5 Reasons You May Like SimCity 4 more than Cities: Skylines!

No region view and no purpose built engine for CS2… still running on Unity and still a CPU drainer.

If I remember correctly, only a single city in a region is simulated at a time in SC4, and all the others are frozen in time. If that's the case, the actual size of a simulated city is several times, depending on what mods you have, smaller in SC4 than in Skylines.

"I think Cities Skylines 2 could be the best city building game of all time"

Well. That aged well lol

Damn, haven't seen a video recorded with FRAPS in forever. Haha I gave up using it long ago for Afterburner. Nostalgia.

Sim City teaches you the basics of the game where as City Skylines barely has a tutorial, that's enough for me.

SC4 for me is better due to the freeways and roads looking more realistic with merging lanes and on ramps and off ramps being better. Also the management of the city and the city itself looks more like you would see it on Google Earth.

15k ppl living in your average skyscraper building? That’s not realistic either bro…

My city has 25,000 people and is bigger than 18 k

Cities Skylines just feel so empty, it feels soulless. In CS, cities do not look realistic, your high-rises are too small, the population living in those high-rises are too little, and overall not much is going on in the game once you progress 3-4 town levels. I hope one day EA will remaster Simcity4 and we will experience the epicness of it once again

I don't know if I can take you seriously after you put your runway approach through a mountain.

I love Cities Skylines as well, What I hate about Cities Skylines is that it’s actually unrealistic in many ways. For example most roads in real life normally have a “Turn Lanes” I believe without a mod this makes roads and traffic unrealistic. They make you depend on roundabouts which is stupid. The “population count” is way off, you got like 14 people living in one home. Not to mention the size proportions of the homes in Cities Skylines. For example sometimes a home built on 1 square can be bigger then a home built on 4 squares making the house next to it look like a bigger house but its not? Also the graphics are cartoony, not realistic at all. Theres a bug in the PS5 version that makes all the commercial businesses have the wrong names over there establishment, I’ll see gas stations named “The Library”. I also hate how power lines are big and ugly, you can’t build smaller land line power connections that look more realistic. I spent so much money on this game but to be honest I miss Sim City being the top city builder. I imagine a PS5 version of Sim City 4 or like if they made Sim City 6 look like Sim City 4 but with Cities Skylines engine. It would be amazing.

"the sequel"
FIVE YEARS LATER

on Simcity BuildIt, more than 7k people live in one building

So, are we gonna ignore that one plane crashed on that hill?

all you had to say was "unity engine" EWW i love rust and kerbal space program but their largest downside is that engine only using 1 cpu core AND CRASHING ALL THE TIME

I have Sim City 4, Deluxe. I like how you don't get DLCs because all you need is included in the package ( unlike City Skylines). Saying that, I also have City Skylines too. They are just as good as each other.

City Skylines is just about the look, where you design a good looking city and that's it, a totally soul-empty game. There is no real life management issues, human issues such as unemployment, protests like Sim City. Citizens in SC are much more difficult to please, schools require increased budgets, hospitals overloaded, etc, they complain about multiple problems at the same time. In City Skylines it's just about water, power, etc and everything is solved 2 seconds after you place a service utility nearby.
City skylines is like a soulless lego boxes to me.
Sim City is much more human.

Are you using any mods for your growable skyscrapers in your city? Because I don't have alot of these designs and variety for my Level 5 High Denisty Commercial, Office, and Residential.

I am going to download simcity 4 tomorrow because my Laptop Can't run Cities Skylines 😩

Another thing is that the building design in Cities Skylines is downright horrible!! You have a handful that look somewhat realistic, and then there are these really stupid looking buildings peppered in there that just don't look realistic at all. You can fix a lot of these issues with mods, but the whole simulation part is just so hollow and aside from trying to make a realistic looking 3d city, there's not really many goals to do. That's why the most popular videos of Cities Skylines are the ones where the city looks super realistic.

Cities skylines: empty North Korean vibes

Megalopolis 2015: 50k
Megalopolis 2017: 60k
Megalopolis 2020: 70k
Megalopolis 2021: 90k
Megalopolis 2025: 500k
Megalopolis 2050: 3m

Skylines is a better sandbox. SimCity 4 Is a better simulator

I used to play cities skylines because I thought it be a great city building game. Turns out, it takes 10 minutes to load a map. Just brought sim city 4 and I dont regret it. And plus, no dlcs, you know what I mean?

I was way to young to play sin city 4 so to me it needs a upgrade in graphics wise. Tbh I actually never seen the gameplay

The thing about Cities Skylines is that, behind the all the freedom it gives you to make a city look the way you want, is just that, a cool empty box. Once you have realized that, you will see that even with all the DLCs there is no gameplay focused on the management of the city. It’s a good sandbox for those who just want to create a beautiful city but they don’t want to strugle with its management.

Simcity 4 on the other hand, gives you a more challenging experience runing and managing a city. When I play SimCity 4 I feel like a mayor. When I play Cities Skylines I feel like an architect or an urbanist.

