City Corner #5 - Spring Cleaning

Hello, Mayors!

Now that the snow has finally melted from Tampere, Finland, it is officially time to introduce you to our next patch, Spring Cleaning! This upcoming patch includes some new content, as well as adjustments to the gameplay, UI, and visuals. Of course, as the title suggests, we have also fixed some of the reported bugs, which we will briefly touch upon at the end of this City Corner. 

So, get your dusters ready, and let’s get into the Spring Cleaning! 

Sometimes there are moments when you’d just want to keep your city and buildings looking a certain way, without upgrades changing the aesthetic of your houses. Luckily, with our next patch, there is now a solution for this; we have added a Historical Building option, which prevents selected buildings from leveling up or being abandoned! This means that if you want to stop the progression of your building at level two and keep that specific look, you can choose to do so!

The Historical -option can be found below the visual customisation. 

Another addition coming in our third patch is the Universal Mod -button. This is an option that can be used  by the modders to add a separate button to your UI that puts all of the mods using this option in one place for easier use. This means that when turned on, you should no longer have issues with icons and buttons going on top of each other, even when using the new UI!

Universal Mod -button is accessible from the right side of the UI.

Speaking of the new UI, we have also added an option to adjust the toolbar size, as well as the transparency of the UI. The adjustments made for the size of the toolbar will also scale the buttons and some other elements, while the transparency option affects the toolbar and the panel background transparencies. 

You can set the User Interface transparency to any percentage between 0 and 100%. Here, the transparency is set to 100%.     

As mentioned in City Corner #4, we have now added a Benchmark tool into the game as a first step towards improving the performance. This is an in-game testing tool, which allows you to check your performance between patches and how the updates affect the performance on your computer. The tool also helps us in gathering data for the future, and lets us know which areas we need to put more focus on. The benchmark tool is accessible through the Main Menu options, or by adding a new launch parameter -benchmark.

In this patch, we have made some bigger and some smaller changes to the simulation mechanics.

For example, we have adjusted the education system in a way that better aligns with the elementary and high school demand. Previously, you might have noticed that elementary schools were filled with students, while higher education remained empty. This was caused by elementary school education lasting 7 times longer per student than high school. We have now balanced these demands, which means that you should see more students attending high schools as well! In addition, there was a secondary bug where the students used to participate in leisure activities only during study time, which we have now fixed in this patch. 

The office buildings and their demand have received a fix in this patch as well. Previously, due to a bug,  the office demand mostly depended on company demand for office products, almost completely ignoring citizen usage. However, the only office good that companies need is software, so almost all of your offices would produce that, which caused too many software companies to spawn. These production statistics have now been adjusted in a way where they are sampled over a longer time period, which reduces the fluctuations caused by the time of day. Signature office buildings have also received a fix, since they were previously treated incorrectly as available for sale, causing the office demand to actually drop.

After thorough research, we noticed that there is somewhat of a problem with the dogs and the overwhelming amount of them. Now, as much as we love our furry friends here at Iceflake, having tens of dogs in one household is a bit too much. We have now reduced the overall number of dogs by adjusting the household pet limits and spawn probabilities, which in turn reduces the number of dogs in your cities.

When it comes to traffic, we have removed the citizens’ ability to move in and out with taxis to reduce traffic jams, and fixed the issue where buses, trams, and trains could get stuck in a permanent boarding state, preventing departure and causing vehicle queues. For those who would like to increase the amount of bicycles in their city, we have implemented a feature where the existing Urban Cycling Initiative -policy will increase the chance of bicycle usage from 20% to 50%. This will be great for anyone trying to create a bicycle-centric city build.

We also investigated the ports in the Bridges & Ports DLC. Players with extensive ports in their builds will find a significant fix to an issue where commercial and industrial buildings did not use the ports upgrade buildings at all for importing goods and storing mail, even when they were available. After this fix, the level progression of commercial and industrial buildings will work properly again.

We have implemented a lot of other fixes for some of the issues you have reported as well, like citizens getting stuck during robberies, outside connections not working with non-highway roads, photo mode visual settings not matching the game rendering, and more!

As per usual, we have already started planning and preparing the next patch, which includes more bug fixes, as well as some adjustments to the traffic and pathfinding, for example. While we keep working on the next patch, we hope that you will enjoy Spring Cleaning to the fullest when it, if all goes as planned, launches at the end of April! Let us know what you think about the changes, and what you are most excited to see! 

See you soon!