[QUOTE=T2L_Goose;39909926]I lowered my standards the day they said it was going to be "more accessible". Why you expected more is beyond me and you're the only one to blame for that.
[editline]14th March 2013[/editline]
They've gone silent because they're fucking asleep. It's like 6am right now where they are.
And uh no they didn't. You got exactly what you were promised. Now you're just being self entitled. You guys knew what this game was going to be like from the 2 betas that were held, the many AMAs on reddit, the overwhelming amount of gameplay videos, and the fucking game description on Origin. Give it a fucking rest. [B]If you expected the best Sim City since SimCity 4 you must have been living under a rock.[/B][/QUOTE]
there were exactly none simcity games after 4 and before 2013
making it the best simcity since sc4 automatically
[t]http://i.imgur.com/6Rkw0Wl.jpg[/t]
How does this work?
During my 40minute work commute I layed out my thoughts for a giant SimCity video rant which I will hopefully do tonight on the whole thing.
Should be fun.
[QUOTE=Jodern;39915343]
How does this work?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][img]http://i.imgur.com/Vr7wV8C.png[/img][/QUOTE]
I've replaced all my industrial zones with CPU/Consumer Electronics/Plastic plants.
$4m/day baby!
So how do I solve the problem of people complaining about high rent. Zone for more low income housing?
I'm doing an experiment to see how well the one avenue without intersections idea I had earlier. Results are great so far, but it's still early in development. Ill be updating this album as I go on:
[url]http://imgur.com/a/hG20W[/url]
[QUOTE=Shortyish;39915653]I'm doing an experiment to see how well the one avenue without intersections idea I had earlier. Results are great so far, but it's still early in development. Ill be updating this album as I go on:
[url]http://imgur.com/a/hG20W[/url][/QUOTE]
Imagine: Agents never getting lost at intersections, no intersections to congest traffic, total streetcar coverage!
[QUOTE=Brt5470;39915363]During my 40minute work commute I layed out my thoughts for a giant SimCity video rant which I will hopefully do tonight on the whole thing.
Should be fun.[/QUOTE]I look forward to watching it.
[QUOTE=Cakebatyr;39915673]Imagine: Agents never getting lost at intersections, no intersections to congest traffic, total streetcar coverage![/QUOTE]
actually more efficient because of the complete inability to get lost.
sure you'd have everyone going down one street, but they'd do that anyway all trying to dogpile down the same route because it's the fastest.
Anyone want a sandbox region in which to just kinda screw around?
The New Stateman website has a very good if infrequently updated games section. There's a very interesting article on the social implications of Simcity's model if you want a read
[url]http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/03/simcity[/url]
[quote][B][U]The depressing suburbanisation of SimCity [/U][/b]
Once we built arcologies. Now we're one step away from gated communities, writes [b]Alex Hern.[/b]
[img]http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullnode_image/articles_2013/simcity_coast.png[/img]
When I woke up this morning, I was feeling virtuous—and also late—and decided to walk to the tube rather than taking the bus, easing the strain on Transport for London's contractor First. I'd already skipped my morning shower, which made life easier for Thames Water, and will pay off later in the day for British Gas, as my boiler stores the unused hot water rather than heating more. I took the second train from my station, rather than the first, which got me a seat and made life just a bit easier for everyone on the marginally less-crowded carriage I had decided not to squeeze my way into. At the other end of my journey, I darted across the road between a gap in the traffic, which appeared to piss off a taxi driver. I hope he didn't take it out on his next fare.
A city is complicated. Millions of autonomous individuals make billions of decisions every day, and to even guess one person's choices perfectly would make you a savant. But at the same time, a city is simple. Every morning, a human tide goes from the outskirts to the centre; and every evening, it makes the return trip. The history of the SimCity series of games is of a slow shift from the latter view to the former.
SimCity makes choices in how it models its world; and those choices are very similar to those made by economists and urban planners every day. Do you examine the desires of every individual resident, or is treating them in aggregate enough? If you build more roads, do you just look at their effect on existing traffic, or do you look at how they encourage more people to drive instead of take public transport? What about taxes - does raising them make people work less? If it does, at what rate?
Clearly, the game can't cover everything. Even the best supercomputers in the world struggle to accurately model the dynamics of cities, and your crappy Dell laptop is not the best supercomputer in the world. So it makes approximations, cuts corners, and then ramps everything up for the sake of making the game actually fun.
But the game is still a simulation, and part of it being fun relies on presenting a game world which makes intuitive sense to people playing. If living next to a landfill made people happier, for instance, most would consider the game broken, even if it was clearly a deliberate choice. So the developers have to pick models of the world which conform to reality.
And that necessitates making choices which are, in essence, political. Not in the classical sense, because few of the questions of day-to-day politics are covered in the stripped-down world SimCity. There's no option for redistribution of wealth, or whether to enact a Keynesian or monetarist economic policy. Nor can you decide whether your schools and hospitals are better-off run privately or by the state; and there's certainly no question of elections. You are mayor for life, even if your terrible city planning would cause a revolution in the real world.
