idea for large cities

[kwetzel345 101]

Hello all,

I am posting this idea because it seems like good one to me, at least for one problem that many of you player are concerned about, me included. Now I know that the problem is small cities,given that we are stuck to medium city sizes, but I feel this can be remedied by giving us this one option. This would be a text box of sorts that tells you that there are two options when creating your new city. One options would be make this a district of the neighboring city, which would result in this district having the same tax base for residents, business, and same spending limit for government services. It would be the same for all of these because you would have chosen the option to make this a portion of your other city. witch would naturally make this have the same features as your other city because you chose to make this a district of your other city.This would also result in these part in not being labeled separate city's, but rather district of the other city.

For this to work, I want to say it could be done by not having to simulate the whole city, but just the city part you are on. For example, If the city was 4 tiles, those 3 tiles can be non active, and the one title you are on can be active. Disasters can only happen on the city tile you are playing on, and the amount of money you would get each month , would be dictated by how many titles make up that one city and how many people each district is expected to get each month, but just as a estimate. This is then how income can be given, which would be naturally more while playing one of those 4 tiles because the city would be larger then 1 tile. This estimate could be guessed by the engine and since it would be a guess, the other three tiles would not have to be running, which would make this a possible less cpu intensive mechanism in the game.

For example, New York city has it's five boroughs. Each brought shares similar guidelines. This is because it is part of one whole city in general.

But that my idea, and want to know what you other players think? Do you like this or not? And if you have other ways that you think this could be implemented, then please post it. I curious to see what other people think! Also, sorry for long post, just feel that adding more always helps make the topic less confusing

  Edited July 3, 2012 by kwetzel345  

[Xyloxadoria 1,099]

This is alredly in the game. Just conncet power/water/roads etc to neighbors in the first city, then make neighbor deals in the second city to use the power and water the first one supplies.

[Jamonbread 222]

I think he means even more seamless then connections and deals. The new district could inherit policies, exchange garbage ect without deals and school and fire overlap which i think is actually possible in the new game. tax sharing would be hard though and I`m sure some of the mechanics of a super seamless tiles would be complicated.

I`m not worried about this at all though. the edges now look onto the neighbouring city and its an extra fuss but not a big deal to do deals. So yes big cities and districts would be nice but I think youll be surprised at how it will play out.

[TheRepeatedMeme 15]

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[Ocram's Razr 964]

I also think that their should be a regional government with governor and regional taxes.

[kwetzel345 101]

ocramseattle, glad you agree, I also think it would really help for the people who might want to build larger cities that are bigger then regular tiles

[etahn54 0]

You can make the connections, but my computer has worked at my home, please that is already ideas.

[TheRepeatedMeme 15]

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[coolwiththecool2 827]

It would be nice to have actual neighborhoods instead of pretending to have a city on various amounts of city tiles in a region, I am kinda tired of doing that....

[Wiimeiser 444]

It should be like The Sims 3, that seems to work.

[PBGV103 729]

KingKazama, please realize that SC4 will NEVER use more than 3.2GB because it is a 32bit program. If this new game is 64bit it should handle nearly 192GB, the total addressable size under Win7 Ulitmate. The real limitation will be the CPU. You'll need a fast CPU with a few core and more cache never hurts, but I doubt we'll see this new game handle more than 2-4 threads, which seems to be the norm.

I have to say if I were involved in the making of this game I'd go for the idea of being able to expand the border of your city to as large as you'd like (barring any case where you might interfere with an existing neighboring city. Of course that idea has it's challenges, mainly because EA wants as much money as they can get, and if you have a horrible little computer from 8 years ago that barely plays itunes, being able to make cities as large as you'd like would "hinder your experience." In other words they don't trust you not to be an idiot and complain when your computer is the limitation. Secondly, if everyone is forced to play on these medium sized tiles "online-play" will be much simpler for them to set up. With everyone playing on the same size cities the regions look like a sheet of graph paper and every cities fits nicely with the next, but if everyone has custom sized cities, or even a limited number of different sized cities, it would be more difficult to fit them together. Something like this would take more time and more resources, which also cost more money and delay the game's release. Thus I predict we'll see a "beautiful game, with lush graphics (though the color will be overly saturated and the modeling slightly cartoony - we can't forget the casual or child player ) and a few more features than SC4, but one hindered by play-ability. I see a game that will be tempting to buy and play for the first month, but loose it's draw after that.

The only real hope I see for the game is that it could possible be modded to accept larger cities sizes at some point. I've worked to recreate Manhattan in SC4, and while Google Earth has been amazing and let me build a scale model, there are limitations. For instance several large buildings are left out because they lie across the borders of two cities. With cities 1/4 the size you'll see 4 times the number of these occurrences when trying to recreate a real city, most likely making the task not worth the trouble.

So far this game seems to follow the current trend nicely. Make as much money as you can and screw the rest is all I've been seeing for the past 5-10 or so years. A lot of people hate on the Final Fantasy series of games, but I must admit they were some of my favorites until their recent decline as well. The idea used to be to create a game the designers would want to play, something inspiring and fun. Then the game would sell itself, but the industry has reduced itself to a bunch of petty fools, scrambling for your every last penny, and producing these limited, formulaic games.

It's truly sad.

[TheRepeatedMeme 15]

PBGV,

I completely agree with your fact about EA, Maxis, and gaming companies in general. Their main goal is to impress you enough with one game so you buy the next, more expensive sequel and so on. They don't really care about the gaming experience, as long as they have a good sale.

I would LOVE to see massive, asymmetrical cities and I know that many gaming computers (like my midrange one) could support it. What I'm afraid of is the complete lack of support for weaker netbooks and the like. I want to be able to enjoy SC13 wherever I am, whether I am in a Starbucks with my chromebook or in front of my monster gaming machine without sacrificing the graphics to the extent that they regress to SC4, 3 or (oh god) 2.

I hope they implement larger cities, but only if they let you choose the size.

Kingkazma25