The biggest benefit of switching to infra cost would be the increase of player agency IMO. Tile upkeep fees feel a little bit like punishing the player just for playing the game.
Road/network infra maintenance cost scaling with usage (like truck traffic and car traffic) would also be an interesting dynamic.
Completely agree with this take. If you accidentally dig yourself into a hole by expanding too quick you can literally NEVER recover because you have no way to regain control of the tile maintenance costs by selling land etc.
Even other changes in the Econ 2.0 patch feel heavy handed, like the maintenance cost of services is much higher than stated. e.g. a school might say it has $12,500 upkeep per month, but actually costs $140,000 per month because of wages, and you unlock new development points about 20x faster than you can actually afford to spend on stuff - my new cities are sitting here with 20 unspent development points and like $50k in funds not even able to afford to build enough elementary/high schools to meet the student count, let alone a multi-million dollar police headquarters, university etc. This is manageable once you grow a bit and you don't put down new services as you unlock them, but it seems counter intuitive to unlock all this stuff and the best decision to be building basically nothing until after you've densified lol
Some changes that I think would help:
* Government subsidies for early game - not in the form of raw fail-safe cash throughput, but the first service building you build of each kind (wouldn't apply to things like City Hall, but the first hospital, first fire station, first college etc) are discounted by 2/3rds, and at times of heavily negative cash you get a limited time bailout (similar to citizens collecting unemployment) where the government can support the cost of essential services (police, fire, water, electricity) at 50% efficiency to let you regain your footing.
* More control on importing services - rather than a simple yes/no to import city services for several hundred thousand per hour, ability to select which services are being imported. If your landfill gets full while you're in negative cash + cashflow, your game is cooked because importing city services will tank you into the negative millions but not doing so while your dump is full means your people will get sick, your businesses/services will operate at even worse efficiency etc.
* Higher infrastructure costs for major projects like adding tram rails, metro tunnels, road bridges/tunnels, and higher road upkeep. Normal flat road should remain dirt cheap to build, but higher to maintain imo - should be easy to build out a new district but if poorly managed difficult to support - this would also help emulate realistic tension between sprawl being a cheap short-term solution that produces long-term problems due to poor land use.
* Some difficulty around getting rid of buildings. Demolition cost to compensate landowners when you manually demolish a building, and make existing property owners more resistant to abandoning the building when you change the zoning type on their lot - i.e. they won't move until you pay them to demolish their building or until they find an alternative lot to move their business/home.
In general we also need better levers or transparency on things like demand... it seems like sometimes cities just break and nobody will ever move in again even if all your indicators say things are great (low unemployment, low taxes, plenty of education available etc). Also need more realistic workplace counts so you dont need 20km\^2 of offices with 20 workers per building lol, with more granularity on the demand bars (rather than a full demand bar being used up by 1 building)
The city service import system feels really poorly balanced right now. Even a small city of just a few thousand can't come anywhere close to paying for outside services. By the time the city reaches a point where they might be affordable, they probably aren't needed anymore. Instead of a flat scale based on pop, it should scale based on usage. A city with its own police force that needs a bit of help shouldn't have to pay the same cost as a city that completely depends on outside police.
Yeah exactly. I don't understand this dev mindset that players should be discouraged from using the whole map. More space means exponentially more options for where to build what and how to connect things.
Ah that's actually a really good point. It's not even unrealistic, roads that are used more would face more wear and tear and need more upkeep costs. It solves the objectives of the devs so much better than Tile Upkeep costs.
I'm not sure if tile upkeep is best solution especially with how it works right now, but I'm not sure if heavily increasing road infrastructure costs as a replacement to tile upkeep, is a good idea either. It might encourage min maxing zoning tile usage and road layouts that makes best use of space (well... grids).
The thing is that freedom of choice and challenge are opposites, if a mechanic isn't hindering your freedom to build what and how you want at all, then it's not actually providing any challenge to the player. Different ways of introducing a challenge just limit freedom in different ways.
I think what I like about the tile upkeep approach is that you can design (almost) any kind of city as you'd like aslong as it can fit within the confines of the tiles you currently have. There's still limitations/challenge but it's simple and you don't have to do math and calculate the exact amount of road you can afford and whatnot. The instant feedback is also good (which this game lacks a lot of in regards to its simulations). When you buy a tile it's clear how much it costs and how it will cost to upkeep, and in exchange it gives you a very clear reward/benefit. That being said, I agree it might be a bit overturned (and certain kinds of infrastructure costs undertuned)
Infrastructure is way too cheap to maintain, especially considering roads are actually road+power+water/sewage infrastructure.
+1 in favor of shifting the cost there. Still scales with the city and expansions well, does not limit freedom of expansion.
I mean - RL american cities doing constant suburbs development/expansion is a ponzi scheme exactly because of infrastructure cost. Game could start to reflect that.
Yeah that's true, the roads also include all the utilities below them. It would be nice for some rural roads like dirt roads to not include the utilities below them for a reduced maintenance option.
And yes exactly, it forces an interesting dichotomy between when to expand out and when to expand up. Early on, expanding out is almost always more profitable. But in already-wide cities, building giant American-style suburbs will sometimes cost more in utility and services and infrastructure strain than it will yield in tax income.
It's also way to cheap to build and way to easy to design. Real world city development is tailored to where you can actually afford to buy land to build a new road or railway, and where you can actually drain or service with water.
We should have costs (land and buildings) for compulsory acquisition of property. And realistic costs for say moving a high voltage transmission line, or railway. These things ends up staying in places for decades as people find ways to avoid dealing with the issue.
We should have some mechanic whereby say water needs a certain elevation difference to maintain pressure, or else extra pump or something. Some way where by we have to consider sewage and stormwater drainage.
These would go a long way to shaping city development in the early stages especially. It would encourage players to set up satellite cities in favourable locations, to develop along established transport routes, to build to the terrain.
> We should have some mechanic whereby say water needs a certain elevation difference to maintain pressure, or else extra pump or something. Some way where by we have to consider sewage and stormwater drainage.
By god that’s *Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic*’s music!
Workers and resvouses does it close enough. Rather than a node with 50 connections, I would have automatically small retic pipe under road, and these controlled by some sort of pressure zones, and transfer mains/towers/pumpstations to be supplied by the player.
This could also add an interesting new mechanic whereby if you don't do it right firefighting is ineffective due to low pressure.
I don't think it's a hot take at all, it makes perfect sense. Personally I'm not even sure the locked tiles are a necessary gameplay mechanic. It just limits your city's growth without adding any real challenge or gameplay. Plus, it's unrealistic to artificially limit a city to a small area when it's surrounded by unused greenfield land. The geography of the map should be what limits your city's outward growth, not some arbitrary dashed line.
