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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

Cities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.

What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town.

I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections.

I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.

Cities skylines has the policy builder feature like you describe. One of the policies you can implement is congestion charges. You can set the policies city-wide, or in certain districts. In the latest builds with the newest DLC, you can even ban cars completely with pedestrian only districts/roads.

Huh interesting. I haven’t really touched it since 2016 so it’s probably different now.

Imagine a city builder where you can't convincingly recreate the rebuilding of Tokyo after WWII

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CS gets way closer to "car free" than anything but the original SimCity (where you could just use rails instead of roads everywhere) - you need to use the Parks and paths and some pretty sneaky design, but you can get upwards of 80% using walking/transit. Takes a lot of work, however, and some mods.

I actually found it the opposite. The more I intelligently laid out alternative transport the more that it got used, lessening traffic. But yes, the default mode is to just optimize traffic everywhere.

It's possible to make a car-free city in CS. It just can't start as one.

There's a Tropico game, I think it's Tropico 4, that is very realistic in that you don't need to literally make roads and asphalt all the things, and roads don't need to be car-centered; you just make buildings and people will walk, and you add a road network to make things more efficient, but it isn't required

Also curved roads and buildings don't need to be right besides the road, etc.

Sim City 4 is more like a suburbia simulator imo

I want free-form zoning, where it's not tile based; CS can do something kinda like it but it's still just tiles in the end, with empty space between.

Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.

Free-form city blocks is also high on my wishlist for C:S2. Without it you can't make convincing European style cities.

Soviet Republic: Workers and Resources has this. It is an incredibly deep city builder and sim with very well modeled systems. The realistic mode requires fuel for vehicles and workers for construction. You don’t simply plop buildings down or define zones that magically fill in.

It sounds like it is biased towards micromanagement, but still might be tons of fun. Thanks for the recommendation.

There's also Foundation, a medieval city builder that works like this.

It makes sense, given that its developer also developed Cities in Motion 1 & 2, which are _especially_ transportation mode simulators.

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