[HN Gopher] A comparison of city building games
___________________________________________________________________
A comparison of city building games
Author : fanf2
Score : 120 points
Date : 2021-01-04 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jandrese wrote:
| > Though it's Californian to the point of having Nuclear Free
| Zone ordinances, SimCity allows players to set tax property tax
| rates above 1%. (probably because it would be unplayable
| otherwise)
|
| Major shade being thrown at the state of CA here.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The effective property tax rate in CA is actually well below
| 1%, since assessed values of properties are not allowed to rise
| faster than inflation or 2%, whichever is _smaller_.
|
| When I bought my house, the effective property tax on it went
| from 0.1% to 1%, as the assessed value under Prop 13 was 1/10
| of the purchase price.
| qndreoi wrote:
| I've been intrigued by property taxes since reading a book by
| Heinlein that sat on the shelf for 40 years before being
| published last year, "The Pursuit of the Pankera". In this
| otherwise forgettable story, the family settles on an Earth
| in a parallel universe where most of the taxes are property
| taxes. The rate is set by the government, but each parcel is
| self-assessed by the owner. The catch is that anyone,
| including the government can purchase the property at the
| assessed value at any time. It sounds like a good idea, that
| would encourage fairness, but I wonder if there are
| unforeseen consequences I am overlooking.
| brewdad wrote:
| That sounds like a recipe for the Billionaires of the world
| to get their hands on a lot of otherwise unavailable
| property. Jeff Bezos will have no problem valuing his
| property at or even above market value, what's an extra
| million dollars in taxes to him compared to the shame of
| having it bought out from under him.
|
| Would be a great way to get back at your enemies when you
| find out they've been undervaluing their assets though.
| skybrian wrote:
| There are apparently-serious papers by economists about
| self-assessment taxes. (Well, somewhat serious; it seems to
| be a theoretical discussion.) For example:
|
| https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art
| i...
|
| Apparently this is sometimes called a "Harberger tax" after
| the economist who proposed it in 1965. Maybe that's where
| Heinlein got it?
|
| I first saw this in a blog post by Robert Hanson, back when
| I still read him.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I heard that idea attributed to Heinlein many years ago
| from a friend who read everything he wrote.
|
| A few downsides I thought of
|
| 1. It makes it easier for rich people to do mean things to
| poor people (it's not like there aren't already lots of
| ways, but something to think about)
|
| 2. In rapidly changing conditions, people who neglect to
| file their paperwork will get screwed -- either
| significantly overpay or get kicked out of their houses for
| below-market values. The people who are neglectful in
| paperwork are probably disproportionately those that we
| typically aim to protect with government interventions
|
| 3. Eminent domain changes a bit; people would naturally
| price their houses for above-market values, because being
| forced to move unexpectedly is a hassle, so you would
| assess your value at a premium to avoid that hassle. This
| means the government would likely have to pay more for
| property than the "fair market value" that courts require.
| Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, that
| may be okay.
|
| 4. Holdouts[1] tend to be popular. Making it financially
| untenable to be a holdout thus might be too unpopular a law
| to pass.
|
| 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate)
| jondlove wrote:
| I appreciate the author mentioning 'Soviet Republic'; as a lover
| of city builders, it is my current addiction and I can recommend
| it as a great game if you are interested in both city building
| and logistics management.
|
| The thread glosses over the "player builds everything" feature,
| but that's not the half of it: everything in your nation is open
| for your consideration: the buildings you construct; the food
| your people eat; the transport vehicles and fuel needed to run
| them - you can choose to set up supply chains all the way from
| extraction, to refinement, to manufacturing and export - or
| import the things (and manpower) you don't care about, at a cost.
|
| Think "Rise of Industry" or OpenTTD meets Tropico, but you also
| need to source the resources and manpower to build your
| buildings, roads, and railways.
|
| I also find the mod selection (namely a wide variety of
| buildings) to be quite an asset to the game
| wry_discontent wrote:
| The import feature in Soviet Republic is especially cool to me.
|
| If you mine/process/store all the goods needed to produce a
| building in your republic warehouses, you can build anything
| essentially for free. You assign trucks to deliver the goods
| and use workers to build it.
|
| The only thing missing from that game for me, is a more
| informative and intuitive UI. It can be hard to understand how
| all the parts fit together and get a good overview of your
| republic.
