Thoughts on SimCity 4
2003-01-31 19:51![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blufiveNow that I have been playing SimCity4 for a while, some thoughts:
(I skipped SC3000, as it didn't seem worth the upgrade from SC2000, which I played extensively. So any comparisons here are to SC2000)
Ye gods, this game is a system hog. I'm playing on an Athlon 1900+, with 512MB of RAM and a 64MB Geforce 4. It's not an uber-ninja gaming machine, but it can run Unreal Tournament 2003 at a respectable frame rate, and laughs in the general direction of most other FPS games. At times, SC4 can be measured in Seconds Per Frame. Now, this is a slow-paced management game, so framerate isn't as important as in Quake III, but it's still annoying. I'd like to zoom in and out a lot more, but the seconds-long redraw that zooming causes is too much grief. I've managed to improve things to some degree by dropping down to 800x600. Saving and loading cities can take 10-15 seconds, easily - more for a big city.
The control interface is generally good, but takes up huge areas of the screen at low resolutions. There's a wide range of graphical map overlays, many of them very useful, though some are flawed. For instance, the health and education graphs seem to include empty accommodation - so a building with 20% residency has a lousy education value, even if those residents are all genius-level.
Apart from speed issues, the graphics are great. There's a substantial improvement in the detail levels, both graphically and gameplay-wise.
The initial tutorial is minimal, going little beyond Zoning 101 and how to use the game interface. The game manual is nowhere near as detailed as that shipped with SC2000. In a game this complex, these are real problems. (Cynic's view: they're saving all that stuff for the expensive "strategy guide")
It's much harder to balance the budget than before, requiring a fair bit of micromanagement. To make it even less newbie-friendly, if you do start to lose money in a big way, it's practically impossible to recover without all but destroying your city. If you're not careful, you can accumulate an ever-expanding debt. To add to your woes, virtually every building requires ongoing funding, which makes cutting costs particularly hard without extensive micromanagement or demolition of buildings which will cost a few years' worth of budget surplus to replace. Any drop in population just tends to lead into a nasty feedback loop of falling income, which can run up a huge debt in no time if you don't make hard choices immediately. My first couple of games led to bankruptcies of epic proportions, and it can still get a little close for comfort at times.
Your Sims and Advisors tend to whinge endlessly about minor problems and offer bad advice, such as suggesting you construct a waste-to-energy plant early in the game, thereby turning a minor waste disposal issue into electricity you probably don't need and a huge budget deficit. Ouch. Another favourite is to encourage you to build mass transit (buses/subways) long before they're necessary, then endlessly complain that no-one is using them.
I've ranted more than once in the past about games which provide "guidance" which leads you straight into trouble. SC4 is a long way from the worst game I've seen on this front, but it's still frustrating. (Homeworld probably takes the dishonour, with a special mention to the Dark Conspiracy add-on pack for the otherwise excellent Ground Control)
New to SC4 is idea of "regions" - huge maps made up of dozens of tiled cities of various sizes. You can play each and every city in a region individually, and they can interact - Sims commuting from one city to another, garbage from one city going to a landfill in the next, and neighbors selling power to each other. One city can be an industrial wasteland, with a leafy commuter suburb on the next map over.
One of the things I miss most is an automatic terrain generator. You have a choice: play on a landscape like a billiard table, on one of 3 or 4 real regions, or spend hours sculpting your terrain - and in the case of a region, I do mean HOURS.
There are very few cities included that you can just load and take over (about 5, IIRC, including the tutorial). Despite region names like "London" and "San Francisco", and accurate geography, none of these cities resemble their real-life counterparts. Some of them are ridiculously optimised, to the point where you can hardly touch them without the budget collapsing (service catchment areas that perfectly match the population distribution, power and water provision finely balanced, etc.) And no scenarios at all. (Cynic: All saved for the expansion pack, no doubt. Couldn't they just include one or two?)
The sense of "time passing" is... different. You can have a day/night cycle, if you want, which is fairly pretty, but bears absolutely no relation to the calendar (which is good, as it would be downright stroboscopic at normal game speeds). Personally, I just found that the constantly changing lighting just made it practically impossible to see what was going on.
There's no chronology/technology element any more, with the date counter starting at year 1, and bigger and better buildings being awarded on the basis of city size and demographics (e.g. the Big Clean Power Planttm now needs lots of high tech industry in the city, the "tourist trap" needs large numbers of sims with disposable income across the region). This removes much of the sense of history that the game had, but removes some of the glaring anachronisms (sims complaining about lack of domestic electricity in 1872).
