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For resources, if you choose to go that way, I would love to see sorta random deposits of natural resources. It would be great to see that your map just happens to have a giant underground oil reserve or an aquifer, etc. I think you should also be able to influence what you find a little by the terrain type, such as make a mountainous map more likely to contain coal and iron deposits. As for water, I think it would be great if you could dig a bowl shaped area above sea level and have it fill with rain water and during one season and drain another season (you are implementing seasons right?). The best part about underground coal or iron is it could replace the standard industrial zone by putting all your If you did choose to go this route, please don't make the resources exhaustible, I would hate to see maps where the player has strip mined all of the map to support their industrial needs. Instead make the resources inexhaustible, but more expensive effective the more you mine. That way instead of getting pop-ups from your industry saying "there is no iron left!" they would just keep nagging you about the price of iron until you build another mine, but you could just ignore them with minimal consequences.
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May 3, 2014 16:12
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I think it would be best, that they just don't run out. But the rate at which you gain ressources should be limited. And raising it is connected to upkeep costs and diminishing returns.
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May 3, 2014 16:15
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Shibawanko posted:Personally I wouldn't care for the idea of time periods and stuff, it would make it a bit too much like Age of Empires or something and less like a landscaper. I'd generally avoid the Simcity Societies/Impressions route where puzzle and strategy game mechanics are wedged into a city builder, since it tends to take away from the core. The gameplay should probably just focus on infrastructure and aesthetics. Edushi is the coolest thing ever, thanks for mentioning it, or I'd never have known it existed.
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May 3, 2014 18:20
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:I think it would be best, that they just don't run out. But the rate at which you gain ressources should be limited. And raising it is connected to upkeep costs and diminishing returns. This is a good post, and I agree with it as well as Crotch Fruit's post. I think it would also tie well into the idea of contracts with private businesses within your town. The mayor isn't the one managing the coal extraction, she's just managing the land it exists beneath because it effectively belongs to her as god of that region. SC13 was pretty stupid to try to make the player play resource tycoon at the same time they're playing SimCity. I absolutely want to see regions have randomized resources that have all sorts of impacts on my city development. What I don't want to do is have to micromanage taking advantage of it. zxqv8 fucked around with this message at 19:32 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 19:27
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I think if we're going to bother having resources to balance it would be under player control, otherwise just get rid of them all and assume the private sphere was handling it all and had it all balanced. Part of the fun of these games is that you are the god-emperor of your city running a semi-command economy. But then again it all depends on how things are presented. Is there much difference between placing a "coal mine" over a coal deposit or placing a "mining zone" on top of a coal deposit and having a building pop up?\ I do like the way cities XL tried to handle businesses. You made taxes off them depending on their PROFITS. A high-tech industry needs to buy certain resources and sell certain resources to make a profit. If the demand for their products is too low or the cost of their imputs too high they can go out of business, or just not do well and thus not pay as high taxes. Of course for all this to work it almost assumes that your city is the only place in the world and has a self-contained economy. With a modern globalized economy a coal mine in canada effects the price of coal in germany. An electronics plant in Thailand effects the price of electronics in Brazil, it's all one big market. But in game terms is that interesting? You'd check a big graph of resource prices, see coal is in demand so you'd develop your coal patch. Great ok the coal mines are doing well but they complain transport prices are too high. You build them a direct rail link to export their coal and they now pay more taxes because they are making more profit. That's fun! Oh no but the price of coal went down because of the global market which might as well be randomzied since there's no way to predict. The coal mine had to lay off half its workers and it's paying way less taxes. Oh now it's doing well again. gently caress it I have no control over this it's basically random and annoying. That's not so fun. This is how I'd do it if I was making a city builder that had resources: Map Generation When starting a new city there's a bunch of options for not just the terrain but also the resources and the sort of region you will be building in. You can pick terrain types, rivers, coast, rockyness, soil conditions, how flat/mountainous it is, all the good stuff you'd expect from a map generation system with tons of options. But you'd also select options for the REGION you are in. Think of Simcity 2000's neighbour view, but expanded. You could pick the overall population density in the area. Are you a new city being built in a region full of already developed large cities, or are your neighbours just tiny villages like you? The terrain you pick for your city would also influence what "off map plots" are available for development. Terrain would of course also heavily influence resources. A flat wet area with a lot of soil will be good for farming but probably not have a lot or any minerals