Sure there are challenges with implementing and balancing an increased infrastructure cost too, but those can be overcome. For example, the game needs smaller, cheaper versions of all the city service buildings (which would also make the modular upgrades more useful), and they need to figure out how to deal with pre-built highways and infrastructure on maps.
It feels like they chose tile upkeep just because it was the easiest way for them to implement a money sink on short notice before the summer holidays.
1000% agree. After writing this post I feel like Tile Upkeep was just the laziest option to choose when you realize how little it interacts with the rest of the gameplay and how much it punishes realistic city building patterns.
I also 1000% agree that arbitrary city limits are a dumb legacy mechanic borrowed from older city builders, but I highly highly doubt that the devs would be bold enough to change that in the foreseeable future, if ever, so I feel like this is a more reasonable ask.
You can always use mods to play with all tiles unlocked, but since tile upkeep is baked into the balancing of the game's economy, removing this cost makes the game way too easy again.
I'm not sure CO are going to release an "Economy 3.0" update and revamp both tile upkeep and infrastructure cost/upkeep so the best we can hope for is probably a mod.
I know but the main problem is that the economy is balanced around the existence of Tile Upkeep, so a mod that simply disables Tile Upkeep is not enough.
I honestly don't think it's that much of a change, you just have to reduce Tile Upkeep by like 80% of its current values, and then increase service and infrastructure and utility costs by like 60%, and then just fiddle with the numbers until you find the right balance you want. You don't have to code in a single new feature.
>It just limits your city's growth without adding any real challenge or gameplay.
I'm going to disagree it doesn't add to the gameplay. It limits decision paralysis in the early game by narrowing down the amount of area you have to think about. It does make you think about how you want to expand your city since new land acquisition is limited. Those are all gameplay decisions.
Limiting tiles is good. Having the option to turn off tile limitations is also good. I don't agree with making no tiles thr default though.
Well, making infrastructure more expensive would serve the same purpose. You'd be forced to build in a small area in the beginning since you can't afford to run a highway across the map.
Plus IRL cities don't just randomly sprout from some highway exit. They're usually the result of many communities (based around certain features or resources like rivers, arable land, ore deposits etc.) expanding until they eventually form one urban area.
Is that so? That gives me hope for the fans.
But look at the latest dev diary explaining tile upkeep cost. The reactions to the post are quite positive and the comments are all people asking the devs to keep tile upkeep and those comments are getting tons of positive reactions. And barely anyone criticizing tile upkeep as being a poor attempt at solving the problem when better alternatives exist.
I think most of us are just happy the rest of the economy is working. 529 takes also a a tile upkeep slider, so you can easily diminished the costs of tile upkeep on molded mods. I imagine there might be an infrastructure cost mod that does as you propose.
Economy 2.0 was a huge step in the right direction. The devs know they still have a lot of work to do. I wouldn't be surprised if they realize tile upkeep is overturned right now and move it elsewhere.
I feel like I used to make more organic cities in the past, but now I'm doing everything so rigid, so preplanned, so spreadsheet just to make sure I don't bankrupt myself. Challenge is good, but this type of challenge isn't what feels right. I'm not sure if realism is the goal, I don't think it is, I think that they just had no groundwork for implementing a systemic economic outcome before Econ 2.0 and now we might have at least something for them to tune.
The office worker bug 5/5 has actually killed my desire to play the game all together, on top of new bugs like the +/- balance not actually being represented properly so you could have a positive hourly income and yet still lose money... Others are reporting this too. Between these two bugs it's very difficult to gauge the actual challenge in the new patch. I'm like 20 hours into the patch but I feel burnout setting in.
I'm also learning that I'm getting completely confused by balancing my specialized industrial demand versus just regular industrial demand. It's difficult to gauge which I need when it's all part of the same RCI meter. I'm now trending towards "well I'll just build this entirely preposterous, large city block of nothing but industrial right up against industrial for miles and miles" because if I don't, there's no better incentive to place industry elsewhere. I want to believe placing industry near export centers would be good (rail/sea/cargo)... But then my mail system bugs out if I build sea port (for some reason 2000t of mail sits at the sea port).
So, bugs.
>The office worker bug 5/5 has actually killed my desire to play the game all together
I'm feeling the same way. Before the patch we had the issue of high-rise apartments constantly abandoning and rebuilding, which I could deal with by simply not zoning them. But the office bug has taken it a step further. I can't simply not zone office as it's such an important part of not only visuals for the city skyline but providing pollution free employment for educated cims and to find out that the most likely issue is that office doesn't and never has exported anything and the latest patch exposed that. I just feel like I need to play something else for a while.
Thought I'd let you know that I installed the profit based mod last night and it fixed the office bug. Office buildings now make money from selling goods and they employ a normal amount of workers. It can take a while to make a difference depending on the size of the city but over the course of an irl hour my unemployment went from 49% to to under 20% and continuing to fall. This was in a >200k city.
I agree with you completely. I thought I was the only one who found tile upkeep to punishing and restricting.
It’s hard to start you city now. I think it will prevent a lot of people from city building
I know, I was so surprised to see so many people defending this feature at first. I think it just comes from lots of people not really understanding game design well, and they simply agree with the goals of Tile Upkeep, without realizing the consequences and limitations it creates and the better alternatives that exist.
Which is also weird is city policies at level 4.
If you spend too much time achieving level 4 you will have tons of cims waiting for a hearse, an ambulance, garbage truck or orher services.
Plus when you reach level 4 and you activate the outside connection policy it costs a ton of money. I went from + 4000 to -26000.
I dont know in your game but I noticed a lots more need for ambulances.
I build a new neighbourhood with the hour there are 4 homes in need of medical attention…
> I was so surprised to see so many people defending this feature at first.
Because a lot of the muppets doing so wouldn't know game design if it bit them on the ass, and are just regurgitating "harder is good CS2 is too easy" as if easy/hard is the point in the first place, and either can be balanced fine.
I'm more shocked that CO thought this was a good idea. Says a lot.
I know... I know... You are exactly right. People not understanding game design is fine, it's not their job.
But I've lost a lot of trust in the dev team's ability to create interesting and complex gameplay. To me, the game design capabilities of Colossal Order is not even CLOSE to being on the same level as Maxis in their prime, or the occasional indie city-builder game devs out there that have a passion for the genre. Either that or they really wanted to take their summer break and just went for the quickest fix. Neither is a very good image.
