of the most important aspects of the simulation is the ideology and set of economic assumptions it works from as a basis. SimCity 4, my long time favourite, is so brutal about this I can't help but suspect that series is a sly, Paul Verhoeven-esque veiled satire- The only way to make your city successful, the guaranteed route to success in those games, is to be the absolute worst neoliberal ghoul you can- You have to cut funding to your services, and let your zones gradually gentrify by restricting supply, to increase demand. That's what the game says is "good", that's what the game rewards with success. You have to create a housing shortage real estate bubble, and then your city suddenly booms. Education, good transport, etc... None of it matters. Land value is all.

As a kid, this didn't mean anything to me. As an adult paying a mortgage... Really makes you think.

Wondering what PS thinks of CS2.

Would love to see a Civ 6 video

My ideal city builder game would let graphics take a backseat to more complex and realistic simulation, and a bigger picture approach. It would also place your cities in time, with demands and technologies changing as you progress. Imagine starting with a railway town in the 1800s, and over time paving and organizing a road network to accomodate growing numbers of car drivers. Then, eventually you’d reach a point where you have to connect to highways and deal with declining passenger rail numbers, and so on.

(5 days ago) title of the video is: " I have some things I need to say about Cities Skylines 2 " people are finally catching up to the bullshit that was the CS2 launch....

quite enjoyed the slower pacing of speech in this video compared to the older Skyrim videos... I could never sleep to the skyrim videos because they would always wake me up, the talking speed was too fast to the point of breaking any feeling of relaxation

Graveyard Keeper is a game that surprised me, initially I thought it was just some kind of Harvest Moon clone... the only way I can describe how it plays is "a top-down view 2D game that feels like playing The Forest" very impressive game design, but gets a bit too grindy towards late game

Soviet Republic stream NOWWWW 🤣🤣🤣pleeeeease

omg thanks whoever mentioned a game called KENSHI in the comments, I just looked up that game and it looks like something I was craving and didn't even know it existed... not even gonna watch videos to not spoil the surprises

Sim tower, my favorite, nailed the passage of time. Two weekdays, one weekend day, and at night when everyone is asleep the spinning clock hands speed up until morning. A year winds up being a handful of weeks, so your tower is still tiny at year 2and 3

The existence of Cities: Skylines 2 is not an excuse for the business model of CS: 1. In fact, it's very telling that huge amounts of DLC for CS: 1 are just basic features of CS: 2. Paradox are having cake and eating it, pretending CS is a live-service game with a regular surcharge to stay current, but then want to roll everything into a new game after fans have spent $400 on the previous game? Maybe just update the engine and release that as a free update?

I will say 5 dollars a month for all the DLC is probably the best practice paradox has done, I don't expect games to be updated for free. their DLC pricing has gotten mega stupid in the last few years (going from 10 euros for a big DLC to 20 euros for a DLC)

but still Id rather this type of monetization over day 1 Battle-pass 70 euro base games
with paid cosmetics, convenience ,and DLC

Also "new" game every 2 years regardless of success (Ala Madden, Fifa, COD ect, Ubisoft)


Their DLC share, and monthly pay policy. makes it so you can say, Buy Eu4 for like 10 to 20 euros, then pay 5 euros. and boom you are done.
less than the price of a AAA game you get 10+ years worth of expansions and updates.

In retrospect, such a shame they didnt manage to pull off the sequel. C:S2 is just so completely broken it basically requires a full re-release to be anywhere as near as good as the first game. Just so many systems seem completely absent with just cosmetic placeholders that might never be implemented. Like the whole production chain to name a thing, but also very very basic stuff like public transportation. Sure it shows the numbers, but they dont seem to correspond to anything actually going on on the map. There are many experiments done by long time fans, like completely turning off all public transport, so setting funding to "0" , let the simulation run for an entire year and then compare traffic density... Which turned out to be exactly the same with no public transport... You could even see people walk in to the subway stations, that didnt have any trains running for an entire year... Thats just so bad that it almost borders on a scam and these issues are so fundamental that you cant really patch that in without redesigning the entire transportation model, one of the core features of any city builder.

Thanks for the quality content buddy

America is better than wherever you are from. Pally.. Don't dis our urban dystopias

I've always wanted to like this game but when I see that it has some 400+ dollars worth of DLC I just end up with a headache because I don't know what dlc is basically "mandatory" and what mods I need to actually enjoy the game.

I want a city builder that lets me get really into the itty bitty bits kinda like the fallout settlement system where you can build every shack