| rayrag wrote:
| Does any of those games have some kind of 'free mode'? I'm not
| interested in playing but rather in a casually designing city,
| similarly to the Townscaper game.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper
| mhh__ wrote:
| I forget the exact keybind but in Cities Skylines you can just
| give yourself a bunch of money and just play
| jagger27 wrote:
| When you create your city you can simply enable unlimited
| money.
| livre wrote:
| Cities Skylines has an infinite money checkbox if I recall
| correctly. You'll still have to properly design the city so the
| people move there and build but game money won't be an
| obstacle.
|
| Edit: found it, it is the built-in unlimited money mod
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/61170136...
| rayrag wrote:
| Thanks for the info. Epic was giving it for free recently so
| I own it. I will definitely try it.
| markwillis82 wrote:
| Are there any mobile versions that are good and not in app
| purchases / time based?
|
| I wouldn't mind paying for a game but not a fan of the time
| based, gem collecting price models. Would rather pay for the app
| and just play
| adamjb wrote:
| OpenTTD has an android port but no ios port (something to do
| with GPL iirc)
| vestrigi wrote:
| I would have recommended TheoTown but apparently they moved to
| a time based IAP model with their mobile app. The steam version
| is still a single time purchase and a great game for the low
| price.
|
| While checking out TheoTown on the App Store I found out that
| there is a paid Tropico version that seems to be a full game.
| n4s33r wrote:
| Pocket City is okay
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| SimCity is why for my first MS-DOS machine I went with a Hercules
| graphics card and paperwhite monitor. The added resolution and
| clarity seemed much more important than the color that came from
| CGA (EGA and VGA were far outside of my budget at the time). The
| game played really well on monochrome.
| test1235 wrote:
| is there a way to read this in a compiled format complete with
| images an' all?
| sabellito wrote:
| Yeah, it's kinda crazy to me that people post.. well, posts
| using twitter. It's not ideal to share this type of content.
| timw4mail wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345955063353597954.html
| test1235 wrote:
| ah, awesome! thanks very much
| carapace wrote:
| I've heard anecdotally that SimCity started at an attempt to
| model Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language. If I had a
| "roundtuit" I'd make something like that. I was playing with
| Godot engine a few months ago and it's pretty fun itself. A city-
| building game-building game...
| mcphage wrote:
| > If I had a "roundtuit" I'd make something like that.
|
| Hmmm, are they out of stock at Amazon? It does claim to be the
| _everything_ store...
| dylan604 wrote:
| it is available, but it's a knock off with fake reviews
| meddlepal wrote:
| Check out NewCity on Steam if you want a pretty cool advanced
| SimCity-esque builder. Its quite advanced for early-access.
| ledbettj wrote:
| Just a warning that although it claims to support Linux, on
| launch I got two options:
|
| * Run without wine (Linux)
|
| * Launch with wine
|
| The first one took me to a black screen. The second took me
| into the game but the colors were entirely wrong -- everything
| was red and black. So caveat emptor.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I thought I'd throw in this link to the awesome donoteat1
| playlist about city building made with skylines:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vln5Ri4Zpgo&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
| zip1234 wrote:
| It missed a really nice one with walkable cities: the Caesar
| series. I remember playing Caesar 2 in the 90s and I believe
| there are newer ones.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Loved both Caesar and Pharaoh, but Caesar (3 I think) was my
| favorite.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 'Plebs are needed'
| xvedejas wrote:
| There were also some follow-up games with Egyptian and Greek
| themes (called Pharaoh and Zeus) which I recall being similarly
| fun. And looking it up just now, there's also one I missed,
| called "Emperor" and set in ancient China.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I spent so many hours on Pharaoh and Cleopatra growing up.
|
| There was a game released in 2015 very similar to these style
| games called Lethis: Path of Progress. I never got into it, but
| maybe other fans of Sierra games will
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/359230/Lethis__Path_of_Pr...
