|
My hope is that economic collapse will be avoidable if you don't want to play it, but something you can optionally choose to play out. Like if you had the aforementioned automotive economy and the rest of your region goes carless, you'd still be able to retool your city with a bit of work. Or if you want to go Flint, just let it collapse, cut your funding across the board, and watch everything crumble.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 14:07 |
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2013 19:41 |
|
|
I'm definitely on board with the idea of being able to toggle between classic nothing-changes Simcity and a dynamic larger economy. Having your cities go Rust Belt could be really fun and add a whole different aspect to the game but I don't think I'd like losing the ability to make cities precisely the way I want them.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 14:19 |
|
|
I hope we can build river / sea walls. That's the only thing that really bugged me. You've had a sprawling city, yet everywhere has mini beaches. Even inner city rivers, I want docks/seawalls and factories and expensive plazas on my rivers 
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 14:34 |
|
|
Rupert Buttermilk posted:This same thing has happened to me with SC2k, 3k and 4, and I can't wait for it to happen with this one. I think it could be best likened to that part on a rollercoaster right before the big drop. For me that feeling usually sets in during install. The possibility that awaits!
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 14:54 |
|
|
Have they said anything about how they're going to get the city off of the forced grid patterns (other than that they're going to do it)? I especially hated things like the beaches you'd plop down which would be a series of ugly off-colored rectangles in a row.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 15:09 |
|
|
Since I'm not able to watch the videos at work I'm not sure if they spoke to this but, one thing I was thinking about was how were they going to change public service coverage areas? In SC4, having it be a circle over a grid-based pattern, and then having the fire/police/school circles being the same sizes, led to me having intersections that were always fire on one corner and cops on the other. Making coverage zones more user-definable (stretch it out more/manually define coverage zones at risk of making coverage worse by spreading your force too thin) or having the zone dynamically shift depending on major roadways (coverage extends further down avenues/highways than roads/streets) would make more sense to me, and give me more freedom to place them. There was another game that I can't recall the name, that had a coverage system similar to the latter.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 15:17 |
|
|
The biggest thing that bothered me about cities XL is that they took roads off the grid, but didn't take the buildings. What made things worse is that all buildings came in just 2 HUGE perfectly square sizes, while roads came in a million sizes differing by just meters. The problem comes when you don't build your roads on perfect grid, you get these huge dead spots. That 31m x 28.5m patch of land is left empty because the building is 30x30m and the best you can do is slap down a park or something. If simcity has a larger diversity of building sizes that will really help. Have some long thin buildings, some tiny square buildings, some huge buildings. Cities will always jam a building anywhere they can! What would be even better is if they had some spline based buildings, or buildings that could scale and bend a little bit to fit into odd spots, this would actually not be too hard to do. I'm kinda disapointed we won't be getting procedural or at least modular buildings. Totally have a huge library of hand-made buildings that get a few choices of randomized skins and details, but also have a big library of podiums, mid-sections, and tops of a variety of styles and sizes that get stacked together. And my dream would be buildings designed for big city/euro style wall to wall blocks that conform to any block size and road curve. This once again wouldn't be hard to do. The game divides the block up into lots, then those lots become extruded up into 3d polygons. A spline based facad model/texture is slapped on the front of the building (with repeatable mid-sections so the height can vary from 1-10 stories or so) and a roof is placed on top. Flat concrete/brick texture is placed on the side walls, and a "back" texture on the back. Bam, instant lot-conforming wall to wall buildings. Sometimes I think I rather have a grid and no open/dead spaces than have curved roads and tons of little awful looking empty triangles and odd spaces the game's square buildings can't fit.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 15:35 |
|
|
I think it was in the Reddit thread with the developers that said there wouldn't be coverage zones, and the availability of firefighters depends on how far away the station is and how long it takes for the truck to get to the fire. That's the most exciting part of this - that it sounds like they've found a way for a lot of simulations to happen on a very local level that add up to effect the city at large, instead of like in SC4 where simulations were calculated on a large level and if you zoomed in you would just see animations that approximated those.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 15:37 |
|
|
Selavi posted:I think it was in the Reddit thread with the developers that said there wouldn't be coverage zones, and the availability of firefighters depends on how far away the station is and how long it takes for the truck to get to the fire. If you watch the four videos from GDC in the OP they explain exactly this. Fires send out agents that travel seeking the closest fire station, which in turn then sends firefighter agents. I wonder if this will lead to some funky urban planning where all important services (Firefighters, Police, Schools, Hospitals, etc) serve as a central hub by mixed residential/commercial.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 18:55 |
|
|
If online regions can be separated from offline then it does sound kind of fun to try and keep your city up and running in the middle of near economic collapse.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 20:20 |
|
|
Eej posted:I wonder if this will lead to some funky urban planning where all important services (Firefighters, Police, Schools, Hospitals, etc) serve as a central hub by mixed residential/commercial. Isn't this exactly how many real-world communities are setup?