to exploit for example. Once all your options are set you'd hit "accept" and the region would be generated. Starting a new city So you picked your terrain and the economic conditions of your region. Let's say you picked a rocky coastal area in a medium developed region. You've got a gorgeous rugged coast thanks to anselm's wonderful map system that a single 21 year old dude made that looks 100x better than the hand-made maps in simcity 2013. You survey your terrain an see what's there. Not a lot of flat land, almost nothing suitable for farming. In one corner of the map is a huge ore rich area, there's an oil deposit just off-shore, and there's coal scattered all over the map. There's also dense forests everywhere, potential logging industry but nothing sustainable but hey lets make some money while we clear the land. Next you survey the region. You've got a little heavily abstracted map of the area, no terrain or fancy graphics, just your city in the middle and 4 neighbours. The game has generated 4 randomized neighbours based on the settings you selected. Each town has a type of class that helps you know what type of city it is as well as what resources it will be putting into the regional economy. As those cities grow their supply of their resources will go up, but so will the demands for what they lack. You don't trade directly with individual cities, it's all pooled region-wide. If the region is short on a resource the price goes up, if it's over-supplying the price goes down. Anything the region doesn't produce enough of doesn't mean people will starve, it just means the resource is imported from abroad at a higher price. You also check out your "off map nodes". Each edge of your map has 2 possible nodes and it's based off the terrain on that edge of the map. You've got 4 mountain nodes along 2 of your edges due to the mountain there, each with a random assortment of minerals and bonuses. Because the south edge of your map, the only small area of farmland you have, is technically grassland, you have 2 "field" nodes south of you. Good potential development locations for farming villages since you'll never produce much food locally. Finally off your coast are two sea nodes. One of the sea nodes fishing resource you can develop and it allows you to build a fishing port in your city which then sends fishing boats out to harvest. The other sea zone has a ton of gas in it, allowing you to develop off-shore gas industry. The town currently has no demands and you can't really build anything because there's no connection to the outside world. So, you build a road connection to the edge of the map in the direction of the biggest city in the region, you're now hooked into the regional resource pool and have some demand based on the neighbour you connected with plus some bonus demand for simply starting a new city. You start building your city!! First Years You've been building for a few years now. You have a cute little mountain town set up near the farmland in the south. You've developed all the farmland and agriculture is selling well in the region so the farms are paying decent taxes. You've built an expensive winding mountain road to some coal and built/zoned a coal mine. It's far enough away from the town that no one minds it and coal is priced well enough that the mine is doing well and adding a lot of taxes and employment for your city. Ore is not priced well because another city in the region is producing a lot of it so you don't bother developing your ore mines, yet anyways. You save up and build a hydro dam, now you have tons of cheap clean electricity! It's wayyyy more than your town needs but you automatically sell the excess power within the region, but its driven the price of electricity down. You've made an impact in the regional economy! You then use that cheap electricity to attract industry to your city and zone a big area of industrial land. The industry grows rapidly and so does the demand for housing and services. The heavy industry though demands a few different resource types though, they want chemicals and they want steel, the demand drives the price up in the region. You decide to use the cheap regional supply of iron along with the available coal and cheap electricity and build a steel mill. This is a huge investment and a risk, but once again it adds demand for a ton of employment and starts to drive up the price of ore. poo poo, your steel mill isn't doing so well, it says transport prices are too high. Your road connection is clogged with trucks. Trucks from your coal mine, ore trucks feeding the steel mill, steel trucks shipping the steel out, and coal trucks from your mine to the smelter. Your industry area is doing poorly too for the same reason, and your citizens are pissed that they can't get around because the whole city is just clogged with bumper to bumper freight. Time for a railway. The terrain between your town and the coal mine is way too expensive to build a railway, but the coastal road to the region could work. You build tracks directly connecting your steel mill with the edge of the map, you also build a freight station near your industrial area, allowing the freight trucks to unload there and ship off the map via trains. The freight station is a big yard and comes in a few different sizes with different capacities. Your city is now doing better! Your coal mine still has to rely on trucks but your steel mill can import and export directly via rail, and your industries are also enjoying the railway link. In the future you have many options. Do you continue to focus on heavy industry and mining, knowing it will destroy the natural environment and create a ton of pollution but provide stable income and jobs, or do you start to develop that pretty coastal area and attract some offices and white-collar jobs, maybe even tourism? Do you keep importing ore from the region or do you develop that far away ore deposit? And when do you think about developing your off-map nodes? It's far cheaper to develop on-map resources and you're not short on coal, but eventually it might be in your interests to develop some off-map farming to your south and a fishing industry on your coast. As you grow you impact on