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It's interesting to stack up other city builders against this as
| well. Airborne Kingdom, Frostpunk, Tropico, Anno 1800, etc all
| focus on different elements of the genre.
|
| I'm working on a city builder as a side project, and it's
| fascinating how many little choices there are that totally change
| the space of the game.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Another twitter thread that should have been a blog post...
| fatnoah wrote:
| That was my first thought as well. I have such a hard time
| consuming content with the Twitter UI in the way.
| ryandvm wrote:
| _ABJECT TANGENT ALERT_
|
| You're absolutely right. I find it incredibly frustrating that
| network effects and game theory mean we're stuck with sub-
| optimal solutions to problems just because "everybody else uses
| it". Twitter thread long-posts are just one example.
|
| I would love to see some proposals for legislation designed to
| mitigate user-base monopolies. Products should be competing on
| features, price, and performance; not on who happened to
| acquire the most users first.
|
| Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Office, iMessages, etc. are just a
| few examples of products that are market leaders not because of
| the quality of their product, but because they happened to
| capture large enough user bases to spur network-based growth.
|
| I have no idea what this legislation would actually look like
| (or how disastrous the unintended effects would be), but at
| first blush I'm imagining something along the lines of
| compulsory interoperability requirements. The devil is in the
| details of course...
| SECProto wrote:
| I only read it /because/ it was a twitter thread. I wouldn't
| have clicked the link if it had been a blog post (unless I read
| the comments here and found a compelling reason)
|
| To defend twitter: each tweet in the thread has to have a
| point, something compelling about it - and in this case, an
| image with each. The limitations of twitter force the author to
| write concisely (as opposed to blogs, where paragraphs can be
| as rambling and long-winded as the author pleases). The medium
| also allows persons to reply to any individual tweet -
| performing a similar role as threaded comments on a site like
| HN, but more focused. Twitter is an ideal format for short-to-
| medium length content like this.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| agree!
|
| Although reading is more comfortable (for me) in a blog post,
| posts also tend to have way more junk before it gets to the
| point. I.e.: recipe posts, entertainment news, etc...
| ekianjo wrote:
| > I only read it /because/ it was a twitter thread
|
| > Twitter is an ideal format for short-to-medium length
| content like this.
|
| So you do enjoy having text broken down in small pieces
| inside an interface that's obviously made for short messages,
| with ads on the side, and replies right in the middle of the
| main body of the text?
|
| All right. I guess we have different standards of
| readability.
| SECProto wrote:
| > So you do enjoy having text broken down in small pieces
| inside an interface that's obviously made for short
| messages
|
| I do enjoy having text broken down into small, coherent
| pieces - whether it be a tweet or a paragraph. Twitter
| enforces it, blog platforms do not. While neither twitter
| nor blog platforms can enforce writing quality, length
| limits at least prevent the most egregious run-on
| sentences.
|
| > with ads on the side,
|
| Twitter doesnt have ads for me on any device - app or
| browser, computer or phone. Blogs generally have ads (that
| circumvent my blocker) or empty white space (where ads had
| been) on every device. Twitter has centred text on my
| laptop (comparable to most blog platforms), or the text
| fills my full screen width on my phone (better than most
| blog platforms).
|
| > and replies right in the middle of the main body of the
| text?
|
| I don't see replies in the main body of the text. I can
| click on any given tweet to see the various replies, but
| otherwise the author's tweets remain in an unbroken chain.
| brewdad wrote:
| As if blogs don't have ads on the side or even in the
| middle of a post occasionally. A properly threaded message
| will have all of the content linked together with replies
| falling all the way to the bottom. Just like a blog.
|
| Twitter isn't nearly as difficult to use as some people
| like to make it out to be. My biggest petpeeve on Twitter.
| Is 30 different replies of "@ThreadReaderApp unroll".
| rement wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345955063353597954.html
|
| edit: I agree with you though. This should have been a blog
| post.
| timw4mail wrote:
| OpenTTD is a great game, especially considering it's free.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Does the AI still go crazy? The last time I played (~5 years
| ago iirc) it still did the trick of filling all possible space
| in an area with loops of train tracks (which are then
| impossible to shift later on unless you buy them out). Still my
| all-time favourite game though even despite that
| baud147258 wrote:
| Don't you need the files from the original game to use it?
| misnome wrote:
| You used to, but it now has FOSS graphics/music/sound packs
| that you can use.
| aequitas wrote:
| OpenTTD is indeed great, but I wouldn't categorize Transport
| Tycoon as a city building game, instead you build a transport
| company. You can have some influence on how the cities in the
| game develop, but they are more tricks to influence the city
| building AI in building a more optmized city instead of actual
| intended gameplay elements imho. Things like grid layouts for
| roads (which the AI won't destroy) or terraforming terrain
| around the city.
