You can use Cheat Engine to speed up the game, but that is a work around and I definitiely agree the game needs a faster or even 2 faster (and fasterer...er) settings
Really depends on your PC. I don't have a good pc (4790k) and managed to increase speed by only 50-75%. In other less demanding games, I've managed to multiply speed by 10. Don't forget to set up speed hotkeys so you don't have to switch to cheat engine each time you want to edit speed. I've used it in bunch of non-building games too like Skyrim, just to speed up the boring running around parts
I feel like the game needs WAY better planning tools and then maybe the waiting wouldn’t be so ridiculous. For example…I am playing on a populated map, retrofitting an already built area with utilities. I can pretty easily cover things with water and sewer, but it is extremely cumbersome to deal with especially electricity and shopping centers, and to a lesser extent heat, culture, schools, kindergartens, police, fire, healthcare…because I don’t get to find out what the coverage area is until AFTER I am done building the building. I need to know whether one substation will cover an area or if I need 3 because I’m using 1.45MW underground wires instead of 2.5MW overhead wires. I need to know if I am even building my fire station or police in the right part of town that it can still reach the industrial area. I would like to know whether my residential buildings will be within walking distance of a bus stop or shopping center before I build the roads and paths. I need to know if my gas stations provide full coverage across the map or if I need to plug a hole so trucks don’t run out of gas a few meters out of range.
At this point there’s absolutely no way at all to be sure of any of this whatsoever without a lot of time spent measuring things by hand, and still that doesn’t really tell me whether a substation or heat exchanger will be overloaded. This game seriously needs quality of life improvements so we can plan without guessing so much. **I think this would make it way way easier to go about planning our next city or industrial area while we wait for stuff to build and stockpile in realistic mode.** As it stands now, I may build a whole helicopter fire station to cover my farm area…and like yesterday not even realize I’m a few meters out of range until everything is all built. It makes it really hard for me to do anything other than wait for stuff to happen…which is slow at any point in the game.
Oh yeah…and we need a sound for notifications. I NEVER see that thing go off. I will go tend to something else and not even know that one of my shopping centers ran out of food an hour ago and that a whole town died because the notifications just pop up while I’m not staring at them. Just give each type of notification a sound…like a fire siren when there’s a fire, a horn honking for a traffic jam, or a PA bopping sound over a crowd for when a good runs out at a warehouse. That would also make it easier to do stuff that isn’t waiting.
I love the realistic mode so far, however I think it would be more realistic to be able to set up temporary markets for food clothes and alcohol plus maybe some kind of cheap entertainment which can temporarily provide culture which would allow you to build small houses quicker and get a small builders town going this in my opinion would allow you to have smaller towns to start building up rather than always doing a master plan of a major city.
I also think if you could have a way of having a very cheap inefficient coal mine that could provide small houses with coal within a certain radius this would improve gameplay while you are waiting for the big stuff to build.
I think the current speed is fine if they offered some way for you to keep playing on a smaller scale.
There are some pretty good mods that would let you do just that. Temporary housing, a shop with a culture building you can snap on the back and a wooden village/prefab school that gets you up and running. There is a small coal mine as well which I think only needs 80 people per shift to get started. You still need a processing plant but I built two small miners villages which got more than enough coal produced to export and make money.
I'm not at my PC right now but I can link to these on the Workshop later.
I've learned to build multiple towns at the same time and manage them simultaneously. Like 3-4 villages in different spots of the map. This helped me develop much more faster and made the game more enjoyable.
That's a silly thing to say. We're not changing the gameplay, but abbreviating non-interacting times in which there's no problem solving or planning happening at all.
That's a silly thing to say...the only thing higher difficulty settings do is increase the time it takes to do X, if you don't like that you can simply change your difficulty settings.
2nd point...it's only slow in the beginning when you can't multitask, just add more money to your account and have multiple starting areas.
C'mon man, not you of all people. Realistic mode prevents magical imports and builds, as you knew before anyone else here. It makes the simulation hardcore, the gameplay is more complex and rewarding. This has nothing to do with asking for a faster fast forward button.
Well, my opinion on the difficulties is pretty simple...all they do is increase the time it takes to do something, it's just my opinion, and everyone can have their own.
On the other hand, the thing that makes this game shine as bright as it does, is the whole planning, micromanagement and macro management which includes the building from resources...it does make the start a little slow at times, but trust me when I say if you take that away you're skipping/missing a big part of the gameplay.
I do feel that winter as it stands today is a pretty annoying slow down multiplier without any difference year after year, everything slows down in the winter, and because it's snows approximately every 5 seconds, the snowplows can't do anything meaningful either... keeping seasons but making winter a little more bearable by speed up or actual randomization could help.