the region grows, but your neighbours are growing too and as they grow you can predict changes in the market. The cheap electricity you provided spurred the industrial city near you to grow its industry too. Your choice to not develop your own ore while raising the price for ore because of your steel mill saw the mining city grow and increase its own supply after a while. The game's cities react slowly, letting the player potentially have first "dibs" on opportunities, but it's entirely possible to create a demand for something then miss the boat. Your booming industrial economy created demand for office but your lovely industrial city has a hard time attracting the workers office needs, so instead the large city near you picked up that demand over time. Now of course if conditions in your town improve you may be able to "steal back" that demand in the future since part of that demand is coming from your city's industries and it's more effective for them to be there. I don't know, just some general possible ideas, many other ways of doing it. Maybe have it even more game like and directly trade with cities or the region like in an anno game. Maybe don't even bother with fluctuating prices or a market and just have it be your own city's demand vs the world's static prices. If you produce something locally it's a cheaper bonus, but otherwise you just import. I do though really think the whole off-map nodes thing would be a great system.
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May 3, 2014 22:12
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Baronjutter posted:...awesome commentary... Good to see that we have the same expectations of myself  Thanks for your in-depth, detailed, colorful description of how you envision gameplay. There's lots of good stuff in it. I prefer the "neighboring cities develop and react to your decisions"-idea, I think it can completely replace the off-site-projects idea. You have enough decisions to make on your city plot and if they become even more meaningful due to the interaction with the region that's even better. I wasn't sure if I wanted to model flexible regional/global prices before your post, but again, the kinds of decisions it forces you to take are very very interesting. Thanks for your collective brainstorming, everyone!
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May 4, 2014 01:27
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That all sounds well and good, but it sounds a little more like an economy simulator than a city builder. Sure you could combine Transport Tycoon Deluxe and Simcity 4 (the last good Simcity) into one game, and it would appeal to some people, but it would be quite complicated. I would not want to see resources from neighboring towns effecting each other in a big way. Like if I build a small town near a coal mine, I don't want to abandon that town because the neighboring city built a nuclear power plant. I think resources should only be used to increase demand for local industry. As for industry, I would love to see it handled more realistically than Simcity. In Simcity, all you see is a yellow zone with no idea what it making, in the real world you see Detroit with a giant auto plant, or Wichita (my town) with
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May 4, 2014 16:35
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In that same vein, are we going to see commercial spaces have parking built into the lot designs, perhaps affected by how lanes are delineated by the player? One thing that's 'off' to me in the SC4 aesthetic is that you don't see the kind of parking arrangements around bigger commercial spaces that are standard in many urban areas, especially in the US. Where the hell are all those shoppers supposed to be parking? I think I recall seeing some others inquire about this, but I don't recall seeing it discussed in any depth. Apologies if I'm retreading.
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May 4, 2014 17:40
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zxqv8 posted:In that same vein, are we going to see commercial spaces have parking built into the lot designs, perhaps affected by how lanes are delineated by the player? One thing that's 'off' to me in the SC4 aesthetic is that you don't see the kind of parking arrangements around bigger commercial spaces that are standard in many urban areas, especially in the US. Where the hell are all those shoppers supposed to be parking? That makes me think that lot generation could be pretty heavily based on its surrounding and look at how people are getting to these places. Have lots of transportation, a big bus infrastructure, and way less road focus? Your buildings are going to generate much more dense, they'll have less parking and look more pedestrian friendly with bigger sidewalks and things like outdoor cafes. On the opposite end, if the lot looks at the surroundings and sees giant 6 lane roads, a distinct lack of a transportation, etc, it's going to build more suburban looking buildings like strip-malls with big parking lots and single family homes with large yards. It would be super awesome to me to watch a city react as you change its infrastructure. A new tram line runs through a suburban shopping district, maybe it cuts a couple lanes off of a giant stroad and connects a popular dense residential area to the shopping district. As the game looks at new demands and looks at rebuilding lots it sees that less people are arriving by car. Not all of the stip-malls just disappear, but the parking lots start getting smaller as more business fills them in. Some of them are just replaced with some new more pedestrian conscious buildings. After that you add a couple bus lines that run service into the surrounding suburbs and that tram now runs right into the CBD of your city. The game looks again at the change in transportation and decides to boost the density again, and you're starting to see something like the transit-oriented development in Arlington VA where you have these clusters of high density around transportation that taper off in the surrounding areas. and as you continue to add more transportation in the area the city density responds accordingly.
