SimCity... the end is near

[Colon™]

The end result of all this is that all the cities came out as by-the-numbers cities. I have yet to see a city from Simcity, 2000, 3000, or 4000 that worked well and was even remotely unique. Comparing one city to another was a comparison in stats, since that was all they were different in. They all had hospitals, they all had police stations, they all had mass transit, they all had most of the same buildings. Maybe one had a farm or something, but that was the extent of it.

Not to mention they all have roads, buildings, even *gasp* people.

In case you hadn't noticed, all real life cities have police stations, hospitals and mass transit as well... Sim City is a simulation game for something. But thanks for confirming the "Sim City" tag on Societies is a terrible aberration.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Colon™
Not to mention they all have roads, buildings, even *gasp* people.

In case you hadn't noticed, all real life cities have police stations, hospitals and mass transit as well... Sim City is a simulation game for something. But thanks for confirming the "Sim City" tag on Societies is a terrible aberration.

QFT.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Adagio
Now that societies has been released, let's look at the score:

Gamespot: 6.0
GameSpy: 6.0
IGN: 5.8
TotalVideoGames: 5.0
GameZone: 8.7
EuroGame: 5.0

Average score seems to be just above 6

Sounds about what I expected.

[lord of the mark]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by EternalSpark

Societies isn't all that bad. It has a much different focus than earlier Simcity games, and it does pay off if you go into it with the right goal. If you go into it thinking you're going to play Simcity 5 then you'll come to the opinion that many of the reviews share.

They shouldnt have called it Simcity. It sounds like a totally different game. You can go too far stretching a brand name. Im looking at you, EA.

Take Simcity 4. I can predict things you've done, and I don't even know you:

You zoned low-density everything. You zoned your residental areas in such a way that you didn't have a lot of traffic, put your commercial zones near the residential, and you put the industrial zones a distance away because of the pollution, but not far enough away that you got issues about the distance the workers have to drive. You then upped your taxes on all of these zones to the optimial rating (the percentage that neither increases or decreases demand), and let it run. Then you started to build hospitals and police and fire when your town got bigger.

Im trying to think of a real life city where commercial zones arent near residential. Or a well planned one where industrial zones are close to residential. You could deliberately make a POORLY planned city, if the difficulty level is set low enough to allow for that. I think all the things youre saying are simply about SC 2,3,4 being realistic.

But not everyone likes realism, all the time. All modern armies have tanks, planes, automatic rifles, etc. You can build a game around that, or you can build one where those things are intermixed with elves, psi-weapons, zerglings, magic potions, whatever. Its just odd to say, release a game called Combat Mission:Battle for Angmar.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Sounds about what I expected.

doc, remember when Wiggy and i were duelling about the Sims, and he defended the difficulty in Sim City compared to the Sims? At least I think he did.

Sim City Societies sounds like the dollhouse version of Sim City. Well, better than the Sims actually, cause without the excess micro.

Think of a two by two chart. City vs Personality on one axis. Dollhouse vs realistic sim on the other. SC1,2,3,4 are in the City/simulator box. SCS is in the city/dollhouse box. Sims and Sims 2 are in the personality/dollhouse box. Sims3, if its as good as it can be from what we've heard(it probably wont be) is personality/simulator.

[FrostyBoy]

Just to note also, Cities Unlimited is looking really good, released in Fall this year.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Sim City Societies sounds like the dollhouse version of Sim City.

The dollhouse version of a dollhouse has a pretty high doll-house quotient in my book.

[Blake]

Originally posted by EternalSpark
The end result of all this is that all the cities came out as by-the-numbers cities. I have yet to see a city from Simcity, 2000, 3000, or 4000 that worked well and was even remotely unique. Comparing one city to another was a comparison in stats, since that was all they were different in. They all had hospitals, they all had police stations, they all had mass transit, they all had most of the same buildings. Maybe one had a farm or something, but that was the extent of it.

I once built a city in Simcity 4 with no car traffic, zero, zelch, nada. It was very profitable and functioned well too.

Mildly unique, even if a carless city does involve abusing some game mechanics .

I also built cities with all industry serviced purely by rail.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Im trying to think of a real life city where commercial zones arent near residential. Or a well planned one where industrial zones are close to residential.

Actually, I highly dislike the zoning in Sim City (or at least, I'd have like to see "mixed" zoning). It's either a serious simplification (which is ok in a game, but sure doesn't make it realistic), or the belief that all cities in the world are like Californian ones. SimCity is about as realistic as Civ

[DarkCloud]

The end result of all this is that all the cities came out as by-the-numbers cities. I have yet to see a city from Simcity, 2000, 3000, or 4000 that worked well and was even remotely unique. Comparing one city to another was a comparison in stats, since that was all they were different in. They all had hospitals, they all had police stations, they all had mass transit, they all had most of the same buildings. Maybe one had a farm or something, but that was the extent of it.