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 20:43 |
|
|
Well, you could still put small satellite services on the outskirts of town. Theoretically, the Main St. fire station could send a truck all the way out there, but it wouldn't get there fast enough to prevent damage. If a small cheap station with a smaller number of simultaneous agents is available, it could cover a large area of your low-density suburbs effectively, as well.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 20:51 |
|
|
I wonder how regions will work exactly. Will it be like in cities XL where formal trades must be set up even for workers and jobs, or will it be more like simcity 4 where sims just naturally drive off the map to neighbouring tiles to work. Will cities exist seemlessly on some sort of region map (or better yet, even shown within the main view) or will it be lovely geographically isolated little nodes like in cities XL. Obviously regions will have economies and general shared RCI balance like in simcity 4 (or at least I assume so) but how will regions connect? It sounds like there's some national/global economy level stuff going on. It would actually be really cool if there were 3 levels. City, region, world. Certain cities in a region could be the capital and that player would then control how the region trades with the outside world. I'd so love to play a region with a bunch of friends and then vote on trade deals with the outside world. If implemented correctly it could be awesome. It also would mean poo poo like airports would actually have a purpose, and could serve a region. Could also have proper big inter-city trains and highways that lead off the edge of the region, and traffic that would drive through many tiles to get outside the region.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 20:59 |
|
|
ExtraNoise posted:It appears to be a rendered visualization. I would imagine the buildings there will probably become assets, but there's no way the game will include all that ambient occlusion from light bouncing off nearby buildings onto other buildings. That is rendered, yea, but there really are lots of ways to include the AO and light bouncing nowadays.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:35 |
|
|
simosimo posted:I hope we can build river / sea walls. That's the only thing that really bugged me. You've had a sprawling city, yet everywhere has mini beaches. Even inner city rivers, I want docks/seawalls and factories and expensive plazas on my rivers Yeah those were pretty much the only add-on I would use in Simcity 4. Beaches don't really make sense right next to the downtown commercial district.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:43 |
|
|
Also, if they do an economic collapse model/Flint Rust Belt model, I hope the solution just isn't cut taxes/services, win game. Like, they should have the option that you can build new infrastructure to keep jobs or people around.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:46 |
|
|
ExtraNoise posted:Isn't this exactly how many real-world communities are setup? Maybe, I was wondering if someone who knew more than I did about urban planning would come to correct me. I imagine a lot of cities that are made up of an amalgamation of a bunch of small towns are like this. Baronjutter posted:It would actually be really cool if there were 3 levels. City, region, world. Certain cities in a region could be the capital and that player would then control how the region trades with the outside world. I'd so love to play a region with a bunch of friends and then vote on trade deals with the outside world. If implemented correctly it could be awesome. It also would mean poo poo like airports would actually have a purpose, and could serve a region. Could also have proper big inter-city trains and highways that lead off the edge of the region, and traffic that would drive through many tiles to get outside the region. Can someone point out what advantages there would be to be "that" city with the airport in the region? It seems like everyone else gets to freeload off your huge financial and land investment.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:48 |
|
|
Eej posted:Can someone point out what advantages there would be to be "that" city with the airport in the region? It seems like everyone else gets to freeload off your huge financial and land investment. Which is why there needs to be better regional integration beyond cities just being totally independent little fiefs. There's some great social/political gameplay opportunities here. Like the "owner" of an airport would have its upkeep paid for by the whole region with everyone pitching in based on their income. Regional-level buildings should have the option for regional cost sharing. That or just have the ability to give people monthly/lump sums of money. "Hey I'll build the airport in my lovely poor farming city, but I want 90% of the money up front plus 500 a year to cover upkeep" Multiplayer presents so many fun opportunities, and the utter failure that was cities XL's multiplayer should fairly clearly show how to NOT run such a thing. I know we won't have anything like this as it's TOO COMPLICATED and not "hyper-fun" but it would be awesome to have various levels of amalgamation, ranging from totally independent city tiles within the region, to fully amalgamated with shared budgets and everything. And of course partially amalgamated where you could agree to amalgamate police or fire services which would then become a regional entity with a regional budget. Could have a vote on who runs the police service, and that player would be the only one able to fiddle withthe police budget and build police stations and so on. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at Mar 13, 2012 around 21:55 |
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:53 |