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May 4, 2014 18:38
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Crotch Fruit posted:That all sounds well and good, but it sounds a little more like an economy simulator than a city builder. Sure you could combine Transport Tycoon Deluxe and Simcity 4 (the last good Simcity) into one game, and it would appeal to some people, but it would be quite complicated. I'm not so sure. At a base level, it actually might make more sense to have resources on the map that must be transported to industrial centers, whether they're in a "region" or in the bounds of your city area. This simulates more traffic and infrastructure needs, as otherwise it's pretty much just for jobs, like in Sim City 4. I am not going to pretend to care how 5 did it with it's resources cuz it was bad, tho. That doesn't mean the player has to control the train times or something that deep, but having it there would encourage better and more involved city design.
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May 4, 2014 19:50
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Parking lots would make a good ordinance. If you want cars to go directly to their destination, require every store to maintain its own parking lot. This will make for sparse suburban style concrete wastelands. For denser inner city or Eurostyle towns, don't require parking lots for each store, and rely on plopped parking lots/towers-- then cars will have to go park first, and then walk/bus/tram/subway from there.
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May 4, 2014 20:03
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Iunnrais posted:Parking lots would make a good ordinance. If you want cars to go directly to their destination, require every store to maintain its own parking lot. This will make for sparse suburban style concrete wastelands. For denser inner city or Eurostyle towns, don't require parking lots for each store, and rely on plopped parking lots/towers-- then cars will have to go park first, and then walk/bus/tram/subway from there. I think this would be better done more contextually rather then an overall city ordinance that way you can give neighborhoods more distinct characteristics rather then it just being overall. Dense urban cores, New hip transit influenced neighborhoods and sprawling suburbs all together. That makes me think of another thing, I'd like to see neighborhoods that change characteristics maintain some of their old features. A lot of us cities have converted their old empty industrial buildings into commercial and residential lofts and maintain the original style. It's be cool if changing the land use didn't have to destroy the existing building it might have a chance of re purposing that building
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May 4, 2014 20:55
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Yeah, after I posted that stream of consciousness I realized that would work well for a dedicated "regional economic game" but for a simcity I want more control and more of a static region. I'd love some blend of "off map plots" and "regional competitors". Something almost like Simcity4's region map, where we as the player have full control, but instead of building whole other cities we just use points or money or some sort of influence to guide or directly purchase regional growth. So maybe the game starts and you have your big empty nicely rendered terrain filled map, but there's a region-view that's just abstracted dots. Depending on your map setting you could be the first city in the region, or it's already developed to some extent with various sizes and types of cities and towns. All those cities pool their resources and demands together to get the regional prices for things like agriculture, ore, high tech goods, heavy industry, financial services and so on. Left on their own, they either don't grow at all or grow very very very slowly (map option?). You as a player though, you as the star of the show and god of the region, can grow these "supporting cities" your self via regional projects. There could be a whole array of city and region specific projects. Maybe your city doesn't have any good farm land so you invest in expanding farmland in a neighbouring farming village. Maybe you don't want to deal with heavy industry but your clean high-tech industries still need their good to function, so you invest and grow the region's industrial city. Maybe you don't even use money for this but some other points or currency. Maybe there's a regional tax and all cities including yours pay into it, and then you as the player spend from this regional treasury to grow neighbouring cities and buy region projects? I think with "AI cities" it would just be frustrating. Maybe you don't produce enough food and it's a bottleneck for your city. Great, now I have to sit around with the game on fast waiting and hoping the AI grows their farming city. Oh poo poo while I was waiting another city stole a bunch of my manufacturing demand away by growing it them selves and now it's not as in-demand in the region. Yes it's more realistic but is it more fun? It also means if you just let the game run, everything will always reach equilibrium. Heavy industry in demand? Nope, a neighbouring city picked up the slack. Region short on electricity? A neighbouring city picked up the slack. Confusing for people who just want to build a city and frustrating for people who really want to dig in there and minmax. Or go the SC4 or cities XL route and actually let the player build up the region city by city them selves. I think sc4's seemless cities were cool but present horrible pathing issues and require a lot to implement. Since Citybound will have BIG maps we won't need to spice a bunch of cities together to create a realistic city. The