How Do I Make Simcity Societies HARDER? (updated with advice)

[Vesson 0]

I really enjoy simcity societies... but its just too easy. I want to play the authoritarian city with real urban unrest thats actually difficult to control..

As it is, it seems all too easy to make my drones comply.

Anyone know how to make simcity societies harder or somehow more difficult? I'm playing with everything on hardest & win with ease.

Cheers.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Haha, you need to get your self a copy of Sim City 4! (If you don't already have it). That's why a lot of people don't want to play SCS it in the first place.

But in time I'm sure some mods will come along that will make it more of a challenge.

[The Almighty Cheese Grater 0]

return it and play sc4.

[tourniquetism 0]

You can actually modify the difficulty settings. There is an XML for it. You can even change them so that the game is impossible. I got a little...too...crazy with it earlier today.

[JCarter 0]

Yeah, SimCity Societies is a bit too easy...thats why Im not wasting money on it

EDIT: 200TH POST!!!

[crazyyaya 4]

The best advice would be to stay loyal to SC4 if your looking for more of a challenge. If thats not what your looking for, use you imagination.

[BurroDiablo 222]

Try building a working city without any roads... bet that'll be fun...

[ruddvantoasty 0]

Yea, drop society and pick up SC 4.

[Silur 3,297]

Play SC4 with fine fun sites exchanges or make Your own game ...

[doodlea21 31]

I predict that whoever makes a mod to increase the difficulty of SCS tenfold will get a Nobel peace prize.

[e350tb 0]

Play it with a bindfold.

(I just couldn't resist, even though I WANT to get this)

[Resender 18]

the only reason why would even buy scs is to get some nice quit rustic cities

[voodoo02 0]

Great!  Sim City 2000 is more fun the Societies!!! Plus I can fly around my city with Sim Copter!!! Wait who remembers Streets of Sim City? I though that game was bad!!! HA!!!!!!

[Vesson 0]

So I've done some tinkering myself on the XML file that was suggested here (thanks).

Here's what you want to enter if you want an "Actually Challenging Game ".  You'll find the file Difficultylevels in Simcity Societies/Data/XMLdb/Game/Difficultysettings

Change the third paragraph to:

<DifficulyLevel ID="Challenging" index="2" stringID="DIFFICULTY_LEVEL_CHALLENGING">

    <Value ID="GlobalDailyModifier" float="-3.5"/>

    <Value ID="JobEfficiencyRelaxed" float="0.2"/>

  </DifficulyLevel>

</DifficulyLevelTable>

I had a slightly tough time of things using these settings in a production/manufacturing type city where I used a bunch of crime producing venues and a coal factory dead in the middle of town...

Therefore you might want to lower jobefficiencyrelaxed to .1 and globaldailymodifier to -4... though having said that my greatest challenge was rougue sims (which i'm pretty sure are spawned due to the large minus on the globaldailymodifier) which I musta spent 30 grand worth of SWAT teams on. The game played well though and now I feel I pretty much have the map under control.

Anyone else have any settings they've experimented with?

[Bluebeard 0]

You could have saved yourself alot of time by just playing SC4.

[Poetic 0]

I tried making a productive city with lots of homes, some workplaces, and virtually no venues. Pretty quickly I had unemployed, homeless, very angry vandals running through the city randomly shutting down businesses, increasing crime, etc... It was amazing to watch - like rioters running everywhere.

I was pretty hard to calm things down - I began building venues, but it just made people drunk and act out even more. Finally I had to start bringing in more authoritarian buildings to start trying to calm things down. I constantly had to bring out the riot police every hour. Of course, this all happened in normal mode - so I had to worry about money, which constantly went down each time a business was closed by a vandal.

After a fairly long-time I was able to rebuild (lots of fires and things), increase happiness and lower the amount of angry citizens (who became vandals) by locking them up. It was definitely the most fun I've had with the game thus far

[kamidan 0]

I'd like to know how this makes the game more difficult?  To me the difficulty of SC4 was many things, but in SCS it seems all I need to do is build things to make the peeps happy, there is no circle of influences so I can build power plants on the other side of the map, when I need more tool energy but a park doesn't look right in my town, I simply build 20 of them over next to the power plant on the other side of the map and reep the reward.  It's little things like this that make the game overly easy and so I am now wondering what the changes you made to the Difficultysettings.xml file actually did to make the game more difficult for you?

It didn't add anything new I would imagine, so what does it change?

Thanks,

Originally posted by: Vesson So I've done some tinkering myself on the XML file that was suggested here (thanks).

Here's what you want to enter if you want an "Actually Challenging Game ".  You'll find the file Difficultylevels in Simcity Societies/Data/XMLdb/Game/Difficultysettings

Change the third paragraph to:

<DifficulyLevel ID="Challenging" index="2" stringID="DIFFICULTY_LEVEL_CHALLENGING">

    <Value ID="GlobalDailyModifier" float="-3.5"/>

    <Value ID="JobEfficiencyRelaxed" float="0.2"/>

  </DifficulyLevel>

</DifficulyLevelTable>

I had a slightly tough time of things using these settings in a production/manufacturing type city where I used a bunch of crime producing venues and a coal factory dead in the middle of town...

Therefore you might want to lower jobefficiencyrelaxed to .1 and globaldailymodifier to -4... though having said that my greatest challenge was rougue sims (which i'm pretty sure are spawned due to the large minus on the globaldailymodifier) which I musta spent 30 grand worth of SWAT teams on. The game played well though and now I feel I pretty much have the map under control.

Anyone else have any settings they've experimented with?quote>

[Cincilla 0]

You can also change the starting money:

in:

SimCity™ Societies\Data\NewConstants.txt

look for the line:

RandomMap/StartingSimoleans;int;50000

change 50000 to whatever you want.

You'd have to wait for the money to be generated by the city workplaces more. It only applies to new cities. So it won't affect saved cities. Same goes for the happiness and work effeciency tweak above I found.

[tourniquetism 0]

Maintenance Mod -- http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14381

It's not much, but it is a start.

[xxbydesign 1]

Ok, so you want the game to be more difficult, thats acceptable. What's not acceptable is everyone else telling you to give up and go back to playing SC4. In case there's some confusion, the origional post found it too easy to control city mood; last time I checked, its relatively impossible to piss off your sims in SC4, as I have yet to have a single riot or a negative mayor rating. They are different games and should be approached differently. Kudos to those who have actually attempted to offer solutions for the initial post.