I found my old Simcity 2000 strategy guide (Power, Politics, and Planning, revised edition) last week and I got the urge, so I reinstalled it and have since been addicted all over again. 3000 never hooked me like 2000 did, and I'm still learning about the intricacies of the simulation.
The thing that prompted this post is that I finally reached my goal of having a 100% approval rating
This particular city has only 85k people due to a large amount of low-density zoning, but theres zero crime, low pollution levels, and very high education and health levels. Theres something oddly satisfying about having thousands of tiny simulated people love you.
Anyone else play SC2k? I know its coming up on 10 years old, but hey, so is Descent. Except the Windows version of SC2k runs fine on my newer system
I killed lots of time on that game. In fact, if it wasnt for me wanting to play that game, I might not know even half as much about computers as I do today.
I got that game to play on my old 486/33 with 4MB of ram (state of the art back in the day). It wouldnt run out of the box, so I read some of the included documentation and learned all about drivers, IRQ's and the wonders of a barebones bootdisk! Man I was so proud of myself that day I got that floppy working to boot me directly into that game.
At one point, my brother and I played SimCity 2000 till we had huge citys and no land left to build on. It sure was fun.
I don't remember what happened to the game though, lost it some time in the past. However I do still have my Linux version of SimCity 3000 Unlimited. I should probably install it to play sometime.
3000 was a flop, IMO. I was pretty danged good at 2000--got a city that covered an entire map (which I terraformed to be flat and dry). In 3000, the only way I could turn a profit was to have a hazardous waste dump, maximum security prison, and/or gigamall complex built in my city. The income from those things financed my... shall we say, somewhat haphazard building techniques?
I've always really enjoyed the SimCity titles. For me, SimCity 2000 is an absolute classic. Like you, I actualled installed it earlier this year and built a quaint little town with it. It's nice how the Windows version by default runs in a Window. It's like a little Tamagotchi. While you're chatting on IM or browsing the Internet, your city can be growing. The only problem with SC2K is that you easily run out of things to do and new things to see. That's where I think SC3000 excels. I still haven't seen half the buildings in that game. But, consequently, I'm not sure you can run it windowed.
I think SimCity 4 was a leap forward graphically, but a mile backwards functionally. I hate how it auto-creates streets for you. I also hate the entire "SimContinent" idea. SimCity 4 would be leaps and bounds better if it stuck with the single map concept, rather than expanding it to encompass a huge world.
Over at the Maxis SimCity BBS there's been vigorous discussion about what SC5 should be like. The general consensus is:
1. For all its amazing achievements, Maxis/EA screwed up on SC4.
2. The real functionality that we all expected in SC4 came in the form of the Rush Hour expansion pack, which Maxis/EA knew, and that's why they sold it to us for ten bucks.
3. SimCity needs to be simplified to attract its original wide audience, but will be shunned if it strays too far from its simulation roots and becomes too easy for the hardcore simulator-freaks.
My current best theory for fixing SC5 is the following:
1. Fix the region concept. It's a great idea but poorly executed. Each city retains too much of the idea of "city" from the previous games. Basically the only way to play the game is to build each city independently and then try to link them together. The way it should be played is that a mayor should be working on two or three cities in any given area of the map, building them up as a network from the start. Think of the "region" as a State. In the real world, each state is a collection of a bunch of counties, but even deeper than county level, most towns work with one or two neighboring towns. There is no legal definition to these "community" boundaries (they tend to form naturally). So rename the region to a State, divide the State into Counties, and in each county the player can establish Towns. When playing a given Town, the player acts as the County Legislator, and plays not only the selected Town, but any adjacent populated Towns (up to 4 at a time). The Towns draw from the County budget, but taxes are different in each Town. This would greatly simplify things like Schools, because now School Districts are very easily defined -- town borders -- and very easily adjusted -- just plop another school in a town and the simulator will redistrict the town based on population density.
2. When a Town reaches a certain population threshold, promote it to a City. Cities have their own Mayors and their own budgets. All services -- Police, Fire, Education, etc. -- are provided out of City funds, as is local transportation -- Streets, Roads, Avenues, Subways, Monorails and Buses. Highways, Railways, Marinas, Shipyards, etc. are provided for by County funds. Cities collect their own taxes but are charged by the County a percentage of the money they have received in County aid for the current fiscal year (taxes are proactive, just like in SC4).
3. When a City becomes too densely-populated (remember that this shouldn't happen until very late because the player should be working on a few towns in a given area on the map, providing "bedroom communities" and the like) allow the player to annex neighboring Towns, or even Cities of smaller population AND density.