region view could just be dots with each city assumed to have many km between them. The terrain doesn't need to be seamless, nothing needs to match because there's assumed enough distance between each dot. The game doesn't need to know where the dots are or how close as it's just all pooled together in one big regional resource bucket. Region doesn't have enough food? Start up a new farming city. Your main city needs more heavy industry but you don't want to pollute it? Start a lovely industrial city. I find this idea fun because it means every city you start or "finish" has some impact. After a lot of play you could really build up a large region to be proud of. I'd just like the greater region to be represented in some way and to have some choices/control over how it develops, not married to any specific ideas so long as it makes sense and presents fun choices to the player. Alternatively I'd be fine with no region, just an abstracted outside world with static high prices to import things you lack plus the ability to develop some "off map plots" at greater expense for things you can't or don't want to produce in your city. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 4, 2014 |
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May 4, 2014 21:58
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I'd love if maps start with a road and perhaps railroad through it. Not just a dead end lie in SC2013, but an actual thoroughfare road with existing traffic on it. Disrupting the through traffic could incur some penalty from the state or regional government, but most importantly it's a real problem to deal with from the start. You could start out building your city off the main road to initially avoid dealing with the traffic, or you could try to attract more customers to stores etc. by building around the main road right away. This will probably work best in an abstracted regional model like Baronjutter is talking about.
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May 4, 2014 22:09
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Yeah, in some ways I guess it would be rad if the game did sort of link the cities in the region or neighbours adjacent to you and know where they are geographically. So you could have a big industrial city to your east and a big mining city to your west and you'd get a lot of big freight trains going back and forth. Or there's an important regional highway going through your map already filled with cars and freight trucks. Of course though now we're getting into actually simulating the traffic on the region scale, which is a lot of work. I mean that's cool as hell but I don't know if it's in the programming budget or cpu power budget. It could be abstracted though. The game would simply know the region has an overall population of X thus Y% of X cars and trucks are generated and randomly attempt to drive from one edge of your map to the other, weighted by the size and number of connections. Just a sort of abstracted regional traffic in the forms of cars, trucks, and trains. This would be through traffic of no benefit to you but simply the price for a growing region and growing economy. Yes you invested in expanding the regional highway system and it's improved the region's economy, but with the increased mobility comes more cars and trucks driving through your map. Want to avoid regional traffic by just having a a few small 2-lane road connections to the outside world? Sure, you have less traffic but you're also not as connected to the regional economy and you're going to stay a sleepy farming town until you upgrade those connections.
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May 4, 2014 22:23
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nielsm posted:I'd love if maps start with a road and perhaps railroad through it. Not just a dead end lie in SC2013, but an actual thoroughfare road with existing traffic on it. Disrupting the through traffic could incur some penalty from the state or regional government, but most importantly it's a real problem to deal with from the start. I mean, it's not a big deal. That's a totally acceptable abstraction... but at the same time it would be really fun to start a city in the middle of an existing road like this or something. Building up from a rest stop to a tourist trap to a metropolis in your own right, or something like that. I'm really interested in this game, and I'm glad we're at this really interesting time where collective brainstorming actually can impact something.
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May 4, 2014 22:37
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After reading all of this wonderful discussion, let me jump in: A city will definitely start with an existing road and there will be existing traffic on it that will even be more than eye candy: It will transport people and goods from one neighboring city to another, based on the respective demands. (Simulating this is not a big problem, it works almost like inner-city traffic. The only difference will be that regional cars won't be uniquely persisted, there will only ever be the ones currently in your town) Now you come along and build a new city that now also starts to offer some things. The cars that had to go all the way to the other city in the past can now get what they need in your city and return. This much I know for sure. What happens then, and how that influences demand, prices and automatic development of neighboring cities, I'm not sure yet. I really want all player interaction to happen on your own city plot. The neighboring cities can react to how well you satisfy your demands, sure, but I don't want stuff like player-controlled regional projects. It's not SimRegion. I'd rather have such things be procedural environmental factors that vary from map to map.