Sim city 4 is far better than skylines.

Can be run on potato PCs.
Better simulation and management.
Tons of addons and custom map.
The community is still alive and that tells you how cool this game is.

City skylines only has better graphics and nothing else. And not to mention how the amount of dlcs they have to suck more money from you.

There is a hard mod for citse skylinse

wow, cities skylines fanboys wrecked this vid. In any ways, Sim City 4 is imo far superior to the latter, and it's got a lot to do with how ugly and generic the latter is.

I love and prefer simcity 4, but this video needs HEAVY editing. 5 min to mention 1 point with 30 examples is terribly boring

Simcity 4 obviates simcity 2013 I understand what old mate is saying with city skylines but when it comes down to it cities skylines should have been sim city 2013. There are pros and cons in cs4 and cities skylines but you have alot more options and better gameplay and graphics. But nearlly everything u have against cities skylines there are mod fixes now

I never really got the hang of Cities: Skylines. I much prefer SC4.

I agree with most of the things that you said, cities skylines is a great game and I have poured hours of time into it but it does have its issues that are held mostly back by the games engine. I think the reasons for the population density issues are that every singe cim in your city has a house and a job and a shop they travel to, if that's through public transport or private vehicles, and that limits the game in the fact that It could barley be possible even now, to have cities with over 5 million + people, and keep track of their every move and where they live etc. However in Sim City, people chose a house for the day went to a job and then slept in an entirely different household after work, and even some sims would just drive or walk around the city with no real purpose or goal. A lot of issues that the base game in cities skylines also has, can be solved with the vast modding capabilities that the game provides, e.g the population density issue can be solved with a mod. As well as this ive seen people talk about how sim city had better gameplay then skylines, which in my opinion isn't true; yeah sim city has a lot of things you can do even with an expansion that almost doubles its content but a lot of that isnt really re-playable compared to the amount of replay ability that cities skylines offers, and that without talking about the 25 dlc's that you can purchase. Overall i dont think that sim city is a better city builder, but more of a simulator for a city as it is very limiting, especially towards the later parts of the game.

I think the SimCity 4 region system was awesome. Even with an average PC you could build huge metropolitan areas by adding up tiles. Here's what I'd like to see in Cities Skylines :

1) First you create a region of 50x50km to 100x100km. You can roughly terraform the entire region as one map but can't do anything else yet. Once you've roughly terraformed your region you can decide the position of the tiles as well as their size. If you've got a potato PC you can use small tiles and if you're confident in your PC you can use larger tiles. Once you've done that you can't go back. You can't terraform on a regional level, you can't move tiles, but you can merge them together if for example you get better PC hardware.
Each tile works exactly like a current Cities Skylines game : you can build, terraform, etc... Just like in SC4 your current tile can exchange stuff with the tiles next to it, but anything outside of your tile doesn't change until you open it.
It'd be nice to have a fixed low quality render of the other tiles at the border so you can have a rough idea of how your city sits next to the rest of the area.

2) When it comes to traffic, I find Cities Skylines disappointing and that's partly due to how they manage population density. Having all these roads and public transit options is awesome compared to SC4 but traffic is a mess.
- Small residential homes get way too many people living in them and you get 4 lane avenues going through "quiet" suburban neighborhoods. That's using TM:PE.
- High density zones on the other hand don't pose as much of a traffic challenge as they should due to the little amount of people who live in them.
- The game doesn't manage parking, which is a huge part of city building. People ingame would use their cars a lot less if they didn't have the option to just put it in their pocket.
- There has to be a better way to handle narrow angle intersections, at least for freeway on and off ramps. Seeing cars merge into the freeway at a near 45° angle hurts my OCD.

3) Some mods need to be integrated in the game. TM:PE, roundabout builders, parallel road tool, move it, ...

4) More ways to color terrain.

5) More bridge types.

6) Bigger farms but also bigger factories.

7) Just like in SC4, being able to zone (up to a certain limit) the exact dimensions of each plot. But just like in CS you should still be able to zone a big chunk of land.

8) Instead of always having to build pipes and powerlines myself, it'd be nicer to be able to upgrade my roads to handle these services. You should still be able to build independant pipes and powerlines. Managing sewage and internet would be nice too.

9) And finally, the game needs to be futureproof regarding PC hardware. In 10 or 20 years I should be able to run better texture files, set higher densities of polygons, draw huge tiles with millions of inhabitants and tens of thousands of nodes without being limited by the game.
In other words, limitations should be as much as possible hardware limitations instead of ingame limitations. Boy if they can manage that I can't even imagine the beautiful stuff people will be building 20 years from now.

Now of course, these developpers don't have unlimited resources and need to make a buck. But it doesn't hurt to dream.

PS : Theme and assets management could be made better. I don't know how many times I've downloaded assets and put them in a theme and ending up deleting it all because it doesn't work...

