One detail that was mentioned on Twitter and that's got me irrationally excited: all your service vehicles are affected by traffic. So if you've got gridlock, your fire trucks can't get to fires in time, your garbage trucks can't pick up garbage, your ambulances can't get sick Sims to the hospital in time. That's huge! Previously they've always been separate simulation layers, but now they're all influencing each other. So a traffic jam (and not just a completely broken network) could indirectly cause a residential building to burn down! That implies to me there's going to be plenty to do as the city gets larger.
It is a similar argument that was raised with XCom and the squad size permitted in game. I think at the end of the day, it will be a non-issue, however on paper, it doesn't exactly look good. Personally, I haven't really made up my mind if I do, or do not like the city size limitation. Most of the time I spent playing SC4 was spent in the smaller regions anyway because I did appreciate the finer details that I'd put into the city. But having the option of just going nuts and creating a massive megalopolis with interchanging highways, mass transit system, and anything else that complements a city builder with a traffic planner would be great. There are of course benefits to this game. As you mentioned later, the simulation aspect with traffic, and the management of emergency services is appealing to me. It emphasises the actual city simulation aspect. Add to that the fact that city streets look a lot better with ability to create curved roads (a function only introduced with NAM if I recall in SC4) adds a much better aesthetic appeal to a developing city. Also Pogo I've had a Tropico 4 city reach 1000 citizens. Of course, the game gets to be a little unwieldy at the higher numbers.
As much as I love the nuts and bolts description you're giving of the simulation, it just sounds like a real world version of Tropico, minus the elections, and with more agents and building variety (biggest I've gotten a city in Tropico is low 1000's). I love the whole agent approach of Tropico, don't get me wrong - and the idea of using that more realistically is interesting. But... I'm just not seeing what this is offering the classic Simcity player who wants to see how Miami would look if you were the founder and developer back in 1900. Even if SC4's maps were small compared to SC3K's, you could use a region. You can't do either here...
What makes you think this game is primarily being aimed at the classic SimCity player? To me it looks like a simplified reboot, at least relative to SC4. That means they are going after a more casual player. Not that its a bad idea if they are targeting The Sims crowd. And its easy to forget that the original SimCity was much less complicated then the later versions. We need to stop thinking of this as a direct sequel to SC4. Its not called SimCity 5 for a reason. :-)
As a casual player who liked earlier versions of SimCity, but was dreadful at them... I suspect this is kinda being targeted at me. I like the idea of a smallish city with a strong focus, where I don't have to always be a generalist to be successful. A lot of the gameplay videos have looked awesome, and while I'm not about to buy this the instant it releases, I'll probably be picking it up within a few months of release. And, yes, if they have an online store like with The Sims 3, where I can buy interesting-looking new buildings and the like, I'll probably throw at least a few bucks at doing so. It's not that I want only online gameplay, or there not to be large maps available. It's more that these things don't bug me very much, and the stuff I've seen about the game so far looks pretty cool. On the other hand, I was excited for SimCity Societies, and that was absolutely dreadful, so I could be just as wrong all over again.
I don't think the game is all that much more casual, I just don't think that the scope includes tough decisions that need to be made in late-game, where you're rolling in cash but your city is also completely stifled by traffic, and the tough decision is "what shit do I need to destroy to get some subways in here before my economy collapses from people moving out because they can't get to work." Yeah but that's pretty much the only thing I can think of. And that assumes that fires actually happen. Traditionally the threat of fire has always been trivial, always, and I mean that in the sense that fires would never or rarely start in the first place, not because fire trucks could get there unimpeded. I have no reason to believe it's going to be any different.
Agree. BTW, my Sims in every single iteration of The Sims series always have about 10,000% more fires in their kitchens than all the millions of buildings I've seen in my SimCity games. So, if they're aiming SimCity 2013 towards the Sims 3 crowd there may be hope yet! The big difference though is that typically you're just replacing the stove, as opposed to ten square blocks worth of industry -- so the basic punishment/penalty aspect isn't really there, as it seems to just boil down to an injection of comedy.
