Topic: Cities in motion 2

[jamespetts]

Those put off Sim City (2013) by the serious problems, people might be interested in the forthcoming Cities in Motion 2, which, unlike the original, will have dynamic city growth based on transport, timetables and a day and night cycle. The curved roads look very similar to those in the latest version of Sim City, and, interestingly, the maps look much bigger.

[isidoro]

I liked, with its limitations, CIM 1 and was able to play it decently with wine.  I hope, when I buy it, to be able to play it with wine again...  It seems to me that CIM 2 will be better...

[mEGa]

First : as Simcity 2013, we must be connected to Internet to play with CIM 1 (using Steam techno).
Second notice : CIM 1 had not very much vehicles and transportation sets are only trams and buses (I didn't know how to use railway without paying it online ?)
What about CIM 2 ? Anybody tested it ?

[jamespetts]

It hasn't been released yet - scheduled for Q2 this year. We're still in Q1...

[Carl]

It had a closed beta test recently, I think -- I applied, but wasn't selected.

There has been very little in the way of preview images or video released about the game, so I'd be somewhat surprised if it was released in Q2 -- but then you never know with Paradox.

[isidoro]

@mEGa: if I remember it correctly, CIM 1 also had underground trains (tube) and ships.  They were somewhat limited, I agree.  And there must be a bug with ships that made them get stuck apparently for no reason.

I bought a physical game (the box with the CD) and, although I think I remember I had to connect to steam to register, I also think that I could play being offline.  But of that, I am not sure...

[asaphxiix]

paradox is a very creative company - they always have great ideas and implementation - but always lacking as well - their ideas just deserve much bigger projects in a deeper level. Sounds like this game is a good step in that way.

[Carl]

First : as Simcity 2013, we must be connected to Internet to play with CIM 1 (using Steam techno).

Steam DRM is not at all comparable to the always-online requirement of SimCity.

First, you won't get booted out of the game if your connection goes down.
Second, Steam works in offline mode so you don't even need to be online to launch the game.
Third, savegames and the like are stored locally.
Fourth, Steam works...

[el_slapper]

I did but Cities in Motion 1 on gamer's Gate. Once downloded, there is no more connection needed. I like a lot.

[rsdworker]

Steam DRM is not at all comparable to the always-online requirement of SimCity.

First, you won't get booted out of the game if your connection goes down.
Second, Steam works in offline mode so you don't even need to be online to launch the game.
Third, savegames and the like are stored locally.
Fourth, Steam works...

excatly - its good one but also Desura as well

[Junna]

Me and rsdworker were in the alpha/beta.

CIM1 actually works to play without running steam, though. I still prefer CIM1 to CIM2.

[isidoro]

Can you please elaborate?  Why do you prefer CM1 to CM2?

[Junna]

Can you please elaborate?  Why do you prefer CM1 to CM2?

It's static cities are more convincing, because the games own cities end up too simplistic and do not appear as detailed (generation is fairly simplistic, though in reality more advanced than that in SimCity, at least these Cims have actual residences and places of work); buildings simply appear along roads, and there's no way to easily control this layout even in the editor (unless they change this, I hope they do, but likewise I doubt they have the time and resources available to them that are necessary). The 48 minute day is too fast for transport patterns to be very pronounced: it should be much longer, 72 minutes or more, at the very least. Most buildings were generic ones from CIM1 refitted and modded and a few new ones, but the ones chosen were all those of a more "American" appearance (you can see this clearly in screen-shots released). Of course, my favourite part of CIM1 is the map editing. The new road patterns are the one thing which stand out in CIM2 as being vastly superior to the system in CIM1, but I'm not sure I feel the way the depots and such work is very intuitive. There were a few other issues I had with the game, but as I'm not sure how much will change for the final release, I'll have to wait and see how that ends up. I do like that the developers are quite responsive and seem engaged in the work, it's just unfortunate that they do not have the resources available to them that ought to.

