About city services

[Reticulated Spline 5]

One of the things in the beta that I really liked was the way city services work now. Here are some of my observations form the beta. Tell me what you think of the way city services work now. And to the haters: please try to stay on the topic of city services. You can talk about city size, the graphics, how EA is evil, etc. in the other topics dedicated to those subjects. This topic is for you for hating on city services and related topics.

Area of influence and capacity

In Simcity 4, schools had a round circle of influence. This means kids either travel by airballoons to school or they swim rivers/ climb cliffs/ cross highways to get there . One of the biggest improvements in the new Simcity in this aspect is that now kids travel by road. This makes you think completely different about how to place schools. Apart from the kids who live within walking distance you can also use schoolbusses. In SC4 this only increased the magic circle of influence but now you actually place the busstops. This allows a single school to serve large parts of the city. What I really like about this system is that it is more realistic, has more depth AND is easy to understand even for beginners. Place too many stops (watch hypnotoads videos on how not to place busstops ) and/or have to few busses and your kids will take too long to go to school. Not only that but also the location of the school and the reliability of the road access to the school are important.

Another thing that has been improved over SC4 is the way the capacity of schools work. In SC4 you had a simple slider which you could set to a single teacher with a small class to a lot of teachers for many students. Of course in real life, it is often classrooms space that is missing, not just extra teachers. Now, you have to actually add new classroom buildings if you want to expand your school. This makes a lot mores sense and creates more interesting dilemmas. If you put your school in a central place to serve as many students as possible, you might not have the room to expand. Heh, an actual problem in SC that real life mayors deal with, imagine that.

How city services are more intergrated with the city

In one of my beta cities I had an industry district connected with a long single road to my residential district. I also had a fire station near my industry. This is of course the typical SC4 setup if you like clean residential zones. I was just done increasing my zoning when a fire broke out in the residential district. Because I already build a fire station (after a fire destroyed my previous beta city) i felt safe and was not paying attention. A little while later the fire had spread and my city was burning. As I zoomed in to find out why, I discovered that my increased zoning had resulted in increased traffic on the one access road between the R and I zone. That in turn caused a daily traffic jam which stopped the fire trucks from reaching the R area.

I really love how more connected city services feel to the rest of the city. In SC 4 when fires break out, your trucks are usually there on time or you can just plop a new one (they are much more expensive in the new game). Also buildings like schools just give a boost to a mysterious circle around the building. Now the buildings actually interact with the rest of the city and can create of have problems because of stuff that influences other buildings. Playing SC4 again the next day, made me miss the services already. They are so much more shallow in SC4.

This makes it all the more unfortunate that because of the small map size, these design challenges become much easier then they could be. Networking is so much more important in this game that the smaller city tiles sizes really hurt what the game could be. I am hopeful for the future. If Maxis can deal with the size issue and release modding tools, this game has the potential to blow SC4 out of the water based on how much more realistic, complex, interactive and rewarding the city services system is alone.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Thank you for posting. That was informational and rational. I agree with you. From the videos, it seems that city services are handled more realistically than SimCity 4 and Cities XL combined.

--Ocram

[chris78hampe 4]

I cant wait to see the larger police and fire stations and see what modules they come with

[Herdervriend 46]

Awesome story:) When I read this I am getting quite exited:) LIke the realism of this:P

[robowing 1]

I have to admit, the first time i realized that the traffic had stopped my fire trucks from getting to the fire i was completely bowled over, i have always just been so used to them just appearing. Which is one of the positives for the new road system although i am curious how services from other tiles will actually work. in one city run i tried my hand at gambling and the roads into my town were completely blocked, makes me wonder if in like real life the cars will get out of the way for the emergency services

[bergerrunner 41]

Okay I'm confused. In Minnesota its a law that cars move to the shoulder or as close as they can get for emergency vehicles with their lights on. Its not that way in sim city? emergency services who need to get from point A to B are just regular traffic?

[MPleines 17]

One of the devs has already stated that traffic will not be able to get out of the way of emergency vehicles. You will have to take care not to place emergency stations near a road bottleneck.

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP, the new system is much better and also more interesting than SC4.

[Jasoncw 11,941]

Yeah I really like the way services are handled.

It's more direct and simple (events happen, an agent is dispatched to the location of the event), but the way it involves the transportation network gives more interesting micromanagement than just increasing or decreasing the capacity and radius funding sliders like in SC4.

[Zimmah 0]

Nice article indeed, way to make your first post. Anyway i think Simcity will be a great game and i can't wait to play it, but i really hope they will eventually allow a bigger city size.

the man two reasons they give are:

1) Computers can't handle it

2) Rankings would be unfair

well the solutions are easy:

1) Allow people who actually have anything better than "facebook game computers" to play on a bigger map.

2) Have separate ranking for bigger cities.

there, problem solved.

[Cob92 360]

Nice article indeed, way to make your first post. Anyway i think Simcity will be a great game and i can't wait to play it, but i really hope they will eventually allow a bigger city size.

the man two reasons they give are:

1) Computers can't handle it

2) Rankings would be unfair

well the solutions are easy:

1) Allow people who actually have anything better than "facebook game computers" to play on a bigger map.

2) Have separate ranking for bigger cities.

there, problem solved.

At least, they could make bigger cities available to sandbox mode only to start off, and add them to ranked play later when technology catches up.

[Spatzimaus 77]

My only real complaint about services was the high buy-in cost. That is, early on you need a garbage dump, a police station, a fire station, a medical clinic, and a school. (Plus power, water, and sewage outflow, but those aren't things you can share with other cities and the startup costs are small for the last two.) You can go a little while without one or more of these, but it won't be long until a fire starts or people start getting sick/injured. So, you have to pay for one of these fairly quickly, but they're EXPENSIVE, with most costing 20-30k at a time when you're earning a few hundred per hour. During the beta weekend I was taking multiple bond issues to afford these, knowing it'd pay off in the long term.

Now, there are a few ways this could be fixed:

1> Add an even smaller version of each. A small "doctor's office" that can only handle 1-2 patients and has no ambulance (but which patients can drive themselves to as needed) would be a nice stopgap before you can afford a full-service clinic.

In fact, take the above idea and have those be DYNAMICALLY placed. That is, if your city doesn't have enough Hospitals to support its current demand (and other cities in the region can't make up the difference), let there be a chance that some doctor will open up shop in an existing Commercial building. Once your city adds more capacity to its existing hospitals, those doctors' shops could close and be replaced with something more profitable, but in the meantime you won't watch a city collapse from lack of a service. It'll just hurt your budget a bit, as those doctors won't generate as much tax revenue as a business would.

2> Change the existing price structure to make the base service buildings less expensive, but the add-ons more expensive. If a 150-student School costs 16k, and a 200-student Classroom costs another 10k (and another schoolbus only 3k), then there's no downside to adding more classrooms to existing schools as needed. But if the school cost 10k (maybe with only a 100-student capacity) and each classroom cost 16k, then it'd make it easier to get started AND would encourage you to have multiple schools instead of just stacking 4 classrooms onto each existing school before adding a new one elsewhere.

3> Reintroduce the "City Ordnance" idea from SC4. Let us appoint a Volunteer Fire Brigade, that gives a small ability to fight fires and requires no dedicated building but which costs a small amount of money each month (more than what a comparable professional fire service would cost). Likewise, Neighborhood Watch and Free Clinics.