Recent reviews by Aety9

It's probably a fun game, but, I was unable to play Co-op. Forwarded ports, double checked firewall settings. Restarted everything. Tried hosting and joining. Tried on different days. 77 minutes of "play time" is just sitting on the menu attempting to get a co-op game going. Every time it's the same generic error "failed to connect to server."

Wish they didn't have invis.

Despite some good changes from CSI to CSII, and 40 hours of gameplay (not counting time invested in watching YouTube tutorials), I just can't seem to enjoy playing it. Maybe mods will help but I just don't have the desire to go down that road.

Building the city up is just not satisfying and feels like a lot of work with little reward. Even destroying the city with disasters is unsatisfying. The tornado disaster, for example, just pops in without any weather effects. No clouds, no rain, just perfectly clear, sunny skies and oh look a twister.

Even the progression system feels lackluster and just get's in the way of enjoying the experience. For example, you can't view where resources (like fertile ground) are until you level up (why??), so you can't easily plan your road network out and end up having to bulldoze entire districts or start over. Luckily we have a solution. Just fill the map with wind turbines until you level up enough to unlock the resource lens.

I could go on, but I really don't want to. I loved Cities Skylines 1 and it's sad to see so much lacking in CS II. I'll probably check back in after a few months or so.

The game performance was fine for me.

Great game. It's got beavers. Happy little beavers.

Great game. Even in early access it's fun.

What's great:

-AI isn't broken. The villagers and raiders don't do anything unexpected and react to threats/conditions appropriately.
-The environments are beautiful, especially for being procedurally generated.
-The challenge isn't artificially difficult. Whatever difficulty you play on can be overcome with proper planning and RNG isn't likely to suddenly end your settlement.
-Being able to move some buildings really helps with long term planning and avoids wasting resources.
-Defensive towers take advantage of height. It's a nice touch that you don't see often enough.
-Being able to move Blueberries to a designated area was a nice surprise. I imagine this feature will eventually extend to some other harvest-able plants.
-Farming system is satisfying. Having to balance crop rotations, soil and fertility is a nice added challenge without being tedious.
-Seasons, weather, and sound effects are clean and beautiful.


What can be improved to the current game:

-No resource cap. You'll have to manually turn off jobs if you start overflowing with that resource. (Dynamic caps based on population would do well in this game.)
-Sand/Clay/Iron/Stone management. Once you run out of something on the map you'll have to start trading for it. Not unrealistic, but some degree of automation would be a huge QOL improvement late game. Ex: "Always buy/sell up to X amount of a resource when available." Other sources of those same materials would also be welcome (like a stone query).
-Map features - game trails, rivers, waterfalls, roads that extend off the map, caves, ruins, etc.
-Auto rebuild destroyed structures - either a toggle-able option like auto upgrade, or something like a carpenters workshop that would be a dedicated build/repair/rebuild structure.
-Work radius adjustments - increase/decrease the work radius of various structures. It could be balanced with a cost of or benefit to efficiency.
-Walls with ramparts where troops can walk on. (T3 walls?)
-Tutorial - The lack of a tutorial is understandable as implementing a tutorial now while the game is still being developed would just add to the workload whenever changes take place. Maybe just loading screen tips for now?

Overall:
Excellent game. As far as city builders go, this is a real gem with a lot of potential. I'm certain a lot of the above is on the way to some extent. I can't wait to see where it goes! Excellent work to the team at Crate Entertainment.

The game really improved since launch. Units behave more intelligently, game is far more stable, UI improvements are nice. Great job, can't wait to see how far this game goes!



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Old review:

I really want to recommend this game as I enjoyed the first Distant Worlds, but I simply can't in its current state. It crashes to desktop frequently (usually about an hour or hour and a half in) and the UI is pretty busy with a lot of raw info thrown at you at every turn.

Once the game is stabilized and optimized (very big FPS drop mid-late game), and maybe a bit of polish on the UI, this will be a fun space empire sim.

Please. For the love of all things farming. Fix the AI.

There are beautiful programs and almost but not quite as beautiful programmers out there that would love nothing more than to design a driving AI for a farming video game.

An AI that is not only capable of making back and fourth lines inside of a square. But an AI that can tackle triangles, parallelograms, heptagons, octagons, nonagons and dare I say it; rounded edges too.

And once we get there, we can look to the future. A future full curvy shapes and polygons where AIs adjust their paths dynamically. Able to avoid hitting trees, fences, or other objects without human intervention. AIs able to stop before interrupting the path of another AI, giving way to the appropriate vehicle. Able to continue a partially completed field without the need to manually line things up.

And once we get there; we can go even further. Imagine, a world of farms where fields aren't just magically completed. But completed using real equipment, live, in front of the player.

Just imagine the possibilities.

I believe that one day, with some dedicated effort and a bit of coffee, we'll get there.


(Player friction on vehicles would be cool too.)

So far so good. A little less manual tasks (like ordering refills) would be a welcome addition as it doesn't really add to the gameplay. I'll update my review after completing more of the game to see what research has in store

Fun game but WOW does the AI need some work

Fun game so far! My only complaints are those likely due to the game being in early access. Things like sound loops that repeat when a building a selected (instead of playing a single loop and fading out like most games), missing or incomplete sentences on some tooltips/instructions, etc. I'm sure all that will get ironed out as the game gets closer to completion.