Now, DLC and MOD time
A wise man once said that the game of P Society, Paradox Interactive, is like a puzzle. It often takes years to see the full picture.
That makes sense.
Look at the P Club Sime, classic war criminal の desire - "Europe Wind IV" next door, the game itself can actually be played for only 148 yuan. But if you have the ambition to become a full-fledged war criminal and are ready to buy all the DLC, then it is only a small -
2136 yuan.
If this amount is a little scary, then allow me to introduce you: the mysterious fifth person who belongs to one of the four cute, the popular bearer of the four moe of P society, and the youngest compared to the other series... "Stars"! The total value of its DLC is only a thousand dollars.
As the wise man said, if you have a P player among your friends and you have achieved the achievement of buying all the DLC in full... Please do not hesitate to worship the Righteous Father immediately. Because, such an existence is either a senior war criminal or a rich brother, no matter what kind of you are a son, you will not suffer too much.
What the? You ask me who is the wise man who sees through the world? I don't know, it's not Lu Xun anyway.
And when the editor-in-chief Mr. Galaxy delivered the unlock key of "City Skyline II" to me, based on the consistent time killer characteristics of P Club games, worried about whether I could complete the game review on time, I barely steadied the corners of my mouth, so that I didn't show a rude smile——
I was worried that I had too much content to launch a game in P Company, but I really looked down on Paradox Interactive.
Of course, jokes aside. The amount of content in "City Skyline II" is worrying, and that is also a horizontal comparison of the previous "City Skyline". As an urban construction simulation game that has been released for 8 years and continues to be updated, coupled with the extremely active mod community generally owned by P Society Games, "City Skyline" has long had a huge volume of all urban construction simulation games on the supermarket.
Its sequel, the upcoming City Skyline II, is actually very unfair compared to its full-fledged predecessor.
What's more, for new players in the "Skyline" series, the amount of content and gameplay of the initial version of "City Skyline II" is enough to ponder for hundreds of hours without getting bored.
For example, urban construction simulations are inherited from SimCity's classic RCI – a mix of Resident, Commercial and Industrial. Whether or not you have experience with SimCity-like games, you need to have a new understanding of the RCI tax system of the "Skyline" series.
In particular, the tax ratio is matched with the RCI.
The first step of any great mayor is the village chief, like the first step of all high-income regimes – to squeeze its residents. Both "City Skyline" and "City Skyline II" require players to obtain sufficient basic taxes in the early stage - especially when industry, commerce, transportation and industry cannot play any tricks.
The basic tax involves the RCI matching ratio.
Skyline II follows the previous generation tax system, breaking down taxes into real estate tax, commercial tax and industrial tax. Commercial tax and industrial tax aside, real estate tax is positively linked to the number of residents. In other words, as long as the player frantically attracts residents to move in and increases the ratio of residential area R, he can theoretically enjoy the hard-earned money of residents.
But at what cost?
The price is balance.
Diao who lives in the player's city - I mean, a good citizen who works hard, needs a job to shine, and also needs enough leisure areas to enjoy life. The rapid expansion of residential areas can indeed increase municipal revenues in a short period of time, but with it comes various maintenance problems.
The first is jobs, which means that the demand for jobs is higher, and players need a lot of industrial and commercial areas. Then there are municipal maintenance, such as various infrastructure construction and park playgrounds, police stations, hospitals, etc., which means potentially huge expenditures for municipal investment.
And the rapidly expanding industry and commerce will generate demand for basic materials such as electricity and ore raw materials, and if the player only mechanically and uninterruptedly meets these needs like a universal wishing machine, it will make financial expenditures fall into a situation where they cannot make ends meet - and even the risk of economic collapse and bankruptcy and restructuring of the political system.
But you can't cut back on food and clothing and overly restrict the development of the city – because residents will still have a need for living space. If the population growth exceeds the capacity of the residential area too much, the citizens will continue to complain that the rent is too high and cannot afford to live in an apartment.
Of course, complaining about this kind of thing is naturally not a big problem for the great P social war, the mayor. However, high rent will significantly reduce residents' desire to consume, thereby further reducing industrial and commercial taxes. Taxes on industry and commerce mean lower corporate profits, which will gradually reduce economic prosperity if leeks cannot be cut. Then, the cycle goes on and on and eventually leads to the crisis of urban development.
