Two different focuses, yes … but also many similarities in the gameplay/interface.
I have been playing with City Skylines for the past 3 evenings, and there are some very interesting features that I would really like to have while playing Train Fever :
– CS allows you to upgrade/downgrade any road without limitation. If you put a larger road, the surrounding houses are destroyed, but rebuilt automatically
– CS allows you to destroy houses/buildings to lay out new roads/rail with one click. It’s much user-friendlier than in TF.
– CS comes with zero “main connection” restriction. You can even destroy the main highway connecting your city to the outside world. If you don’t rebuild it, your city does not expand properly … but at least you are able to improve the roads or destroy/rebuild everything in an easy way that TF player can only dream of
– Creating new transportation lines is 100x easier in CS than TF (of course, with much less options as the game focus is not on precise transportation plans)
– Generally speaking, the layout of any new road/zone/train/metro/bridge is 10000x easier in CS than in TF. You don’t get blocked every 5 minutes because of terrain elevation, rail/road crossings. You don’t loose millions of cash trying to figure out how to build a goddamn bridge over a small river.
Train Fever is certainly the nicest transport tycoon I’ve every played, and one of the best. I really appreciate the way UG tries to improve the game over time, the free DLC, the modding community …
… but Cities Skylines is by far the best city-builder ever made, with a sense of user friendliness that send TF back 10 years in the past.
I don’t say this to criticize TF or UG. I’ve really enjoyed playing TF, and I will certainly continue to do so in the future (when I’ll switch back to TF after hours on CS 🙂 … but CS is certainly the best example of what kind of improvements should be done to TF or any futur TF2 to raise TF level from “a nice good transport tycoon-type game” to “the best transport-tycoon game ever” 🙂