Discussion about City Tile Size

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Alot has indeed changed over the years, he has become a lot more popular.

On a serious note, I would prefer either 4x4 cities or unlimited region sizes with buildings able to straddle multiple cities.

  Edited April 13, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Mark Waybill 242]

TBH unless regions are split regarding authority and heirarchy of management, I shan't be happy till a region IS a city tile.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

But these 10x10 maps were lifeless and dull, except a few ugly comic figures. In SC5 nearly everthing will be part of the simulation and will be animated. We also don´t know what scale they will use. In SC4 a street is 16m wide and a small R$ house could be 8x10m. This is far too big compared to RL. When they use RL dimensions a SC5 2x2 square will look bigger compared to a medium SC4 tile.

If they use RL dimensions then 2x2 will be way to small to fit anything. No city is that small in RL except for podunk country villages.

I wouldn't get excited about the size too much. This is a simulation, not real life. The village I live in is bigger than that.

[Cob92 360]

But Focus Home Interactive managed to pull off 10x10 maps, and Cities XL 2011/2012 only runs on a single core, right? I think 2x2 and even 4x4 is too small now. I'd be happy with 8x8. Most international airports cover an area larger than 4km^2 (the longest runway at Heathrow is is 3.9km) Fingers crossed Maxis won't limit us to a measly 2x2 map.

But these 10x10 maps were lifeless and dull, except a few ugly comic figures. In SC5 nearly everthing will be part of the simulation and will be animated. We also don´t know what scale they will use. In SC4 a street is 16m wide and a small R$ house could be 8x10m. This is far too big compared to RL. When they use RL dimensions a SC5 2x2 square will look bigger compared to a medium SC4 tile.

If they use RL dimensions then 2x2 will be way to small to fit anything. No city is that small in RL except for podunk country villages.

I wouldn't get excited about the size too much. This is a simulation, not real life. The village I live in is bigger than that.

It's a game, and a game needs to be fun. My fun is killed when I'm making neighborhoods and all of a sudden I'm out of land to build on. Small maps force me to build cities that all look like New York. Large maps let me build spread out cities that look like the other 99.9% of the USA.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ Why should anyone want to look like anything in the USA. Many of us live in the world, not one country.

[Dewm 177]

^ Why should anyone want to look like anything in the USA. Many of us live in the world, not one country.

Well without sounding bull-headed, the majority of Simcity buyers are in the U.S. ......But it doesn't really matter either way, what Cobhris96 was meaning is, not everyone wants a compact urban city, 1.3 million people crushed into a square mile of land.

Alot of people want to build cities/towns that aren't NY, I live up here in Alaska, and I live in area where there are "two sister towns" with houses scattering all around and small little urban area's here and there, total land taken up? close to 30 square miles... So I would never be able to build a town that looked like the one I live in, in SC5.

...That is what his point was.

[Cob92 360]

^ Why should anyone want to look like anything in the USA. Many of us live in the world, not one country.

I didn't say that every city should be American-style; I said that the game should give us the option to build a city like that. And I'm pretty sure most cities in the world don't look like NYC.

[XXProtoXX 6]

Well the main point should be that larger city tiles offer for a more spread out, dare i say (generic), looking city, as people have said, sometimes they want there cities to be dense and compact, and sometimes they want sprawled out metropolises. Either way EA/Maxis's development team should have an option for both.

[Mark Waybill 242]

Well I live in Wollongong, which is about five kilometres in width and about twenty five in length, as it lies on a narrow coastal plain. Sydney to the north is a sprawling city with suburbs that reach a good way out from the cbd to about forty kilometres or so. Kiama to the south is a small coastal town with hinterland with a much less dense population, and the town itself is mostly low or lower medium density. Kiama might just fit it's central area in a 2 by 2 kilometre map. Maybe. Just.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

4x4km city tiles would be preferable but 2x2 km is just fine as long as you can have buildings (airports) straddle multiple cities that you own. I previously mentioned that.

