Recently got Skylines and g*med hard on it today, but, as someone who sunk hundreds of hours into SimCity 4, I'm not getting the appeal. SimCity 4 is just so much comfier?
Is Skylines really just a traffic simulator? I watched a video by a self-proclaimed city planner all about how to make efficient transitions from the highway to your town, and it seemed like the road building / traffic control is the whole point.
What am I missing?
Just a traffic simulator? No, it's a fully featured city builder. With all dlc's, at least. Community talks a lot about traffic stuff because that's the hardest part of the game. It may be a little too realistic for some people. I mean literally, every citizen will actually get in a car and drive to work, to shops, etc. Every shop need to be restocked by a perfectly real truck that actually drives around. Every factory has trucks to get materials in and goods out. Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, garbage trucks, coffin trucks, postal vans, taxis, buses… Each needs to actually get from A to B to work, rather than just be in a range. It's much less abstract, and the scale of it all is much higher than than in SimCity. Honestly, i don't remember ever losing a game in SimCity. But here? It took months real time of trial and error to actually build a properly functioning high density city. And i'm not even the dumbest Skylines player. I guess it might be the definition of "uncomfy" for some people, but for me, that was the whole fun of it, actually.
It's too unrealistic, people drive their cars, then the cars vanish, which encourages people to build cities as dense as NYC, with literally no public transit.
Also coffin trucks are way outside the scope of the game, really weird to add that and not pizza delivery or any of a million more common sources of traffic.
Cars vanishing is a bug tho.
But
burgerbrained players and modders are something else.
I mean when they get to their destinations. Dense cities aren't forced to choose between building mass transit and dedicating 30% of their land to parking.
Not exactly, cars are actually parked when here is space. You can install some parking mods and see for yourself. Yes, here is no in-game penalty for not having It, but you can play it fair. Also, you see, while the scale of the game is higher than SimCity, it is still lower than in reality. That's why you don't need the murrica-sized parking hell.
If the game forced you to build america sized parking hell to have an america style city, it would be amazing propaganda.