But the decisions that Maxis, the developer of SimCity, makes embed assumptions about the world which may or may not be true. And while some of them aren't particularly contentious - is it more unpleasant to live next to a power plant or a landfill? - others are.
The most obvious is the one common to all the games in the series. SimCity has no truck with market urbanists, those who argue that the best way to develop a city is for the state to provide a few basics, like roads and power, but then let the free market take over. Those urban planners argue that, rather than dictating whether a particular area be used for offices, houses, retail or industry, the options should be available for any of them; the natural tendency will be for offices and houses to clump together, but if someone wants to pay the inflated land costs in a central business district to build housing, they shouldn't be prevented from doing so.
In SimCity, of course, one of the few constants in the series is the existence of zoning laws. As mayor, you have to dictate whether particular land can be used for residential, commercial or industrial purposes, and only then does the "free market" kick in.
Similarly, almost all municipal buildings in the game are placed by the player, and run by the state at a cost to the taxpayer. Every Sim gets universal healthcare, and all private schools are banned! Truly, SimLand is a lefty utopia.
The series does model some aspects of political economy. The mayor has the ability to raise or lower tax rates, and as the games get more advanced later on in the series, those rates have effects on demand. Tax too much, and your Sims will stop spending money in shops, causing a city-wide recession. Tax too little, of course, and you won't have any money to spend on improving the city. It's a basic introduction to the idea of the Laffer Curve—that there is a peak level of taxation which maximises revenue.
But for the most part, nuance isn't what SimCity specialises in. Want to reduce crime? Build more police stations! You need to be tough on not having enough police stations, and tough on the causes of not having enough police stations, but not much more than that. "More schools" is all you need to improve education, "more hospitals" will save more lives. For every problem, the solution is throwing money at it.
The thing is, cities are complex systems. And while abstractions like those SimCity offers make things more predictable, ultimately the outcomes they result in can take you by surprise.
Perhaps the most famous example of that was Vincent Ocasla's SimCity 3000 megalopolis Magnasanti. Ocasla planned out, over four years and on reams of graph paper, a city with the maximum possible population for the game. [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU&feature=player_embedded]The result is a totalitarian nightmare[/url]. Almost every square mile is covered in enormous tower blocks, linked by subway systems. Dotted throughout are whole city blocks with monolithic purposes; one has 36 libraries back to back, another holds one of four funfairs (though in place, they look more like Glorious Leader's Mandatory Fun Zones). The game ends in the year 50,000, as Ocsala trumpets a population of just over 6,000,000 people with zero abandoned buildings, zero water pollution, zero congestion. He's built a utopia no-one would ever want to live in.
But as the series progresses, relatively minor changes fundamentally alter what the megacities you can produce look like. SimCity 2000, for instance, includes the Arcologies - gigantic, self-contained tower blocks which need little in the form of support structures. A few nuclear power stations and a whole grid of them, linked by subways, is the perfect city in that game.
But the new SimCity renders that sort of perfection — perfectly aligned grids, mathematically predictable cities, and so on — impossible. Part of that is because it introduces synchronous multiplayer — a first for the series — letting Sims from neighbouring cities travel across to yours. But it's also because the game has doubled down its focus on roads, which are now the default way for connecting everything. Electricity flows along roads to houses, poo flows down them to sewage plants (not literally, of course, though the much-vaunted Glassbox engine would probably be capable of rendering it).
At least in the betas of the game out now (the final version may change some key variables), the success of your city is dictated far more by the placement of roads than any previous version. It's no longer enough just to lay out a simple grid that connects everything to everything else — instead, you're expected to map out an intricate suburbia linking to highways to take your car-commuting sims into the downtown where they work.
As a result, the game ends up encouraging suburbanisation to a much greater degree than before. [url=http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/453186-simcity-vs-suburban-sprawl/]Norman Chan[/url] tried applying suburban planning techniques to the game, and found that the most effective design — at least in the short games the beta let you play — was a cul-de-sac-heavy layout reminiscent of the worst of America's subprime neighbourhoods.
Once the game was actually released, it was clear the news was even worse. What appeared to be teething problems with an unstable always-online implementation got worse rather than better, and EA turned off key features in a desperate attempt to salvage some reputation. Polygon, which initially awarded the game 9.5 out of 10, downgraded its score twice, and now has it at just 4. And the questionable decisions the developers made to simplify aspects of the simulation render it unintuitive at best.
If your city's population grows too large, roads get congested—unavoidable, given the lack of subways—but if roads get congested, your power and water utilities, which run along the same streets, also start to get clogged up. Streets can be upgraded to avenues (if you're prepared to rip up your buildings), but there's an undeniable sense that the game is attempting to punish high populations, and especially high densities. It looks like the archetypal city of this entry in the series is more Houston than Hong Kong. It may not be the most political decision they make, but in a game that's all about building cities, it's the most important one.[/quote]
I want the ability to make one way roads, is that much to ask?