I think there's some potential for naming these map images as SimCity 4 vs Simcity 2013: edit: spoilered for v-scroll
As shown in the Digital Deluxe Edition trailer Maxis/EA put up a couple days ago, certain landmarks will change the look and style of your city's architecture once placed. Since then, someone asked whether all landmarks will support that feature in their own way, here's the scoop (DDE = the $80 Origin exclusive Digital Deluxe Edition): Soon after the Tweet went out Maxis stopped by Reddit (link to ongoing discussion) to clarify some related stuff:
I guess this game is targeted at me too, because I loved 1, liked 2 a lot, then skipped 3 and 4. I'm starting to get really intrigued by this one.
To be clear, I don't think anybody actually likes it, including or even especially the developers. It's a processor limitation. The big difference between this and, say, XCom is that it's much less labor-intensive for Maxis to increase the city size at some point than it would be for Firaxis to release larger maps; it requires little more than making regions with new city boundary sizes. It's even easier than it would be in SC4, since it's off the grid now. And since the creative director has said "we can and will increase the city size" at some point, then it seems inevitable. I think it's worth pointing out that I'm going to be playing on the smaller city sizes anyway, just as a counter to all the people going "Oh hell no! Dealbreaker!" Some dude on Something Awful freaked out that how dare I be so deep in EA Stockholm Syndrome to suggest that smaller maps were better, when I was just saying the same thing I said here: large maps in the previous games could be boring, since you can only focus on so much at one time. Saying it's like real-world Tropico with more agents and building variety strikes me as kind of like saying Half-Life 2 is just Doom with cut-scenes. (I'm sure there's a better analogy than that, but I can't think of one at the moment). Having a city that functions from 1000 citizens to hundreds of thousands of citizens -- apparently the testers at Maxis have gotten cities with one million population -- is a huge part of the appeal of the games, over Tropico which is focused on agricultural islands and the character of its presentation, or Anno which is focused on industrial chains. I'd completely agree that it doesn't look like "develop Miami from 1900 to present day" is going to be what this version of SimCity is best at. Personally, I don't think that SimCity's ever done a great job of the historical aspect -- I'd see the menu and think "I can start in 1900! Awesome!" but then see that there weren't any dramatic changes in transportation or architecture, just new power plants. I still think everybody's underestimating what regions will be able to do in this game. It looks like there's always going to be gaps between the cities, although it remains to be seen if there's some kind of technical limitation on how big those gaps have to be (I can't imagine what that limitation would be, but I dunno how it all works). I'd hope that cities can be closer together than in the regions that we've seen. As for recreating the geography of south Florida: I'm still a little surprised that my link to the Sims 3 Create a World tool wasn't the unstoppable combo-breaker I expected it to be. Maxis has always released tools like this for SimCity, and the one for the Sims 3 came out well after Maxis was completely subsumed by EA and turned "evil." There's absolutely no reason for them not to release the same thing for the new SimCity. And this always sounds like an asinine dismissal, but it's not intended as such: if recreating a real-world city over time is the goal, then why not just play SimCity 4? The architecture isn't overwhelmingly different in the new game, and the agent-based simulation will be more of a big deal on the smaller scale. It seems like all you'd be giving up is the "vintage" filter. Everything else -- non-grid based roads, 3d buildings instead of sprite-based architecture -- comes with the necessary limitations on city and population size. I honestly don't get why the popular conception of the new game is that it's been simplified. (The SA forums and the Idle Thumbs guys were also saying it's been simplified). I'm guessing that people see "smaller" and automatically think "simpler?" Because I'm having a hard time thinking of anything in SC4 that's not included in the new version. As far as I know you can't explicitly zone for farm land, which was really mostly cosmetic. And you can't build subways or seaports, both of which seem like perfect candidates for an expansion. Drawing power lines was all but obviated in SC4 (and hasn't been fun since they took out the "zzzt" noise anyway). And anybody who says they actually enjoyed laying down plumbing is just plain lying. If anything, it seems like what's there is now a little more complex. Your water towers and pumps are actually removing water from the supply, and you'll eventually have to find more. Your coal & oil plants are actually using up those resources -- and you can now mine them yourself or trade them. Your services no longer have simple coverage radii, but are now actually affected by the traffic network. Your industry is actually working with actual products instead of just high/medium/low wealth, and they have to have actual commercial markets to sell them. That's what strikes me as so clever about the simulation and why I can't