What happens after your city is built?

[cruisin 2]

I haven't played Simcity in a long time. I LOVED Transport tycoon deluxe, wish there was a new game like that, because there are constantly things to do as cities grow and new things come out.

Now for SimCity, this new game. What is there really to do when your city is built? I watched many youtube videos, but, I can't really see this being a game you can play for hours and hours as new things constantly change and stuff. Do you just update random buildings? Do people think once their city is built this game will get boring fast?

[macvirt 361]

You're supposed to go out there and tell how awesome and shiny it is, seeking a form of self validation of image by means of virtual messaging with unknown people, so they go out and buy it.

Back serious, really, just don't ask such questions There is no comparing SC4 with SC2013. You are approaching it from the direction of SC4 and TTD. Those were created for different types of users in a different era for a different market. SC2013 was created for today's trends, today's generic markets, today's patterns of social / casual / leisure gaming.

[Trioxis 32]

Even though you'll fill the map a lot faster than you would the large tiles from SC4, the concept of regional play may mean your cities will be more dynamic and will require more attention to keep running properly. I'm quite excited about the possibilities and challenges it may bring. Whether or not this is a good reason to keep playing is up to you, but I always got bored with the somewhat stale cities in SC4.

[Mudkest 29]

slightly off topic I guess, but on the "I loved transport tycoon" comment, have you looked into open ttd? its kind of a giant mod for the game, bugfixes and what not.

http://www.openttd.org/en/

[Xenocity 343]

In theory your city should be dynamic, thus alway in need of something.

But most of us quite playing when we get our cities to the spot we want them and start a new city.

[LucasK336 54]

It will be fun to see what happens when your oil-based city runs of oil or things like that...

[JaceTwice 115]

I'd imagine you'd start the next city in the region and see what happens from there. Chances are the second one will effect the first one in some way and you'd have to go back and make some changes to the first one you built, which then will affect the second one, and so on and so on for each city you add to the mix.

Once you've got an entire region filled with balanced cities and a great works then I would say you were done. And who knows how long that'll take.

[macvirt 361]

There's no such thing really as a state of balanced cities without micro management if the player is engaged in the multiplayer component. Even if he or she is not, there are interdependancies to take in to account. Predominantly - as mentioned - derivative from the market & transaction mechanisms. The joke of "running out of oil" is funny, but it is a good example of the necessity to keep track of cities. There's no real thing as "build & move on".

[strokesboy21 11]

start a disaster and rebuild hahahaha

[Harlequin_666 17]

SC2013 was created for today's trends, today's generic markets, today's patterns of social / casual / leisure gaming.

My problem is that social gamers...don't spend $60+ on a game. They usually play for free and do the micro-transaction route, or they pay $4.99 for something like Angry Birds. And a lot of us here won't be paying $60 on such a limiting game. Now if the game was for sale for $20 or $30, then I can see the "social gamer" aspect, and EA can make even more money with DLC. Paying $60, one would be more hesitant to pay $5-$15 for chunks of downloadable extras.

[Hoipus 292]

I now understand that it is a rental game, and if I choose to "buy" it, I will "buy" it for a rental price, like $5.

[nhgriffith 179]

Most of the Simtropolis community seems to only want to focus on any and every comparison between SC4 and SC2013 in which 4 beats 2013.

If this were 2006, and this were truly a sequel or simply just the next iteration in the series, I could see more validity in these arguments. But it's not. It's 2013. And you guys only care about the fact that the map is smaller and that there's no god-mode terrain editor.

So what?

You know there are other difference between the game too, right? Take schools. I don't have a school with a round radial area of effect plopped in the center of a rigid grid-like city. Instead, I have a school with an area of effect that is defined by bus stops that I personally place, and the layout of my roads doesn't matter. I could give my school a radial area of effect just like SC4 if I wanted, but then give myself round, curved roads to match it. Or I could stick with grid-like squares, but design an efficient bus route to properly navigate into the corners.