[QUOTE=Cakebatyr;39915673]Imagine: Agents never getting lost at intersections, no intersections to congest traffic, total streetcar coverage![/QUOTE]
I tried making streetcars, but that creates an intersection where the high density highway from the regional highway begins, so I have to stick to buses. That one intersection created a huge pileup at the front of my city, so I started over and tried a new approach.
[QUOTE=Lethaxx;39915801]I want the ability to make one way roads, is that much to ask?[/QUOTE]
Sure just wait for the "Rush Hour" DLC pack, you can get each feature for 20$ or buy the whole pack for the triple price of the standalone game!
[editline]14th March 2013[/editline]
Hey guys, new blog update:
[url]http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8[/url]
I hate having to move utilities like power stations and recycling plants that have a lot of modules. Instead of simply moving it you need to demolish it, rebuilt it then re-add every module.
Ah they're sorting out the road issues.
Good to hear.
They're fixing the stupid traffic apparently.
[QUOTE=barttool;39915872]Sure just wait for the "Rush Hour" DLC pack, you can get each feature for 20$ or buy the whole pack for the triple price of the standalone game!
[editline]14th March 2013[/editline]
Hey guys, new blog update:
[url]http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8[/url][/QUOTE]
This is actually very good post from the dev.
I'm very happy to hear that they are on the track of fixing the 90% of annoyance that bugs me in Simcity.
Can't wait to see the results of their work.
[QUOTE=barttool;39915872]Sure just wait for the "Rush Hour" DLC pack, you can get each feature for 20$ or buy the whole pack for the triple price of the standalone game!
[editline]14th March 2013[/editline]
Hey guys, new blog update:
[url]http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8[/url][/QUOTE]
[quote] But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.[/quote]
Then don't talk about it like it IS implemented in the many promotional videos before release you dirty liars.
[editline]15th March 2013[/editline]
Why was all the stuff he's talking about not discovered(implemented during testing?
I barely have any factories and my city does not have enough workers mind you my city has like 1 high density HT industry and like 9 small ones
Tornados are fuckin' sweeeeeeet.
[thumb]http://i.imgur.com/Mqg3tbA.jpg[/thumb]
It formed right on my fire station and threw everything around for a bit.
[B]Edit:
[/B]
Zombie invasion right as everyone started leaving a rock concert.
Only 13 people killed, surprisingly.
[QUOTE=Killuah;39915988]Then don't talk about it like it IS implemented in the many promotional videos before release you dirty liars.
[editline]15th March 2013[/editline]
Why was all the stuff he's talking about not discovered(implemented during testing?[/QUOTE]
Very good question. I think it might be a sort of suspension of disbelief-style psychological thing. People were so excited, they didn't notice these things until it started to cool down a bit.
[QUOTE=striker453;39916057]I barely have any factories and my city does not have enough workers mind you my city has like 1 high density HT industry and like 9 small ones[/QUOTE]
1 high density, high tech building requires [b]a lot[/b] more educated/wealthy people than a small or medium one. That's really the best I can say, because honestly I still haven't quite figured out how to balance industry well with the rest of the city. I feel like their requirements are more sensitive and harder to fulfill than commercial and residential.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/bjnh1ou.jpg[/t]
Anybody wanna play on the test server?!
That post from the devs is exactly what I'd hoped to read. Although it's sad it wasn't like this from the start, I'm happy the issues are at least being addressed!
[QUOTE=Mad Chatter;39916080]Tornados are fuckin' sweeeeeeet.
[thumb]http://i.imgur.com/Mqg3tbA.jpg[/thumb]
It formed right on my fire station and threw everything around for a bit.
[B]Edit:
[/B]
Zombie invasion right as everyone started leaving a rock concert.
Only 13 people killed, surprisingly.[/QUOTE]
Why would you occupy so much space on solar power? I don't think avoiding a little pollution is worth wasting so much space in this game.
[QUOTE=Shortyish;39915861]I tried making streetcars, but that creates an intersection where the high density highway from the regional highway begins, so I have to stick to buses. That one intersection created a huge pileup at the front of my city, so I started over and tried a new approach.[/QUOTE]
SimCity V: Intersections are the Enemy of the State.
[QUOTE=barttool;39916367]Why would you occupy so much space on solar power? I don't think avoiding a little pollution is worth wasting so much space in this game.[/QUOTE]
Never used it before, so I plopped it fairly early on and haven't gotten around to making this place safe for a nuclear power plant.
[QUOTE=Killuah;39915988]But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.[/QUOTE]
That's not a game design compromise, that my friend is an [B]Artist[/B] getting his way and the programers and game designers having to compromise [B]for the Artist[/B] not [B]with the Artist[/B]
This is why Artists should not be in charge of Game Design or make decisions on Game Design.
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