[Dewm 177]

Well I live in Wollongong, which is about five kilometres in width and about twenty five in length, as it lies on a narrow coastal plain. Sydney to the north is a sprawling city with suburbs that reach a good way out from the cbd to about forty kilometres or so. Kiama to the south is a small coastal town with hinterland with a much less dense population, and the town itself is mostly low or lower medium density. Kiama might just fit it's central area in a 2 by 2 kilometre map. Maybe. Just.

I wanna live in Wallogong, just to say I live in Wallogong.

Edit: What a fantastic looking city! Love those highways..

  Edited April 15, 2012 by Dewm  

[Mark Waybill 242]

Yes the Southern Freeway is the main one running north-south. This is the reason why up until now, while there is an Illawarra region terraformed region you can download, I haven't come close to building anything like the town's layout. And, as is obvious from that image, 2 by 2 kilometres would be tight. With a large SC4 map you need two to include Mount Keira and the city as well, and as in full 3d I'd imagine an obvious and important landmark like that or the Eiffel Tower or the London Eye etc would be nice to be visible from any part of the city where you could see it in real life.

So if we are limited administratively speaking to 2 by 2 kilometres, I'd still want to be able to see beyond that, even if it was just a frozen snapshot.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Actually, if I acquire a license for this game, I would expect to treat a region as a single muncipality with local "city tiles" developing. Clearly, single player, me. I like to create rural but connected municipalities with farms, industrial pods, residential/commercial areas, etc. all well connected by a transportation network and spaced out by green areas. If this is not possible in this new product, I am not much interested.

Since I live in an Ontario rural area, I don't expect farms to be on the order of 2Km², but what about users in Saskatchewan? How big is a quarter section farm out there?

BTW, 2Km² is just under 500 acres. Farms around here tend to be from 50 to 300 acres. If I had four farms in one of these cities, it would be rather hard to get some population as well, eh?

  Edited April 15, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Dewm 177]

Actually, if I acquire a license for this game, I would expect to treat a region as a single muncipality with local "city tiles" developing. Clearly, single player, me. I like to create rural but connected municipalities with farms, industrial pods, residential/commercial areas, etc. all well connected by a transportation network and spaced out by green areas. If this is not possible in this new product, I am not much interested.

Since I live in an Ontario rural area, I don't expect farms to be on the order of 2Km², but what about users in Saskatchewan? How big is a quarter section farm out there?

BTW, 2Km² is just under 500 acres. Farms around here tend to be from 50 to 300 acres. If I had four farms in one of these cities, it would be rather hard to get some population as well, eh?

My sister in-law lives near saskatoon, and her husband works for a farmer out there, and she said he owned close to 40,000 acres.

[jacksunny 741]

A lot of farms are that big. Our farm is about 600 acres. The farms in SC4 were extremely unrealistic. If you think about it, to have a realistic farm, it would have to cover more than one of the SC13 city tiles, same with airports.

[elavery 1,013]

2x2 tile size! Are you kidding me! That is the biggest load of crap I have heard in awhile. You could barely fit a freeway interchange on a tile that size. And as for building major ports or airports, those days are now over. The 4x4 tile size in SC4 is way too small, I couldn't imagine operating on anything smaller. If the city tiles end up being this small the game is dead in the water. What kind of amateurs are developing this game? Have any of them ever played SimCity?

[jacksunny 741]

^The thought here is that the game will be to slow to play on a bigger city tile, considering it is 3D. Hopefully though, it will be possible to increase this for those of us who have machines capable of handling this.

The other thing I just remembered is the simulation engine. From what we have been told, the engine only seems to support 500,000 Sims. The small tile sizes might be so the simulation engine can function properly.

[Ohadi195 30]

4 km²?? Maxis, are you kidding me??? lol you guys do realise that if you drive at let's say 120 kph you pass 2km within one minute. don't you?

Now, All this "Glass Box" (or whatever) worth NOTHING if I can't build a dicent city.