|
|
Eej posted:
Increased commerce since everyone is sending their sims to your city for the airport, better economic opportunities since you have a major hub for trade in the region (all interregional commerce would go through an airport and thus your city), tolls, etc. edit: Man I really hope they're going with some sort of multiplayer play a city in a region mode now so I can make my own little Singapore, very dense residential and commercial city based off a huge seaport. piratepilates fucked around with this message at Mar 13, 2012 around 21:59 |
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:55 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Which is why there needs to be better regional integration beyond cities just being totally independent little fiefs. There's some great social/political gameplay opportunities here. Like the "owner" of an airport would have its upkeep paid for by the whole region with everyone pitching in based on their income. Or, using their new agent system, the airport could send out vacation agents to residences and business trip agents to commerce zones, and collect payments.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 21:56 |
|
|
Yeah that's something that's always a problem in simcity, cities don't usually run schools or airports and specially not hospitals. Yet in simcity the local mayor builds and runs all of them. An airport should be a regional entity, almost like a region-level reward that would be earned by the region and built by an agreed upon city. Same with schools and hospitals and such, those are built by powers much higher than a mayor. Cities will often petition higher governmet powers and say "hey we need more schools!" or "build us a new hospital you goofs!" but in most countries it's never the city paying for or even having much control over this. Which does raise the question, what sort of country does simcity exist in? Some sort of crazy randian utopia where 9% taxes are considered extreme and each city fends for its self with its own health and education systems? Every 2x2km patch of land a totally independent health system?? How would an actual realistic national health system even be modeled in a game like simcity? You'd just get a hospital for every X population given generally as a "reward" to be freely sited? It's more realistic but there goes a whole area of player choice. Investing in health and education is expensive, but pays off by giving you educated workers. Nationalize this and a whole gameplay mechanic is out the window...
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:16 |
|
|
simosimo posted:I hope we can build river / sea walls. That's the only thing that really bugged me. You've had a sprawling city, yet everywhere has mini beaches. Even inner city rivers, I want docks/seawalls and factories and expensive plazas on my rivers I agree completely. That absolutely drove me nuts in SC4, and the only solution was ploppables which were ridiculous and took forever. I personally think any coast should just automatically sea-wall if it's near a high-enough density construction. (Think how sidewalks show up near roads when you zone near them.) Having a pristine beach 20 feet from the base of a 110 floor skyscraper makes no sense!
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:22 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Which is why there needs to be better regional integration beyond cities just being totally independent little fiefs. There's some great social/political gameplay opportunities here. Like the "owner" of an airport would have its upkeep paid for by the whole region with everyone pitching in based on their income. But the airport would require a massive road network that ties into the whole region. For example if I have the airport in my city then I would expect my immediate neighbors to pay through the nose for me to link them up with a highway to get traffic through their city. And I would expect them to charge money to link their neighbors up and so on. Every region linked to your airport through an efficient network would also increase the value of your airport. I would not be above extorting my whole region for cash by threatening to demolish their link and cutting all traffic through their city.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:23 |
|
|
Demiurge4 posted:But the airport would require a massive road network that ties into the whole region. For example if I have the airport in my city then I would expect my immediate neighbors to pay through the nose for me to link them up with a highway to get traffic through their city. And I would expect them to charge money to link their neighbors up and so on. Every region linked to your airport through an efficient network would also increase the value of your airport. I would not be above extorting my whole region for cash by threatening to demolish their link and cutting all traffic through their city. Yeah, at least we can hope the airport is actually a huge source/destination of traffic as it gets bigger. I'd also love to be able to build proper main railway stations that are also huge traffic destinations, and of course send out little trains to the edge of the region. Region connections at the edge of a region map HAVE to be a thing... they have to. Please maxis  I want to see trucks shipping their products off to simnation, I want freight trains and container ships going through a few maps to leave the region.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:30 |
|
|
Just having a decent building editor with the mechanics of sim city 2000 would be enough for me.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:46 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:
Two sets of rail, heavy to connect to other cities, light rail for your subway/mass transit system?
