Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.

An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.

For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.

In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.

I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.

Good games give me the same feeling as reading a good fictional novel: I get transported into the universe, following the character or whatever action is unfolding.

More generally, games give the player a goal to achieve, whether that’s winning over others, cooperating with others, completing a campaign, collecting a bunch of goodies (or all the goodies), relaxing and enjoying scenery, crafting min-maxed playthroughs, or trying over and over again to beat a level.

Being focused on this goal can help keep your mind off of whatever is troubling you in the present.

エアーステーション

Airstation

It’s OK, your screen must have been upside down when you were looking at the Steam page… :)

Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect at release… I tell myself that Cities Skylines wasn’t either in 2013 especially before Mass transit and other DLCs. I’m hoping the incremental performance improvements will keep coming.

My city is at 90k now and it’s harder to play, sitting at about 10fps… Might be time to start a new city at 100k.

I won’t disagree with your stance, but I have just one question…

In which currency are you getting $100 for the basegame? Canada it’s $70 (rounding up), but pre-release it was C$60, USD it’s $50, in NZD it’s $80. The deluxe version isn’t worth it at all, you basically get the Golden Gate Bridge and the promise of a few assets and a DLC over the next year… for double the price.

It’s on PC Xbox GamePass only. Console release is delayed for sometime, presumably because it doesn’t perform well enough on them yet.

Yep to me it feels like Industries and Mass Transit DLC-like content from 1 was brought in and better integrated with the C:S2 basegame.

Thank you!!!

Eh, I wouldn’t disparage the parent commentor for giving the release-day version an earnest try. Some people will be okay with the game in the state it’s in right now, some won’t, and that’s fine.

I think they also would agree they expect it to get better with another 6 months of active development, especially preparing for console release.

I know I could stream/video edit, but more I’m thinking about setting up a short video within the game. For example, following a train pulling into a station but you want to get the angle and position just right or from multiple angles. Currently the simulation can be slowed or stopped but every time you play the thing the simulation only moves forward rather than returning to the previous state.

Laptop with 1660ti Gpu and Ryzen 7 4800H Cpu. I have most of the visual effects off but high LoD

Definitely easier to manage new/remote developments in this game. Government subsidies are also a nice hand-hold but I have no idea how it’s calculated. Trains in C:S1 are super unprofitable, government investment makes it work well. (I’ve gotten subways can be profitable in C:S1 after lots of work).

I wouldn’t mind the terrain overlays if it looked clearer with it selected, for some reason it was hard to use, especially at night.

I agree with the majority of your points. It does feel a little bit early access and the stop sign thing was a pain point.

I’ll just offer a counterpoint to your comment of Industry, Park, University district. Although the latter two don’t have much besides individual buildings to place, Industries feel way better integrated in 2 than 1. In C:S1 you had generic and specialized industry zoning which was entirely separate from the Industry district. This sort of zoning made things brought by DLC feel tacked on. We might see DLC for C:S2 work the same way but there’s an opportunity to integrate it more fully with base Cities Skylines systems, like satellite campuses and sports arenas being an “upgrade” for a college for example.

I’ll start, having grown a city to 40k, it’s low-medium quality and hovering at 20fps but at least it’s consistent. I don’t get huge amounts of stuttering unless I swap tabs from the game which I have to change my resolution up and down to fix. I’ve been having fun with it despite that and I’m looking forward to a smoother prettier experience later.

Traffic AI is way better, the Industries are much better integrated and freight rail being managed by the player makes it way easier to deal with because external trains aren’t clogging your lines and trucks aren’t in a long queue waiting to enter the station. I like that some citizens like to jaywalk more than others.

I still can’t figure out how to flip one way street directions. I’d like the destination path view of a person or vehicle again. I’d like to be able to assign a stop sign to only two of the four directions of an intersection.

I wish for a way to capture 30-60 seconds of a simulation to go forward and backwards in Photo mode.

I agree that it’s probably hard for dunkey to continue his schtick when he is starting to raise a kid. A review for a game trying to just maintain rhyming feels a little forced.

I can only laugh imagining Dunkey’s child playing League of Legends in front of him.

$5/hr of playtime to account for hours I may enjoy and not enjoy as much. That puts it on par with a cheap night out.

My favourite games are $0.02-$0.50/hour of play time.

Ah you’re right… I’ll fix that

There will be a grid feature where you can make a perfect grid of city lots at once.

Yeah, same, I’ll reserve my judgement for later. If it’s truly awful and unplayable then I’ll have to finish building my RTX 3090 system, lol.