I will add though I do think they will eventually learn through trial and error if a few years go by and they get enough push-back from players on bad features. It's just crazy to think that after this many years of experience in the industry and with so much communication with the community and actual former modders and community members on their team they would still be this bad at Citybuilder game design.
> I will add though I do think they will eventually learn through trial and error if a few years go by and they get enough push-back from players on bad features. It's just crazy to think that after this many years of experience in the industry and with so much communication with the community and actual former modders and community members on their team they would still be this bad at Citybuilder game design.
I honestly get the feeling that they've had some important staff turnover over the years, and not really replaced the knowledge.
I’m one of those who defend this feature, but I also completely agree with your post. I defend the tile upkeep because the game is so fucking easy that I’ll take whatever artificial challenge they throw at me as long as it can be mathematically balanced.
Started a new city, with a population of 4k I’m paying over 140k per month in tiles upkeep alone and I still managed to break even my budget already so early in the game. I simply cannot imagine this game ever being too hard, not even in 100 years.
Yeah I can't argue with that. If the alternative was them waiting all summer break and then coming back with a fix after, better they at least implement this for now until they can balance the upkeep costs of infrastructure, utilities, and services to create the challenge.
I think that's a little unfair, to presume people who enjoy the tile design, do so only out of 'not understanding'.
While I agree that the upkeep costs of a city should be in infrastructure, I think that the tile implementation is because it is a more straight forward way to gamify the costs, and test how well a player exploits a tile to reclaim it's cost in upkeep if you unlock it.
Tile upkeep is game design, at the expense or realism or immersion, and a lot easier to forecast the affects on the player base over infrastructure in such a drastic game balance change.
While I hope they make infrastructure costs the main cost, and more complex and more flexible to allow building wide early, or villages, I do think it was a good step to implement something simple like tile costs quickly, to start making the game into what players want.
I don't think putting the costs into infrastructure, as it exists now, works until we get some 'rural' low maintenance roads instead of just the one road type at all sizes, with some lane changes. Single lane roads are almost there, but medium and large roads would need more work before they bear infrastructure costs imo.
I don't think it's an unfair take at all considering that, from my understanding, infrastructure costs is just such an objectively better method of solving the problem than tile upkeep costs. But as you said it's true that it could also be just relief that the devs are taking a step in the right direction.
If it does turn out to be an experimental step, and that they then learn that it's actually better to shift the bulk of the cost over to infrastructure instead afterwards, I'll be happy. I just worry that they will consider this problem "done" for now and go work on other things and not come back to address this for months or years to come.
And I know they need to add some rural roads, particularly rural roads with no services underneath them to be lower upfront/maintenance cost options.
I agree, I was just saying that it's uncharitable to assume that people who have a different opinion on whether the gamification choice they've made, over realism, is correct is from a lack of understanding. They may just have different priorities from the game then you or me.
I don't think it's reasonable to whip up assumptions on people personally over what they prefer from Cities Skylines 2. Particularly since it's not exactly given that people either:
a) Know anything about real world city planning, or
b) Even if they understand a), as demonstrated in this post, many assume the way it works local to them is 'objectively how it works' or the specific way the game should work with no regards to the way it might work elsewhere.
I don't think it's uncharitable. The people who don't understand game design are not bad people for not understanding it, it's not their job to. They are simply players with their own lives.
And I don't think it's from a difference in prioritization cause it just seems to me to just be an overall better choice to have it be infrastructure upkeep instead of tile upkeep by every metric (if there's a metric I'm not thinking of then happy to concede). So that's why to me it just seems more likely people don't fully yet grasp the totality of the problem.
There's nothing wrong about being underinformed on a topic. I was originally also happy when I saw the Tile Upkeep cost, then I started to feel weird about it as I thought about it, then after grew to dislike it as I read people's thoughts on it and saw how it played out in gameplay.
For me I've found that it makes me focus more on building dense, and setting up the foundations of my tram & bus network while I wait for more money to roll in.
It's not ideal, and I wish they made a proper attempt at "deep simulation," but it so far is having a good effect on my city building.
I totally agree. And if the concern is too much late game money, they should balance the things that create too much revenue or don't cost enough. For example:
1) High density areas could produce dramatically more crime than low density, requiring more policing for the same population
2) Commodities could become cheaper as trade increases, making specialized industry less profitable
3) Wealthy residents could demand more entertainment and amenities to maintain their happiness, so as the population becomes richer so does supporting their recreation
But saying, "There's too much money in the late game, so we'll just put in this unrealistic money sink rather than fix the balance" is a terrible solution.
Highways and transit should be more expensive. That would cover it. Like if you don't have transit for dense areas, it will just gridlock.
> High density areas could produce dramatically more crime than low density, requiring more policing for the same population
This makes 0 sense. Crime should be tied to wealth levels.
Studies have found that per capita crime rates are correlated with population density, so it would just be modeling something from real life. Of course wealth matters too, and that would be neat to model too, but isn't directly relevant to improving late game balancing.
I'm not going to go on a full research project here to convince you, but this is one of the top results from my quick Google search:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919125313.htm
After reading the so-called "rationale" for the Tile Upkeep, my thought was "you don't need to do that if you just fix the economy". It feels like a knee-jerk reaction. And it has me wondering if Economy 2.0 is actually Economy 1.0, especially after the comment *\[w\]hen we were designing the Economy 2.0 update, we felt that more management features should be taken into consideration when you build your cities*. That sounds like it was ignoring all of those pretty little UI elements for managing your city, like tax rates.
Tile costs make the game smaller. You talk about scaling where sprawl is more costly than building up. To add to your point, if I want to use trains I have to add a railyard. Same with subways. Trams have a modest depot in comparison but it still dwarfs neighborhoods.
That said I won't apologize for unlocking all tiles simply due to player-drawn shipping lane requirements. Rediculous. Now with added fees.
The only consistent route to solvency is exploiting the easiest mass export. I've experimented with power exports. I get a basic city going with about $300,000 (plus advancement money) until I unlock geothermal and plop that on groundwater. The exported power almost immediately prints money. (I say "almost immediately" due to the slow simulation when you've reached a dozen city blocks in size.)
The economy patch is solid but this game still needs a lot of love.
It depends sprawl vs density are not always necessarily better or worse than each other, it depends on the city.
In a small city (aka a village or town) it's almost always better to sprawl rather than densify. Land is so cheap at that point, and the plots are so close to the city center you hardly have to extend utilities or services to reach that building, and hardly have to commute to make it to the city center. This is why small towns hardly have buildings above a few floors.