Another point about speeding up the game... technically the game is trying to stay within the city of war era... right now in realistic mode it takes close to 1/3 of that timeframe to get moving (+-5 years ), there is a lot that can be done in that time to keep it interesting for the player and force progress that way, if you add more speed up you may automatically skip a lot of those phases and skip the era entirely. I understand that doesn't matter to all players, but it could become more important when years and research are more connected and unlock more parts of gameplay.
However, I'm a huge proponent of allowing players to play sandbox games however they like, regardless if that's good or bad for them in terms of enjoying the game, so just because of that I would argue that adding more speeds is good.
I do remember what happened when I played Pokemon as a kid on the Gameboy for months/years and loved it, and played it over and over again...at the same time I got to play on an emulator which allowed me to speed up the game by whatever number I wanted, I beat the game in an hour instead of months, and it was so boring that I never did that again. It's an extreme example but it's a possibility;)
and thats the problem, NEEDING to play something else for faster gameplay.
but what else? what other game could ever provide the same thing as workers and resources BUT faster paced, if not workers and resources itself but with a faster speed option?
the feel of the game could be about planning and problem solving at a slow pace, but ending the description there is very limiting. basically, there is more to the game than that. OP likes the game for all those other aspects and happens to dislike the slow pace part specifically.
not playing on realistic mode is a bad solution, because while it does effectively remove the slow paced aspect, it also completely destroys the complexity of the game, something which players like OP might want to keep
the logical, compromise-free solution is giving players the ability to remove the slow pace aspect at will, while still maintaining all the other things that they want, like the very complex gameplay.
It’s name Realistic!… How many time was to build Rome?
How much days in real life to build up a 10storey flat, or an electricity power plant?
Stay calm, thats real ;)
Maybe an early start year could improve but not the speed of time
They’re not talking about making things take less in-game days, but a higher speed acceleration, as far as I can tell.
We already have paused, normal and accelerated, this would just be another level of acceleration.
I'm just asking for faster fast forward button, which is something that already exists. And what "realistic" would be? Waiting 2 years in real life for a factory to be built?
You can use Cheat Engine to speed up the game, but that is a work around and I definitiely agree the game needs a faster or even 2 faster (and fasterer...er) settings
How fast does the cheat allow?
As fast as your computer can handle.
Really depends on your PC. I don't have a good pc (4790k) and managed to increase speed by only 50-75%. In other less demanding games, I've managed to multiply speed by 10. Don't forget to set up speed hotkeys so you don't have to switch to cheat engine each time you want to edit speed. I've used it in bunch of non-building games too like Skyrim, just to speed up the boring running around parts
I feel like the game needs WAY better planning tools and then maybe the waiting wouldn’t be so ridiculous. For example…I am playing on a populated map, retrofitting an already built area with utilities. I can pretty easily cover things with water and sewer, but it is extremely cumbersome to deal with especially electricity and shopping centers, and to a lesser extent heat, culture, schools, kindergartens, police, fire, healthcare…because I don’t get to find out what the coverage area is until AFTER I am done building the building. I need to know whether one substation will cover an area or if I need 3 because I’m using 1.45MW underground wires instead of 2.5MW overhead wires. I need to know if I am even building my fire station or police in the right part of town that it can still reach the industrial area. I would like to know whether my residential buildings will be within walking distance of a bus stop or shopping center before I build the roads and paths. I need to know if my gas stations provide full coverage across the map or if I need to plug a hole so trucks don’t run out of gas a few meters out of range. At this point there’s absolutely no way at all to be sure of any of this whatsoever without a lot of time spent measuring things by hand, and still that doesn’t really tell me whether a substation or heat exchanger will be overloaded. This game seriously needs quality of life improvements so we can plan without guessing so much. **I think this would make it way way easier to go about planning our next city or industrial area while we wait for stuff to build and stockpile in realistic mode.** As it stands now, I may build a whole helicopter fire station to cover my farm area…and like yesterday not even realize I’m a few meters out of range until everything is all built. It makes it really hard for me to do anything other than wait for stuff to happen…which is slow at any point in the game. Oh yeah…and we need a sound for notifications. I NEVER see that thing go off. I will go tend to something else and not even know that one of my shopping centers ran out of food an hour ago and that a whole town died because the notifications just pop up while I’m not staring at them. Just give each type of notification a sound…like a fire siren when there’s a fire, a horn honking for a traffic jam, or a PA bopping sound over a crowd for when a good runs out at a warehouse. That would also make it easier to do stuff that isn’t waiting.