The same goes for police, fire, and hospital coverage. You're no longer plopping a radial-coverage based building in the center of a grid-based city. This has been a major plight in SimCity for over 20 years now.

And it's fixed. (And is also more realistic, and when it comes to any simulator game, realism is high on my list of criteria for quality.)

Yet no one on Simtropolis seems to care, because the city is smaller now.

Your city isn't done when you've filled the map. If that were the case, how come New York City still bothers to elect a mayor? It happens because the city is still alive. The city still has problems that need solving, and the city is still growing. And this is happening despite every square mile of New York City already being zoned, powered, and given running water and sewage, etc. All the basics are still covered. Yet that city still grows.

So why shouldn't our SimCity cities continue to grow?

Once you've covered all the square mileage of your city, you start expanding on your third axis. You grow your buildings upward. Upgrade streets to increase density.

You can also grow your city's wealth by focusing on improving the tenants. Whether improving your industry from dirty to clean high tech industry, or turning those low-wealth fast-food joints into higher wealth commercial buildings, or changing that run down apartment block into high-rise condominiums, there's plenty of options for city growth. Moreover, you can focus on some of the city specializations.

Just because you've zoned every square inch of your city and got some sort of building to grow in there doesn't mean your city is done.

But even when you do get to the point of being "done" with the city (which even happens in SC4), just go to a different area in your region and start working on that. Plus, there will be great works that multiple cities will collaborate on to build.

[Spatzimaus 77]

There's no such thing really as a state of balanced cities without micro management if the player is engaged in the multiplayer component. Even if he or she is not, there are interdependancies to take in to account.

This. In SC4, you didn't have to balance a tile before moving on to another one, because time wasn't passing on tiles you weren't actively controlling. This was most obvious on the "dump" cities, where you'd put a massive garbage dump and dirty power plants to support whatever big city was next door; since pollution didn't cross borders, you could be as inefficient and filthy as you wanted and it'd still work out just fine. But even without that, you never had to worry about what was going on in the cities you weren't controlling.

But in this game, time is still passing in your other tiles, so even a single-player region with multiple cities can have all sorts of problems. If your budget wasn't balanced in your first city, then if you spend too long in your second city you might return to find a collapsed first city. Even if it was balanced at the time you played it, the addition of a second city might change the balance of commuters to where the first city no longer has the same economic demands it did before. For instance, if your second city has a big university, then the education levels of the entire region will increase, which means more wealthy sims, which means lower population densities (as high-wealth buildings hold fewer people than low-wealth for a given land area) and different desires for parks and such. On the other hand, adding those universities might mean that when you return to your first city, you find its old dirty industries have been replaced with much cleaner and more profitable high-tech companies... basically, the simultaneous nature has its good and bad sides, but both serve to make the game less predictable.

Now, if you're playing multiplayer, each person will see these effects as they play, so it's not really a problem to adapt. But in a single-player environment, it means that you'll constantly have to revisit your old cities to make sure they're still doing their jobs... and that's before the resources start to run out, or the pollution gets into the groundwater, or the crime rate from casinos gets so out of control that the crime bleeds over into other cities. This is one area where I'm not unhappy with the 2x2km tile sizes; if we had 4x4s it'd be too easy to make a single self-sufficient city and never have to leave it, but with the smaller tiles we're going to be forced to specialize a bit, with different tiles having different specialties. And that not opens the door for the simultaneity issues mentioned above, it also encourages multiplayer play in general.

[osse84 18]

slightly off topic I guess, but on the "I loved transport tycoon" comment, have you looked into open ttd? its kind of a giant mod for the game, bugfixes and what not.

http://www.openttd.org/en/

What we need is an openSC4.org Love open ttd, but somehow time moves so much faster in it than what I member. Once money starts pouring, I set out building intercity track and before I'm done, suddenly it's 1992 and the game is almost over... Maybe it's just me who is exceptionally slow

[nhgriffith 179]

I don't think time actually passes in neighboring cities unless they're being played even in the new sc. If it did, this would be highly problematic for online multiplayer regions.