Is there a 12 step program for infrastructure maintenance survival horror games?

I'll never forget you, Lord Bootycheeks. Please forgive me.

Nb: 'higher powers', are not necessarily 'religion'.

/

I think you need to plan your cities more like a small country town, and expect less density per meter of road than the game actually lets you put down. Rather than playing to the games metrics of population and income, just expect less of the city and spread it out more.

Every time I come back to it I have another dig through the menus, thinking I must be missing something, but there’s no “car-free city” option. As far as I understand, the new Plazas & Promenades DLC does not actually address this either.

Am I missing something? Why does the end-game always have to be traffic? Seems like a wasted opportunity.

You can avoid having to spend too much time on managing traffic if you follow some "design patterns", there is a bunch of them, so Google is probably your best friend.

Although, there is a good comment on reddit that gives a quick overview, with links to more in-depth material, that might be a good starting point for you: https://old.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/m57lq8/how_...

However, this only postpones the traffic nightmare. Eventually, the city grows to a point where the remaining ~20% of people using cars overwhelm even large, well-designed traffic systems.

Honestly, this seems depressingly realistic? Paris has lots of public transportion and walkable areas, and the Peripherique is still a traffic jam from hell.

However you do still need roads as businesses need them to ship and receive, and this is where traffic management counts.

The other strategy is getting everyone onto bikes and onto public transport. If they can do it, citizens will prioritize public transport and cycling over cars. So once you get rid of the trucks, and design the city in such a way that citizens can cycle/train to work/commercial then you'll reduce heaps of traffic.

Interestingly, I built high speed rail to a second town I built that's only connection is the railway, it's quite small but also very little traffic. Almost everyone takes the rail into the main city for work. I think better cities in the game would actually be to treat suburbs like a series of small towns, rather than lots of massive city blocks.

I now have 32GB just to play that game. I'm also considering buying another machine with 64GB for the same reason.

Please, help me.

Well, first step: get a desktop with 4 RAM slots so if you need to upgrade memory, you don't have to buy a whole new machine, just new RAM sticks.

Personally I'll always prefer mouse+keyboard, but it's also fun to play games in the living room.

I want one, but I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around what I would actually do.

Huge range of games with a wide variety of inputs. I don't want to admit to you what my weekly playtime average looks like since receiving the Deck, but it's high.

Vampire Survivors is my most highest played one based on hours though =) You can play it with the sound and most of your brain off, so you can still listen to what's going on in the TV show you're "watching".

GTA V runs perfectly on it, I played through Quantum Break. And as soon as I get Heroic Launcher (Epic + Gog games) working, I'll start with Witcher 3 and CP2077.

Honestly, its more that it feels like a new input type entirely in a class of its own. I find I use it a lot to mix and match gamepad controls with keyboard shortcuts and mouse click-drag, sometimes all within the same game.

Noita has gamepad controls, but a lot of the interface works a lot better with mouse+keyboard. Deck lets me use gamepad controls for when my character is interacting with the environment, and use mouse+keyboard controls when I open my inventory. This wouldn't be realistic on another device, because the environment/world continues in the background even while you have your inventory open, so you need to be able to switch immediately from inventory management back to world-interaction.

Most games are like this: they rely heavily on one input, but being able to make use of the other inputs simultaneously gives you a ton of options.

The one class of game that I really enjoy but haven't tried yet is heavily-keyboard-focused games like some traditional roguelikes. Some, like Brogue, have a small enough control set that it would be pretty easy to map all the main keys, and supplement with mouse input for eg inventory selection. Many require more keys and don't allow mouse input, however. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead has something like FIFO keyboard shortcut for inventory items, and uses a-z plus several symbols; that would be pretty painful on Deck. I haven't played that in years though, so maybe would be better today. I've been seriously meaning to try Cogmind or Caves of Qud on the Deck, though.

I’d like to find a good tutorial on it, but it seems like one of those games that you either get it or you don’t, like Civ (also utterly failed to get anywhere in Civ 6 multiple times)

https://youtu.be/Iu8YwpngbzE

If you want a shorter "just tell me where things go at the start so I can copy it" this one is a strong and easy layout for a city

https://youtu.be/8FXyrf8dwVQ

Also I'd recommend playing a few cities with the unlimited money option enabled.

Tho from what I remember was mostly due to unmanaged item growth just making your fortress have to calculate more and more and more stuff. With some game knowledge and management you can run few hundred years (Longdeath being one)

Also, never play Dyson Sphere Project. It ruined me worse than Factorio. Jokes aside, it’s a fantastically beautiful and well done game.

Now, Workers & Resources, Soviet Republic still stays challenging...

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...

I assume its more of a macro type game vs micro? I am thinking in terms of RTS type games here (which do not directly translate obviously). I always loved Total Annihilation for example but could never get into Starcraft at all.

When it came to developing nuclear powered infrastructure, it was going to take a huge refactor of my factory in order to not have "spaghetti infrastructure" criscrossing my factory. I started estimating the time to abstract resource production and modularize the delivery network, I was looking at a good few hours of focused work to get it done. Maybe I could split it into sub-tasks and approach it that way? Gosh, that sounds a lot like my job. So I stopped.

/s

This is something I wrote a few years ago and has been sitting in the drafts of a blog... https://gist.github.com/shagie/696b98749b7978444a267e5e02c6a...

Factorio is such an addictive, amazing game. There’s always one more thing to automate. “What if I could automate my nuclear reactors to keep fuel consumption low … oh, but what if I could automate the fuel production itself?” On and on. It’s kind of like KSP if you play it in hardcore where you can’t do anything except through kOS.

How many people must we lose before the government does something??

If that sounds appealing to you stay the heck away from Zachtronics.

Also, I disagree that it's easy to complete in 20 hours. The speedrun currently sits at 1h25m and while <20hr is quite possible for anyone to accomplish, it's pretty unrealistic for a first run where you'll likely hit a few progress snags.

Though, unlike some other games, the progress never slows down - misallocating early skill points in some games causes serious pain making up the same points without the proper tools at an exponentially increasing cost... in Factorio a tech is always the same cost so researching out of order simply delays how quickly you can become more efficient.

Given the availability of blueprint imports and YouTube, I don't think 20 hours is unrealistic. There's just too much content out there now on exactly what to do and when -- jump start base, main bus, bots, modules, launch, trains. When I originally got the game, Nilaus hadn't started doing megabase tutorial videos.

It sucks, but over time the Internet spoils games completely. Mods improve the situation because the content can be too niche for mainstream creators to profitably monetize. Kr+SpaceX is basically impossible to cover outside of Discord.

So... 100+ hours to research all this, and then <20 hours to complete the game :)

F... advanced oil processing

I repeat, MAN DOWN!

This is addressed on the post, and it looks like decent Deck support should happen in the near-to-mid-future.