4. Numerous transportation tweaks that I won't go into here because I'm a civil engineering nut.
I have a much more detailed plan, but I might just ditch the whole "Save SC5!" campaign and start work on the city simulator I've wanted to work on for a long time: FOCUS (the Free Open-source City and Urban Simulator). Anyone with me?
Anyone know a way to get sim city 4 deluxe to run in a window? I'd play it a lot more if I could have it open on the side somewhere instead of having to run it full screen only.
Aside from the Dcrazy's point on micro-management, most of what he said you need to do in order to grow cities properly in SimCity 4.
MS has enough money to make PC gaming a second thought, and I spent many a happy hour with the SNES version of Simcity, so for SC6(its probably too late for 5) Maxis should pick a console, and build to that. That'll force the designers to concentrate on only what a player wants to focus on at a given moment, and let the CPU handle the rest.
Using DCrazy's first point, if you want to place a specific school in a city you can when you want to, but most of the time schools should be built automagically on residental zones when needed, same with police, hostiptals, and fire stations.
What happened, starting with SC2K, is that Maxis added information overload to that game, and kept adding to it, and Maxis should really scale back on what the player needs to deal with.
Overload to a point - SC2K could only handle about 255 micro-simulations (individual police, fire stations, hospitals, schools, etc).
I really don't like the "region" concept introduced in SC4. I liked it better back in 2000/3000 when you had neighboring cities controlled by the AI and you could make deals and such with them. I think they should expand on that concept, rather than giving me direct control over them. It hearkens back to Civilization, where you had little control over the other competing nations. There was a competition between you and the AI that made things interesting.
Things I thought SC4 got right. I really liked the detail of the graphics. There was something tremendously cool about the day/night cycle. Every morning, you watch the cars migrate from the residential districts to the industrial ones. As night approaches, all of the street lamps and headlights turn on, and the entire mass exodus happens in the opposite direction. Being able to zoom in and click on a patio umbrella on some random house was pretty neat, and there was just enough variations in the buildings to make it look like cookie-cutter suburbia half the time. I liked the premise of having to start with a rather slummy town and work your way up to a big city. Everything in the other SimCity games looked so pristine and nice - it was actually cool to see slums and low-rent neighborhoods present. I liked how it forced you early on to value certain things, like the city's coffers, over public services like education and security (so true to life).
Things I didn't like. Definitely didn't care for it auto-managing the road system when I zoned areas. It made things look rather disorganized. Didn't like the SimNation concept, as discussed before. Didn't like how sluggish it would sometimes act, or its random fits of instability. It's not a very long list, but each one was a "big" issue to me.
Avder - For SC4, I know you can add a command-line argument to the shortcut to force windowed. It's either -window or -windowed.
Kyouryuu wrote: I liked it better back in 2000/3000 when you had neighboring cities controlled by the AI and you could make deals and such with them. I think they should expand on that concept, rather than giving me direct control over them. It hearkens back to Civilization, where you had little control over the other competing nations. There was a competition between you and the AI that made things interesting.
I hear that! SC4 sucked when it came to understandability
Kyouryuu wrote: I liked it better back in 2000/3000 when you had neighboring cities controlled by the AI and you could make deals and such with them. I think they should expand on that concept, rather than giving me direct control over them. It hearkens back to Civilization, where you had little control over the other competing nations. There was a competition between you and the AI that made things interesting.
I hear that! SC4 sucked when it came to understandability
I dunno, were you trichording the instant you first installed D1? Hell, trichording wasnt even documented in the manual until D3.
Kyouryuu wrote: I liked it better back in 2000/3000 when you had neighboring cities controlled by the AI and you could make deals and such with them. I think they should expand on that concept, rather than giving me direct control over them. It hearkens back to Civilization, where you had little control over the other competing nations. There was a competition between you and the AI that made things interesting.
I hear that! SC4 sucked when it came to understandability
I dunno, were you trichording the instant you first installed D1? Hell, trichording wasnt even documented in the manual until D3.
Reference noted. And no I barely knew how to fly when I first played descent. BUT, SimCity has been around for a lot longer, people grew accustomed to a certain style of gameplay, which SC3k and especially Sc4 seems to have broken, hence my confusion rating.
Not as many as you might think. SC4 buildings are insanely detailed in 3DS Max (Maxis-designed buildings are modeled down to the keyholes on the doors) but are projected onto a rectangle when exported into game format, thereby reducing the poly count to six.