You can finally build on slopes, allowing you to build cities on hills, but you still can't build on really steep stuff, so you can't quite do a "town on a cliff" like Positano, where people park their cars on the roof. Everything's still based on the square-grid, however, so all cities have that American feel.
There are now two types of regular road: cheap, low-speed, low-capacity local streets, and higher-capacity roads. As a result, the maintainence/construction cost of roads is less of a problem, particularly early in the game, as you can build the cheaper streets and upgrade to roads later if necessary.
Schools and Hospitals now have "catchment areas", which you can adjust via bus/ambulance funding, and their costs are explicitly tied to the number of people they serve, which means that you can now twiddle both types of funding to better serve your population and budget.
Power stations no longer spontaneously explode after 50 years, but gradually decline over time, becoming more and more expensive for less and less power.
Agriculture! You can now zone for farms.
Taxes have gotten more fine-grained, and can be adjusted to reward or punish rich or poor citizens, dirty or high tech industry, etc.
The old rule of extreme caution wielding the bulldozers when near anything expensive remains, as there's STILL no "confirm" or "undo" on the demolition tool. Come on, guys, I can drop a death-dealing alien robot downtown, steer tornados through the business district, or call up a volcano in the suburbs, but I can't say "oops, I didn't mean to demolish that very expensive brand new power plant". This is compounded by the sometimes sluggish movement of the mouse cursor.
Finally, the way the emergency services are handled has improved - you click the "deploy firefighters" cursor on the burning building, and halfway across town, a fire engine leaves the station and fights its way through traffic, before arriving on the scene and deploying hoses. Once they're there, you can easily move them around individually. I've yet to fight a really big fire, but it works much better than the "deploy fire engines in squares next to the fire and pray it doesn't spread in the opposite direction" approach of SC2000. It also means that keeping your traffic levels under control can allow you to have fewer fire stations, but still get crews to fires quickly enough.
All that whinging aside, I'm enjoying it. The learning curve is probably steeper than earlier games, it's less newbie friendly, and the hardware requirements are eye-watering. Most of my other complaints are just niggles and, overall, it's a significant improvement on the earlier games - for old hands like me, anyhow.
(I skipped SC3000, as it didn't seem worth the upgrade from SC2000, which I played extensively. So any comparisons here are to SC2000)
Ye gods, this game is a system hog. I'm playing on an Athlon 1900+, with 512MB of RAM and a 64MB Geforce 4. It's not an uber-ninja gaming machine, but it can run Unreal Tournament 2003 at a respectable frame rate, and laughs in the general direction of most other FPS games. At times, SC4 can be measured in Seconds Per Frame. Now, this is a slow-paced management game, so framerate isn't as important as in Quake III, but it's still annoying. I'd like to zoom in and out a lot more, but the seconds-long redraw that zooming causes is too much grief. I've managed to improve things to some degree by dropping down to 800x600. Saving and loading cities can take 10-15 seconds, easily - more for a big city.
The control interface is generally good, but takes up huge areas of the screen at low resolutions. There's a wide range of graphical map overlays, many of them very useful, though some are flawed. For instance, the health and education graphs seem to include empty accommodation - so a building with 20% residency has a lousy education value, even if those residents are all genius-level.
Apart from speed issues, the graphics are great. There's a substantial improvement in the detail levels, both graphically and gameplay-wise.
The initial tutorial is minimal, going little beyond Zoning 101 and how to use the game interface. The game manual is nowhere near as detailed as that shipped with SC2000. In a game this complex, these are real problems. (Cynic's view: they're saving all that stuff for the expensive "strategy guide")
It's much harder to balance the budget than before, requiring a fair bit of micromanagement. To make it even less newbie-friendly, if you do start to lose money in a big way, it's practically impossible to recover without all but destroying your city. If you're not careful, you can accumulate an ever-expanding debt. To add to your woes, virtually every building requires ongoing funding, which makes cutting costs particularly hard without extensive micromanagement or demolition of buildings which will cost a few years' worth of budget surplus to replace. Any drop in population just tends to lead into a nasty feedback loop of falling income, which can run up a huge debt in no time if you don't make hard choices immediately. My first couple of games led to bankruptcies of epic proportions, and it can still get a little close for comfort at times.