stop gushing about the game. Instead of having a bunch of monolithic simulators that get more and more complex with each iteration, it generates complex systems from the combination of thousands of very simple behaviors. That's how they can handle cities of 10s of thousands of sims without (I'm presuming) bogging down and without completely faking it. It seems like it'll be a bitch to debug -- it looked like there was a bug in the beta that kept power from routing through the road network correctly -- but it also seems near-indefinitely flexible. And just for the sake of being the counter-point again: I believe this one is even more likely to stay interesting as the game progresses, because the simulation is more dynamic and unpredictable. Traffic's going to be even more of a concern, because, frankly, it's a bitch to get those little things behaving correctly at the programming level, and there's always going to be weirdness with the vehicles. (I had a bug in the beta where there was so much residential demand that an entire block of the city was stuck in gridlock just because of the moving trucks. In SC4, whenever I ran into an insolvable traffic problem like that, I had the luxury of just fading the cars out). I do wish there were more variety in the road sizes, since theoretically they can be of arbitrary width now, because that would mean that demolishing an avenue to make one with streetcars meant all of your wealthy buildings on either side of that avenue got demolished. The reason I believe it's going to be different is that I started at least a dozen cities over the course of the beta, and I had fires going off regularly in each one. (What I thought was a nice touch was that houses would pop up a little warning thought bubble whenever the resident Sim was about to do something stupid that started a fire). In the city where I tried to go for max population density, I ran into the situation I was describing above -- fire trucks coming from my residential district were slow to reach my industrial district because of traffic, so I had to decide between adding more trucks, a bypass road to the industrial district, or give that district its own fire station. I never did try to grow a city without a fire station, though, so that'd be an interesting experiment. And if that's the only thing you can think of: if ambulances can't get from the clinic to injury sites in time, your residents and workers will die. If patrol cars can't get to incidents of crime, the land value will go down. If garbage trucks can't get from the dump to houses or commercial buildings to pick up the trash, their land value will go down. If school buses can't reach a neighborhood, the residents will stay uneducated and won't develop to high wealth and won't provide workers to your high-tech industry. (Also, uneducated sims are more likely to start fires and to get sick from germs, according to the loading screen game tips). If freight trucks can't make it from your industry to your commercial zones, both the industry and the commercial buildings will run out of things to sell.
Is there a good city building game that let's you start say in the 1860's and build into the present day? That would be cool.
I wouldn't call it complicated exactly (the gameplay isn't so much hard as it is busy), but but it can be excessively "fiddly" if you let it (it's a micro-manager's dream). There are simolean sliders for pretty much every individual service or utility building, not to mention a bunch of tax options, charts, graphs and map overlays out the ying-yang, and tons of optional edicts and social programs such layered on top of that (plus the Rush Hour expansion adds quests/tasks and stuff to help improve your mayor rating and the like, but I don't play around with those too much.). If you enjoy accounting, balancing and fine tuning budgets, or the act of micromanaging a ton of individual nodes and switches, then you'll probably feel at home (I don't enjoy it so much as find it compulsory, to a fault at times). This is the type of game where there's hardly ever a time where there isn't something that needs your attention if you're just playing it straight. However, that stuff becomes much less important if you just lower the difficulty, or even go as far as using the in-game money cheats -- and playing smaller maps/cities mitigates this busywork significantly. We're only a month away from SC2013 hitting the streets though, so unless you were chomping at the bit (like me) I'd probably just wait for that if I were in your shoes.
They have to fake it at some point in the region, don't they? I would assume that growth in neighboring cities comes from approximations and not simulating every agent in cities that aren't directly loaded? Errr... that was only a graphical fade. The traffic problem is still there. OK, cool. There was a charm to the simulation of SC4, though, like looking at your traffic or crime overlays and seeing the immediate results of making some change halfway across the map. Nope. Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon/Locomotion! are both economic builders that do a pretty good job at taking you through history (the latter two in terms of the vehicles you use for your transport system). Children of the Nile has a nice ancient theme going on.[/quote]
Is that good? I know nothing about Locomotion or Rollercoaster Tycoon; the only Tycoon game I ever played was Transport. Which was amazing. Still is amazing, for that matter.
