It's like modern vs old, DRM vs EA, shiny vs deep.

I shouldn't be buying anything, but let's say I want to urbanize shit up, does SimCity 4 still hold up visually? Is Cities: Skylines so much sleeker that I should just wait for it here? Is Tropico 3 close enough? Hi!

From what I've seen, Skylines has more 'depth, in that there's more things to manage, but it seems to restrict you in little growth levels. factors are glaringly obvious, and you can kill everyone should sewage manage to seep into your water. There are no disasters* in Skylines, either.

SimCity 4 while old, still has a better feeling atmosphere, and overall the technology wasn't there to give people the logistical nightmares that you have to deal with in newer games. This, if it is better or not is a matter of opinion. Also, SimCity 4 still has the lovely regions where you can have cities indirectly interact with each other.

Sometimes the disasters are ones we inflict on ourselves...

http://www.oddee.com/_media/imgs/articles/a94_w2.jpg

from here

From all accounts it looks like they have a solid basegame, though I imagine the meat and longevity of the game will come from it's inbuilt modding/workshop support

Simcity 4 still looks amazing. I've made custom buildings for SC4 and now making custom buildings for Cities Skylines. Simcity 4 is a 2D game which take 4 perspective renders from 3D models of buildings. This means that buildings in SC4 can have all the detail without polygonal constraints or texture size worries. Skylines is a full 3D game, and the buildings are restricted to polygonal counts and smaller texture sizes. However, this also means you can rotate freely around the city and buildings while SC4 allows only 90 degree rotations. SC4 has an amazing night mode and buildings are light up at night. Skylines has no nightmode, yet.

Skylines is the best city builder since Simcity 4, plays like it as well (uses the zoning method) and adds a number of great features to the game. The much wanted curved roads for one. Ability to make great, interchangeable functional roads and highways is another, something which the older Simcities lacked. You can highlight districts with a paint tool and set individual ordinances to the particular district, another great addition. You can also follow any person or vehicle in Skylines and you'll see them doing their routine and going to their destination. While there are some features from the Simcities that are missing in Skylines, such as disasters, I got a feeling they'll be added in eventually as DLCs. We all know how Paradox seems to roll with them these days.

Note the asterisk.

Any chance Cities: Skylines will make it to GOG?

Not likely, it's fully integrated with Steam and doesn't work without it.

What did it indicate? The workshop stuff?

You can technically cause disasters such as a flood, but fun disasters like meteoric strikes, rampaging robots, tornadoes, and such aren't in.

The game. Some Paradox games just use Steam for download/updates but work fine even if you don't start or even have installed Steam afterwards. From other threads on this topic though it appears Skylines isn't one of those and won't work without Steam.

Given that, and the integration of cloud saves and more importantly the steam workshop, the latter of which I imagine Paradox will consider an important part of the 'experience' of Skylines, I doubt the games going to release on GOG any time soon.

Maybe when Cities: Skylines 2 is released...
... and maybe after we receive Cities in Motion 1+2.

So let me get this straight.

It's not an Online game . . . but it saves to the (Steam) Cloud ?

Sure sounds Online dependent to me.

Steam Cloud saves locally and then, if connection is availible, it uploads saves to the cloud while keeping the local saves - Steam Cloud is more of a backup than being a primary save files storage. You can even disable it entirely if you don't want to use it and just stick to offline saves IIRC.