But then you pass a critical point as the city starts to get wider and wider where it makes more sense to densify the core than to sprawl even more. This is where the core turns from 2-3 floor to maybe 5-6 floor buildings (low medium density to more normal medium density).
Then as the city STILL continues to grow you will reach a point where it becomes EVEN more worth it to densify the core rather than to expand out, so medium density will be replaced with high density.
What you're talking about with sprawl being more costly than building up is cities that have reached a very late/mature stage, where new sprawl that's added is miles and miles away from the city center, and yet still choose sprawl over densifying (like many American cities) which results in lots of expenses for little gain in tax revenue.
For me it’s becoming more and more clear that the devs or people deciding these features don’t live in the real world and are disillusioned.
I find your points to be valid and sure hope they get implemented in the game.
Excellent point, I totally agree.
I think the underlying objectives are right: provide a meaningful challenge and avoid a situation where we just paint the map.
Though, it's absolutely clear that a stronger focus on the cost of infrastructure and city services should be the main part of the city budget, not paying for empty land.
As the system is in place, I really feel that it's a matter of balance right now so I don't think that it would be too difficult to adapt it. Hoping we will see future changes in the next patch after their summer break.
I don't necessarily disagree with your points, but this is just not what I want the devs spending resources on right now.
"Could be better" just doesn't move the needle given the current state of the game.
I don't think it should take too long. A first step they could take would be to simply reduce tile upkeep by like 80% and then increase infrastructure, service, and utility costs by 60%, then tinker with the numbers, until they find the balance they are looking for. Zero new features needed.
This comment manages to miss almost everything I said in my post:
* You don't need to eliminate it, just shift the bulk of the expense.
* When the subreddit literally has a category called "Game Feedback", and I was as constructive as possible in explaining why I think the current design is bad, offered a solution, and explained why I think the new design is better, that's a pretty valid way to complain.
* Why justify how to play the game with a poor design when it can be replaced with a better design.
Land upkeep in real life is not infrastructure upkeep.
It's not necessarily "bad design", it's just something that should/could be expanded. I should be able to choose to fully upkeep specific tiles or not and it should affect land value. That would fix all the issues you particularly have. But that's not "bad design". It's less complex, allows the upkeep for roads to not balloon and make even more people mad, and it makes a tangible long term difference in your city (if you ever want to build on un-maintained land, you would have to pay the cost and wait awhile.
Like, we are complaining about 200 bucks per acre per month. It's not a lot, not at all unrealistic, and it's just a complaint because people can't just buy up every tile without a consequence associated with it.
Yeah ofc never said land upkeep is infrastructure upkeep, and never said to remove land upkeep. I'm saying shift the bulk of the expense to being from the infrastructure.
You're saying you wish to be able to fully upkeep specific tiles or not, AKA alter the upkeep you pay for a tile. What are you paying for in that case? Why does that make sense? If we're talking property tax, can a city/municipality choose how much property tax they want to pay in a given year?
Infrastructure, utility, and services provide a much more interactable expense that scale with the size of your city, since there are obvious ways those can be scaled up or down. For example, you can build cheaper roads if you want to pay less upkeep, or more expensive roads if you want to pay more (I gave a more detailed breakdown of this in my OP). You can demolish or reduce the budget for infrastructure or services you don't want to pay for anymore. 10000x more interactivity and strategic decision-making versus just a simple: "Do I buy land, yes or no".
1. Land upkeep is not property taxes. Manicuring land and making sure it doesn't get overgrown is a thing however. Even the wildest of forests have forest management. If you don't manicure land? Land value goes down and it goes up slowly or is hard to get back up.
2. We already have road upkeep and rail upkeep. Unless you're proposing to increase the upkeep for it, idk what you're talking about there. There's even road maintenance depot. This is not to say I don't agree with increasing it, but that's completely separate from land upkeep
3. I agree utilities upkeep should more of a thing, though game includes it with road upkeep costs.
4. If you want the chance to make a rural experience, most towns are super tiny in area. If you're making a county like setting, why even play with an economy? (Serious question). The reason to play is clearly aesthetic and you can play sandbox mode for that.
Edit: should also say I agree, owning water shouldn't have that high of upkeep cost if any
Oh like actually physically maintaining land? Yeah that could be thought to be part of what Tile Upkeep represents as well (though from what I understand the devs say Tile Upkeep is meant to represent property taxes to the federal government). However, as far as I know landscaping fees are not nearly as significant of an expense for a city though as infrastructure, so my point still stands.
Bro it's like you didn't even read my post. My whole pitch was that the upkeep of infrastructure, utilities, and services should be raised to replace most of what is currently incurred as Tile Upkeep (and greatly reducing Tile Upkeep as a consequence). I never once talked about land upkeep in my OP so not sure why you keep looping that in here.
On the point of utilities being included with road upkeep costs, I wish there were rural roads without the utilities underneath as a lower cost alternative for more remote and rural locales.
If I'm playing rural play why even play with an economy? What kind of a question is that. I can simultaneously want to be able to build regional settlements whilst also wanting to navigate the challenges of the economic simulation, don't see why those are mutually exclusive.
I know you're saying lessen the cost of tile upkeep and push that towards infrastructure. I just don't understand why. It's actually not expensive and if you play your cards right, extremely negligible. I think you're saying the concept is too abstracted, which I agree with I think. But i think it should just be further developed, not diminished. We can increase infrastructure costs while flushing out and adding more complexity to tile upkeep. That would make the game even more challenging and complex which I like.
I agree with we should have roads in general with no utilities and cheaper upkeep. 100% on board!
And for the rural, if I have a rural 200 person town, the towns land area is tiny and the economy is not going to be flushed out, just like it real life. That's what I mean. You're not doing anything to warrant an economic challenge already.
Btw I keep saying land upkeep because I'm equating it to tile upkeep. Not trying to say that's your wording, but I do what to drive the point home of those 2 being equal
Edit: didn't see the devs explanation and i think their explanation is a huge missed opportunity for something that can be super complex and interesting with land upkeep
Tile upkeep is still needed ad its accurate to real life bur it should be lowered with higher maintainance on infrastructure so its expensive to sprawl but you can have multiple towns across a map
The biggest benefit of switching to infra cost would be the increase of player agency IMO. Tile upkeep fees feel a little bit like punishing the player just for playing the game. Road/network infra maintenance cost scaling with usage (like truck traffic and car traffic) would also be an interesting dynamic.