How am I suppose to build this with the planned map size. is this the new "modern" game? you tell me!

from CitiesXL, map size 100km²

Excuse me for being the "party killer" but this is a joke. in any way this "agents" thing is really too much, I want to build a city not to go crazy by it's simulator (who cares if one person drinks coffee and put it on trash), really it will be just a pain in the s.

it's like this, if you want to design a new aeroplane would you play a flight simulator?? NO!! you will take 3d program and design it.

  Edited April 16, 2012 by Ohadi195  

[MandelSoft 2,775]

^^ You wanna get back to the Eternal Commuter bug or capacities by tile? I don't think you don't want that either. The game should have a decent simulator to start with, and this look really promising. It makes the city feel more alive, dynamic and realistic. I always had kind of a dead feeling with the CitiesXL cities...

Though, the map size might be too small for high-end PCs, which could handle bigger maps...

  Edited April 16, 2012 by mrtnrln  

[The_City_Builder 299]

I think it's safe to assume there will be bigger map sizes. Remember, the game was only just announced almost a month ago. I can recall that when Cities Unlimited was announced, they presumed the final game would have small maps.

Look what happened with that.

[drdru7029 52]

So if we are limited administratively speaking to 2 by 2 kilometres, I'd still want to be able to see beyond that, even if it was just a frozen snapshot.

Yeah I agree, that would indeed make up for a lot.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Tiny maps. Tiny minds.

If they can't write better code than that, then Maxis needs real programmers. Perhaps it has become too easy to use fancy VHLLs and they've forgotten how to get down on the iron and scratch. Taking the easy way out with things like Python will not produce a fast program. Even C has its limitations, and some critical stuff has to be written in assembler.

  Edited April 16, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Ohadi195 30]

It makes the city feel more alive, dynamic and realistic. I always had kind of a dead feeling with the CitiesXL cities...

are you kidding me? 4km² could be "realistic" for a small town of 20k people at most, not for a heavy populated large city, let alone metropolin..

and as it looks to now citiesXL is much better than this new game. at least I can create large highway and mass transit systems as well as farms, airports, seaports, industries and holiday zones without being afraid of losing space.

@1701adguru

It's nice to be optemistic but I think that even YOU don't buy it. even maxis said themself that the "engine" don't support more than 500k people.

so if you ask me, this glassbox worth square ZERO.

@A Nonny Moose

well what did you expect? Maxis wants to make fast money so they have to make something "new". they don't care that our processors will waste their time canculating unimportant details like the time and distance the milk truck deliver fresh white 3% fat cow milk to the sleepy 5 member familty (in a specific age and skin color ye?) at a small street no # and not to forget the house floor, or the poor boy that got 60% on his math's exam.

no wonder that they did not make big maps, they know that their addicted fans will buy it anyway.

It's really a shame that after ten years sim city is going BACKWORDS in time, I stick with Cities XL.

  Edited April 16, 2012 by Ohadi195  

[The_City_Builder 299]

Oh, how I love that everyone is violent and drowning in speculative thoughts of others. :|

Heres my question for all of you:

Someone go and find me a picture of a final sized map from SimCity 2013, and then maybe I'll reply back.

  Edited April 16, 2012 by 1701adguru  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Its fun to speculate. It will be interesting to see just how wrong we are. The first indication will probably be at E3 in June. Frankly, I think the purpose of the announcement was to gather some pre-marketing data.

[MandelSoft 2,775]

It makes the city feel more alive, dynamic and realistic. I always had kind of a dead feeling with the CitiesXL cities...

are you kidding me? 4km² could be "realistic" for a small town of 20k people at most, not for a heavy populated large city, let alone metropolin..

I have never said that 4 km² is fine for me. Heck, if you read this entire thread, or even the first page, you'd find

and as it looks to now citiesXL is much better than this new game. at least I can create large highway and mass transit systems as well as farms, airports, seaports, industries and holiday zones without being afraid of losing space.

