Sim City 2013: Wealth Levels and Reason of Abandonment

[alvinheriadi 2]

Discuss about wealth levels here!

I want SimCity has many wealth level (Example: 5, from § to §§§§§)

Starting wealth in my imagination is §§, can be § if too many unemployment, low education, low health, too much pollution (air and noise), and near annoying buildings/structures such as prisons, garbage dump, incinerators, power plants, highways, stacked flyovers, road construction, tunnel construction, airports, etc.

And i want discuss about reason of abandonment.

In my imagination, abandonement reason will be:

1. Annoying Buildings
2. Commute too long
3. Lack of demand
4. House too noise to live in
5. Smelly place
6. Vulnerable to crime
7. etc.

  Edited March 28, 2012 by alvinheriadi  

[jacksunny 741]

tbh, one thing that really annoyed me in SC4 was traffic noise. I don't think traffic noise should have a big impact on anything.

You give some good points. If there is an incinerator in the middle of a suburb, the wealth levels in that suburb should not be able to go over $.

[asasa45454 4]

As long as there is a way to combat traffic noise I would like to see it have an effect. Mass transit, walls, roads being used under capacity [honking, accidents contribute to noise]

We really dont know much if anything about how these factors are going to work in SC2013 so it's hard to say.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This may be barking up the wrong tree.

We don't know enough about the game mechanics to even consider that there could be abandonment. It will all depend on the daily Sims generation, and this may just depend on random factors in the generator. Remember, each Sim is new every day.

I think it is a mistake, given the current amount of information to assume some of the "features" of SimCity 4 will appear in the new iteration.

[croxis 150]

This may be barking up the wrong tree.

We don't know enough about the game mechanics to even consider that there could be abandonment. It will all depend on the daily Sims generation, and this may just depend on random factors in the generator. Remember, each Sim is new every day.

I think it is a mistake, given the current amount of information to assume some of the "features" of SimCity 4 will appear in the new iteration.

That isn't quite right. Each building has a population that is persistent. It is not generated new every day. What are generated are the agents, which transports resources (which include population) around the map. So a house Unit gets the time for work message, creates a car Agent, moves a population Resource into the car Agent, and the traffic system drives the Agent to work. The population Resource is then moved into the factory and the car Agent is destroyed. At the end of the work day the factory Unit creates a bunch of car Agents and puts population Resource into the Agents (it may even also add money Resource into the car Agent too, we did see this in the GDC videos), then the traffic manager drives the Agents to the nearest house with room and transfers the population Resource into the house Unit. The agents are then destroyed.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This may be barking up the wrong tree.

We don't know enough about the game mechanics to even consider that there could be abandonment. It will all depend on the daily Sims generation, and this may just depend on random factors in the generator. Remember, each Sim is new every day.

I think it is a mistake, given the current amount of information to assume some of the "features" of SimCity 4 will appear in the new iteration.

That isn't quite right. Each building has a population that is persistent. It is not generated new every day. What are generated are the agents, which transports resources (which include population) around the map. So a house Unit gets the time for work message, creates a car Agent, moves a population Resource into the car Agent, and the traffic system drives the Agent to work. The population Resource is then moved into the factory and the car Agent is destroyed. At the end of the work day the factory Unit creates a bunch of car Agents and puts population Resource into the Agents (it may even also add money Resource into the car Agent too, we did see this in the GDC videos), then the traffic manager drives the Agents to the nearest house with room and transfers the population Resource into the house Unit. The agents are then destroyed.

Well, that is basically my understanding, but I tend to simplify. The Sim is carried about by agents, and collects information as a resource and does a resource dump when it arrives at 'home' which is not necessarily the place it left.

[knighthawk75 56]

As long as there is a way to combat traffic noise I would like to see it have an effect. Mass transit, walls, roads being used under capacity [honking, accidents contribute to noise]

We really dont know much if anything about how these factors are going to work in SC2013 so it's hard to say.

No we really don't. However, let me echo the requirement that while the traffic noise component is a nice dynamic to have they either have to make it far less impactful or provide reasonable countermeasure offsets like you mention, or a bit of both. SC4 failed badly in this regard.

[soltangris 42]

Well, that is basically my understanding, but I tend to simplify. The Sim is carried about by agents, and collects information as a resource and does a resource dump when it arrives at 'home' which is not necessarily the place it left.