[jamespetts]

The developers have just released their latest "Developers' Diary]http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?676796-Cities-in-Motion-2-%96-Timetable-Zones-and-Ticket-Pricing-%96-Developer-diary-10]"Developers' Diary entry, describing their zonal ticketing and timetabling options. What is intriguing about this so far is that Cities in Motion 2, a commercial game, is including features deemed too complicated even for Experimental users.

Whilst I don't think that we can sensibly accommodate price variations by users for the time being (not least because of the impact on our routing system, which is more performance sensitive than in CIM due to us simulating entire large regions instead of single, albeit large, cities), I notice that many users of Experimental have in effect implemented timetables by the back door using the convoy spacing feature. It will be interesting to see what proportion of CIM2 users actually use timetables to see whether it would be worthwhile one day having a more explicit timetabling tool for Experimental, albeit that would be a low priority for my time at least compared to a number of things that are currently in the development queue and that will take some time to complete.

[asaphxiix]

I don't think I'd recommend this one... i'm still too new to tell more about it, but a very bad first impression. Seems the space-time continuum is way off...

[jamespetts]

Oh? How so?

[asaphxiix]

it takes 45 minutes to cross a 500 meter bridge... with no traffic.

[jamespetts]

Is this perhaps a case of multiple scales where internal consistency is observed? One might say of Simutrans that it takes a week to make a 300km journey by train if one looks at the month/year time scale...

[asaphxiix]

I didn't understand your question

In simutrans it doesn't really matter what the real time is in terms of day/week/month etc., in cim2 it does. So you have a 2 hour morning rush period, when a rather small bus loop takes 3 hours to complete. for a passenger to cross from one side of town to another would take a whole day at least, and although there's no information on whether pax even have origin/destinations, it does seem they finish their journeys very late at night, or else it's a very upbeat town.

[Carl]

Oh, I see CiM2 has been released:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/225420/

The initial price point of £14.99 is very low, much lower than the original, leading me to think they have low expectations. Coupled with the fact that I didn't see much publicity about the recent release...

[isidoro]

I guess I'm out of the game: no Linux version and only download.  At least, with CIM1 I was able to buy the CD and run it with wine...  A pity...

[dannyman]

I pre-ordered and have since paid for the game, but haven't had a chance to play it yet due to the far more engaging game of being a new father.  I dislike Steam but it isn't as annoying as Simcity, which, while beautiful to look at feels like a step back from SC4, unfortunately.  :/


CiM1 was fun, and yes, it is always nice when a game works under Wine.  I bought the North America pack and had fun helping the hippies in their mission of "free healthcare" in San Francisco until I tried to re-route a trolley line and it insisted that the route had to detour to the far side of the city.  Nasty bug, there!  Anyway, as a simutrans fan I feel obliged to sample other games in this genre and CiM2 shows some potential, as if it is, in some respects, a labor of love.


(Don't tell my boss, but I use the Windows partition on my laptop as the commercial game platform since my home gear is all Linux.


Happy gaming, yall!

[asaphxiix]

I guess they'll patch it up at some point, but until then, it's not ready for release, and hardly playable. Laying tracks is a nightmare, editing existing lines (or even checking their route) is near impossible, there's no indication at all of passenger traffic (what lines they go on, when, origins, destinations), and worst of all, no autosave, and the game crashes relatively often. As usual with paradox - great ideas, poor execution.

Upsides: Very nice graphics; Despite the twisted time-space issue, the time-of-day feature fundamentally changes gameplay and adds a whole new dimension, adding very much to the game experience, such dynamics is very enticing to keep monitoring and correcting; The zones and tickets feature is also nice, but does not come to not very meaningful experience in game play,  probably since the whole economy system is lacking - there's hardly any clear connection between financial decisions (pricing, wages, scheduling) and revenue.

[jamespetts]

Interesting discussion, and congratulations Danny! I tried unsuccessfully over the week-end to get the demonstration version of the original Cities in Motion to work under Wine on an old Linux computer that I use when staying with my parents - the problem was the graphics, which would show as completely black with some shadowing.

