Andy Gainey

I've made some (painfully slow) progress on implementing the core simulation code for my Since I'm finally giving the economic simulation some concrete attention, I am curious about what the community might think of a particular feature that is currently part of that core. The general feature in mind is that the cost, speed, and quality of various player-initiated activities can be affected by the current state of the economic simulation. (Such activities include stuff like road construction or the routine operation of city services.) For example, cities with a strong steel industry might allow the player to build bridges more cheaply, rather than having to import more expensive steel. But cities with a weak construction industry might experience slower construction times and higher construction costs due to the need to import construction labor from out of town. Similarly, the prevalence of a well educated work force and a large high-tech equipment manufacturing sector could make it cheaper to operate a hospital, but lack of a well educated work force could cause schools to be more expensive to run or have less educational effect due to not being able to easily hire good teachers. In addition to the player being affected by the economic simulation, the economy could conversely be affected by player-initiated city activities. If the player goes through a few years of building a lot of stuff, the local construction industry might boom. But if the player quits building and zoning for a while, then the construction industry might experience a contraction if the city were a major source of construction work. In all these cases, I envision the behavior arising simply because the player is essentially just another participant in the economic simulation, not because the specific behaviors are pre-designed and hard-coded into the game. I realize that getting the desired kinds of emergent behavior out of a simulation can be tricky, but for now I'm hopeful on that front. On the other hand, if I can achieve such emergent behavior, I'm still not sure about what impact such behavior would have on the sense of fun that players would experience. Here are some hopes and worries: Speculated Pros The city will feel move "alive" and reactive, and the player will have more "interesting decisions" available. The player will feel like their decisions have more meaning to the evolution of the city. The player will feel like their decisions are influenced more strongly and obviously by the current circumstances of the city. It sets the stage for an interesting variety of designed scenarios or challenges, rather than faking such scenarios using superficial or blunt mechanics. Speculated Cons Changing prices might be more frustrating than fun. Relevant economic data might be hard for the player to quickly find, evaluate, understand, and respond to. The quantity of relevant data and the potentially complex consequences of player decisions might inhibit more casual play. (I don't want to "dumb down" gameplay, but I don't want the gameplay to turn into a tedious desk job either! ) I have some ideas to mitigate con #1, but even with those ideas, prices for the player will still change, just not very rapidly. For con #2, I imagine this will just require the proper effort to design high quality charts and maps. Once I have a simulation producing lots of this relevant data, I'll be able to more easily evaluate what it takes to understand it, and solicit feedback and insight from others about how best to present it visually. For con #3, the balance that I'll be attempting to achieve is for the player to be capable of mostly ignoring the details and still being able to build a reasonable city without dooming it all to failure. But for the players that want to dig deeper, I want the economic simulation to provide that meaningful depth. And I want interesting tidbits of those details to be poking up near the surface, easy to find if you're looking for them. Ultimately, I envision the economic simulation as a major source of story telling elements that the players will use to build narratives for their city. Do you share any of these hopes or worries? Have any additional hopes, worries, or general ideas to add to the mix?

Are you asking about a market size, i.e., number of people who would pay a typical amount of money to purchase such a sequel? Or are you more curious about the number of more dedicated players who actively get involved in the community and/or talk about the game a lot with friends and acquaintances? Last year I worked on a business plan focused on developing something that could loosely be considered a real SC4 sequel, so it was important for me to answer the first question about market size. In the ideal case (that is, with a magical marketing ability to reach the entire target market), I would speculate anywhere from 1 to 3 million, largely based on what limited sales data I could find for the SimCity series in particular, and various other city builders like the Tropico or Anno series as well. If one could break into a different, larger market (for example, crossing over into the realm of MineCraft players), then the target market could be 10 million, but that's a heck of a stretch. As for fanbase, I found that to be a lot harder to estimate. For a while I was considering a business model that would depend heavily on an active modding community, but the numbers I saw I would require were intimidating. So I chose to not focus on the potential size of the fanbase, and just concern myself with playerbase instead.

