There's no micro-management, no direct input, and no delay. In a single giant city, connecting a road between 2 developments would immediately allow a "flow" of resources (water, electricity, workers, coal, fire/police protection, garbage collection, etc.) between the parts. Again, that's fine for me because the small plots really opened up some interesting gameplay (in theory anyway). Along with the number fudging, (the game only simulates ~40k citizens), I don't believe GlassBox would easily be able to handle significantly larger city plots. Recent patches have significantly improved this but I still see tons of starved stations while others are over-serviced. Stations/stops get filled with hundreds of sims, suddenly 5-6 vehicles arrive (way more than required) and then they bounce between a few mostly empty stops while other stops not 5 buildings down are completely packed. Public transit is still somewhat broken too. Built a small industrial area slightly closer to your housing area? Suddenly your traffic changes dramatically, unpredictably and unrealistically. And because tons of sims clamoured, there are huge, unexpected traffic jams.įorgetting their previous job is an implementation shortcut (saves tons of memory) but leads to sims repeating the previous day's mistakes, not being able to optimize their route based on final source/destination, and wildly inconsistent traffic patterns. Even after all the vast improvements in patches, sims still seem to clamour for the same jobs leading to thousands of sims going to a single work place, realizing it's full, and then not having enough time to go to the next work place.
The intra-city traffic simulation was implemented with some very poor decisions. But for whatever reason (technical issues with network or GlassBox? Dogmatic adherence to this new co-operation gameplay?), the game has not seen any large plots. The larger plots would give you the old-style SimCity feel and the smaller plots would provide this new gameplay "shift". To satisfy everyone, it may have been nice to have some regions with dramatically larger plots and some regions with only small plots. And that's a paradigm-shift, making you think about the game in different (possibly uncomfortable) ways.
Based on the interviews and the way resources are shared, this seems to be what the designers were thinking. You should think of your "old-mega-city" as the entire "region" of which each plot is a part of the whole.
The game forces you to focus your cities on only 1-2 things, each. Smaller plots force increased co-operation and specialization since you can't have a single city be all-encompassing anymore. Why Small Plots Are Okay (in theory)įor that latter part, I can see gameplay/design reasons reasons to have smaller city plots. But I still had a blast for dozens of hours building.
Yes the game launched without highways and terrain deformation (added a few months later) and the cities plots are small. This is by far the most enjoyable set of creation tools across any city building game on the market. Fast (in performance and ease-of-use), snappy tools, super clean parseable UI, etc. The Build Toolsįor the most part, the building part is amazing. I would've been happy if "SimCity 2013" was a faster, modern-interface version of SC4+ RushHour but was super excited about the new ideas and gameplay simplifications teased at the beginning of the year. I've played each iteration for hundreds of hours (except Societies), building cities, min/maxing the simulation, optimizing and routing traffic, having a themed city, etc. Let me start by saying the SimCity franchise has been one my favourite over the past 20 years. SimCity: Amazing city builder, horrendous city simulatorĪfter listening to the end of year bombcasts, I wanted to jot down some of my own thoughts about SimCity 2013.
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