Discussion about City Tile Size

[yummysinsemilla 16]

Don't know if this has been posted, but one of the testers managed to get 750,000 sims in a city.

http://forum.ea.com/...6BB8525A00BA4F6

Nobody cares. 750K people in a parking lot is not a fun game to play.

He's more or less just stating that the size of the city's borders doesn't mean you are limited to small cities.

I'm really not sure why everyone is complaining. They have a set design in mind; simulating a city to the smallest detail by simulating each citizen. Do they have the hardware means to create a megacity of 20 million inhabitants with this engine? Likely not. So they create the format of what will work on a general basis. In the future, it will expand, just like the original Simcity had a small map and no terraforming, SC2k a step up, SC3k another step and SC4 another.

Sure, if they used the same engine SC4 used, they could create cities the size of half the SC4 region. However, they are not using the same engine. Why should they go away from the whole premise of the new engine by not simulating things that "aren't important"? In a city, everything is important. If something wasn't important, why would they program it into the game to begin with?

I am intrigued about the new engine. I would love to actually "see" the problems of my city actually being created by the actions of the citizens rather than statistical calculations. I also like the idea of an interconnected multiplayer that gives you more of the feeling of building an actual working city, rather than "painting a city" as people in these threads have mentioned.

There's not really a whole lot you can say about the game as a whole. Almost all of the complaints are and have been speculation. If you don't feel you would like it, don't buy it when it comes out. Wait until word of mouth comes out from the people who have. All I know is, from what I've seen, I will definitely be buying this game.

[MPleines 17]

Exactly what I was thinking, Yummy. Everyone is comparing this game to SC4, which is only natural I suppose, but it is a different, new game that can be enjoyed at a different level. Instead of greater size you get greater depth, at least one would hope so! From what I've seen so far, I think it is.

That is not to say that I would have loved to see larger city areas too, but hopefully, that will come later...

[BravoGreenONE 120]

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

And its sheer assumption that the maps Will get considerably bigger in the near future. maxis will cater to the lowest denominator. If the developers need to dial down the simulation a bit to get a decent map so be it. I know the maxis folks have worked hard on this, and it pains me to say this, But right now it just looks silly

[flyer2359 92]

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

And its sheer assumption that the maps Will get considerably bigger in the near future. maxis will cater to the lowest denominator. If the developers need to dial down the simulation a bit to get a decent map so be it. I know the maxis folks have worked hard on this, and it pains me to say this, But right now it just looks silly

I agree, the incredibly small maps are going to be a deterrence to the fun that the new SC will provide. I have a feeling I'll be able to fill a map within 30-45 minutes of playing.

[yummysinsemilla 16]

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

And its sheer assumption that the maps Will get considerably bigger in the near future. maxis will cater to the lowest denominator. If the developers need to dial down the simulation a bit to get a decent map so be it. I know the maxis folks have worked hard on this, and it pains me to say this, But right now it just looks silly

While I'll agree that regions themselves look silly, did medium maps on SC4 look silly? Because that's what the new maps are comparable to.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I do not care deeply about individual sims but I do care. The Glass Box engine also eliminated one of the biggest gripes about SimCity 4, the cars in SimCity 2013 do not randomly appear and disappear. It is also pretty realistic at simulating the distribution of resources. My biggest complaint is that regional space is nonfunctional. I really wished that working farmland could go there. Food is a vital resource in reality and should be a factor in SimCity 2013 to add a challenge and limit the population of unprofitable or unconnected cities.

--Ocram

  Edited January 17, 2013 by CaptCity  

[Skyrunner27 23]

The only problem I had with the farm idea in the past was that haw would the resources be collected. Now I think that you may build a granary type facility and it would send out trucks to collect the resource of food. The Trucks would come back to store it in the granary facility. The amount of food brought back would rely on water and season. Also there would only be certain parts of the region with farms to keep with the comparative advantage.

[Dewm 177]

I don't care about the social aspect of the sims, I hated the feature in SC4 where you could make a sim, and assign it to a building etc.. it was stupid... but at the same time it didn't really take any hardware so whatever.