Yeah it let you build into terrain and make bridges much easier. I found even simple roads to be a pain in the ass in Transport Tycoon to be a pain in the ass.
Closest I've ever played is Simcity 2000 - you start in 1900 and work your way forward (with transport and power options unlocking as the years go along). Only Simcity where the calendar ever felt like it mattered...
Yeah but it never really changed thematically, buildings looked the same throughout all ages, didn't they? Of course, I think every SimCity game had a progression for industrial buildings, since you wouldn't get the hi-tech stuff until after the 1950s or something like that.
Because I've always found SC4 lacking. It doesn't have the charm of its predecessors, its overly fiddly in ways I don't like, and I found the regions to be a poor substitute for the substantially larger tiles sizes of SC2000 and 3000.I want to scroll over a landscape going from country to suburbs, to city, and back again in one fell swoop. Is it too much to ask to recreate Miami in a modern city simulator, while a newspaper features a columnist whose only joy in life is mocking my decisions? Thus I find myself bouncing between 2, 3 and 4 - I'll start off happy, then get sick of the graphics, or the trains that never seem to work, or the fiddly mods, and then go off and build some courses in sim golf instead. Simcity 2000 on some of the console versions had building styles that would change periodically. This was also a feature on SC4K (though they dropped the phased in techs for some reason).
I fired up SC3000 today just to remind myself what the differences were and I agree that SC4 ultimately lacks something. I never did get the hang of the regional interaction, to be honest. Plus I HATE HATE HATE that I can't have the game generate a random map for me to play as is or tweak. Having to build my own map from the ground up was dull, not to mention having to make sure all the other tiles in the region flowed together.
You could have tweaked one of any number of regions. And there was a button to automatically rectify edges.
Or you could be insanely lazy like me and just download regions by the armfull at some place like this: Simtropolis. I spent dozens of hours creating regions when I first bought the game ten or so years ago, but I haven't put a whole lot of effort into personally creating custom hand-crafted regions/maps in probably six or seven years or more.
I may have to change my answer to say that SC3000 is my favorite. I heard this yesterday and it made me about as happy as I've ever been outside of Epcot. Something about the new game just makes it seem more accessible than SC4 did to me; it seems more like playing and experimenting than dealing with a simulation. From what I've read the other cities are frozen in time when you're not playing. (But if you've opened it up to another player, you can both be playing at the same time and your changes will be "live" for tho other player). It sounds basically the same as how SC4's regions worked, but apart from multiplayer the big difference is that the regional connection is a source & sink for agents. SC4 made the region connection affect the traffic simulation, but since so much of the simulation was based on coverage radii and area of effect, the connection was really just a source of RCI demand. As I understand the new version, the connection acts like a giant building on one side of your city, that's generating and receiving everything that's built in that city -- power, water, commuters, tourists, garbage trucks, freight trucks, etc. The only bits that are faked are that the other city doesn't change over time (so resources never run out), and of course whatever fakery the game has to do to keep the number of active agents down to a reasonable number. Yeah, that's what I was saying. In SC4 when a vehicle got stuck or crashed into something, I could just fade it out. The actual traffic simulation treated the vehicles basically like points. In the new game, the physical space taken up by the car actually makes a difference in the simulation. So if you've got intersections spaced too close together, for instance, you can get bad gridlock simply because the cars don't physically fit on the street. Check out the traffic in this video: traffic can get backed up because of congested intersections several blocks away. The old traffic simulator did try to simulate that by making intersections more expensive, but there's stuff it'd never be able to reproduce. For instance, my car is stuck because three blocks ahead of me, everyone in the right lane is trying to make a right turn onto a perpendicular street that's at capacity itself. (Look at the right side of the screen at the very beginning of that video).
I didn't think SC4 was that great, but the new one (whatever they are calling it now... SimNeighborhood? SimBlock?) is looking considerably worse. I've wanted a new SimCity game for a long time, but at this point, I think I'm just going to pass.
