Sim City games

<is still looking for someplace he can get Sim City 2000 for a Mac OS X>

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Tell me who to murder to get a Simcity 5 and they're bloody dead.

I absolutely love SC4. I had to cheat to play SC2 back in the day, but now I can usually keep a city in the black and expanding. I'm dying to see a new game that's more detailed and complicated, (looking at YOU Societies) that makes better use of the neighbor connections. For example, it'd be great if the Simnation was actually a real "nation". For example, shipping that garbage from one city to another on the far side of the nation. Two cities make an agreement and the ones in between deal with the additional traffic and some tiny revenue from the "business".

Plus, the game desperately needs in-game world generation. If I want the whole nation to be max-sized cities then let me do it.

Plus there are tiny things that always annoyed me. For example, how much heavy industry exists in a random American city any more? Always bugs me when the city can NOT expand without five square miles of Pollution Co. Smoke Factories. Commercial zones should be able to carry more of the employment workload. Or at least acknowledge that modern industry doesn't involve as many giant smokestacks as it used to.

Also, I do miss the revenue gaining propositions from say Simcity 2000. In 4 all you have is a, hopefully badly bugged, $100 a month from legal gambling. Not much. And a ton of ways to spend money.

edited 21st Apr '11 5:55:40 PM by Rotpar

"But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." - O'Brien, 1984

As I got better and better at the games, those moments where random enormous sections of your city would become abandoned dead zones practically overnight with no solid clue as to why, which used to plague me in 2000, happened less and less. This made me happy. Now I'm not supermayor, and it generally takes me a while to get those really big skyscrapers and such (much shinier than your usual skyscrapers that you get for good but not perfect performance), but my city still runs well. This also makes me happy.

Also, whoever thought of agriculture is a genius. Even if they, and industry in general, do make the car missions in IV much harder than they need to be.

edited 21st Apr '11 8:02:59 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Regarding the choice of factory design, I guess Maxis was aiming to portray The Theme Park Version of urban America; smokestack industries from before environmental regulations seem to be more recognizable than its modern but often stark counterparts. Anachronism Stew was one of Maxis' specialties back in the day.

edited 21st Apr '11 8:57:36 PM by MalagasyParrot

Don't cut back on funding! You will regret this!◊

I got Sim City 4 Deluxe off Steam recently since I've given up on the prospect of finding my SC 4 disk. I had to add a bit of code to the start up in order to get it to work though. But now it's good (I just can't Alt-Tab).
I'm also playing without cheats now. I always use to, but I find that I'm enjoying the game even more that I'm actually playing it properly. I have to admit though that some of my cities haven't turned out too hot though.

Sim City Societies is a joke. My old SC 4 disk was screwed so I bought the pack that had SC 4 and Rush Hour along with Societies and its expansion. Societies is just shit. There's no challenge to it at all. First try my city was working, developing exactly how I want it to, and I was beating all the mission requirements. No real decisions to make, no tough calls, nothing. Just the easiest easy mode SC I've ever played.

First of all there are some mods out there that dramatically increase the amount of jobs generated by industry, by a factor of three or four, and increases your reliance upon commercial work. As for the smokestacks, it's a phase you've got to work through. As your education level climbs and you shift taxes to penalize heavy polluters and attract high tech industry you'll see a shift in the mix and the heavy polluters will die off. It's all a matter of tweaking things to strongly discourage that kind of industry and attract the kind you want.

The biggest key to city success that I've found is to take it very slowly. It's tempting to give the sims everything they demand until you think about reality, people are always demanding more city services and more of this and less of that and no matter how much you give them they're never happy. So ignore them. Focus on building the city you're after. So long as you're in the black and the city is growing just ignore them. It's not bad to monitor what they're wanting and even to give it to them from time to time but never do something to just shut them up as everything you do will have an impact that will ripple through the city and it could take a year or even more to really see what your action resulted in. For instance if you bulldoze an industrial park to make way for a fire station that your budget says you can afford. That industry might have been where a sim half way across the city worked. Suddenly they're out of a job... and can't find another they really want. They eventually leave the city and that nicely developed house is abandoned. The ones next to it drop in value. The next group that moves into that house might not keep it, it could revert to a lower income house keeping the revenue from it depressed, and hurting those lots around it. Suddenly that fire station is costing you WAY more than you thought it would. Now if that's all you did then the impact isn't too severe and you can recover from it some way. But if you built the firehouse then slammed down a school, some parks, and a police station as well that you thought you could afford suddenly you can find yourself in an unexpected budget crunch.