Now with the glassbox, I do like the fact that it simulates every sim.. that's awesome, everyone going to work, going to the store etc.. that's awesome!

That being said, part of the engine I don't like is the "limited resources" aspect of it. Limited water, limited coal etc..

And if they had to sacrifice some of the map/population size, because of certain things (like limited coal) then they should have made the decision to leave it out.

That's another thing, if they can handle 1million+ on a medium map, why can't we have larger maps? from the sound of the sweet (a beta tester has hit 1million!) it sounded like they didn't know how many sims the engine can handle.. So if they don't know, is the map design more of a preference then a hardware forced decision?

[CaptCity 4,893]

...did medium maps on SC4 look silly?...

Nope, it's what I usually play.

And an edit note: As I have mentioned before, making comments that include "most do/don't" or "everybody does/doesn't" or "all of us are/aren't" are over-generalizations that can not possibly be proved or checked for correctness and will only lead to off-topic arguements - such as those included in the posts that have been removed here. Care needs to be taken in usung precise and accurate wording when posting our thoughts.

[Joronamo 14]

Small and medium tiles are cool because you can treat them as independent municipalities, districts or suburbs. The problem with this new game is the space between the tiles. It just looks awful and unrealistic in my opinion. They should be adjacent to one another like in SC4. 

[BravoGreenONE 120]

Medium and even small city tiles in sc4 were fine, only because we were able to build in the adjacent city tiles. as a side note, because of the limitations your just not going to get the full artistic potential out of this game like sc4. It was always nice to check out some of the city journals on here. We'll have to see where that goes, but it doesn't look promising

[Dewm 177]

Small City size is fine. In fact I run SC4 on all medium tiles because the big tiles lag too much when you fill a quarter of the grid with buildings on high graphics. Its more realistic because then you can treat each smaller tile as a seperate suburb or city ala LA county (Santa Monica, El Segundo, Compton, Culver City, Hawthorne, Long Beach etc).

The problem is the space between cities in this new game. If they made them adjacent to each other all would be fixed. I know its been said before but just sayin'.

trust me you would have used the large if you had a decent PC. (or if SC4 at least ran multicore)

I am fortunate enough to have a really good PC, and all I would ever play where large city tiles + with the region setup, I was actually able to build a large metro area.. slowly sprawling out into suburban area's with farming out on the edges.

but none of that seems possible with this new game.

[StoNe220022 159]

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

I agree, the incredibly small maps are going to be a deterrence to the fun that the new SC will provide. I have a feeling I'll be able to fill a map within 30-45 minutes of playing.

I agree with this sentiment, to me models are about tinkering and spending months on one project. This game does not seem to be about modelling cities, but more so about simulating city life/growth. If you head to the blog on sc.com where this chap talks about building his coal industrial city...it only takes him 5 days of blogging before his entire city is constructed; and even then, it's a coal industry centric city.

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

Small City size is fine. In fact I run SC4 on all medium tiles because the big tiles lag too much when you fill a quarter of the grid with buildings on high graphics.

Medium and even small city tiles in sc4 were fine, only because we were able to build in the adjacent city tiles.

I do agree that medium sized tiles were fine, including small tiles to be good. But what makes it different however, is that I treated tiles sometimes as either satellite cities, or suburbs.

One of my entire medium sized tiles would just be 'Finnley Downtown' which had direct train/road/bus/ferry/subway access to the tile over the bay to 'Freemantle Beach' where my most prestige residents would live...further uphill (one tile across again) was the lower residential area of 'Bayview Heights' and two tiles across the tile was a large farming community which fuelled the region; this in fact centered around the concept that region = city; tile = metro/suburb/industry sector etc...

The issue with SC2013's tile size (or more to the point, regional design); it doesn't allow the user to theoretically expand upon the virtual borders of their creation as the software constraints each city tile as an independent 'competing' city within the same region.