| timw4mail wrote:
| That's certainly true. I kind of like the fact that if you
| mess with a city too much they'll get mad at you .
| mhh__ wrote:
| It wasn't very ergonomic last time I tried a few years ago but
| you can even play it on android
| coffeeboy27 wrote:
| Tropico, in general, is always being slept on. Tropico 6 is a
| genre defining game in my opinion. If you're into city building
| games I highly recommend giving it a chance.
| elthran wrote:
| Agreed with Tropico - great tongue in cheek setting and feel.
| For whatever reason though, which I can't quite put my finger
| on, the gameplay in T6 just feels worse to me than T4/5, as if
| its been dumbed down
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It is different than all the other city building games listed,
| in that you place all the buildings by hand.
|
| That being said I would not really count Transport Tycoon as a
| city building game because transport is literally the name of
| the game.
| eastbayjake wrote:
| Started with the original Tropico when it first came out, just
| downloaded Tropico 4 to play over the holidays based on some
| feedback that 4 had less complex and more fun gameplay than 6.
| Any perspective on which is the best in the series?
| Alenycus wrote:
| I've put a bunch of hours into 3 4 5 and 6. I'd rank them 4 >
| 6 > 5 > 3. 4 is clearly the best though, everything just
| seems to hit the perfect balance between simple fun and
| complexity, and the writing and character rpg elements made
| me want to play with different play styles. 6 is big, but I
| find myself getting bored in the middle game. 3 and 5 are
| just worse than 4 in essentially every way. All are fun
| though.
| dghouk wrote:
| Skylines is far more flexible than the author gives it credit
| for. At this point it's more of a platform for community content
| than a game, it would be very common to see almost no vanilla
| resources used (maybe besides roads) in a build. The vanilla
| assets are often both ugly and poorly optimized, something from
| Steam can look more realistic while also having fewer triangles!
| See the "low poly trees" collection for an example.
|
| It's also very common for the player to use place every building
| manually, contrary to to the author's table. If you check out
| /r/CitiesSkylines or YouTube, anything that looks really good is
| likely done this way.
|
| The game also doesn't force you to prefer transit vs. cars, it's
| very flexible and you can build an Asian, European, or American
| (NYC or "sprawl") styles easily. YouTube examples I can think of:
|
| - Nydal - European - Marble Mountain - American (California) -
| Kobyashi Island - Japanese
| jbob2000 wrote:
| My only criticism of Skylines is that it's not a game, it's
| just an art board for painting cities that move. There aren't
| enough meaningful challenges to building your city, the reward
| for playing comes from making something aesthetically
| appealing.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Indeed, if you DO actually try to "play" and build a
| functioning city, the inability to handle traffic in any way
| basically stops you dead at small town size
| syshum wrote:
| Someone needs to know Lane Mathematics and proper round-a-
| bout setup :)
| tidepod12 wrote:
| Designing your city in a way that allows traffic to flow
| (and takes advantage of traffic alternatives such as the
| myriad of public transit options you can design and build)
| is one of those "meaningful challenges" that you're
| supposed to play through. That's kind of the point.
| dragontamer wrote:
| City Skylines is a one-dimensional "game", in that all
| problems revolve around traffic.
|
| There's NOTHING wrong with that!! Traffic simulation is
| incredibly hard, and its very fun to resolve that issue (or
| "attempt" to resolve the issue). To truly solve traffic
| problems requires you to understand how and why all the
| cars are moving the way they do.
|
| The main issue IMO with City Skylines, is that once you
| "solve" the traffic problem (which is almost always a
| combination of Highway -> 3-way Artery road with few
| intersections -> "cul-de-sac" style distribution of cars to
| their final endpoints + a few mass-transit options),
| there's nothing else to the game. All problems start, and
| end, with traffic management.
|
| As such, if you're already a "traffic expert" (due to
| playing games like Factorio or OpenTTD beforehand), you can
| quickly build an optimal City Skylines setup and then have
| not much else to do.
|
| SimCity was truly a game with multiple dimensions. Skylines
| is mostly a traffic simulatior (a good one, but still...
| "just" a traffic simulator).