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May 4, 2014 23:31
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That's fair enough. But if the region does start out semi-populated with neighbours and they grow and change, could the initial population/development of the region be a map creation option? As well perhaps how quickly the region grows or reacts to what you're doing? Also parking is super important. Parking takes up tons of land is is pretty much the #1 difference between a city developing like say Dallas, or like Munich. You can build tons of highways and 50 lane roads, but if there's nowhere to park cars at or near housing for people to own cars, and no where to park cars at the destination, people can't really drive around. I'd love to see both street parking and off-street parking modeled, I know it's tricky and never been done in a city builder but it's really that important. Parking takes up so much land if it's surface parking, which reduces density, which spreads things out, which then requires more roads (vicious cycle). Parking in an urban environment (multi-level, underground) is extremely expensive and adds hugely to the cost of the buildings. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 00:25 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 00:21
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Please dont require a road through the map at the start. Let the player build a road if they choose to, then give traffic. I like SC4s unrealistic style of plopping a city in the middle of nowhere with no connections necessary. Will you have SC4-ish regions? If so I would fully support developing a city, leaving a blank map, develop a city on another side and then have a road through the previously empty map.
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May 5, 2014 05:07
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Baronjutter posted:That's fair enough. But if the region does start out semi-populated with neighbours and they grow and change, could the initial population/development of the region be a map creation option? As well perhaps how quickly the region grows or reacts to what you're doing? Sure, that could be configurable. Baronjutter posted:I'd love to see both street parking and off-street parking modeled, I know it's tricky and never been done in a city builder but it's really that important. Parking takes up so much land if it's surface parking, which reduces density, which spreads things out, which then requires more roads (vicious cycle). Parking in an urban environment (multi-level, underground) is extremely expensive and adds hugely to the cost of the buildings. I also really want to have that but on the [game breaking if not existing ... nice to have]-scale, it's more to the right. Crotch Fruit posted:I like SC4s unrealistic style of plopping a city in the middle of nowhere with no connections necessary. Why? Crotch Fruit posted:Will you have SC4-ish regions? If so I would fully support developing a city, leaving a blank map, develop a city on another side and then have a road through the previously empty map. Eventually, I think so. For now I will concentrate on one big city tile.
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May 5, 2014 22:04
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I like to just be able to build a city anywhere as well, rather than needing a road. That would just feel kind of restrictive. In SC4 at least, sometimes you'd find a landform or location or whatever which aesthetically suits you and you just want to build there, rather than wherever would be most realistic.
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May 6, 2014 00:45
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It's really not hard to make a road from your perfect spot to the edge of the map. How else do people come to your city or is it some post-apocalypic last city on earth thing? I love an excuse to make a cool winding mountain road through the wilderness.
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May 6, 2014 01:17
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Baronjutter posted:It's really not hard to make a road from your perfect spot to the edge of the map. How else do people come to your city or is it some post-apocalypic last city on earth thing? I love an excuse to make a cool winding mountain road through the wilderness. What if it's on an island or just out in the middle of nowhere? I don't see why you would want a mandatory start from a road, the game has to begin as a single city from nothing anyway, so why not just let the player build the intercity roads SC4 style?
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May 6, 2014 01:22
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anselm_eickhoff posted:
Well I think what SC2013 did was horrible in that you could not relocate the highway and I would hate to have that. Also, people have bush planes and poo poo, or maybe they took a wagon off-roading to your settlement in the early
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May 6, 2014 02:18
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Having to start out in the corner would be pretty restrictive, too.