LOL, you mean that you get up in the morning, leave your nice house which you had taken pains to acquire and furnish, go to work, work your but off the entire day, and then come back...... home? Oh, wait, the traffic engine decided that today you're gonna sleep at your grandma's, because there's too much traffic to get home! And the next day you might sleep at your colleague Jane's... (mmmm, wonder what your wife would think about that).

There's so many things wrong with that concept I don't even know where to begin. Even if you leave on one side how ridiculous this concept sounds in real life, how can you create a persistent Traffic satisfaction for a House unit if its residents keep moving every day? What about the resident's Environmental satisfaction, that should change every time he sleeps in different house? Is this gonna be centered around the House, or around the People that live in there? Can a House be satisfied with its Desirability factor? Maybe the House would think there aren't enough schools and playgrounds around for its little houses, and then pick up its foundations and move to another neighborhood??????

If that's correct, I'm lifting my hands from Sim City. A more stupid notion I haven't heard in my entire gaming life.

[jacksunny 741]

^Yikes! A simple "I don't like it" would have been enough.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

We have to stop thinking SimCity 4.

This is a new paradigm. After 10 years, a paradigm shift is to be expected. Forget Sims as continuing beings. They are being used only as resource transfer items. The resources being those that went with the "permanent" Sims in the past instances of the game. I believe it is rather clear that all the wealth and other attributes will accumulate and reside in the residentials, and these will "rub off" on that day's Sims. The Sims will acquire or lose some of these as they bumble about in the city, then return someplace else and do a deposit of their results then vanish like the snows of yesteryear to be recreated with more/less attributes next day. This upsets a lot of apple carts, and we have to come to a new way of thinking.

If the randomizing routines are really good, and there is no reason for them to be less than that, things will be more evenly spread out and some of the "skewiness" of previous games will not be so present. At the moment, I can't think of any reason for abandonment of buildings other than an economic depression.

Of course, poor placement might do it, but that is fixed with the bulldozer. We will learn how to layout a city eventually. One assumes that the game will be endless unless the Mayor goes broke. What you do when you have a humming city in its full state is one of the things that hasn't been revealed.

[croxis 150]

it is also standard for game devs to prototype their ideas to make sure they are viable before spending millions of dollars making a game. I would almost be willing to bet that EA/Maxis prototyped tracking individual sims vs what we now see in SandBox and found that the simulation behavior was close enough to the same so they decided to use the competitionally simpler option. If the end result is the same, does it really matter what is happening in the GlassBox (as opposed to a black box)

[soltangris 42]

I simply don't see the logic of all this, that's it. How can you create a credible simulation of an individual Sim unit, if it keeps changing his residence? What about the workplace, is this gonna change as well? Like every cycle the engine is gonna calculate the nearest job suitable for the agent? Such level of randomization really amazes me, and I don't see how it helps the simulation.

It's simply not the same thing to have the simulation centered on a static building (and consequentially taking into account only its surroundings), and to have it centered on the living citizens, with their own needs. For example, the living citizen will keep into account not only the services and environmental conditions available at his home, but also travel time to his job, the type of job, the type of vehicle used to travel, etc. I don't see how this will be possible without keeping persistent Sim Units! How, for example, you'll be able to calculate a credible Traffic statistics if the Agents forming the traffic always have different start/end points of their journeys????

On the other hand, if the engine somehow is centered only on the Residence as a persistent Unit, and creating citizen units as Agents for each cycle, I fail to see the logic behind all this. Why randomize their movement like this? Won't it be more simple to have them always have the same start/end point of movement, and simply recalculate the route according to current traffic conditions?

I'm all for innovation, but this looks a bit too much for me, sorry. This looks more like a shortcut, a convenient trick of the engine, rather than an improvement of game simulation, which we all are hoping to see.

But then again, we don't actually know how all this will fir into the game..... I guess wait and see

[croxis 150]

I simply don't see the logic of all this, that's it. How can you create a credible simulation of an individual Sim unit, if it keeps changing his residence? What about the workplace, is this gonna change as well? Like every cycle the engine is gonna calculate the nearest job suitable for the agent? Such level of randomization really amazes me, and I don't see how it helps the simulation.