Hence, a region is now made up of 16 distinct cities, as opposed to....here is an entire region...go play!

[Cob92 360]

Id wager that most people are not asking for sc4. They just want a reasonable map size. The map size as of now is ridiculous.

I agree, the incredibly small maps are going to be a deterrence to the fun that the new SC will provide. I have a feeling I'll be able to fill a map within 30-45 minutes of playing.

I agree with this sentiment, to me models are about tinkering and spending months on one project. This game does not seem to be about modelling cities, but more so about simulating city life/growth. If you head to the blog on sc.com where this chap talks about building his coal industrial city...it only takes him 5 days of blogging before his entire city is constructed; and even then, it's a coal industry centric city.

You can do the exact same thing on SC4. It takes me less than a week to build up a single city. Now a region might take several weeks, or it might be something I poke at for maybe an hour a day for months on end, but a city is a quick and easy thing to build. I actually like it that way; when I spend too much time putting a city together I get attached to it and afraid to do radical experiments on it.

[CaptCity 4,893]

trust me you would have used the large if you had a decent PC. (or if SC4 at least ran multicore)

Nope, medium's what I like, and my computer's fine. (See what happens when making statements like that? )

[Joronamo 14]

On 1/18/2013 at 3:01 AM, Dewm said:

On 1/17/2013 at 10:25 PM, Joronamo said:

Small City size is fine. In fact I run SC4 on all medium tiles because the big tiles lag too much when you fill a quarter of the grid with buildings on high graphics. Its more realistic because then you can treat each smaller tile as a seperate suburb or city ala LA county (Santa Monica, El Segundo, Compton, Culver City, Hawthorne, Long Beach etc).

The problem is the space between cities in this new game. If they made them adjacent to each other all would be fixed. I know its been said before but just sayin'.

trust me you would have used the large if you had a decent PC. (or if SC4 at least ran multicore)

I am fortunate enough to have a really good PC, and all I would ever play where large city tiles + with the region setup, I was actually able to build a large metro area.. slowly sprawling out into suburban area's with farming out on the edges.

but none of that seems possible with this new game.

I have a very good computer with 8GBof RAM and my SC4 still lags... even when I build on large tiles and only fill it up a quarter. I've found that medium and small tiles are lag-free. So it's good to balance it out between tile sizes. It will also add realism (i.e. small municipalties vs. bigger cities etc.).

[Dewm 177]

Gotcha,

Well my comp is a 3.2ghz (its a quadcore but I know that, that doesn't matter in the case of SC4)

And I have 24gb of ram.. but I doubt it uses a eighth of that.

And I don't get lag.. (maybe its a hair slow when zooming in and out a ton.)

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Gotcha,

Well my comp is a 3.2ghz (its a quadcore but I know that, that doesn't matter in the case of SC4)

And I have 24gb of ram.. but I doubt it uses a eighth of that.

And I don't get lag.. (maybe its a hair slow when zooming in and out a ton.)

The same with my set-up, I've customized regions so they're predominantly filled with large tiles and such tiles only start to lag when you've reached a population of say 1 million and above. Though if large (SC4 ones) tiles have too few neighbours, for instance say one has only 4 large tile neighbours, this limits demand cap relief due to road connections and thus limiting growth in a large tile city. So like for like, a medium sized tile tends to be better for demand cap relief so bigger may not always be better...

But if demand cap relief is a thing of the past in SC 2013 and it comes down to resources, then maybe road connections will serve a more logical role and maybe bigger (bigger tiles) could indeed mean better.

[Dewm 177]

Gotcha,

Well my comp is a 3.2ghz (its a quadcore but I know that, that doesn't matter in the case of SC4)

And I have 24gb of ram.. but I doubt it uses a eighth of that.

And I don't get lag.. (maybe its a hair slow when zooming in and out a ton.)