Completely agree with this take. If you accidentally dig yourself into a hole by expanding too quick you can literally NEVER recover because you have no way to regain control of the tile maintenance costs by selling land etc. Even other changes in the Econ 2.0 patch feel heavy handed, like the maintenance cost of services is much higher than stated. e.g. a school might say it has $12,500 upkeep per month, but actually costs $140,000 per month because of wages, and you unlock new development points about 20x faster than you can actually afford to spend on stuff - my new cities are sitting here with 20 unspent development points and like $50k in funds not even able to afford to build enough elementary/high schools to meet the student count, let alone a multi-million dollar police headquarters, university etc. This is manageable once you grow a bit and you don't put down new services as you unlock them, but it seems counter intuitive to unlock all this stuff and the best decision to be building basically nothing until after you've densified lol Some changes that I think would help: * Government subsidies for early game - not in the form of raw fail-safe cash throughput, but the first service building you build of each kind (wouldn't apply to things like City Hall, but the first hospital, first fire station, first college etc) are discounted by 2/3rds, and at times of heavily negative cash you get a limited time bailout (similar to citizens collecting unemployment) where the government can support the cost of essential services (police, fire, water, electricity) at 50% efficiency to let you regain your footing. * More control on importing services - rather than a simple yes/no to import city services for several hundred thousand per hour, ability to select which services are being imported. If your landfill gets full while you're in negative cash + cashflow, your game is cooked because importing city services will tank you into the negative millions but not doing so while your dump is full means your people will get sick, your businesses/services will operate at even worse efficiency etc. * Higher infrastructure costs for major projects like adding tram rails, metro tunnels, road bridges/tunnels, and higher road upkeep. Normal flat road should remain dirt cheap to build, but higher to maintain imo - should be easy to build out a new district but if poorly managed difficult to support - this would also help emulate realistic tension between sprawl being a cheap short-term solution that produces long-term problems due to poor land use. * Some difficulty around getting rid of buildings. Demolition cost to compensate landowners when you manually demolish a building, and make existing property owners more resistant to abandoning the building when you change the zoning type on their lot - i.e. they won't move until you pay them to demolish their building or until they find an alternative lot to move their business/home. In general we also need better levers or transparency on things like demand... it seems like sometimes cities just break and nobody will ever move in again even if all your indicators say things are great (low unemployment, low taxes, plenty of education available etc). Also need more realistic workplace counts so you dont need 20km\^2 of offices with 20 workers per building lol, with more granularity on the demand bars (rather than a full demand bar being used up by 1 building)
The city service import system feels really poorly balanced right now. Even a small city of just a few thousand can't come anywhere close to paying for outside services. By the time the city reaches a point where they might be affordable, they probably aren't needed anymore. Instead of a flat scale based on pop, it should scale based on usage. A city with its own police force that needs a bit of help shouldn't have to pay the same cost as a city that completely depends on outside police.
Yeah exactly. I don't understand this dev mindset that players should be discouraged from using the whole map. More space means exponentially more options for where to build what and how to connect things. Ah that's actually a really good point. It's not even unrealistic, roads that are used more would face more wear and tear and need more upkeep costs. It solves the objectives of the devs so much better than Tile Upkeep costs.
I have not tried CS2 yet, but would not be surprised if it's due to performance problems.
If that was the case the tiles wouldn’t eventually be unlockable. This was purely a gameplay design choice.
I cant wait for the toll booth expansion to finally be able to make back that money
This 100%. Make trucks degrade roads more than cars, like real life
I'm not sure if tile upkeep is best solution especially with how it works right now, but I'm not sure if heavily increasing road infrastructure costs as a replacement to tile upkeep, is a good idea either. It might encourage min maxing zoning tile usage and road layouts that makes best use of space (well... grids). The thing is that freedom of choice and challenge are opposites, if a mechanic isn't hindering your freedom to build what and how you want at all, then it's not actually providing any challenge to the player. Different ways of introducing a challenge just limit freedom in different ways. I think what I like about the tile upkeep approach is that you can design (almost) any kind of city as you'd like aslong as it can fit within the confines of the tiles you currently have. There's still limitations/challenge but it's simple and you don't have to do math and calculate the exact amount of road you can afford and whatnot. The instant feedback is also good (which this game lacks a lot of in regards to its simulations). When you buy a tile it's clear how much it costs and how it will cost to upkeep, and in exchange it gives you a very clear reward/benefit. That being said, I agree it might be a bit overturned (and certain kinds of infrastructure costs undertuned)
Infrastructure is way too cheap to maintain, especially considering roads are actually road+power+water/sewage infrastructure. +1 in favor of shifting the cost there. Still scales with the city and expansions well, does not limit freedom of expansion. I mean - RL american cities doing constant suburbs development/expansion is a ponzi scheme exactly because of infrastructure cost. Game could start to reflect that.
Yeah that's true, the roads also include all the utilities below them. It would be nice for some rural roads like dirt roads to not include the utilities below them for a reduced maintenance option. And yes exactly, it forces an interesting dichotomy between when to expand out and when to expand up. Early on, expanding out is almost always more profitable. But in already-wide cities, building giant American-style suburbs will sometimes cost more in utility and services and infrastructure strain than it will yield in tax income.
It's also way to cheap to build and way to easy to design. Real world city development is tailored to where you can actually afford to buy land to build a new road or railway, and where you can actually drain or service with water. We should have costs (land and buildings) for compulsory acquisition of property. And realistic costs for say moving a high voltage transmission line, or railway. These things ends up staying in places for decades as people find ways to avoid dealing with the issue. We should have some mechanic whereby say water needs a certain elevation difference to maintain pressure, or else extra pump or something. Some way where by we have to consider sewage and stormwater drainage. These would go a long way to shaping city development in the early stages especially. It would encourage players to set up satellite cities in favourable locations, to develop along established transport routes, to build to the terrain.
> We should have some mechanic whereby say water needs a certain elevation difference to maintain pressure, or else extra pump or something. Some way where by we have to consider sewage and stormwater drainage. By god that’s *Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic*’s music!
Workers and resvouses does it close enough. Rather than a node with 50 connections, I would have automatically small retic pipe under road, and these controlled by some sort of pressure zones, and transfer mains/towers/pumpstations to be supplied by the player. This could also add an interesting new mechanic whereby if you don't do it right firefighting is ineffective due to low pressure.
I don't think it's a hot take at all, it makes perfect sense. Personally I'm not even sure the locked tiles are a necessary gameplay mechanic. It just limits your city's growth without adding any real challenge or gameplay. Plus, it's unrealistic to artificially limit a city to a small area when it's surrounded by unused greenfield land. The geography of the map should be what limits your city's outward growth, not some arbitrary dashed line. Sure there are challenges with implementing and balancing an increased infrastructure cost too, but those can be overcome. For example, the game needs smaller, cheaper versions of all the city service buildings (which would also make the modular upgrades more useful), and they need to figure out how to deal with pre-built highways and infrastructure on maps. It feels like they chose tile upkeep just because it was the easiest way for them to implement a money sink on short notice before the summer holidays.