We can see the logic with statistics! Let us look at traffic. When you drive to work/school, leaving the same time every day, and taking the same route every day, you can figure out the average time it takes to get to your destination. but we also soon find out that not every day is the same. Some days there is little traffic on the road, other days it is unusually bad. So not only is there the average commute time but there is variation as we look at the day to day data. As we record enough data and graph it we get a normal distribution:

Left-Right is the minutes it takes to get to school/work, and up-down is how often that travel time happens.

Now when we play simcity we really don't care about individual sim travel time to work. I know a lot of people think they do, but individual sim travel time is an indicator of something else. What we are really interested in is the traffic pattern - the volume of cars on the roads. We set up the simulation so indvidiual sims go to and from the same location every day. We run the simulation a thousand times and get the traffic data on the roads which will end up in a normal distro.

Now we change the simulation to work like GlassBox does, run it a thousand times, get the traffic from those same key road and that data too will form a normal distribution. Then we use statistical tools to compare the two different graphs to see how similar the two simulations are. If the graphs are very close then we can say that we get the same behavior even though the underlying simulation is very different.

When my own game engine is ready (still doing the basic stuff at the moment) I'll test it for you

[Ocram's Razr 963]

1. That was a wonderful demonstration, Croxis!

2. Abandonment would happen when a sim returning to work does not want (or afford) to go back to the same house.

3. I really want 4 or 5 wealth levels (with the 5th being keystone elite multibillionaires, there are less than 50 households in our world that qualify).

4. Wealth levels of buildings could degrade or upgrade (renovations) when desirability/value changes to the point where sims of an adjacent wealth level prefer the building more than those with the original wealth level.

[MINIggy03 227]

I wish if Sims moved out of their homes it would go up for sale instead of abandoning. It should become condemned looking when it's been sitting empty for a long time.

[Mark Waybill 242]

I wonder whether we as Mayors will have the right to construct social security offices for paupers, or would that be a government area in the game.

I suppose my main problem with this style of simulation is that they said you see what they sim and all that so I assumed each Sim would be definite and defined definitely, rather than transient and able to evolve or be replaced continuously

[JcCali1214 34]

OcramSeattle, I agree with your 3rd point - we should have more wealth levels - I feel as if it's a natural evolution to the series, especially in regards to how the devs are talking about the simulation. I feel as if the 3 wealth levels - which have always worked and I am not, to this post, still not complaining about, - seemed to simple. Heck let's go six or seven from poverty level If-I-Don't-Get-My-Next-Paycheck-I'll-Be-On-The-Streets Sims to the "Keystone elite multibillionaires" as you very well put.

And Mark Waybill, I hope we do have the expansion of power to build more governmental buildings, such as social welfare offices, unemployment offices, DMVs, etc.

And ya, Abandonment should be more complex but easily available to the player and have alternative options to curb it - everything from easily done to ethically questionable - and everything in between.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

6 would be the maximum number of wealth levels if you go from $10,000 a year doubling with wealth level to $320,000 a year so in this case

poverty: 10k

poor: 20k

lower middle: 40k

upper middle: 80k

upper class: 160k

Elites: 320k

an added one could be

Keystone: 640k

Source: Wikipedia: Social Class USA by wealth

  Edited April 9, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Mark Waybill 242]

I've come to the conclusion that when Sims are individually and properly simulated, their jobs will give them an income which will give them a wealth level, by way of putting their income in a bracket. Thus you could theoretically have an unlimited set of wealth levels like with forum levels *pokes 'Dweller'* The income itself could be anything, and would try to fairly realistically give a relative idea of the type of job the Sim had. (I.E CEOs get paid more $$$ than labourers and chimney sweeps)

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Though I think that a realistic scale of wealth would be best, there should also be 4 tax brackets of wealth and 4 "distinct" wealth levels of buildings (with props and textures possibly changing slightly to show a small increase or decrease in wealth).

  Edited April 10, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Mark Waybill 242]

And of course fashion and way of behaving like in CXL.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Appearences of the sims (I hope they are at The Sims/City Life resolution and not The Sims 2/Cities XL resolution), could indeed vary with their wealth level (and possibly culture). As a matter of fact, I would prefer that, as long as it does not become super exaggerated like in City Life and Cities XL.

[Mark Waybill 242]

Yes, agreed. CXL made the Sims like parodies of Maxis Sims.