Wow, this video got brigaded by Cities: Skylines fans

I like Cities XL, the game focuses on wealth classes

When it comes to traffic and size, Cities: skylines has it all. Thats because the CS team worked on a previous game about transportation and such. However, if you want to focus about in depth look of buildings, different styles, analysis in the urban development and being overall city focus, Simcity takes it by storm. Thats why I always preferred Simcity over Cities: Skylines.

I wish Simcity would have stuck with the classic single player mode, if that was the case, it would have killed Cities: Skylines off the market. However, I do give them the props for trying to make an online city building game. They just needed to either have a much bigger space or, shrink the buildings down in size. None the less, I give them props for trying. They still remain the only City Online building game on the market.

Simcity is truly the first in a lot of stuff. And at the end, they were the first to create an online city building game that could have been revolutionary if they just tweaked it a bit.

Servers crashed because of the amount of people that were on the game at the same time. The developers didn't even expect that many people to buy and play the game. So in a way, popularity killed the game lmao!

@ Tech Dive Gaming

How do we contact you in regards to doing a beta test or a review for our game?

3 remarks.
A, On lot size / grid reach:
Limiting the depth of a lot to 32 meters does indeed make an area with high rise buildings look very unrealistic, especially if you compare it to an American downtown.
This limitation being chosen may have to do with the fact that the game instead of the player decides the lot size. In SC4 you could decide how you wanted a block to be divided into lots, so you had much more control. If C:S had grids extending 10 squares from a road, there would be several problems: 1st: It would be hard to indicate to the player what a reasonable block size would be. 2nd: It would be hard for the game to decide how many squares to use for each lot. 3rd: If you want more realism, the lot depth would differ between low and high density zones. 4th: If the game had to show the player that the zoning is too far from a road on a square-by-square basis, the view could very quickly become cluttered.
I can imagine an easy fix though: When you build a road, the first 4 squares of the zoning grid are drawn with solid lines and the next 6 squares with dotted lines. If you zone the grid with low density zones, only the first 4 squares are zoneable. If you select a high density zoning tool, all squares are drawn solidly and zoning the first N squares from the road unlocks the zonability of the next row of squares (and of course, this is checked by the game in a way that drawing in all 10 squares at once is made possible). If you have the high rise ban active for some district, in that district only 7 squares from the road are drawn solid and zoneable with high-density zones.

B, On population density, building occupancy, agent limit and full Cim lifetime simulation:
The one big advantage that this simulation achieves is that it allows for a more realistic traffic simulation. But then on the other hand, the base C:S game does not give you the necessary tools to effectively manage that traffic because "that complexity is not suitable for casual players". On the other hand, if you want your game to be suitable for casual gamers, why would you need a hyper-realistic simulation? As far as I'm concerned, as long as the game simulates all relevant aspects of a cities overall population (which includes realistic density, education and wealth, the fact that Cims will not only move into your city at age 30 only and also die all at once, ...), that's a good enough simulation for me. I don't need every single car to be simulated or the ability to follow a Cim around the city for their entire lifetime.

C, As far as the current difficulty of C:S is concerned I think a 6th flaw is that the game is not actually challenging enough that your decisions actually matter. It really feels more like a sandbox than a simulation. I haven't yet encountered a single instance where any simulation would be necessary and you couldn't just simply make the buildings' graphics upgrade based on the number of service needs you fulfill.

D, On wealth: Technically, C:S does simulate wealth. It's just strictly tied to education. All highly educated Cims are assumed to be rich, and being uneducated is strictly the same as being poor (or working in a job that does not require any education automatically makes a Cim poor, I don't know to what factor wealth is tied). Also, in contrast to SC4, the C:S engine does allow buildings to have occupants with a mix of different wealth/education levels. The disadvantage of C:S regarding wealth is that single stat of a building is determining both wealth and occupancy, while in reality they would actually be largely anti-correlated.
I guess the fact that the occupation density of poor(/uneducated) Cims is the same as for rich(/educated) Cims is a direct consequence of the agent limit. If your engine limits you to 80 Cims per high rise building, it does not make a lot of sense to have that number differ between high and low wealth occupants.
Again, it would not be impossible to just replace the 1-dimensional "occupant count" progression system for building upgrades with a 2-parameter "building size and apartment luxury" progression system. If you make the education/wealth level of cims that a building primarily attracts relatively strictly tied to its luxury level and make both larger and less luxurious buildings contain more apartments, you basically have the same "poorer sims are housed more densely than rich sims" effect from SC4 that you described.

There indeed is a lot of inspiration that the developers could take from SC4 if they ever want to make Cities:Skylines 2.

Ever heard of the realistic population mod?

No

This guy works for EA / Maxis for sure lol

Maybe there's a reason why SimCity has been around since 1989 before EA killed it and not Skylines.

Its unfair to compare unmoded cities skylines to moded sim city 4

I want just sprites in a city builder, I do not want full 3d.

I just mod cities skylines. Basically fixes all these problems.

We only need a SC4 remake to work perfectly with 1000 mods in modern computers.