Simcity(2013) is coming. Anyone looking forward into playing this one?
Although tempting, I've decided to wait little more (A year or so) to see how game will evolve.
Simcity4 was absolutely great. It enabled players to play and create multiple cities in a whole region. Take a city as organ of a living thing, the region was the whole body.
Since the release of Simcity4 Rush Hour expansion release, I'm strongly convinced that transportation network structure building plays such a heavy roll in providing fun in playing area development game. Now you can see and provided more direct information input on how blood flows among cities.
From Rush Hour, if you clicked on road/track, you could see the all traffic using that spot and its volume. It was such a huge addition into game play, huge mod project NAM have emerged. The MOD still operates after more than 6 year or so. Rush Hour completed the base of SC4 and Mods have made game legendary.
Although, providing public service (Police, Education etc) becomes trivial chore. You need to build them. Its matter of sooner or later.
Throughout the series, 1~4, when I think back, it was never a very interesting element.
On top of that, due to limit of computational roof of consumer PC, inter city traffic had big loophole.
Now I've moved to Simutrans almost completely since it allows development of whole region at real time.
Player have no direct power on how cities should grow but that is not really important from my taste.
Most importantly, Simutrans allows to oversee and operate how people move around cities. On top of that, Simutrans covers industries as well.
On the other hand, seems like maxis is putting a lot of emphasis on 'specialization' of cities. Allowing user to give specific characteristic for cities.
If Simutrans could afford to give its cities different functioning characteristics, it would be even better. For now it will stay as an idea...
Quote from: colonyan on November 24, 2012, 04:28:46 PM
Simcity(2013) is coming. Anyone looking forward into playing this one?
I have Simcity 2000 dusting down somewhere. The best I ever managed was to just barely make enough money to replace the power plant every 50 years. That got boring fast. Then I found Transport Tycoon, which was much more fun, until the lack of variation bored me (and the music doesn't sound as good on Microsoft's software synth). I found Tropico much more fun than Simcity.
^ Tropico. Yes. I remember and played. It was brilliant game. Wow. Now speak of that, I miss its music. XD
V I meant of course the first game. It had more than a dozen tracks. And all that sunshine.
I think Tropico 4 only has two tracks, or maybe the whole thing is a single medley. I'm getting a little sick of them/it after playing through the campaign (except the last map).
I've still got SimCity 3000 in a fairly dust-free CD case. Lovely little game that! I could watch the news ticker for hours...
As to individuality in cities... Nice idea. We've got that to some extent with tourist attractions - e.g. some cities do churches, others do football stadia. I like the OTTD thing that city roads vary - some have palm trees, some have street lights...
SimCity 4 was a fabulous game and it still garners a huge community of people making graphics/mods/etc. I'm watching SimCity 5 with interest but I somehow believe that it will fall short of the magic of 4. The maps will be smaller, for starters. Some of the added detail with simulated vehicle traffic and economic aspects will be interesting to see how they work, they did a lot of work on a detailed simulation engine. If SimCity 5 is open to heavy modification, it will attract much of the SimCity 4 crowd probably. But if they restrict/limit modification, I can see SimCity 4 still being popular among people who really enjoy building a detailed city.
The things that I didn't enjoy that much about SimCity 4 were the micromanagement of utilities (the whole water supply system seemed superfluous) and services (police, fire, etc) and the lack of detailed transportation dynamics. Subways could be built but other than a tube underground they had no other features. Above ground railways could have had so much more life added to them.
This is where Simutrans really flies. The transportation modelling is fabulous and the large map sizes allow for an entire region to be on one map.
Specialization of cities is an interesting concept... though in a way that sort of occurs through the placement of factories in urban areas. If that dynamic could be taken to another level... though I'm not sure how that would occur.
I like the larger maps of Simutrans. It honestly wouldn't take too much for me to get most of what I like about SimCity into Simutrans: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=10699.0 <- That's most of it, at least.
I'm hoping that someone will take up the cause of making a more SimCity-like mode, where you control the growth of Simutrans, as far as building the roads and areas for buildings (i.e. zoning), and Simutrans grows buildings only.
Il also suggested building emissions : http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=10318.msg98179#msg98179 (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=10318.msg98179#msg98179)
I'm pretty sure it could be used to create a very complex simcity-like.
Well, I think I'd like a mix of Simutrans & Capitalism, instead. Then, industries would make a full sense. Though it could only work for towns in smaller numbers.