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| > SimCity was truly a game with multiple dimensions.
|
| I keep hearing this, but what other dimensions does it
| have?
|
| I remember playing SimCity in highschool and can't really
| remember anything it has that City Skylines does not.
| That is likely due to multi-decade-old memories and not
| that it actually lacks those dimensions.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I played SimCity 2000 off of GOG a few months ago (around
| when I was also playing City Skylines). A few things:
|
| 1. SimCity2000 has much higher relative costs for
| infrastructure. Roads, Police, Firefighters, etc. etc.
| cost lots of recurring money, to the point where a
| typical player even on $20,000 "Easy" mode will probably
| fail the first few times they play. I've never run out of
| money on City Skylines, literally never. But even with
| all my experience on SimCity 2000, I can "fail to
| bootstrap" on medium ($10,000) or hard (Bonds/Debt) mode.
| (Especially if an unlucky early game fire disaster
| happens). In contrast, the recurring costs in Skylines is
| so puny that I forget about that aspect entirely.
|
| 2. Disasters in Sim City 2000 force you to rebuild
| occasionally. Or at least, carefully consider the
| placement of your items. (Ex: low-lands may flood,
| getting destroyed. Airplanes may crash, causing fires
| near airports). Despite being a pain in the ass, the
| chaos of disasters grossly changes the feel.
|
| ------------
|
| Ultimately, Skylines has more similarities to
| Rollercoaster Tycoon and/or Tropico than SimCity.
| Skylines simulates every individual sim (with HEAVY
| emphasis on traffic). The emergent behavior of each
| individual sim following simple rules is a particular
| style of gameplay.
|
| However, SimCity was more of a abstract economic
| simulator, where larger decisions had more pronounced
| effects. Opening commercial roads to neighbors would
| create trade between cities. Airports and/or seaports
| need to be managed with your neighbors. This style of
| gameplay: a "big picture" city simulator, ultimately
| plays extremely differently than City Skylines.
|
| In City Skylines: building an airport or seaport causes a
| traffic spike that you need to manage. In SimCity,
| building an airport or seaport causes an increase in
| commercial demand and/or industrial demand. Its just
| fundamentally different.
|
| --------
|
| Really: its just that one thing: Skylines's
| infrastructure costs are laughably low. There's no worry
| about ever running out of money... no matter what you
| build, you're always flush with cash.
|
| In SimCity, you'd worry whether or not you've saved up
| enough cash to bootstrap a new section of your city. In
| Skylines, you just build it, and if it doesn't work
| (unforeseen traffic issues or whatnot), delete it and
| build it again.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| A road layout using concentric circles with spokes works
| too.
| gregmac wrote:
| > you can quickly build an optimal City Skylines setup
| and then have not much else to do
|
| You can definitely get to an optimal state then stop, but
| you can also keep growing. As the city grows, it requires
| refactoring roads and public transit to keep things
| going.
|
| I recently got the Industries add-on, and found that also
| adds an interesting dimension: as you add factories, they
| require more of certain types of raw materials and I find
| myself wishing I had made the farming zone bigger, for
| example, debating if I should raze this nearby 5-star
| neighborhood, reroute a well-flowing multi-lane highway,
| or start a second zone somewhere else.
|
| I kind of like I can get it to an equilibrium and stop,
| while not feeling like I'm leaving it unfinished. I tend
| to play for a couple weeks then take a break for a few
| months.
| capableweb wrote:
| > the reward for playing comes from making something
| aesthetically appealing
|
| More like "The reward comes from playing with your own
| objectives and succeeding at them" which is one of the
| hallmarks of sandbox games, not just Cities: Skylines in
| particular.
|
| I've played Cities: Skylines quite a bit, the genre is my
| favorite one. While I agree the game doesn't force you into
| completing arbitrary objectives, I've found it quite
| challenging myself, but that's also because I setup my own
| objectives to be challenging.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I want to see a remaster, or some sort of faithful remake of
| SimCity 4. Something about its crisp graphics and trimetric
| camera projection feels irreplaceable. I still frequently listen
| to the soundtrack while I work too. God I love that game.
|
| If EA released the sources to it or created a "Definitive
| Edition" I could die happy.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| I'd want a lot more than a faithful remake of SC4 (although SC4
| would be a great starting point) -- the SimCity games have
| always, to a degree, been games that follow suburban
| California's zoning laws, and they're really great at making
| sprawling California suburbs.
|
| Just a few things I'd want to add to city games:
|
| - Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones.
|
| - Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up
| far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support
| urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway
| entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when
| they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a
| road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively.
|
| - Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish
| I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a
| vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together
| commercial and residential plots, when many residential
| buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making
| them effectively "light" density commercial contained within
| "dense" residential).