In short, whether it is overdevelopment or underdevelopment, it will make the game go to a bad ending. It may sound like crap, but this is surprisingly realistic from a game's point of view. Players need to think from a very realistic perspective, be cautious when arranging RCI zoning, and try to balance the needs of residents with the actual development plan of the city.
It's like fishing for nests, more bait is pure feeding fish, less bait is not attractive enough, no fish is hooked. In short, it is not the problem of the anglers themselves.
Ahem... Let's get back to business. The "Skyline" series is very demanding for new players. First of all, you have to be patient, and secondly, you are willing to delve into game mechanics - after all, mechanics are really P Society's strength. If these two points are difficult for you, then most P Club games are not for you, and City Skyline II is no exception.
Unless you're playing the unlimited sandbox mode, and that mode also requires a certain level of love—love for romantic city planning.
For veteran players, many of the things that were first released in "City Skyline II" do not seem to be much different from the original generation. On the one hand, it is because the traditional performing arts DLC array of P Society has not yet been rolled out; On the other hand, mod writers did not enter either. But the good news is that compared to the original generation, "City Skyline II" has a lot of minor fixes to optimize the game experience.
For example, the very conspicuous new road planning system.
Just adding the angle between routes, the range of influence of routes, and the alignment lines between different routes greatly optimizes the gameplay experience when players pave roads and build bridges - which was unimaginable in the previous game, and can only be saved by the author of the mod.
Similarly, there are new pathfinding mechanisms.
The most puzzling thing in "City Skyline" is the rough wayfinding mechanism of "the shortest straight line between two points". Even if the actual route distance is thousands of miles, game AI - such as fire vehicles and medical vehicles - will still choose the one with the shortest straight-line distance. In order to reduce the internal friction of similar transportation systems, players can almost only use square tofu blocks to plan urban zoning.
But in City Skyline II, such a problem never came up again. According to the official version, they optimized the wayfinding mechanism, increased the weight of the actual route distance, and significantly reduced the burden on players and mod authors.
At least in Urban Skyline II, my city is free to grow wildly.
There are quite a few small details beyond that. For example, the new urban development rating system no longer uses population as the only criterion, but a more diverse and comprehensive comprehensive development rating. Another example is the new landmark system - there is a shadow of the original special building system, but it has also clearly developed a deeper gameplay.
Although "City Skyline II" has not changed much in the core gameplay structure - this is also an old problem of P company games. But in the optimization of many game experiences, it has really put a lot of hard work. And based on the consistent operation routine of P Society, with the help of follow-up DLC and community mods, the actual experience of the game will only become better and more interesting.
After all, some games are like fine wine, which always takes time to settle. And I also hope that with the joint efforts of P Society and the community, "City Skyline II" can brew a bucket of rich and fragrant Du Kang.
The first taste is spicy, and the mouth is sweet.
By the way, a digression.
When reviewing Metropolis: Skyline 2, I apparently had some unrealistic fantasies about the P Company, so I flipped in using a computer that I personally thought was fine—obviously, you can't hope for the optimization of the P Company, and you can't hope for an unfamiliar computer.
The result of this rashness was that the game completely collapsed after half an hour of running, and even the game's files collapsed for me, and I could only use the company's small water pipe to download another 50 G behemoths.
Of course, there are problems with the optimization of P company, but it is not so unbearable. The problem was on that computer — you know, it was an unfamiliar computer, so unfamiliar that I couldn't remember the last time it was turned on. But it should be a good computer, but there is a problem with some part.
"Memory burst" is the answer given by colleagues in the hardware department.
Good, not a big deal – just grab two new memory sticks, get them in the new place of residence, and I'll be back in the warm embrace of P again.
And since you want to change, you will do it in one step. My colleague brought me two 48G Kingston FURY DDR5 RGB memory, and the aluminum heat sink combined with Kingston FURY's patented Infrared Sync Technology technology provides silky RGB light effects, making the case of an unfamiliar computer a little lively - these days, even the memory is on RGB, it's really ... It's kind of pretty.
In terms of performance, it is also enough to support "Metropolis: Skyline 2", a friend who directly said that he could not optimize before the release - 96GB of storage capacity, 6400MT/s speed and high-speed CL32 timing, enough to easily digest the redundancy brought by urban development; After passing Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO certification, it also has higher overclocking potential, greatly improving the data efficiency of multi-core processors, and ensuring performance even if the city is everywhere.
The unfamiliar computer got new storage, and I was able to continue to review it—thanks to the technology, and thanks to Kingston.