Your Sims and Advisors tend to whinge endlessly about minor problems and offer bad advice, such as suggesting you construct a waste-to-energy plant early in the game, thereby turning a minor waste disposal issue into electricity you probably don't need and a huge budget deficit. Ouch. Another favourite is to encourage you to build mass transit (buses/subways) long before they're necessary, then endlessly complain that no-one is using them.
I've ranted more than once in the past about games which provide "guidance" which leads you straight into trouble. SC4 is a long way from the worst game I've seen on this front, but it's still frustrating. (Homeworld probably takes the dishonour, with a special mention to the Dark Conspiracy add-on pack for the otherwise excellent Ground Control)
New to SC4 is idea of "regions" - huge maps made up of dozens of tiled cities of various sizes. You can play each and every city in a region individually, and they can interact - Sims commuting from one city to another, garbage from one city going to a landfill in the next, and neighbors selling power to each other. One city can be an industrial wasteland, with a leafy commuter suburb on the next map over.
One of the things I miss most is an automatic terrain generator. You have a choice: play on a landscape like a billiard table, on one of 3 or 4 real regions, or spend hours sculpting your terrain - and in the case of a region, I do mean HOURS.
There are very few cities included that you can just load and take over (about 5, IIRC, including the tutorial). Despite region names like "London" and "San Francisco", and accurate geography, none of these cities resemble their real-life counterparts. Some of them are ridiculously optimised, to the point where you can hardly touch them without the budget collapsing (service catchment areas that perfectly match the population distribution, power and water provision finely balanced, etc.) And no scenarios at all. (Cynic: All saved for the expansion pack, no doubt. Couldn't they just include one or two?)
The sense of "time passing" is... different. You can have a day/night cycle, if you want, which is fairly pretty, but bears absolutely no relation to the calendar (which is good, as it would be downright stroboscopic at normal game speeds). Personally, I just found that the constantly changing lighting just made it practically impossible to see what was going on.
There's no chronology/technology element any more, with the date counter starting at year 1, and bigger and better buildings being awarded on the basis of city size and demographics (e.g. the Big Clean Power Planttm now needs lots of high tech industry in the city, the "tourist trap" needs large numbers of sims with disposable income across the region). This removes much of the sense of history that the game had, but removes some of the glaring anachronisms (sims complaining about lack of domestic electricity in 1872).
You can finally build on slopes, allowing you to build cities on hills, but you still can't build on really steep stuff, so you can't quite do a "town on a cliff" like Positano, where people park their cars on the roof. Everything's still based on the square-grid, however, so all cities have that American feel.
There are now two types of regular road: cheap, low-speed, low-capacity local streets, and higher-capacity roads. As a result, the maintainence/construction cost of roads is less of a problem, particularly early in the game, as you can build the cheaper streets and upgrade to roads later if necessary.
Schools and Hospitals now have "catchment areas", which you can adjust via bus/ambulance funding, and their costs are explicitly tied to the number of people they serve, which means that you can now twiddle both types of funding to better serve your population and budget.
Power stations no longer spontaneously explode after 50 years, but gradually decline over time, becoming more and more expensive for less and less power.
Agriculture! You can now zone for farms.
Taxes have gotten more fine-grained, and can be adjusted to reward or punish rich or poor citizens, dirty or high tech industry, etc.
The old rule of extreme caution wielding the bulldozers when near anything expensive remains, as there's STILL no "confirm" or "undo" on the demolition tool. Come on, guys, I can drop a death-dealing alien robot downtown, steer tornados through the business district, or call up a volcano in the suburbs, but I can't say "oops, I didn't mean to demolish that very expensive brand new power plant". This is compounded by the sometimes sluggish movement of the mouse cursor.
Finally, the way the emergency services are handled has improved - you click the "deploy firefighters" cursor on the burning building, and halfway across town, a fire engine leaves the station and fights its way through traffic, before arriving on the scene and deploying hoses. Once they're there, you can easily move them around individually. I've yet to fight a really big fire, but it works much better than the "deploy fire engines in squares next to the fire and pray it doesn't spread in the opposite direction" approach of SC2000. It also means that keeping your traffic levels under control can allow you to have fewer fire stations, but still get crews to fires quickly enough.
All that whinging aside, I'm enjoying it. The learning curve is probably steeper than earlier games, it's less newbie friendly, and the hardware requirements are eye-watering. Most of my other complaints are just niggles and, overall, it's a significant improvement on the earlier games - for old hands like me, anyhow.