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May 6, 2014 02:29
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I'm sure you'll be able to move the road. Honestly, not having a road to start with doesn't make sense from a programming perspective. With a road, you can bootstrap your city with people and demand from the other cities in the region. If you're trying to start something from nothing, you have to program in fake demand and resources in such a way that it allows you to get started without affecting the game later on - it's clunky and complicated. Besides, look up a small rural town. They all look like this:    Pit stops on a major road. KillHour fucked around with this message at 02:44 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 02:39
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Well, from a "programming perspective" you just kinda fudge the values a little, let people move in even if the industrial zone is not finished yet. Simcity, SC2K, SC3K, and SC4 all let you build a coal power plant in the desert, then zone a few blocks of houses so you air-drop a few residents to go work in the power plant. Why did you build a power plant? Who were you supplying with power? Doesn't matter, you were just starting the city. That horrible Simcity abomination that shall not be named is more realistic in that in plopped down a highway. . . But I like the old style game play, I think it is smarter to be more like the old good Simcity instead of the new Simcity.
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May 6, 2014 02:59
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Crotch Fruit posted:Well, from a "programming perspective" you just kinda fudge the values a little, let people move in even if the industrial zone is not finished yet. Simcity, SC2K, SC3K, and SC4 all let you build a coal power plant in the desert, then zone a few blocks of houses so you air-drop a few residents to go work in the power plant. Why did you build a power plant? Who were you supplying with power? Doesn't matter, you were just starting the city. That horrible Simcity abomination that shall not be named is more realistic in that in plopped down a highway. . . But I like the old style game play, I think it is smarter to be more like the old good Simcity instead of the new Simcity. Just because the game was fundamentally broken and unfun doesn't mean you have to do everything different just because. He's already putting in a ton of ideas from the new Sim City, including having roads serve utilities, agents, having different resources, etc. Hopefully he just won't do a terrible job of it. As long as you can move the road to where you want it, I don't think it's a big deal. I mean, you already have to have a road anyways, right?
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May 6, 2014 03:09
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I'd rather not have a pre-build road at the start because I don't trust the game to make it pretty enough or in the "right" spot, but I certainly hope we need some sort of connection to the outside world before people move in.
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May 6, 2014 05:41
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Good compromise would be that when city is starting, player has to make a major road from edge of map to another. This way there is something to build the city around, but player can still decide where the road goes.
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May 6, 2014 06:55
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Banemaster posted:Good compromise would be that when city is starting, player has to make a major road from edge of map to another. This way there is something to build the city around, but player can still decide where the road goes. Maybe have the player place a marker for where their city will "be" in some vague sense, then generate a road to that point from the edge of the map?
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May 6, 2014 08:11
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Brainbread posted:Maybe have the player place a marker for where their city will "be" in some vague sense, then generate a road to that point from the edge of the map? You might not necessarily want your city to be around the road, but maybe rather a bit out from it.
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May 6, 2014 09:47
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I think the fairest solution would be allowing the player to place the initial road. I'm loving this thread by the way.
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May 6, 2014 18:35
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Just for a note, one game that has the "initial road that must be kept working" is Caesar III, perhaps also other games in the series. It's the only of the Impressions city-builders I've played but I rather liked the idea of "building your city along the Road to Rome". Of course, the maps in Caesar III were all pre-made rather than generated. (It also served as a great example of the dangers of a purely agent-based city system! Except for the water, that didn't use agents.) nielsm fucked around with this message at 18:53 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 18:50
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Yeah, sequels like Pharaoh also had the main route as map base. They were great games.
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May 6, 2014 18:54
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It's true about the problems with agent-based simulation though. Nothing better than seeing your top-tier luxury housing collapse into slums because the market seller hasn't turned left for two years.
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May 6, 2014 18:56
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I guess no one here played Cities XL very much but in that game you have to draw a connecting road as the first step in your city.
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May 6, 2014 19:13
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ToastyPotato posted:I guess no one here played Cities XL very much but in that game you have to draw a connecting road as the first step in your city. Yeah that's exactly what I'm expecting. Hell of a lot easier than writing a whole "initial road AI" that reads the starting terrain and paths a road through potentially rough terrain.
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May 6, 2014 19:23
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New Update! The Road to Alpha, Week 9 - A Day In the Life of a Citizen (I will respond to the discussion soon!) anselm_eickhoff fucked around with this message at 02:54 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 02:43
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 18:52 |
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Thanks for the insane late-night ramblings! You're really making rapid progress, plus staying amazingly active responding to our stupid questions. So what you're saying is that time is a 4-season cube? Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 07:07 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 07:02
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