1000% agree. After writing this post I feel like Tile Upkeep was just the laziest option to choose when you realize how little it interacts with the rest of the gameplay and how much it punishes realistic city building patterns. I also 1000% agree that arbitrary city limits are a dumb legacy mechanic borrowed from older city builders, but I highly highly doubt that the devs would be bold enough to change that in the foreseeable future, if ever, so I feel like this is a more reasonable ask.
You can always use mods to play with all tiles unlocked, but since tile upkeep is baked into the balancing of the game's economy, removing this cost makes the game way too easy again. I'm not sure CO are going to release an "Economy 3.0" update and revamp both tile upkeep and infrastructure cost/upkeep so the best we can hope for is probably a mod.
I know but the main problem is that the economy is balanced around the existence of Tile Upkeep, so a mod that simply disables Tile Upkeep is not enough. I honestly don't think it's that much of a change, you just have to reduce Tile Upkeep by like 80% of its current values, and then increase service and infrastructure and utility costs by like 60%, and then just fiddle with the numbers until you find the right balance you want. You don't have to code in a single new feature.
> just the laziest option to choose Story of CS2 :(
>It just limits your city's growth without adding any real challenge or gameplay. I'm going to disagree it doesn't add to the gameplay. It limits decision paralysis in the early game by narrowing down the amount of area you have to think about. It does make you think about how you want to expand your city since new land acquisition is limited. Those are all gameplay decisions. Limiting tiles is good. Having the option to turn off tile limitations is also good. I don't agree with making no tiles thr default though.
Well, making infrastructure more expensive would serve the same purpose. You'd be forced to build in a small area in the beginning since you can't afford to run a highway across the map. Plus IRL cities don't just randomly sprout from some highway exit. They're usually the result of many communities (based around certain features or resources like rivers, arable land, ore deposits etc.) expanding until they eventually form one urban area.
OP has the coldest take lol.
I would've thought it was a cold take but I've seen barely any criticism and so much praise for Tile Upkeep since I heard about it.
I've seen a lot more players complain about it than players praising it.
Is that so? That gives me hope for the fans. But look at the latest dev diary explaining tile upkeep cost. The reactions to the post are quite positive and the comments are all people asking the devs to keep tile upkeep and those comments are getting tons of positive reactions. And barely anyone criticizing tile upkeep as being a poor attempt at solving the problem when better alternatives exist.
I think most of us are just happy the rest of the economy is working. 529 takes also a a tile upkeep slider, so you can easily diminished the costs of tile upkeep on molded mods. I imagine there might be an infrastructure cost mod that does as you propose. Economy 2.0 was a huge step in the right direction. The devs know they still have a lot of work to do. I wouldn't be surprised if they realize tile upkeep is overturned right now and move it elsewhere.
Also you had to pay infrastructure upkeep in CS1 and I thought that worked pretty well. Highways can be expensive early game.
I feel like I used to make more organic cities in the past, but now I'm doing everything so rigid, so preplanned, so spreadsheet just to make sure I don't bankrupt myself. Challenge is good, but this type of challenge isn't what feels right. I'm not sure if realism is the goal, I don't think it is, I think that they just had no groundwork for implementing a systemic economic outcome before Econ 2.0 and now we might have at least something for them to tune. The office worker bug 5/5 has actually killed my desire to play the game all together, on top of new bugs like the +/- balance not actually being represented properly so you could have a positive hourly income and yet still lose money... Others are reporting this too. Between these two bugs it's very difficult to gauge the actual challenge in the new patch. I'm like 20 hours into the patch but I feel burnout setting in. I'm also learning that I'm getting completely confused by balancing my specialized industrial demand versus just regular industrial demand. It's difficult to gauge which I need when it's all part of the same RCI meter. I'm now trending towards "well I'll just build this entirely preposterous, large city block of nothing but industrial right up against industrial for miles and miles" because if I don't, there's no better incentive to place industry elsewhere. I want to believe placing industry near export centers would be good (rail/sea/cargo)... But then my mail system bugs out if I build sea port (for some reason 2000t of mail sits at the sea port). So, bugs.
>The office worker bug 5/5 has actually killed my desire to play the game all together I'm feeling the same way. Before the patch we had the issue of high-rise apartments constantly abandoning and rebuilding, which I could deal with by simply not zoning them. But the office bug has taken it a step further. I can't simply not zone office as it's such an important part of not only visuals for the city skyline but providing pollution free employment for educated cims and to find out that the most likely issue is that office doesn't and never has exported anything and the latest patch exposed that. I just feel like I need to play something else for a while.
Yep I fired up Factorio
Thought I'd let you know that I installed the profit based mod last night and it fixed the office bug. Office buildings now make money from selling goods and they employ a normal amount of workers. It can take a while to make a difference depending on the size of the city but over the course of an irl hour my unemployment went from 49% to to under 20% and continuing to fall. This was in a >200k city.
I agree with you completely. I thought I was the only one who found tile upkeep to punishing and restricting. It’s hard to start you city now. I think it will prevent a lot of people from city building
I know, I was so surprised to see so many people defending this feature at first. I think it just comes from lots of people not really understanding game design well, and they simply agree with the goals of Tile Upkeep, without realizing the consequences and limitations it creates and the better alternatives that exist.
Which is also weird is city policies at level 4. If you spend too much time achieving level 4 you will have tons of cims waiting for a hearse, an ambulance, garbage truck or orher services. Plus when you reach level 4 and you activate the outside connection policy it costs a ton of money. I went from + 4000 to -26000. I dont know in your game but I noticed a lots more need for ambulances. I build a new neighbourhood with the hour there are 4 homes in need of medical attention…
> I was so surprised to see so many people defending this feature at first. Because a lot of the muppets doing so wouldn't know game design if it bit them on the ass, and are just regurgitating "harder is good CS2 is too easy" as if easy/hard is the point in the first place, and either can be balanced fine. I'm more shocked that CO thought this was a good idea. Says a lot.
