
large regional ones) and many of these auxiliary systems use transportation as a gameplay mechanic (e.g., firefighters have to drive - following the rules of the roads the player lays out - to the scene of the fire). And while there are nods to things like garbage collection and education and healthcare, they’re much less nuanced (e.g., the buildings are less expensive, so there’s less of a tradeoff between small local buildings vs. Specifically, City: Skylines is about transportation many of the construction options in the game revolve around getting people from Point A to B. Granted, some of these features were more game design decisions than faster CPUs + GPUs, but in aggregate they make the game feel like a more expansive, better-realized Simcity derivative than anything I’ve played since Simcity 4.Īt the same time, I’m finding that I actually like the choices the developers made around its systems.
#Cities skylines instruction manual series#
Since then, I’ve went through everything from Caesar IV to the Civilization series to Transport Tycoon to many of the later Simcity entries.
#Cities skylines instruction manual manual#
I remember trekking out to friends’ houses every week to spend a few precious hours working through the game, and when I wasn’t playing, I was reading the thick instruction manual over and over again to paper craft strategies in vitro. And that cities, even in a super-simplified abstraction, are pretty hard to build and maintain. That there’s wonderful complexity in the interaction of systems. It introduced me to the idea of using computers for simulation. Simcity 2000 was a hell of a game for a 10-year old.