I am minded to purchase Cities in Motion 2 in order to analyse how its mechanics work and compare it with Simutrans-Experimental, and to see how well that some of the ideas work there. It should be an interesting comparison with Simutrans, I think.

[dannyman]

Thank you, jamespetts.

I am eager to see how they handle rush hour, which is a very important concept for transit systems, but which seems difficult to work into a casual game.  It sounds like they have a system where you simply specify line frequency, and then they'll increase the frequency during rush hour for you.  (So, like a 30m frequency line will toss out a couple extra vehicles during peak to bring the line to 10m?)  (Okay, but then where do the extra vehicles come from?

What I liked about CiM1 (or even SC4, and also Tropico) was you could click on the little people to see where they were going, and how they were feeling.

What I really liked about SC4 was when you could click on a road segment and you'd see a multi-modal overlay of all the sources / destinations of the users.

It would be neat if simutrans one day had route overlays on the playing field.  Maybe each mode has a color, then subsequent lines have a slightly different shade.  That would be darned handy when re-working bus routes in a larger city.

If I ever have the free time I want to blog a game, probably Pak128.Britain-Ex, probably around 1915, with a few regional companies with interchange points, and make some nice system maps along the way.

[jamespetts]

I have just spent some time reading the forums: the reaction from people who purchased the game is very interesting: some are unhappy about various aspects of it, but others seem quite pleased, and a number are replying to the disgruntled people defending the game. What is even more interesting is that the lead developer is personally replying to a significant proportion of the posts complaining about things, in some cases going into detail of what she is going to to do fix some of the problem that have been identified: see here for example (promises to introduce edge scrolling, fix the broken multi-player and improve the editing of underground metros). That does not by itself answer the criticism that they ought to have got these things right in the first place, but an impressively good response all the same.

I also particularly liked the feature in Sim City 4 Deluxe/Rush Hour showing origins and destinations of traffic - there was some really quite detailed traffic simulation in that game, especially with the Rush Hour expansion and the Network Addon Mod. Road traffic is hard to simulate well because of the very large number of autonomous agents that each make complicated routing decisions from which the traffic patterns are an emergent property: this was an issue that I encountered when attempting to make private car simulation more realistic in Experimental (and in the end had to adopt a highly approximate approach).

I shall look forward to your diary!

[asaphxiix]

Thank you, jamespetts.

I am eager to see how they handle rush hour, which is a very important concept for transit systems, but which seems difficult to work into a casual game.  It sounds like they have a system where you simply specify line frequency, and then they'll increase the frequency during rush hour for you.  (So, like a 30m frequency line will toss out a couple extra vehicles during peak to bring the line to 10m?)  (Okay, but then where do the extra vehicles come from?

there are several overlaying frequencies, one for whole day, one for morning, night weekend etc., what it basically means is you can specify bus departure times almost specifically throughout (quite flexible), which is very nice.


If I ever have the free time I want to blog a game, probably Pak128.Britain-Ex, probably around 1915, with a few regional companies with interchange points, and make some nice system maps along the way.


Hope to see you in the next multiplayer game
The last one was epic.

[Carl]

The buggy release of the game is not a surprise: Paradox have a habit of releasing games in an unfinished, and sometimes unplayable, state. More often than not they get things up to scratch eventually, however.

[Junna]

I guess they'll patch it up at some point, but until then, it's not ready for release, and hardly playable. Laying tracks is a nightmare, editing existing lines (or even checking their route) is near impossible, there's no indication at all of passenger traffic (what lines they go on, when, origins, destinations), and worst of all, no autosave, and the game crashes relatively often. As usual with paradox - great ideas, poor execution.

