SimCity Revisited in 2025

[MegaRapidz 28]

SimCity in 2025 I believe needs revisiting. Yes it's an old game, and many of us have strong opinions about it or EA in general, but I don't want to see it die.

To coarsely summarise the history of the game and its mods:

• SimCity released in 2013.
• The vast majority of mods were last updated around 2015.
• Few mods in 2019-2023 exist.
• We got an awesome modpack collection in 2020
• We had a horrendous game-breaking update in 2024 from EA (that has a janky fix to get the modpack working rn).

Given the modern tools such as AI and better technology, are we, as a community, any closer to understanding how to produce better or more ambitious mods for this game?

Are these threads even alive? I will kick some life into them regardless  

[urbanmosaic 239]

I've been using SC13 since it came out.  I've never used mods because I mostly played online, but now that online is mostly dead, I'll have a look at the collection of mods.  I can't play online now anyway cause EA falsely accused me of some unknown infraction.  I talked to their security people and they must have been OD'd on coffee and donuts cause they couldn't get the picture that either their AI is whacked-out or somebody hacked their servers.  I wasn't interested in getting involved in EA's psycho-political culture so I play offline.     

[MegaRapidz 28]

14 hours ago, urbanmosaic said:

I've been using SC13 since it came out.  I've never used mods because I mostly played online, but now that online is mostly dead, I'll have a look at the collection of mods.  I can't play online now anyway cause EA falsely accused me of some unknown infraction.  I talked to their security people and they must have been OD'd on coffee and donuts cause they couldn't get the picture that either their AI is whacked-out or somebody hacked their servers.  I wasn't interested in getting involved in EA's psycho-political culture so I play offline.     

I can confirm that there are only a handful of mods (in addition to the post-2020 modpack) to check out. Also, I was banned in 2015 for something about FIFA 15 that I can't remember, but fortunately, my appeal 10 years later caused them to unban my account out of goodwill. While my account was banned, I was completely unable to play SimCity offline as it couldn't access the online server for DRM verification, at least since the update in 2024. I recommend giving the appeal a try - but as humiliating as it is, being hyper respectful in your message may increase your chances of success.

Also, there appears to be some activity in 2025 of someone deep-diving into the labyrinth of SimCity code to reverse engineer it. This could be the start of pushing more ambitious mods, and accessing parts of the game we couldn't access before. I'm keeping my eye on it, and will make a post if it yields something new and unseen. 

[plumbbob_detonation 6]

That's some absurd bits of story, getting banned for no reason at all

If there are some hopes left for SimCity, I'd love to see the way agents work gets fixed, and then transport. They're so dumb when it comes to finding work or shops, It always irritates me when I see those Sims fail to commute correcly (going back and forth between 2 bus stops ???), The developpers never adressed these problems which caused a lot of backlash back in 2013. The game really has a good foundation but the execution is so messed up (curse you EA). But I suppose that would mean rewriting thousands of lines of code :/

I gave up SimCity quickly in 2013 and lost track of all the discussions around these problems as there were just too many. Now that I come back to SimCity, I think that I like the game more than 12 years ago, with mods and a much lower expectation haha. It's still very annoying sometimes but I can actually enjoy it now.

[Mardoin69 1]

I'm not sure if some people's ban situation was due to this but, there has been a hacker on the Simptropolis site in the past. I paid for some security services which listed this site as having been hacked. Also, my profile data and login credentials (along with a lot of other members) was collected and distributed / sold to other hackers (or, interested parties) on the dark web. It's been quite some time ago that this happened and the security service (along with my own due diligence) resolved this security breach for me. I made sure to change up all my login credentials of course. I thought I should mention this for anyone who hasn't changed up their login credentials in a long time. They probably should.