3/4/2023 0 Comments Openttd city builderAnd it would cost far, far more than my current city (which was straining to fund a single school, after all) could ever hope to earn. Behold, the might of the history museum!Īfter the school was up and running, I learned that my next major unlock - a city hall - would take place at 20,000 residents. Most do several things at once, which only increases the need to think carefully about placement. Some allow greater housing density nearby, some affect which jobs are in demand, and some improve land value, for example. It's different for each amenity building, too. ![]() The school did fill such a thing, but more important was its effect on the area around it - a sort of buff, if you like, which effected several different local variables. And I hadn't just been doing it to fill an arbitrary "education" demand, either. It had been a proper, major choice, with consequences and everything. It meant I had to think really carefully about where best to put it, and once it was up, the education budget was high enough that I had to raise income tax just to keep from plunging into deep debt. In NewCity, when I was finally allowed to build schools at pop 5000, I found they were so expensive that I could only afford the one. You put them down cos you have to, and it's cheap enough that it doesn't really feel like much of a decision. In other games, you'll have the inevitable plopfest of fire stations, schools, clinics and the like to handle very early on, and it always feels a bit arbitrary and chore-ish. There wasn't even anything else to build, except basic zones, until I got to (I think) 5,000 residents. By the time my city had 1,000 residents, it was already the size of a good-sized city in another game, with an actually realistic-seeming sprawl of farmland surrounding it. You make your quaint little starting town, with its carefully planned road layout, neat farm cluster and tiny commercial district, and. Expanding in NewCity, by contrast, is like growing a massive lawn. You build the core of your city, then add to it slowly over time, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, stopping periodically to spend ages tinkering with road layouts. Because while the basic elements of the game are all borrowed from elsewhere, the way they play out in practice is impressively original.Įxpanding in Skylines, which is pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing right now, is a gradual business. And to be fair, this is probably one of the biggest obstacles NewCity will have to overcome, as in its early game it felt so much like a particularly barren SimCity clone, released decades too late, that I almost quit in disinterest. It speaks the green-blue-yellow zoning language of SimCity fluently, and can manage a decent conversation in OpenTTD besides, to the extent where anyone familiar with the general territory can play pretty much by instinct. I don't feel like I need to explain the basics of NewCity because they are, ironically, nothing new. A baby city, newly hatched from its concrete eg. The game's core, on the other hand, feels like the foundation of something really special. NewCity's problems, therefore, don't concern me, as they're all fairly peripheral set dressing issues. But this is early access, friends! And early early access, too, as the game's only been up on Steam a couple of weeks. Its UI is bleak, and its music is - with profound apologies to the composer, who I'm sure has done much better work in other genres - horrendous. It stutters a bit, at least on my PC, when speeding up time in a decent-sized city, and it feels very feature-sparse, to an extent where in the early game I wondered if I was missing some menus. ![]() Because for all its wonders, NewCity is, as it stands, a fairly ugly game. ![]() Looking out of an aeroplane window with a migraine, that is. Indeed, in the later stages of the session I played with it, I kept zooming out and having the uncanny sensation I was looking out of an aeroplane window. There's no doubt about it: NewCity is all about urban sprawl, and actually comes close to being able to replicate the terrifyingly massive size of actual, real world cities. They make Cities: Skylines metropolises look poky, and cities from 2013's SimCity look like quaint little villages. The first thing that tends to strike everyone about NewCity, is how massive its cities are.
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