Introduction: Hi Simtropolis! I'm Andy Gainey, founder of the newly formed independent game dev company Experilous. For my first major project, I'm seriously considering working on a city builder. I have been contemplating city builder designs for a long time, have accumulated many ideas (as we all have, no doubt ), and have recently been putting together a pretty strong vision for many aspects of this project. Nonetheless, there are plenty of major design decisions that I haven't made yet, and so I seek the aid of the city builder community during these early design stages. In the upcoming weeks, I'll be posting questions and topics of discussion on issues that I know are important but that I have not yet made any strong decisions about. I'm curious about the features and styles of gameplay that are important to each of you, and to what degree. In addition, there are numerous technical and design challenges a city builder project is likely to face, and I'm eager to explore the vast landscape of potential solutions to those problems with you. I'll keep a record of those topics in this post. As a preview of where I'm likely to go first: Discussions: Detailed agent behavior versus statistical approximations (not yet posted) Plenty more... In addition to the above discussions, we can use this thread for talking about what topics you think are most worthy of discussion, especially during the initial stages of design and development. I am also open to any general questions you might have about the project and my plans for it. I know I don't have a lot to offer yet in the way of functioning systems or screenshots, but hope to begin working on prototypes soon. What systems would you be most interested in seeing prototyped first? Current Vision: Obviously, there are a lot of big decisions that I have not yet made. So what does my vision consist of? Here are a few of the important attributes I seek to achieve: Modern Large Cities: Every time I run numbers to estimate the technical feasibility of a design based on CPU, GPU, memory, and bandwidth concerns, I'm working with upper limit numbers such as 10 million residents, 1 active vehicles, or 400 square miles (~1000 square kilometers). I've had to reject some ideas because they simply wouldn't get even close to functioning given those numbers. I want large cities to be an option for players, and I don't think I'm alone in this desire. Super-Efficient Engine: The core simulation engine needs to be optimized for modern computers. That means things like 64-bit support, broad parallelization to fully take advantage of multicore CPUs and maybe even GPGPUs, and cache-friendly processing to be able to churn through large amounts of data. If I want to provide the large numbers while minimizing the amount of statistical approximations I depend upon, an efficient engine design will be absolutely critical. Thorough Mod Support: Modding communities can do great things, even when it isn't made particularly easy. I want to go out of my way to encourage modding. In the ideal case, I'd like to provide in-game editors for certain types of mods (such as by making a building architect tool an integrated component of ordinary gameplay). A system for handling dependencies, versioning, and other technical mod issues has also been on my mind for a while. High Degrees of Customization: Sandbox games are ultimately about the player's vision, and I want to enable as much city customization as possible, both functional (such as highway interchanges) and aesthetic (such as park layouts or street surfaces). Feel free to follow my activites on my website experilous.com, or through my Twitter handle @AndyGainey. I look forward to interacting with this community during my pursuit of building a worthy game!

Oh yeah, I definitely remember MUDs. That's a pretty cool concept to integrate a strong creative component into a MUD system. In general I don't think the software architecture of MUDs will work for what I'm hoping to accomplish, but there might be some high level concepts that could provide inspiration. As you stated in the multiplayer thread, I do hope to have interesting behaviors and properties emerge from a simulated system, instead of hard coding those behaviors and properties. But in order to achieve the scale I want, I'm learning that I have to be very picky about what actions the simulation actually involves at a low level, in order to reliably produce only the types of emergent behaviors that are relevant to gameplay. I've seen (and created) simulations that have failed to produce the desired behaviors, and/or have produced lots of not fun behaviors. A common cause seems to be that these simulations often are based upon actions that are too low level, or try to model real life a little too directly. These simulations also tend to be unable to handle large numbers due to how specific and numerous all their actions are that need to be computed. Creating a simulation using this kind of model has been my instinct also, but I'm slowly forcing myself to think outside the box some. My brain doesn't like that very much though; it rebels frequently. Thanks! I've been reading some about Virtucity too. I'm interested in what decisions are working out, which ones caused complications, et cetera. Over the past month of development, I've been almost entirely ignoring graphics, UI, variety of features, and so forth, and instead focusing almost entirely on the core simulation. And boy have I run into complication after complication. My most recent struggle has been with trying to get the economic system and the transit system to play well together, such that who trades with whom actually takes travel cost into account reasonably, while being able to scale up to hopefully millions of agents trading with each other. I'm sure you can imagine some of the pathfinding pain that that can involve. I think I came up with a strange but workable solution, but it's one of those things like I was describing about where I had to actively avoid using a straight-forward realistic model and instead use a model that doesn't make realistic sense, but should produce the large-scale behaviors I want. (In particular, buyers and sellers that are closer to each other have a better chance of making a trade with supply or demand is limited, and their prices tend to be more favorable on both sides of the trade. In other words, local traders should have a competitive advantage over farther away traders.) I totally sympathize. Single player has been my greatest source of fun also, and I absolutely do not want to force or even nudge people toward a multiplayer mode. But my curiosity and whatever business instinct I have suggest that there exists a good way to implement multiplayer. One that might even appeal to players, myself included, who have traditionally gravitated toward single player modes. So my plan at this point is to simply maintain the technical possibility of a multiplayer mode, but otherwise design the game around single player. Once an early version of the game is out, if enough people take advantage of whatever limited multiplayer exists and seem to have fun with it, then I will try to expand that experience. I will admit that the technical requirements have already been a bit of a burden at times, and I'm sure they'll keep cropping up, limiting certain solutions that might work in a purely single player game. But keeping that door of possibility open is important to me; a business risk that I'm willing to take, I guess. I just want to emphasize that the effects of this decision are almost purely technical, however, and do not have much if any influence over the heart of what I want the game to become.