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:50 |
|
|
I want really robust freight infrastructure. Like, I want to be able to recreate Howland Hook, Port Elizabeth and Port Newark and focus on that and then leverage this to my advantage in region play with other players. I don't care if I basically recreate central Jersey and have very little middle or high income sims, I just want a drat monster container ports where I can see the little TEUs being put on boats that actually then path out and leave the city by way of the ocean. EDIT: AND INTERMODAL FACILITIES. I want train hookups and I want to watch those little fuckin' TEUs move from rail to mover to gantry train to the ship deck. I've got such a nerd boner for this game but I just have this undeniable undercurrent feeling of doom. I'm sorry, I'll lay off any negativity...but its just so hard because SC4 was such a love of mine. Still is. And the more I play Cities XL the angrier I get for some reason...probably due to the lack of overland rail. I'm insane, I'm sorry. I'm listening to MIster Mister for some reason too.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 22:56 |
|
|
Mooseontheloose posted:Two sets of rail, heavy to connect to other cities, light rail for your subway/mass transit system? Take that casual poo poo and gently caress off, only 2 types of rail? If I can't choose between 3rd rail power, side rail, or overhead lines, on at least 3 different gauge options plus a detailed and realistic signaling system that makes transport tycoon look simple I'm not buying the game. But yeah I'd seriously love it if they made railways better. I also hope they don't treat subway/elevated/ground light transit as separate things, but rather just a matter of the same track at different elevations so we can build metro systems that are a fluid mix of underground, grade, and elevated track. If they looked to cities in motion I think they'd have a solid sytem, obviously with less detail, but something similar in how you build track/stops, quick set up a route, and maybe pick what sort of vehicle to use. If we can do the last thing we could use the same track for many "types" of rail. Want a tram? Just build a rail on grade and plop down some small stations and set the route to use trams. Want a subway? Build that same track underground, build some large underground stations, and set the route to use a metro train. They could give us just a few options like: tram, light rail train, small metro train, large metro train. And yes yes yes I want freight trains serving my industry and ports, metro trains zipping around my city and going to neighbouring cities, and regional trains using heavy rail tracks to move sims off the region map. I'm curious how transit will work, we might be getting some "cities in motion lite" level of detail. No more just blanketing an area in bus stops and having it work. In previous simcities a sim would simply enter a bus stop, then invisibly move to the closest bus stop to their destination as if they had their own private bus taking the most direct route. With agents we'll most likely actually have buses and trains moving on actual tracks and routes picking agents up and dropping them off like in cities in motion. Most likely we'll slap down some bus stations then create a route by clicking on the stations in a row. Overall funding would determine the frequency of buses, and if they're extra kind we might be able to tweek each line and pick what sort of vehicles like in cities XL. As much as cities XL's transit system was a bit awful, I did like that you had to actually plan out the bus lines and even got to pick a general class of vehicle. Transit is one of the most important things in a big city so I really hope they do it right and give us the tools to make effective transit systems that work how we'd expect. I don't want to gently caress around with forcing people to take various modes through awful gamey road building. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at Mar 13, 2012 around 23:10 |
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:06 |
|
|
I emailed Maxis about getting some screengrabs from the GDC videos that were revealed earlier so we could get a better look at the early version of the game and some of the assets. I didn't get anything showable, but I did get a good response:Charlie Sinhaseni posted:... So at least there's something on the horizon to look forward to. 