The same with my set-up, I've customized regions so they're predominantly filled with large tiles and such tiles only start to lag when you've reached a population of say 1 million and above. Though if large (SC4 ones) tiles have too few neighbours, for instance say one has only 4 large tile neighbours, this limits demand cap relief due to road connections and thus limiting growth in a large tile city. So like for like, a medium sized tile tends to be better for demand cap relief so bigger may not always be better...

But if demand cap relief is a thing of the past in SC 2013 and it comes down to resources, then maybe road connections will serve a more logical role and maybe bigger (bigger tiles) could indeed mean better.

exactly, and that is what I was saying. When Capt. first posted he made it sound like he didn't play the large tiles because they lagged to bad. And I was just stating with a decent modern PC it should lag at all.

But if he prefers to play a medium tile, thats great.

I just didn't want people thinking he played a medium tile because the large ones were glitched into lagging really bad. Its merely hardware.

[The_City_Builder 299]

That might just be the tutorial maps.

Yeah, I'm being optimistic. Which seems odd at this point.

[Niego 2]

[Dewm 177]

That would be awesome if they did.

That combined with the Origins thing..and I might buy it.

(On the origins thread someone was saying that if you buy the physical copy then you don't need to log into origins) IF that is true...and maybe in a year they expanded the map size.. they would have a customer.

[tomfoolery_79 85]

FROM OCEAN'S BLOG/TWITTER:

"City size. Yes, its smaller than I'd like. Please understand that we're at the beginning of a completely new system and give us some time."

He knows people, he knows!!! Sounds like a Rush Hour Expansion improvement

[RyanMorgan95 144]

https://twitter.com/...750708493647874

I'm glad Ocean acknowledges the community's frustration (on the whole) with the city size, and hopefully, they'll add the option for larger cities at some point.

[Dewm 177]

FROM OCEAN'S BLOG/TWITTER:

"City size. Yes, its smaller than I'd like. Please understand that we're at the beginning of a completely new system and give us some time."

He knows people, he knows!!! Sounds like a Rush Hour Expansion improvement

https://twitter.com/...750708493647874

I'm glad he acknowledges the community's frustration too. Hopefully we'll see bigger cities at some point, preferably as a patch/update because the small city size is a shortcoming of SimCity.

Here's to hoping!

[Hellken 1,658]

From iomex on reddit:

http://www.reddit.co...simcity_so_far/

The city size is actually smaller than the medium city tile on SC4 but bigger than the small city tile.

[Dewm 177]

From iomex on reddit:

http://www.reddit.co...simcity_so_far/

The city size is actually smaller than the medium city tile on SC4 but bigger than the small city tile.

Such a shame they made the grassy parts between cities, with the "region view" they have it would make the perfect upgrade from SC4, if all of the cities touched.

[RyanMorgan95 144]

Such a shame they made the grassy parts between cities, with the "region view" they have it would make the perfect upgrade from SC4, if all of the cities touched.

I seem to recall one developer saying that's how they started out, but then they would have to either simulate (graphically) the neighbouring cities, which would be too resource-intensive, or just have a static, "lifeless" neighbouring cities. I'd be happy with a fog that surrounds the active city if it means cities are contiguous. Both the tile size and space between tiles are possibly the greatest shortcomings of SimCity, judging by the screenshots I've seen; I fear the Beta (if I'm lucky enough to get in) will only confirm this.

[dysonraf 37]

Its fairly obvious even the devs are not happy with tile size. This is something I 100% think will be sorted once the game is established. Why would it not be people are crying out for it! The main priority is clearly to get the game out, functioning correctly and being stable for multiplayer.

Its clearly more work than just a few lines of code. They

are going for city specialization and increasing tile size might throw those mechanics out the window.

I cant see it been paid for content either. New buildings yes as that only affects the person in the city. You can't have one person in a region operating a huge city whilst poor john smith runs a 2x2 cos he cant wont buy DLC.

Just my 2 cents

[The_City_Builder 299]

The SimCity Store (as quoted in the manual) will contain "free and paid content" that adds to the gameplay experience. I also recall Ocean Q recently tweeting about how it will be possible to make larger maps in the future once they optimize a few things.