Sim City - A Smattering of Impressions

[DeathTouchWilly]

I know there's a really long thread about Sim City already ongoing but here's my opinion on the game so it's easier to keep track of the flames  :P


I have about 40 hours of play time since release and I feel like I'm just emerging from the novice stage into really getting into the strategy layer. At first just learning the basic mechanics was fun and engaging and I found that most of the systems they've devised are intuitive with a few notable exceptions. Now that I have a handle on "how stuff works" I can see that the game has considerable strategic depth that offers significant replay value. I love diving in the aesthetics of my cities to make them look cool but if i were just to go for the pure "make the most efficient city possible and damn how it looks" I would say just that element will offer more than $60 worth of gameplay. Anyone who has played previous iterations of Sim City can rest easy I believe as the same spark captured with the older games I believe is still alive here, albeit differently.

Today the SVP of Marketing at maxis essentially said "Mission accomplished - the servers are stable as a table". I can't speak to how accurate that is but I will say that I sunk A LOT of time into the game over the weekend and at no point did I encounter connectivity issues. I can say that the game is stable and the always-online component does not hamper gameplay, anecdotally speaking of course. My objections are more of the philosophical nature but I'm not going to beat that dead horse here.

So lets keep things succinct since we're all busy here and frankly I'd rather hop back into SimCity:

The good:

• The game is different from the previous Sim Cities but it's the same in all the right ways. I still feel like I'm playing Sim City except a lot of the annoyances that dragged the experience down are removed, automated, or reworked. As I've said elsewhere this is not a carbon copy of Sim City 4 but it is still fun without losing the appeal that accompanies the Sim City brand.
• Maybe not a big plus to some people - but the game is gorgeous and when your city begins to become an impressive vertical spectacle zooming in to the street view and taking a stroll is pretty fantastic.
• New cooperation elements have a lot of potential especially things like Great Works which give huge regional bonuses to surrounding cities but take a massive amount of resources to create. It would be a tall order to build one of these Great Works by yourself hence reinforcing the cooperation. Basically a Great Work is a special spot on the regional map where players can begin construction on something ambitious like a Space Program, an International Airport, a massive Solar Power farm, etc. As you would expect, a large amount of money and resources are required to complete these projects but when they are built they furnish the region with massive bonuses.
• Speaking of resources there's a significant new gameplay element in natural resources and mining/manufacturing. Players can mine things like Ore, Coal, and Oil and convert these commodities in to more valuable refined resources (Alloy, Steel, Fuel) to sell at a higher profit. Additionally they can use these resources to make consumer products like CPUs, Computers, etc. which go at an even higher profit margin. Setting up trade depots via rail and sea are equally as important here so the need for a robust, well funded infrastructure is crucial.

The bad:

• Despite being hyped as a major new feature, the inter-city cooperation is still a mess. It's not documented well so many major questions on mechanics remain (and yes, I've been lurking in all the Sim City forums and the boards are alight with debates on how this stuff works). Inexplicably some resource/money gifts to other cities go missing and don't appear for a long time. Some gifts appear instantly... is this server lag or a gameplay element? Beats me. Additionally, sharing resources like Police and Fire aren't nearly as effective as I think they led people to believe. In order for you to have adequate police coverage from a nearby town that town will need to have a HUGE surplus of police manpower which rarely happens. This may be by design but it is rare that a player will have enough resources to spare in their own city such that a neighbor can truly "free ride" on their services. Utilities like water and power work a lot simpler and are much easier to share so I'd say that mechanic is a success.
• The game is a bit buggy. Not in the sense that it crashes but there are a lot of anomolies that were both reported in forums and witnessed by me that I can confirm. Once example: Something strange happened with the way I built a road so freight trucks were stuck in an infinite loop driving in a circle outside a trade dept never delivering their wares. I had to destroy the depot to fix this issue and then rebuild it. I'm sure these will get ironed out in due time so I'm not overly concerned.
• If you start a city on a server (Like North America - East 2) and then that server proves to be too busy the next time you log in you have many other cities to choose from but your city is saved to that particular server. Which means you'll have to choose another server and if only servers you've never played are available that means you're starting from scratch again. Basically your city saves to that server and that server only. This is also a pain because there are many servers and I have trouble remembering what I saved where.