| publicola1990 wrote:
| May be add slums too, if it does not have them. I found
| Cities Skylines for example, has not concept of urban
| squalor.
| jagger27 wrote:
| SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with
| agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty
| easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps
| for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the
| two systems.
|
| The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the
| transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a
| mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm
| not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
|
| Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it
| makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly
| impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something
| that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities
| Skylines is even worse at it.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway
| combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or
| not.
|
| Road Top Mass Transit
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| > SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with
| agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty
| easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or
| pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't
| connect the two systems.
|
| That's there, but it was pretty dumb -- it didn't take
| terrain topology into account, so you wouldn't have to
| worry about making sure agricultural zones didn't wash into
| rivers/lakes/oceans that might otherwise be used for water
| supply.
|
| > The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the
| transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a
| mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but
| I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
|
| While I love modding in general, I think something so
| fundamental as being able to put up a "bus stop here" road
| sign should be included in the default game. As it exists,
| a bus stop or subway entrance take up as much space as a
| small home.
|
| The NAM is a great mod if you're looking to get into SC4
| today, but it really should be included in any new release
| for the knock-on compatibility benefits (you don't have to
| worry about another mod somehow breaking NAM).
|
| > Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without
| it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly
| impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something
| that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities
| Skylines is even worse at it.
|
| Skylines is definitely worse at it. The base game is a
| little too bare-bones for me (generally, I like games where
| the simulation is a state machine where you can tweak
| inputs vs directly messing with it), and the transportation
| options are lacking even when compared to SC4. I've tried
| to get into it a few times, but I keep bouncing off.
| zokier wrote:
| If we are assembling a city builder wishlist, then the
| biggest item for me would be richer concept of _time_. In
| SimCity and its ilk, time handling is really simplistic. Even
| huge infrastructure projects finish pretty much instantly so
| making dramatic changes is not that disruptive, and there is
| nothing to simulate the changing of eras so your cities end
| up having fairly monotonous texture.
|
| What if as your city evolves it would change from old-town
| narrow cobbled streets and weirdly shaped buildings to early
| modern brickwork, then brutalist concrete monsters, and
| finally modern sky scrapers and suburbs, or whatever, so
| different neighborhoods end up feeling different based on the
| era they were built. And if/when you need to remodel/improve
| the area, you'd have to take the existing stuff more into
| account and plan for the potentially multi-year construction
| project with the construction traffic and potential street
| blockage etc.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| SimCity is very much a product of its time. They went with
| the dominate development paradigm of the late 80s and I guess
| they've stuck with it because the game has sold very well.
| Why mess with the cash cow? If there ever is another version
| released, maybe the features of the competition will spur the
| project managers of SimCity to expand into the modern era.
| jagger27 wrote:
| SimCity as I knew and loved it is completely dead. The last
| entry to the franchise was a mobile game released in 2014.
| I can't see the series being much of a cash cow for EA
| anymore.
| meddlepal wrote:
| You might enjoy NewCity on Steam
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I still frequently listen to the soundtrack while I work too.
|
| The SC4 soundtrack definitely works really well for non-
| distracting background music while doing work. I recall that
| one of the Youtube videos having the music had the comment
| along the lines of "I was looking for a different game [Soul
| Calibur 4, I think?] and found this instead... HOW IS THE MUSIC
| THIS GOOD?"
| dehrmann wrote:
| Random Simcity soundtrack trivia: apparently "Concrete
| Jungle" from SC3k is in a pretty unusual time signature. And
| the soundtrack is also pretty good.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| SimCity 2000 was my thing back when I was 10. I got SimCity 4
| shortly after release, but I didn't like it because it was too
| complicated.
|
| I'd rather have something like 2000 instead of 4.
| speeder wrote:
| I tried to convince EA to let me do that. Didn't work.
|
| EA really, REALLY doesn't want to update SC4, they don't want
| to fix its easily fixable bugs, and don't want to share the
| source either, despite the most important parts of it being
| Open Sourced recently (EASTL is notable)
|
| SC4 to start of, was never finished, while modding the game and
| then trying to fix its bugs, I found out a ton of features
| people want, DO exist, but are partially implemented, for
| example the game even calculate the wind effects on the ground,
| but does nothing with the result of the calculation.
