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Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters is another expansion for the hit city builder, prepare for mother nature to come calling.

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Quite an amusing teaser really, are you excited about it?

I do love that it's being expanded again, but I hope they do better than the Snowfall expansion which disappointed me somewhat. Having the snow locked to a specific map was quite a letdown.

About the expansion
Natural Disasters will add a series of city-destroying emergencies to Cities: Skylines, which can occur unexpectedly during the game – or be manually triggered by mayors seeking a challenge or some sort of gruesome, vindictive pleasure. Buildings and infrastructure will be destroyed, fire can spread across locations, and countless lives may be lost unless players implement the right emergency plans and responses and keep an ear on the new radio alert system. Fans of Cities: Skylines will have the chance to overcome everything from massive fires to meteor strikes, and allow their friends to do the same with a new Scenario Mode, where custom challenges can be designed and shared through Steam Workshop.

Features

* Deep, Impactful Gameplay: Keep your city going through the devastation of several possible doomsday scenarios, from towering infernos to the day the sky exploded

* With Great Power Comes Great Response Abilities: Plan for, and respond to, disasters using early warning systems, countermeasures, and new disaster responses such as helicopters and evacuations – finally, a Paradox game where “Comet Sighted” actually means something

* Radio Saved the Video Game: Citizens can go Radio Ga-Ga with a new broadcast network, helping to rapidly spread evacuation warnings and emergency alerts – or simply relax to new in-game music stations

* An Objectively Good Feature: Scenario Mode allows players to design custom game objectives, including custom starting cities, win conditions, time limits, and more – and share scenarios to Steam Workshop

Chirpocalypse Now: Heck yeah, new hats for Chirper

It's due some time this Winter. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Mountain Man Aug 18, 2016
Could be interesting, but I suspect most people will use it like they used natural disasters in the SimCity games: save the game, unleash natural disasters and reduce your city to a smoldering ruin, then reload your game and continue playing as normal. As hard as it is to keep a city running in Skylines, I can't see how it would be much fun to have your metropolis randomly destroyed by a meteor or tornado.

Speaking of Cities: Skylines, I wonder when they're going to get the Linux performance issues sorted out?
omer666 Aug 18, 2016
Quoting: Mountain ManSpeaking of Cities: Skylines, I wonder when they're going to get the Linux performance issues sorted out?
Performance issues are related to Unity engine. While it's getting better, progress is slow. I don't think it's Colossal Order's fault.
Liam Dawe Aug 18, 2016
Quoting: omer666
Quoting: Mountain ManSpeaking of Cities: Skylines, I wonder when they're going to get the Linux performance issues sorted out?
Performance issues are related to Unity engine. While it's getting better, progress is slow. I don't think it's Colossal Order's fault.
I still think it is their issues, considering I personally tested and livestreamed it before release where it worked far better before a patch seemed to nerf it down. They have still never replied to me on that.
Kimyrielle Aug 18, 2016
Considering that disasters were the last and only thing EA's joke of a city builder had still going over Cities Skylines, adding them doesn't surprise me much. Like you, I am super disappointed with how they implemented the winter features (I still hope they will eventually see the errors of their ways and change it, so we can use them on every map), but this is still one of my favourite games, so I will buy the DLC.
numasan Aug 18, 2016
I'm a sucker for Cities: Skylines so I'll buy this for sure. Adding disasters is only natural (pun intended) and something I think most will like, to spice things up. I just hope there will be many kind of disasters, and not just fire-based ones, such as viral epidemics or something that requires more police. Having only natural disasters also sounds a bit limiting - am I the only one who'd like to see plane crashes if you have an airport near urban areas?

About the last DLC, I also hoped for dynamic seasons. As it is now it doesn't really matter, you just have to buy more expensive pipes and deal with snow-dumps. Trams makes a big difference, but everyone got that for free, right? I don't expect a substantial DLC this time either, which in a way is sad. Would be nice if the patch improves the 'cims' intelligence when it comes to public transportation, or issues with too many trains when there are only two incoming/outgoing connections. I don't really feel any performance problems (my largest cities have ~150.000 citizens), but if it can be improved, sure great.
Kimyrielle Aug 18, 2016
Quoting: numasan(my largest cities have ~150.000 citizens)

That's actually a cosmetic pet peeve of mine I wish they'd improve. We build cities that look and feel as if they had 5-6 million population, but the games tells you it's 200,000. :S
Rhythagoras Aug 18, 2016
I'll keep my eye on this. Although I'm concerned about how they are going to handle building damage and such. The workshop assets are what make this game really great. Having the assets themselves be modified to be compatible with the snowfall DLC was a little annoying. Hopefully this DLC won't be set up the same way.
finaldest Aug 19, 2016
This game has taken hundreds of hours away from me so a new expansion pack is good news. I cannot wait to see some actual game play footage.

I have not really suffered performance issues with this game, However I don't run 1000's of mods and I use only traffic related mods. I run a 4770k with 16gb ram and gtx770 and now play CSL exclusively on linux.

Just found out that unity updates will be pushed out into cities skylines once the expansion launches. It was mentioned on paradox forums. This should help improve performance.
bakgwailo Aug 19, 2016
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: omer666
Quoting: Mountain ManSpeaking of Cities: Skylines, I wonder when they're going to get the Linux performance issues sorted out?
Performance issues are related to Unity engine. While it's getting better, progress is slow. I don't think it's Colossal Order's fault.
I still think it is their issues, considering I personally tested and livestreamed it before release where it worked far better before a patch seemed to nerf it down. They have still never replied to me on that.

I think they are using a customize version of Unity, but I wonder what underlying version it is based off of. I know somewhere around 5.3 they apparently did a complete rewrite/overhaul of the OpenGL backend which might help, and 5.4 was supposed to bring multithreaded rendering among other improvements.

Since they are on a customized version though, no idea how hard it would be for them to upgrade the engine, or if they would even be interested in doing so anyways on a kind of older game. Its kind of a shame - definitely the best (modern) city building sim out there.
Ehvis Aug 19, 2016
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With Skylines being a continued development from Cities in Motion 2, I would expect it to be Unity 4. At the moment I can only recall Kerbal Space Program doing a Unity 4 to Unity 5 conversion and it appears that it took quite a bit of effort. Also, they may still be busy porting features over from CiM2 into C:S. :P
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