One nice way to solve this issue, just run the game balls to the wall speed. That way things will happen faster and you can see impacts quicker. Now that said you might want to slow the game down if things go drastically amiss. And you don't want to kick it in the ass if you're not in the black. Most of my cities run on a slim positive margin in the budget, only a few hundred dollars positive per month. I don't run out of cash because I run the game so fast that it doesn't really matter.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

Yeah, I did learn a while back that demolishing stuff can need to snowball effects. And being able to adjust funding for a given school or hospital is beautiful.

I'd love to see the zoning tool be used for more things. Zone out school and hospitals rather then laying down in big identical structures. Especially for military bases.

"But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." - O'Brien, 1984

I remember playing SC 3000 (UK edition! No idea what the difference was from, presumably, the Rest-Of-The-World edition) when I was much younger. I don't really think I understood it, I tended to lose lots of money then cheat for more and just build random stuff.

I got SC 4 a few years back and although I wasn't great at it, I do think I did much better. It helps that SC 4 has some excellent improvements/additions, like automagically creating streets and lots in zoned areas.

Hm. I must see whether it'll run on this laptop.

EDIT: I found an old mosaic'd screenshot I made of one of my creations, Wundograd. See here!◊

edited 23rd Apr '11 9:39:52 AM by EthZee

(Yeah, I saw the last post date. I just don't care. )

Between the original SC on PC and SNES, and to a lesser extent the floppy-based SC2K, I lost count of how many hours I've blown away growing a city.

Christmas Eve I set up an account at GOG.com, to accept some gift games from a friend, and did some browsing. One of the games I came across was 2K. I remembered liking that a lot, and at 3 bucks (on sale) it was almost a no-brainer purchase.

And, sure enough, using the free time I have from being off from work for the holiday, I've blown a majority of my waking hours just playing 2K. Still as fun as I remember it, once you get past the start-up period.

Never really looked into anything SC after 2K, though. Either I didn't have a) the computer for it, b) the money for it, or c) the interest in it.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Is there still any future for this series? Or did 2013 kill it off?

Optimism is a duty.

EA seems to only be using it for Mobile games these days. And with Maxis gone I can't see them doing much with it. Now that Cities: Skylines is on the market, they have lost the edge.

It's like EA's other I Ps - it seems once they slip they let it go, then the market gets competitors trying to fill the void and EA doesn't seem to take advantage: look at how many Dungeon Keeper spiritual successors there are; Or Syndicate-likes; or Theme Hospital attempts.

I have no idea why they don't just license some of these things out, or put some of their multiple teams on simple ports.

It's a shame how so many classic games get ruined and then dumped into license oblivion by just one company.

Optimism is a duty.

So has EA always been this lazy with their licenses?

Because Sim City was usually awesome, in my opinion. And outside of Civilization, this was basically the only great city-building series that I know of. But since there's an void and Cities: Skylines quickly filled it; it shouldn't be that hard to explain why going exclusively mobile is an missed opportunity here.

Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break

Way back when they got the C&C license, they were already pretty notorious for it, if I remember correctly.

Optimism is a duty.

Was randomly thinking of Sim Copter and Streets of Sim City today.

Has anyone ever done that since, besides like Dwarf Fortress (the ability to do this is what initially drew me to that game)? Like, a game where you build a business, city, country, etc and the get to adventure in it with a distinct, more immersive gameplay style?

I love it: it’s the kind of world building / adventuring mix you usually only get in games like D&D.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 9th 2022 at 9:43:51 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

It was an interesting concept, but it always felt more like a gimmick than a fully grown feature to me. I think a later game could have gotten more out of it, but alas, the series never got that chance once EA killed it.

Optimism is a duty.