[Darth-Apple]

I spent many hours back in the day playing Cities XL (and its iterations that followed, such as the 2012, Platinum, and XXL versions). It was overall a great game that seemed like it was lacking something somewhere. I can't exactly pinpoint exactly what it was. It should have blown SC4 absolutely out of the water, but for whatever reason it didn't cut it for me. The cities just felt... lifeless. 

However, for its time, CXL was a pretty ambitious game. The maps were absolutely gigantic. I've never even come close to filling a tile in the game, so it was awesome to have the freedom to build as far as you wanted to. And of course the graphics were absolutely gorgeous. Even by today's standards, they blow even Skylines out of the water. It was perhaps the single biggest selling point for the game. 

What it lacked was a sense of fine-grained detail in the simulation. Skylines is the only game in the genre that simulates each sim individually. SC4 and CXL both simulate in batches, where batches will take the same routes, work at the same places, have the same attributes, etc. This is done to save CPU, which is a large part of the reason that Skylines cities never seem to reach higher populations, despite the sheer number of skyscrapers you can build in a city. 

In CXL, there aren't any disasters, aren't really any fine grained events that happen with the sims that make you feel connected. It's more crude and more generalized in a lot of ways. And it really kinda kicked CXL in the behind in the end. The original developer went bankrupt from developing it, and as a result, Focus Interactive took over the project and didn't really do much to add to it or to finish some of the unfinished aspects of the game. 

What are your thoughts on this ancient game? Despite its shortcomings, the graphics are gorgeous (even by today's standards), and the maps are huge. It definitely has things that were done right, despite its pitfalls.

[Guardian]

I loved Cities XL, but you are right, it was missing SOMETHING. I felt it was revolutionary in terms of the non-grid system and the graphics of the game. But, it was just a 'builder' and had a lot of missing depth. Very polished, just no depth.

[Darth-Apple]

That's a good way of putting it. Just something about it.

[SpookyZalost]

you know... there is one thing about modern city games I thought Sim city societies, SC3K, SC2K, SC1, and SC Creator did very well.

the idea of building styles.

now Sim city 2016 had the futuristic style and worked similarly to Societies but that's just something I've thought was missing from both Cities XL and Cities Skylines.

and while this is corrected with mods... it would be nice to have it from the get go as a select able option.

[Guardian]

Styles is one thing I wish there were more variance. Out of the box they're kinda plain. Thank goodness for mods! Adding these mods on Steam is crazy easy for Skylines. Makes the variations you can use really easy. Problem is you have to wait for someone to make them.

[Darth-Apple]

Thankfully there are quite a few. The DLCs are great for Skylines as well. I'm using Mass Transit and After Dark so far. I think I'm going to be settling with Park Life next, and that will be it for my DLCs.

One thing that would be nice in Skylines is the ability to pick a different starting tile. Often I find myself really liking a map, and wishing I could build on a different part of it. As of now, even with the 25 tiles mod, you can only build up to two tiles apart from the starting tile, so you're pretty limited in terms of what parts of the map you can actually build.

There is an 81 tiles mod that unlocks the entire map, but once you have the entire map unlocked, it becomes impossible to zoom out and see the whole city. It can become a nuisance very quickly.

[SpookyZalost]

I still want my cyberpunk/futuristic city Style

that's something that SC1, SC2K, SCS and SC2016 all did that the other's don't

[Thomas]

Tbh I don't think any city building games are relevant except Cities Skylines and Sim City 4.

[SpookyZalost]

SC4 barely works these days though without a lot of hassle.

you know something is weird when a game works better in linux, under wine, than a modern windows on the same hardware

[Darth-Apple]

It works fine on Mac for me. I cannot get Nam to install successfully, however. SC4 without the NAM is a much infirior game and was never worth playing for me.

[SpookyZalost]

is the NAM installer not running?

have you tried extracting NAM and installing it manually?... (side note, does this still work?)

worst case... have you tried using the windows installer with WINE for NAM then copying everything over?

[Darth-Apple]

The Mac installer is quite literally the windows installer running under Wine, as I found out. It's pretty freaking unstable...

Should I decide to play the game, I will try manually extracting the archive. As it turns out, there are very few Mac players of SC4 out there in the community. I do have a Windows machine that I use to play Skylines, so I suppose I could just use that instead.

[SpookyZalost]

@darth, my MacBook actually supports sc4... I've been meaning to get a copy for it, when I do, I'll see if I can help bugfix etc

[Darth-Apple]

I'm using the steam version of SC4, if that helps. It's only $5 right now, so it won't hit the wallet too hard.

[SpookyZalost]

I can tell you how I got NAM working in linux a while back when I was doing some testing work through brian.

I ended up using WINE to run the EXE since I was running the windows SC4 from CD in linux.

however not everything showed up so I had to go through and edit the file locations for some things due to the / vs \ windows to unix file organizational differences, once it got working though... other than the occasional graphical bug nam ran pretty stable on SC4 in wine.