|
| It also has a advanced modding system using dlls, theoretically
| you can make dlls using the game APIs and greatly modify its
| behaviour but the API documentation is heavily secret, asking
| individual EA (ex)employees about it resulted in them telling
| me it is secret, and asking EA itself got my questions outright
| ignored (different from other requests, where they reply
| declining...)
|
| And it has bugs because the devs went so cutting edge at the
| time, that they used everything they could of the hardware,
| that immediately moved from under them:
|
| 1. It uses RDTSC for its original documented purpose: count
| clock cycles. Meanwhile right after launch Intel decided that
| RDTSC was supposed to count time instead, and changing what it
| does, breaking some features of the game, and causing crashes,
| the game still crashes often because of this.
|
| 2. The game uses DirectX 7, mixing DirectDraw and Direct3D, it
| used all the features it could at the time, it was running
| really poorly in a laptop of mine, so I went to check and found
| out that nVidia some 2 years after the game launch decided that
| DX7 is so outdated that they wouldn't bother supporting it at
| all, and whenever a game asked questions to the videocard using
| DX7 APIs, it would lie, so SC4 on my nVidia based laptop would
| get a lot of lies as answers to queries to the video card
| capabilities, and attempt to do poorly supported things,
| resulting in severe graphical artifacts and performance issues.
|
| To me the treatment of SC4 by EA just serves to show that EA is
| a company that doesn't care for quality that much.
| outworlder wrote:
| > whenever a game asked questions to the videocard using DX7
| APIs, it would lie,
|
| This makes me wonder if Wine would run it better. Usually,
| Wine only "lies" if Windows itself does and if not doing so
| will cause things to break.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Are you aware of any OpenTTD-like projects for SC4? If EA
| won't play ball that seems like pretty much the last option
| left.
| speeder wrote:
| There aren't any, sadly.
|
| Closest SC4 sucessor for now is the game "New Cities" that
| is fundamentally different, and proprietary.
|
| Open Source there is an early SimCity clone, but it is not
| a clone of SC4 specifically, and it is a lot more simple.
|
| There were multiple attempts by multiple people on starting
| such projects, but all of them failed fairly early, the
| task is seemly just too daunting, in fact this is part of
| the reason why the game got released in a unfinished state,
| in an interview a programmer that worked on SC4 at the time
| said they "coded themselves into a corner", and were unsure
| how to fix it, EA then gave them the ultimatum of "release
| now or never", reimplementing SC4 itself thus seems to be
| too hard.
|
| OpenTTD was much easier, in part because TTD itself was
| written in assembly, so when you decompile it, you are
| seeing the actual source for most part, there are no C++
| craziness going on, no virtual tables or crazy jumps.
|
| SC4 was written in C++ with a ton of non-standard stuff,
| Paul Pedriana is a mad genius, so unless you have
| supernatural amounts of patience and time, you won't
| understand a disassembly of SC4, you need the source to do
| anything substantial.
| humaniania wrote:
| Thank you for your efforts!
| Voline wrote:
| I became addicted to SimCity 2000 in 1996 when I was in economics
| grad school. I loved it, but was so frustrated by the neoliberal
| assumptions built into the game.
|
| The game rewarded strategies that were not backed up by empirical
| study, or even common sense: You could lace a city with rail from
| residential to industrial and commercial zones, and the people
| would still clamor for more and wider roads; There were no mixed
| use zoning (You cannot shop in your neighborhood?); Your people
| would demand more police and if you didn't give it to them,
| they'd riot!
|
| The game rewarded you if you tried to make a California town.
| (But not Davis -- no bike paths!) The city government could not
| build public housing ... (The majority of housing in Helsinki is
| publicly owned).
|
| I wanted to be able to twiddle the parameters based on the way
| real people and cities have been observed to behave. New study
| comes out that says that people seek out 15 minute walkable
| neighborhood? Go to the settings panel adjust the parameters
| accordingly ... The people should riot if you give them too many
| cops.
|
| When Yannis Varoufakis took a job as house economist at Valve
| (before he was appointed as Finance Minister of Greece), I
| thought it might be a good time to pitch the idea to them, but he
| left soon after.
| aakour wrote:
| The city of Helsinki owns about 17% of the residential building
| stock, not the majority.
| (https://www.asuminenhelsingissa.fi/fi/content/kaupungin-
| omis... - in Finnish)
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