Isn't that the very definition of a successful self-reliant city?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Actually, I highly dislike the zoning in Sim City (or at least, I'd have like to see "mixed" zoning). It's either a serious simplification (which is ok in a game, but sure doesn't make it realistic), or the belief that all cities in the world are like Californian ones. SimCity is about as realistic as Civ

oh yeah, it would be nice to be able to make the West Village than Jane Jacobs wrote about (ie an urban area with a scattering of small factories within a residential area) or like SoHo NY (an industrial area gradually being gentrified by artists, etc) or other kinds of mixed use. Thats different from what I thought the above user was asking for, which was residential areas totally divorced from commerce and at a considerable difference as in some dream of Le Corbusier, or heavy industry "cheek by jowl" with residences as in say Marcus Hook Pennsyvlania (and in many parts of western europe I take it) The latter though it certainly exists, is poor planing, and not something I could imagine happening in a city started from scratch in 1900 (the Simcity2000 opening assumption)

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
simcity 2000 had buildings that housed like 40,000 people.

that. is. not. realistic. how. many. times. must. i. make. this. clear.

The Arcology concept is a valid one that was definitely a popular vision of what city life in 2050+ might have evolved into, given sufficient technical progress and the need to sustain ever-greater population density in the biggest cities. Working out how to make arcologies work in practice is a necessary logical step along the path of establishing colonies in space, something that is still on the agenda despite the tendency these days to send a robot rather than an astronaut on space missions.

One of the things I dislike about the later versions of SC is their lack of future vision. They make little attempt to take city planning forward from current standards. Sure, I like seeing my city get bigger, but I loved watching my city evolve from 1920 era to sci-fi spectacular too.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
oh yeah, it would be nice to be able to make the West Village than Jane Jacobs wrote about (ie an urban area with a scattering of small factories within a residential area) or like SoHo NY (an industrial area gradually being gentrified by artists, etc) or other kinds of mixed use.

Indeed I'm also thinking of shops located within residential buildings. For example, in my hometown, such shops (located at the ground-level of several-stories residences) the main providers of local business tax.
This kind of mix between business and housing in the same building is very pervasive in Europe, and I imagine it's pervasive in pretty much every dense city centre in the world.

Thats different from what I thought the above user was asking for

Fully agreed. My contention was more of a general one against the idea that SimCity is realistic. SimCity has some semblance to reality, but is such a simplification that you're as likely to become a good city planner thanks to SimCity as to become a good godlike ruler by playing Civ

The latter though it certainly exists, is poor planing, and not something I could imagine happening in a city started from scratch in 1900 (the Simcity2000 opening assumption)

You'd be surprised In the 1950's over here, it looked a really peachy idea to build the worker's flats right next to their factory (and that's the time when many hamlets became suburban cities, in a process akin to SimCity's, only that instead of a fully blank map, you get a small village-y blurb in the middle, farms, and roads). I'm sure those grand ideas have been had elsewhere as well.

[Sirotnikov]

This game is going to be awful.

To quote myself:

http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=5061353

...you do have that fat chick as the Lead Producer of this gay looking retarded game.

Concepts mentioned through out the review such as "prosperity", "spirituality", "societal energy" and hawaian shirt days(!!!) are so obviously a female's idea!!

Why does every building has, in addition to tons of positive effects, some special positive ability to boost spirituality / societal energy / prosperty? This sounds more like a magical d&d adventure!! Do buildings also have healing spells and mana potions?

Societies seems to be a really colorful sandbox for dumb children.

I bet that every possible way to loose this game has been gutted, in favor of win-win scenarios, where there is no way to get in a deficit budget.


SimCity was about a semi-serious grand-strategy simulation. The player's role has changed, from a position of designating areas, designing infrastructure and controlling city-wide economy, to placing hotdog carts around in order to "maximize societal prosperity and workers energy regeneration".

And I bet each hotdog cart has a magical special ability to make one sim extra prosperous for a day!!! So you spend your game buildings tons of hotdog carts and assigning a sim to each one, to boost everyone's productivity! YAY!!!

But wait, too much hotdog carts can degenerate societal energy because they make people fat. We can utilize a requirement that all buildings have staircases, but that would make our little fat sims unhappy and short of breath (thereby reducing our societal jollity factor! OH NOES!!!ONE!!).

So instead let's build a pharmaceutical company that has a special ability of producing dieting pills for workers in the entire city!! And it generates tax profits too!!! YAYS! problem solved!!


BLECH.
What utter crap!

My words never sounded truer.

what a gay idiotic game sim city socities.

and it has ugly graphics.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
simcity 2000 had buildings that housed like 40,000 people. it let you control funding and placement of everything in the city. it featured alien attacks.

that. is. not. realistic. how. many. times. must. i. make. this. clear.

I'm not sure how I missed this post.

Sorry to kick the soap box out from under you, Wiggly Puff, but I guess this means the WTC complex in New York and it's daily population of 50,000 workers and 200,000 visitors was a figment of everyone's imagination.

It's a matter of political will, availability of materials to build such structures. The technology has been there since at least the 70's when the Twin Towers and adjoining buildings on the site were built, moreover the technology has progressed a lot since then. It's not a mater of "Can we?" but rather "Will we and when?" Someone just needs to step up and do it.