Upsides: Very nice graphics; Despite the twisted time-space issue, the time-of-day feature fundamentally changes gameplay and adds a whole new dimension, adding very much to the game experience, such dynamics is very enticing to keep monitoring and correcting; The zones and tickets feature is also nice, but does not come to not very meaningful experience in game play,  probably since the whole economy system is lacking - there's hardly any clear connection between financial decisions (pricing, wages, scheduling) and revenue.

I've only experienced a single crash. I don't know what sort of problems you're having with laying tracks, unless you mean with the underground view - which is deeply unsatisfying under developed areas and roads. As I mentioned previously, the time is far too brief in real time per day minute; it should have been 72 minutes per day, or 96, even, rather than the current 48; which is too brief for the variability in travel at rush-hours etc to become very relevant to the game mechanics. 

[el_slapper]

The buggy release of the game is not a surprise: Paradox have a habit of releasing games in an unfinished, and sometimes unplayable, state. More often than not they get things up to scratch eventually, however.

With exceptions. Hearts of Iron 2 was playable & enjoyable from scratch(CK2 also, from what I've heard). Others like Rome never reached the playable state.

[jamespetts]

One of the great advantages of Simutrans over Cities in Motion 2, I think, is the way in which we do multiplayer. Cities in Motion 2 has a peer to peer multiplayer - there is no persistent server. One can save a game and then agree with the person to host the game again from a saved game and so play over multiple sessions in that way, but that takes a lot of organisation; having a persistent world as with Simutrans is much preferable.

Additionally, this alters the style of play. In Cities in Motion 2, it is possible to fast forward during a multi-player game. That, combined with the impracticality of resuming the game after a session, and the goal-oriented gameplay (which, although not compulsory, is enabled by default) rather than Simutrans's open-ended gameplay, leads to short intensive sessions where players build a network, then turn on fast forward and let it run and see who reaches the relevant goal first. That does not allow the exploration of the deeper aspects of the game. Furthermore, the number of players per multi-player session is limited to 4, unlike Simutrans's 16 - and there is always the danger of a player dropping out, which, because the thing is run peer-to-peer, means that the player cannot simply rejoin later, causing the multi-player experience in that particular session to come to an end unless one can find somebody else in the game lobby to play the other player's company starting from a saved game.

The great delight in a persistent world as with a Simutrans server is seeing a recognisable landscape of urban and rural, of economy and transport slowly evolve over time in response both to the game's own internal automatic mechanisms and the complex emergent properties of the myriad choices of multiple players over months of real time.

[Junna]

With exceptions. Hearts of Iron 2 was playable & enjoyable from scratch(CK2 also, from what I've heard). Others like Rome never reached the playable state.

Actually HOI2 was riddled with critical bugs until a few patches into the game. But Paradox is not the developer of CIM, though, it's a small studio in Finland; Paradox just does the publishing.

[jamespetts]

There is currently a rather unfortunate bug (reported here) whereby large buildings, including skyscrapers, shopping centres and stadia, downgrade to small residential houses if they are covered by a 'bus line and nothing else - this can have quite a severely detrimental effect on the gameplay.

[jamespetts]

One rather good feature of Cities in Motion 2 is the dynamic allocation of vehicles to lines: vehicles are purhcased in a depot, and are sent out of a depot whenever they are required for a timetabled working. Vehicles have to visit depots regularly for maintenance. Although the particular implementation in Cities in Motion 2 could be improved upon (vehicles have to visit depots too frequently, and there is insufficient control over which vehicles can be assigned to which lines), there is much to recommend this basic principle, and it might be worthwhile considering implementing something a bit like it in Simutrans one day.

[isidoro]

I finally managed to buy a CD version of Cities in Motion 2 and works flawlessly in Linux/wine (through Steam).  From what I've seen so far, the game is beautiful, with lots of options.  It's also true that I pretty much enjoyed CiM 1.

It has timetables, but they are automatically generated and you can set the time interval between vehicles.

Another nice thing to consider is that vehicles are purchased at depots (as in ST), but depots have capacity and every line must start and end in one of such depots.  Therefore, deploying depots play a more important role in CiM2 than in ST.