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:22 |
|
|
simosimo posted:I hope we can build river / sea walls. That's the only thing that really bugged me. You've had a sprawling city, yet everywhere has mini beaches. Even inner city rivers, I want docks/seawalls and factories and expensive plazas on my rivers I'm pretty sure there's downloadables on simtropolis to fix such complaints. They have everything to fix up your city, for SimCity 4 at least.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:31 |
|
|
Jebediah Kerman posted:I'm pretty sure there's downloadables on simtropolis to fix such complaints. They have everything to fix up your city, for SimCity 4 at least. Yeah but the seawalls are really horrible, you have to plop individually. It's a lot of boring work to get stuff to look good. Auto seawalls, or some seawall drawing thing would be great.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:40 |
|
|
Is it just me or is Simtropolis the worst site? I've been trying to register for 3 days and it's so slow it just times out the second I hit submit.
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:54 |
|
|
It's worse when what you're downloading is going at <10kb/s
|
| # ? Mar 13, 2012 23:57 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:And my dream would be buildings designed for big city/euro style wall to wall blocks that conform to any block size and road curve. This once again wouldn't be hard to do. The game divides the block up into lots, then those lots become extruded up into 3d polygons. A spline based facad model/texture is slapped on the front of the building (with repeatable mid-sections so the height can vary from 1-10 stories or so) and a roof is placed on top. Flat concrete/brick texture is placed on the side walls, and a "back" texture on the back. Bam, instant lot-conforming wall to wall buildings. The OP mentions wall to wall buildings as a possible feature, and I'd personally love it too. SC4 seems to be based on the assumption that American cities are the default building style, and so most have parking lots, even for the biggest of buildings. In reality the spread out American city is in the minority, and almost all major cities are super dense wall to wall stuff. Disappointing Pie posted:Is it just me or is Simtropolis the worst site? I've been trying to register for 3 days and it's so slow it just times out the second I hit submit. It's always like that.
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:00 |
|
|
I wish my name was Ocean Quigley.
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:02 |
|
|
Disappointing Pie posted:Is it just me or is Simtropolis the worst site? I've been trying to register for 3 days and it's so slow it just times out the second I hit submit. The site owner doesn't have enough money for a proper server to handle the site's popularity and downloads. Also the community is awful and mostly the worst children and man-children (men-children??).
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:05 |
|
|
piratepilates posted:Increased commerce since everyone is sending their sims to your city for the airport, better economic opportunities since you have a major hub for trade in the region (all interregional commerce would go through an airport and thus your city), tolls, etc. Well what I was thinking of is basically you're Newark and your airport is basically just a stop over to tourism, business, etc. in NYC. I don't see how you could counter that unless there literally was a button that said "offer airport access to neigboring city for: xxx Simoleons". That would make sense from a game perspective (pay a fee or build your own drat airport) but it's not like you can charge another city in real life for using your airport, as if you could track from which city a person is coming from. TyroneGoldstein posted:I want really robust freight infrastructure. Like, I want to be able to recreate Howland Hook, Port Elizabeth and Port Newark and focus on that and then leverage this to my advantage in region play with other players. I don't care if I basically recreate central Jersey and have very little middle or high income sims, I just want a drat monster container ports where I can see the little TEUs being put on boats that actually then path out and leave the city by way of the ocean Or I guess you could be happy being this guy.
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:07 |
|
|
Baronjutter posted:The site owner doesn't have enough money for a proper server to handle the site's popularity and downloads. Also the community is awful and mostly the worst children and man-children (men-children??). Well at least Simtropolis can say it didn't look into taking legal action against a banned user who registered a new account to troll them or something like SC4 Devotion did.
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:08 |
|
|
A lot of the stuff you guys want is in SC4 mods, if you're interested. NAM lets you have a fully integrated subway/elevated/surface/street tram rail system, for example. The people in the SC4 modding community are the worst kinds of sperglords but they make amazing stuff. The amount and quality of custom content is unbelievable.
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:13 |
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2013 19:41 |
|
|
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/ar...n-simcity/1464/ Interesting article not sure if it's been posted
|
| # ? Mar 14, 2012 00:20 |
|