Did Ben just tl;dr the thread? I've enjoyed reading the comments form Pogo, ChuckJ and others once the hackles came down. It seems the new SimCity won't scratch all of the same itches as previous editions but it looks to be offering some interesting things of its own in terms of how the systems all inter-connect. I'm less concerned about having a giant sandbox as I am having an entertaining one. Mostly, though, this got me wanting to re-install SimCity 3000. I pulled out one of my Giant Binders of Old Games and my SC3000 discs were conspicuously absent. I obviously had this idea before...and now I can't remember where I put the discs. Worse, it's not available (legally) from any digital site yet. *sad trombone*
I feel your pain Creole Ned. I went to start up SC3000, and found my original disk - but not my Unlimited one :( Got it working thanks to some no-cd cracks... but I miss my CD music :( That was the pinnacle of Simcity soundtracks!
No, I've been following the thread. And while I get where ChuckJ is coming from on the scale issue, I can't get over the fact that none of the cities shown in any of the screenshots look or feel anything like an actual city. The whole appeal of SimCity, at least for me, is that it feels like a simulation of a city, not an abstracted, shrunken-down representation of a city, connected in a very game-y and abstract way to other disparate parts of a city. And I understand that other SimCities also featured scaled-down cities, but the important thing is that the cities in those games didn't feel scaled down. They did a good job at maintaining the illusion of scale, which is all a SimCity game really needs. The new game very clearly down't do that, and this along with other various issues (like the online requirement) have finally pushed the game past the tipping point for me, and into "don't buy" territory. I'll gladly reassess my position if the game comes out and people say that it's great, but feedback from the beta so far has been decidedly lukewarm.
I spent many sleepless nights playing SC and SC2K, growing fledgling cities into acropolis-villes, then moving on to more difficult challenges (thriving cities with no roads, irregular landscapes, etc.…). I see nothing in this rendition whatsoever appealing. And I did buy SC3 and SC4 and was a waste of money as neither captured my attention more than an initial bout. Perhaps I am off the rail here, but I think *The Sims* may have been the death knell for *Sim City*. That it appears that subsequent editions of the game haven't added much other than a few nifty frills, yet what should have happened was a widening of scale, both on macro and micro level, to match gamer sophistication, improved graphics engines & CPU horsepower, etc.… and enlarge the game stage to a grander scale. Not to say Civilization with a tech tree and forces of conquest, but networks, trade, commerce, social engineering, etc. And more on micro level, some elements of *The Sims* -- sociological impact of churches, bars, schools, various forms of commerce, casinos, luxury, industry, etc.… Maybe some of this is indeed embedded in SC5 -- I don't know. But just peering into this thread and the other bumper promotional sources, it looks like a woefully unappealing offering. And that is a profound statement given my allegiance to the old-school SC game.
No, your statement isn't profound considering you admitted that A) You haven't done any research into the game and B) haven't even read the thread.
1. I have indeed read this entire thread, as well as other promotional fare on this game. 2. Point is, this thread nor other promotional fare provide any compelling reason that I would enjoy playing this game (or even investigate deeper than this here thread or the brochure genre promotional fare). And as "admitted", I lost many many nights sleep playing SC and SC2K. Same would be for bookstores and newspapers -- I used to subscribe to a half-dozen papers, and my residence is overflowing with books. Yet no newspaper circa 2013 would merit a subscription and my last half-dozen ventures into a bookstore resulted in purchase-less exits. I still read news and books but nothing about the bookstore (at least the ones in my geographic vicinity) or newspapers is compelling enough anymore. Ditto for this game unless page 10+ of this thread reveals some unbeknownst gem(s) hitherto undiscovered.
I think that to expect a big new layer of complexity or scale from SC is perhaps to expect them to commit suicide-via-grognardization. That isn't to say they couldn't rework the fundamentals in interesting ways.
I don't expect more complexity--in fact, I think the game could stand to have less of the fiddly-ness that SC4 had. One of the cool things about the earlier SimCities was that there was an enormous amount of complexity in the simulation, but the manner in which the player interacted with the game was fairly simple. I wouldn't mind seeing them head back in that direction a bit. The scale is really an issue, though. A SimCity game on the scale that they are offering is a bit like a Where's Waldo image in which Waldo is hiding in a crowd of ten people.
Sure, but that is not the same as firing off random maps, adjusting the parameters, until you find something that strikes you as interesting. And the edge rectifying thing could break stuff on existing maps if you weren't careful.
I'd be surprised, given NCSoft's prior history. They've shut down more MMOs than most publishers have published.