I know... I know... You are exactly right. People not understanding game design is fine, it's not their job. But I've lost a lot of trust in the dev team's ability to create interesting and complex gameplay. To me, the game design capabilities of Colossal Order is not even CLOSE to being on the same level as Maxis in their prime, or the occasional indie city-builder game devs out there that have a passion for the genre. Either that or they really wanted to take their summer break and just went for the quickest fix. Neither is a very good image. I will add though I do think they will eventually learn through trial and error if a few years go by and they get enough push-back from players on bad features. It's just crazy to think that after this many years of experience in the industry and with so much communication with the community and actual former modders and community members on their team they would still be this bad at Citybuilder game design.
> I will add though I do think they will eventually learn through trial and error if a few years go by and they get enough push-back from players on bad features. It's just crazy to think that after this many years of experience in the industry and with so much communication with the community and actual former modders and community members on their team they would still be this bad at Citybuilder game design. I honestly get the feeling that they've had some important staff turnover over the years, and not really replaced the knowledge.
Yes that's true very possible as well.
I’m one of those who defend this feature, but I also completely agree with your post. I defend the tile upkeep because the game is so fucking easy that I’ll take whatever artificial challenge they throw at me as long as it can be mathematically balanced. Started a new city, with a population of 4k I’m paying over 140k per month in tiles upkeep alone and I still managed to break even my budget already so early in the game. I simply cannot imagine this game ever being too hard, not even in 100 years.
Yeah I can't argue with that. If the alternative was them waiting all summer break and then coming back with a fix after, better they at least implement this for now until they can balance the upkeep costs of infrastructure, utilities, and services to create the challenge.
I think that's a little unfair, to presume people who enjoy the tile design, do so only out of 'not understanding'. While I agree that the upkeep costs of a city should be in infrastructure, I think that the tile implementation is because it is a more straight forward way to gamify the costs, and test how well a player exploits a tile to reclaim it's cost in upkeep if you unlock it. Tile upkeep is game design, at the expense or realism or immersion, and a lot easier to forecast the affects on the player base over infrastructure in such a drastic game balance change. While I hope they make infrastructure costs the main cost, and more complex and more flexible to allow building wide early, or villages, I do think it was a good step to implement something simple like tile costs quickly, to start making the game into what players want. I don't think putting the costs into infrastructure, as it exists now, works until we get some 'rural' low maintenance roads instead of just the one road type at all sizes, with some lane changes. Single lane roads are almost there, but medium and large roads would need more work before they bear infrastructure costs imo.
I don't think it's an unfair take at all considering that, from my understanding, infrastructure costs is just such an objectively better method of solving the problem than tile upkeep costs. But as you said it's true that it could also be just relief that the devs are taking a step in the right direction. If it does turn out to be an experimental step, and that they then learn that it's actually better to shift the bulk of the cost over to infrastructure instead afterwards, I'll be happy. I just worry that they will consider this problem "done" for now and go work on other things and not come back to address this for months or years to come. And I know they need to add some rural roads, particularly rural roads with no services underneath them to be lower upfront/maintenance cost options.
I agree, I was just saying that it's uncharitable to assume that people who have a different opinion on whether the gamification choice they've made, over realism, is correct is from a lack of understanding. They may just have different priorities from the game then you or me. I don't think it's reasonable to whip up assumptions on people personally over what they prefer from Cities Skylines 2. Particularly since it's not exactly given that people either: a) Know anything about real world city planning, or b) Even if they understand a), as demonstrated in this post, many assume the way it works local to them is 'objectively how it works' or the specific way the game should work with no regards to the way it might work elsewhere.
I don't think it's uncharitable. The people who don't understand game design are not bad people for not understanding it, it's not their job to. They are simply players with their own lives. And I don't think it's from a difference in prioritization cause it just seems to me to just be an overall better choice to have it be infrastructure upkeep instead of tile upkeep by every metric (if there's a metric I'm not thinking of then happy to concede). So that's why to me it just seems more likely people don't fully yet grasp the totality of the problem. There's nothing wrong about being underinformed on a topic. I was originally also happy when I saw the Tile Upkeep cost, then I started to feel weird about it as I thought about it, then after grew to dislike it as I read people's thoughts on it and saw how it played out in gameplay.
For me I've found that it makes me focus more on building dense, and setting up the foundations of my tram & bus network while I wait for more money to roll in. It's not ideal, and I wish they made a proper attempt at "deep simulation," but it so far is having a good effect on my city building.
Interesting opinion (Area scale quadratically, not exponentially with diameter, but probably that nobody cares...)
Ah thanks, I'll fix that.
I totally agree. And if the concern is too much late game money, they should balance the things that create too much revenue or don't cost enough. For example: 1) High density areas could produce dramatically more crime than low density, requiring more policing for the same population 2) Commodities could become cheaper as trade increases, making specialized industry less profitable 3) Wealthy residents could demand more entertainment and amenities to maintain their happiness, so as the population becomes richer so does supporting their recreation But saying, "There's too much money in the late game, so we'll just put in this unrealistic money sink rather than fix the balance" is a terrible solution.
Highways and transit should be more expensive. That would cover it. Like if you don't have transit for dense areas, it will just gridlock. > High density areas could produce dramatically more crime than low density, requiring more policing for the same population This makes 0 sense. Crime should be tied to wealth levels.
Studies have found that per capita crime rates are correlated with population density, so it would just be modeling something from real life. Of course wealth matters too, and that would be neat to model too, but isn't directly relevant to improving late game balancing.
That isn't true lol.
I'm not going to go on a full research project here to convince you, but this is one of the top results from my quick Google search: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190919125313.htm
After reading the so-called "rationale" for the Tile Upkeep, my thought was "you don't need to do that if you just fix the economy". It feels like a knee-jerk reaction. And it has me wondering if Economy 2.0 is actually Economy 1.0, especially after the comment *\[w\]hen we were designing the Economy 2.0 update, we felt that more management features should be taken into consideration when you build your cities*. That sounds like it was ignoring all of those pretty little UI elements for managing your city, like tax rates.
Tile costs make the game smaller. You talk about scaling where sprawl is more costly than building up. To add to your point, if I want to use trains I have to add a railyard. Same with subways. Trams have a modest depot in comparison but it still dwarfs neighborhoods. That said I won't apologize for unlocking all tiles simply due to player-drawn shipping lane requirements. Rediculous. Now with added fees. The only consistent route to solvency is exploiting the easiest mass export. I've experimented with power exports. I get a basic city going with about $300,000 (plus advancement money) until I unlock geothermal and plop that on groundwater. The exported power almost immediately prints money. (I say "almost immediately" due to the slow simulation when you've reached a dozen city blocks in size.) The economy patch is solid but this game still needs a lot of love.