There's a bunch more that could be said but I'd rather wait until I dive deeper into the game.

[Yskonyn]

Nice writeup! Thanks!

I have been having lost of fun these last 48hrs too. Server issues have hampered my start significantly, but as of today there were no waiting times nor server connectivity issues for me anymore.

About sharing fire and police; one of the creative producers of the game said it doesnt really affect the sharing city in a negative way if they volunteer all their units to help other cities.
I took that as that you wont ever run out of your own forces despite sharing them. Do you think otherwise?

[LongBlade]

Willy is awesome. He could have been a famous game writer. Instead he's some anonymous techie working for The Man.

[Keunert]

Steve Jobs?

[Longdan]

Willy is awesome. He could have been a famous game writer. Instead he's some anonymous techie working for The Man.

Which pays the bills better?

[Bison]

I've noticed that the city with the police/ambulance will only send the vehicle when an emergency happens.  So if a building is on fire, a shared fire truck will eventually turn up on the scene.  Police do not perform the hourly routes, but will eventually (usually after the fact like real life) show up at the scene.

I had a fun session playing with my brother.  The game is fun, but here are a few issues they need to fix.

1.  Larger city zone maps.  The size now is completely unimpressive.  Sure your town looks cool with the skyscraper graphics, but underwhelming in the ability to do something outside of maxing your zones.
2.  8 maps.  No variety.  No randomization.  No customization.  All with fixed roads leading into the zone.
3.  Basic functions are broken.  Inter-city trade, traffic ai pathing, jobs to sim ratio.

I've got more but I'm hungry and dinner is calling.

[Jarhead0331]

Hmmmm...this one was not really even on my radar.  I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I need to buy it.

[jomni]

My big city is now having a major water crisis.  I never had this happen in any Sim City game before.  This is  tense and exciting. I'm afraid to load my city until I stabilize a new town that can export water.  I'm still unsure how to actually go about selling the excess water from that town.

[DeathTouchWilly]

My big city is now having a major water crisis.  I never had this happen in any Sim City game before.  This is  tense and exciting. I'm afraid to load my city until I stabilize a new town that can export water.  I'm still unsure how to actually go about selling the excess water from that town.

In the city that's currently in crisis go to your water producing builds and you will see at the bottom right corner there's your water meter. There should be some icons/text noting that there's excess water available from other cities. Click that and then a pop up at the bottom of the screen will let you click "Buy" to purchase water.

With water/sewage/trash/power you purchase them in "bundles" periodically. Essentially every few days of game time a message scrolls by saying you bought one of these utilities. If you were to load up the exporting city and delete all your power plants (extreme but clear cut example) and then loaded your importing city - the next time the importing city went to evaluate whether the neighbor had power to spare it would balk and say that it failed to import power because the exporter had none extra to spare. Then the shortages start and the real fun begins....

Having a power shortage a city that exports has ripple affects. Not only is the base city short on power because of careless expansion but the cities dependent on them will also not get their share of the juice and now  you have multiple crisises at once.




To speak to your points Bison I'm right there with you. I also allegedly learned that those awesome great works you can build in very large regions don't actually apply to every city in the region, only the pack of 3 cities that are eligible to work on them. The 9 city regions have 3 groups of 3 cities united by a highway and are somewhat insulated from the other two groups. That immediately pissed me off because if you don't have a road connection in Sim City you can't share power, trash, sewage, and water.

I think the most damning criticism for me, which i neglected to mention above, is the small map size. On some levels I think this was to make the game more difficult. Confined spaces mean you have to grow your city vertically which is considerably harder to accomplish and then responsibly manage then just having a big sprawling North Jersey mess of a city. That said, I'd still like to aspire to build a large skyscraper city complete with casinos and all the bells and whistles. The current city size doesn't give you the same sense of accomplishment when you fill it with high rises because it's normally not that big of a space (although I've still yet to truly pack a city with skyscrapers even after all this time).