Oh is CitiesXL better? Then why did I go back to SimCity 4 and let CitiesXL catch dust. It's because the game is not better out of the box. Especially the game lacks inter-city mass transit like trains (it has metro and busses tough, but not something basic as trains). The standard highway system is very rigid and has illogical interchange designs.

I know mods may solve this in the future (and yes, I've tried modding the game myself once, I won a Trixie for that), but there are still some issues that turned me off, like odd traffic behaviour, the lack of good statistics (I didn't know what the hell I was producing resource-wise at a given time), memory leaks, poor peformance, random glitches (trees that suddenly disappear) and the unpredictable and unstable behaviour of the game when you apply mods. And funny enough, I missed the grid in CitiesXL, which is really helpful to "aim" your city plans...

The SimCity 4 community is still very active after almost ten years. I don't see much of the CitiesXL community lately, nor I've seen a mass-transfer from people going from SC4 to CXL. That problem might also hit SC5; if the fans are not satisfied about the game, they go back and continue playing their old game. SimCity Societies went through this since it failed utterly hard to please fans in almost every way, cutting out the core of what made it predecessors so good. CitiesXL tried to take SimCity's place, but it was not the right time yet and it was not done by the right company, leaving us with a sloppy programmed, buggy and bad performing game. We all hope that SimCity 5 will be better than that, but seeing CitiesXL's errors, I remain skeptical...

It's nice to be optemistic but I think that even YOU don't buy it. even maxis said themself that the "engine" don't support more than 500k people.

so if you ask me, this glassbox worth square ZERO.

And where did you read that, if I may ask?

It's really a shame that after ten years sim city is going BACKWORDS in time, I stick with Cities XL.

And I'll stick to SimCity 4, thank you sir!

By the way, how is this going backwards in time? We now have engine and powerful enough computers that can actually SIMULATE every sim individually, not just some generalized code and behaviour. Traffic jams occur because there are actually people who all want to use that route; they occur naturally, and not by a generalized process (like measuring traffic intensities per tile/per lane per stretch). In that perspective, it's revolutionary!

Best,

Maarten

[Ocram's Razr 964]

500,000 is not the limit of the number of sims simulated but on all agents and here is the kicker: workers, electricity, water, sickness, goods trucks, resource trucks, and civic service vehicles (ambulances, fire trucks, police cars) are ALL agents. That is why the limit on the population is 200,000. This should not matter if region play is similar to city play only that some areas are inaccessible because they are owned by "your friends."

Unfortunately, unless you have a high end PC that has buttloads of processing power, then you will be out of luck when the game requests a cubic asston (the cube of the distance 1,000 kilograms of galloping donkeys can cover in a minute) of data processing and rendering.

  Edited April 16, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Cob92 360]

2x2 tile size! Are you kidding me! That is the biggest load of crap I have heard in awhile. You could barely fit a freeway interchange on a tile that size. And as for building major ports or airports, those days are now over. The 4x4 tile size in SC4 is way too small, I couldn't imagine operating on anything smaller. If the city tiles end up being this small the game is dead in the water. What kind of amateurs are developing this game? Have any of them ever played SimCity?

Hey, I'm as displeased as you are, but you've got to keep in mind that "SimCity" for them is what the game is out of the box. It doesn't include airports the size of an SC4 large city, nor does it include RHW interchanges or modular ports. However, even with the compressed stuff that Maxis puts in SimCity games, it's still very hard to fit a city of a decent size on any of the maps they have, and if you want to build something other than NYC/Hong Kong/Tokyo, your city will only be as populated as a large town.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I hope that one can zone airports or lay down landing strips like roads. I would not mind a farming landing strip to be the same size as a SimCity 4 one but I want the largest airport available in the game at release to be comparable in size to the Large Airport in Cities XL.

[jacksunny 741]

I completely agree with Maarten. If SC13 is a failure, will people jump ship to CitiesXL? God no.

SC4 will live for a long, long time.