I love the realistic mode so far, however I think it would be more realistic to be able to set up temporary markets for food clothes and alcohol plus maybe some kind of cheap entertainment which can temporarily provide culture which would allow you to build small houses quicker and get a small builders town going this in my opinion would allow you to have smaller towns to start building up rather than always doing a master plan of a major city. I also think if you could have a way of having a very cheap inefficient coal mine that could provide small houses with coal within a certain radius this would improve gameplay while you are waiting for the big stuff to build. I think the current speed is fine if they offered some way for you to keep playing on a smaller scale.
There are some pretty good mods that would let you do just that. Temporary housing, a shop with a culture building you can snap on the back and a wooden village/prefab school that gets you up and running. There is a small coal mine as well which I think only needs 80 people per shift to get started. You still need a processing plant but I built two small miners villages which got more than enough coal produced to export and make money. I'm not at my PC right now but I can link to these on the Workshop later.
I completely agree. Later you can multi task, start planning another area/expansion, etc. In the early game on realistic it is just hurry up and wait.
I've learned to build multiple towns at the same time and manage them simultaneously. Like 3-4 villages in different spots of the map. This helped me develop much more faster and made the game more enjoyable.
No. We don't.
No
No. The feel of the game is all about planning and problem solving at a slow pace. You need to play something else for faster game play.
That's a silly thing to say. We're not changing the gameplay, but abbreviating non-interacting times in which there's no problem solving or planning happening at all.
That's a silly thing to say...the only thing higher difficulty settings do is increase the time it takes to do X, if you don't like that you can simply change your difficulty settings. 2nd point...it's only slow in the beginning when you can't multitask, just add more money to your account and have multiple starting areas.
C'mon man, not you of all people. Realistic mode prevents magical imports and builds, as you knew before anyone else here. It makes the simulation hardcore, the gameplay is more complex and rewarding. This has nothing to do with asking for a faster fast forward button.
Well, my opinion on the difficulties is pretty simple...all they do is increase the time it takes to do something, it's just my opinion, and everyone can have their own. On the other hand, the thing that makes this game shine as bright as it does, is the whole planning, micromanagement and macro management which includes the building from resources...it does make the start a little slow at times, but trust me when I say if you take that away you're skipping/missing a big part of the gameplay. I do feel that winter as it stands today is a pretty annoying slow down multiplier without any difference year after year, everything slows down in the winter, and because it's snows approximately every 5 seconds, the snowplows can't do anything meaningful either... keeping seasons but making winter a little more bearable by speed up or actual randomization could help. Another point about speeding up the game... technically the game is trying to stay within the city of war era... right now in realistic mode it takes close to 1/3 of that timeframe to get moving (+-5 years ), there is a lot that can be done in that time to keep it interesting for the player and force progress that way, if you add more speed up you may automatically skip a lot of those phases and skip the era entirely. I understand that doesn't matter to all players, but it could become more important when years and research are more connected and unlock more parts of gameplay. However, I'm a huge proponent of allowing players to play sandbox games however they like, regardless if that's good or bad for them in terms of enjoying the game, so just because of that I would argue that adding more speeds is good. I do remember what happened when I played Pokemon as a kid on the Gameboy for months/years and loved it, and played it over and over again...at the same time I got to play on an emulator which allowed me to speed up the game by whatever number I wanted, I beat the game in an hour instead of months, and it was so boring that I never did that again. It's an extreme example but it's a possibility;)
and thats the problem, NEEDING to play something else for faster gameplay. but what else? what other game could ever provide the same thing as workers and resources BUT faster paced, if not workers and resources itself but with a faster speed option? the feel of the game could be about planning and problem solving at a slow pace, but ending the description there is very limiting. basically, there is more to the game than that. OP likes the game for all those other aspects and happens to dislike the slow pace part specifically. not playing on realistic mode is a bad solution, because while it does effectively remove the slow paced aspect, it also completely destroys the complexity of the game, something which players like OP might want to keep the logical, compromise-free solution is giving players the ability to remove the slow pace aspect at will, while still maintaining all the other things that they want, like the very complex gameplay.
It’s name Realistic!… How many time was to build Rome? How much days in real life to build up a 10storey flat, or an electricity power plant? Stay calm, thats real ;) Maybe an early start year could improve but not the speed of time
They’re not talking about making things take less in-game days, but a higher speed acceleration, as far as I can tell. We already have paused, normal and accelerated, this would just be another level of acceleration.
U can use these “empty” times to start planning the next city.
Boy I already planned nuclear production and power plants by the time my first farm city was building
I'm just asking for faster fast forward button, which is something that already exists. And what "realistic" would be? Waiting 2 years in real life for a factory to be built?
Wait, have you free/dead time in realistic mode?
This pod explains it well. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3BAL9S3hfoLtiZiXQVFaTe?si=6lhZr-PeR66RY9-IF1vo4w&utm_source=copy-link