[jomni]

Wait,  my water producing city is not within the 3 city group of the one with the crisis.  That means I'm screwed right?  And within he water crisis area, no city has an abundance of water.

[Bison]

I'm pretty sure Willie is correct.  The sub-regions are unable to share the common commodities like water, power, waste disposal because they don't share a road connection.  Those commodities travel via interconnecting roads.  I "think" the specialty commodities might be in the same category unless the train connects do something other than people moving in between sub-regions.  Frankly I'm not sure why the hell they designed the game this way.  They might as well put the cap at 4 cities map and called it a day.  Otherwise I think you are mostly pulling tourism from the other sub-regions.  I hope I'm incorrect in my assessment.  Right now we are moving onto the next sub-region on our map.  So in the next few days I should have an understanding of how inter-region trading works.

The problem with the map size (and I played Cities XL Platnium this morning to checkout the map size difference) is exactly Willie says.  You have to build up.  Annoying because sometimes big spawling cities are fun because you are not forced into maximizing every block.  You cannot waste a section of the map to a windy rural road, or a chaotic urban sprawl, and still run a successful and fun city. The curved roads are merely to squeek out the one or two extra RCI plots. 

[Bison]

Also if you play several cities solo on a map, only one city is ever active at a time.  At least, that's what my brother and I discovered tonight.  So while you play five or six city hours on building one city, the other cities time stands still.  So I think this accounts for the delay that some people report in gifting money.  Also if I'm running turtle, the other people can run cheetah speed and it has no effect on your city at all.  Weird but there you have it.

[DeathTouchWilly]

Also if you play several cities solo on a map, only one city is ever active at a time.  At least, that's what my brother and I discovered tonight.  So while you play five or six city hours on building one city, the other cities time stands still.  So I think this accounts for the delay that some people report in gifting money.  Also if I'm running turtle, the other people can run cheetah speed and it has no effect on your city at all.  Weird but there you have it.

Holy crap I think that just gave me a revelation. I haven't confirmed this myself but I have heard that when you gift money to other cities an armored car physically leaves your city hall and drives to the recipient's city hall. Generally when I gift I go to the rich city, make the donation, and immediately load the poor city. BUT--- if what Bison says is correct the armored car will sit on the rich city's street, frozen in time, and the money will never arrive. I think I've seen this exact thing happen. I will gift money and load the poor city. Nothing arrives after 20 or so minutes. I got back into the rich city to tweak a few things and send another gift to see if that helps and generally it does but what must actually be happening is while I'm tweaking the armored car is exiting the rich city... hence BOTH gifts going through when I load my poor city because I finally gave the armored car(s) time to leave off the map... light bulb moment!

Will have to experiment later to confirm.




Separately there's some interesting data mining going on already. This thread over at Simtropolis is very illuminating (the bottom bit especially).

http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/54730-simcity-info-and-data-analysis/

Kids do not count toward your population
Shoppers who go to parks return happiness back to the home, kids who go to parks do NOTHING AT ALL
Freight delivered to stores does not affect the store supplies at all, it only returns happiness to the source industry
Commerce stores vary in worker count (see above).
SOME commerce stores stay open at night (Gas, Hotdog stand) and others don't!  There are a lot of shoppers wandering around at night, so it may be beneficial to blow up buildings until you get one open all night
ANY time you add upgrades to buildings (extra fire truck, police station, school buildings, dump trucks, extra wind turbines etc...), no workers are added, the worker count stays the same for the building
Medium/high income residents start off as educated, but can become uneducated if you have no schools
# of workers in a building seems to have no effect on that building (i.e power output from power plants etc...)
When Students return home they add education to the home, they do not increase happiness

[Bison]

So why build playgrounds?

I've seen the open/ closed stores.   Just click on them and it reports open/closed.

Just a note:  the delay is my theory.  I maybe completely wrong.   However it is the only thing I can think of causing long delays.    Unless there is a bad ai pathing between cities when sending a gift.

The resources seem to be bugged too.   I had an oil rig that had 100 months worth of supply.   A couple of city hours later I was down to 9 months. 

[Longdan]

^^Was that oil rig being built or did it just burn up the supplies?