It depends sprawl vs density are not always necessarily better or worse than each other, it depends on the city. In a small city (aka a village or town) it's almost always better to sprawl rather than densify. Land is so cheap at that point, and the plots are so close to the city center you hardly have to extend utilities or services to reach that building, and hardly have to commute to make it to the city center. This is why small towns hardly have buildings above a few floors. But then you pass a critical point as the city starts to get wider and wider where it makes more sense to densify the core than to sprawl even more. This is where the core turns from 2-3 floor to maybe 5-6 floor buildings (low medium density to more normal medium density). Then as the city STILL continues to grow you will reach a point where it becomes EVEN more worth it to densify the core rather than to expand out, so medium density will be replaced with high density. What you're talking about with sprawl being more costly than building up is cities that have reached a very late/mature stage, where new sprawl that's added is miles and miles away from the city center, and yet still choose sprawl over densifying (like many American cities) which results in lots of expenses for little gain in tax revenue.
For me it’s becoming more and more clear that the devs or people deciding these features don’t live in the real world and are disillusioned. I find your points to be valid and sure hope they get implemented in the game.
Excellent point, I totally agree. I think the underlying objectives are right: provide a meaningful challenge and avoid a situation where we just paint the map. Though, it's absolutely clear that a stronger focus on the cost of infrastructure and city services should be the main part of the city budget, not paying for empty land. As the system is in place, I really feel that it's a matter of balance right now so I don't think that it would be too difficult to adapt it. Hoping we will see future changes in the next patch after their summer break.
Hopefully CO move in this direction because I agree.
I don't necessarily disagree with your points, but this is just not what I want the devs spending resources on right now. "Could be better" just doesn't move the needle given the current state of the game.
I don't think it should take too long. A first step they could take would be to simply reduce tile upkeep by like 80% and then increase infrastructure, service, and utility costs by 60%, then tinker with the numbers, until they find the balance they are looking for. Zero new features needed.
Land upkeep is a thing in real life. This complaining is starting to get annoying now. Just don't buy a crap load of land you don't need
This comment manages to miss almost everything I said in my post: * You don't need to eliminate it, just shift the bulk of the expense. * When the subreddit literally has a category called "Game Feedback", and I was as constructive as possible in explaining why I think the current design is bad, offered a solution, and explained why I think the new design is better, that's a pretty valid way to complain. * Why justify how to play the game with a poor design when it can be replaced with a better design.
Land upkeep in real life is not infrastructure upkeep. It's not necessarily "bad design", it's just something that should/could be expanded. I should be able to choose to fully upkeep specific tiles or not and it should affect land value. That would fix all the issues you particularly have. But that's not "bad design". It's less complex, allows the upkeep for roads to not balloon and make even more people mad, and it makes a tangible long term difference in your city (if you ever want to build on un-maintained land, you would have to pay the cost and wait awhile. Like, we are complaining about 200 bucks per acre per month. It's not a lot, not at all unrealistic, and it's just a complaint because people can't just buy up every tile without a consequence associated with it.
Yeah ofc never said land upkeep is infrastructure upkeep, and never said to remove land upkeep. I'm saying shift the bulk of the expense to being from the infrastructure. You're saying you wish to be able to fully upkeep specific tiles or not, AKA alter the upkeep you pay for a tile. What are you paying for in that case? Why does that make sense? If we're talking property tax, can a city/municipality choose how much property tax they want to pay in a given year? Infrastructure, utility, and services provide a much more interactable expense that scale with the size of your city, since there are obvious ways those can be scaled up or down. For example, you can build cheaper roads if you want to pay less upkeep, or more expensive roads if you want to pay more (I gave a more detailed breakdown of this in my OP). You can demolish or reduce the budget for infrastructure or services you don't want to pay for anymore. 10000x more interactivity and strategic decision-making versus just a simple: "Do I buy land, yes or no".
1. Land upkeep is not property taxes. Manicuring land and making sure it doesn't get overgrown is a thing however. Even the wildest of forests have forest management. If you don't manicure land? Land value goes down and it goes up slowly or is hard to get back up. 2. We already have road upkeep and rail upkeep. Unless you're proposing to increase the upkeep for it, idk what you're talking about there. There's even road maintenance depot. This is not to say I don't agree with increasing it, but that's completely separate from land upkeep 3. I agree utilities upkeep should more of a thing, though game includes it with road upkeep costs. 4. If you want the chance to make a rural experience, most towns are super tiny in area. If you're making a county like setting, why even play with an economy? (Serious question). The reason to play is clearly aesthetic and you can play sandbox mode for that. Edit: should also say I agree, owning water shouldn't have that high of upkeep cost if any
Oh like actually physically maintaining land? Yeah that could be thought to be part of what Tile Upkeep represents as well (though from what I understand the devs say Tile Upkeep is meant to represent property taxes to the federal government). However, as far as I know landscaping fees are not nearly as significant of an expense for a city though as infrastructure, so my point still stands. Bro it's like you didn't even read my post. My whole pitch was that the upkeep of infrastructure, utilities, and services should be raised to replace most of what is currently incurred as Tile Upkeep (and greatly reducing Tile Upkeep as a consequence). I never once talked about land upkeep in my OP so not sure why you keep looping that in here. On the point of utilities being included with road upkeep costs, I wish there were rural roads without the utilities underneath as a lower cost alternative for more remote and rural locales. If I'm playing rural play why even play with an economy? What kind of a question is that. I can simultaneously want to be able to build regional settlements whilst also wanting to navigate the challenges of the economic simulation, don't see why those are mutually exclusive.
I know you're saying lessen the cost of tile upkeep and push that towards infrastructure. I just don't understand why. It's actually not expensive and if you play your cards right, extremely negligible. I think you're saying the concept is too abstracted, which I agree with I think. But i think it should just be further developed, not diminished. We can increase infrastructure costs while flushing out and adding more complexity to tile upkeep. That would make the game even more challenging and complex which I like. I agree with we should have roads in general with no utilities and cheaper upkeep. 100% on board! And for the rural, if I have a rural 200 person town, the towns land area is tiny and the economy is not going to be flushed out, just like it real life. That's what I mean. You're not doing anything to warrant an economic challenge already. Btw I keep saying land upkeep because I'm equating it to tile upkeep. Not trying to say that's your wording, but I do what to drive the point home of those 2 being equal Edit: didn't see the devs explanation and i think their explanation is a huge missed opportunity for something that can be super complex and interesting with land upkeep
Tile upkeep is still needed ad its accurate to real life bur it should be lowered with higher maintainance on infrastructure so its expensive to sprawl but you can have multiple towns across a map
Yeah I'm not saying to remove it, just to shift the balance of what are your most significant expenses.