As described my I'm in the early stages of designing a city builder and seeking community input on a variety of topics. The first topic I want to tackle: Multiplayer. Some people have no interest in multiplayer, and I similarly feel that a city builder should be single player at its core. But there's clearly a large demand to share in-game experiences with one's friends even within the city builder genre, and I'd love to develop a game that is designed to optionally accommodate that shared experience as fully as possible. Or at least as fully as is relevant, which raises the question: How much multiplayer are people interested in? The "MMO route" taken by Cities XL and SimCity 2013 isolate each city, and thus each player, quite a bit. The system is easier to implement on top of an otherwise single player experience, but does it do a good job of capturing the social aspect that people seek? How much more satisfying would it be if multiple players could be actively working within a single city at once? Greatly? Marginally? Would it matter if, for technical reasons, only one player at a time could be modifying a specific area in the city? Or more severely, only one player at a time modifying anything in the whole city at all? Would it actually be a welcome feature to be able to limit certain players to certain areas or activities, especially if hosting a public server with strangers joining cities? In short, what, if anything, excites you about the possibility of multiplayer? What type of experience would you most want to share with your friends? Is a save file and/or screenshots enough (e.g., city journals)? Or having multiple cities interact with a shared regional economy? Or do you want to collaboratively build a city together? What activities, what details, would be the most engaging in a multiplayer city builder? If you want to let your imagination run free for a moment, by all means, be my guest; I'm fascinated with the untold possibilities of where everyone's imaginations might end up.

Sorry for being quiet on here for a few weeks. I got mired in some technical difficulties and kept struggling to get through them. Fortunately that breakthrough seems to have happened a few days ago. The result is that I now have a partial foundation of the simulation running. After the player approves a blueprint for road/zone layout, the city goes to work buying land, buying construction materials, and hiring construction labor to get roads built. Private agents do the same to build houses, and then the same for industrial if there is enough demand from residents to warrant it. Price beliefs for residents who buy the resources from local industy (or import more expensive resources if there's not a sufficient local source) also adjust over time, which reflect increases in cheap supply or increases in demand. Eventually these price belief adjustments will be done for all buyers and sellers. All this economic activity has raised my next investigative question that I want to raise to the community, which will be posted shortly. Also, here's a screenshot of current progress: (Though I do want to stress that the visuals and the user interface are all complete placeholders right now.)

Yeah, those lists have been valuable as I've done research on various projects. Thanks for maintaining them, and thanks for the addition of my project! Sorry I don't have a name for the game yet. Names are so tricky; I've scrapped so many for being lame or having trademark issues. :-/ On a related note, another project also popped up just this last week that got a quite a lot of attention on Reddit and elsewhere: Citybound. I'll be eager to see its progress. The best of luck to all active city builder projects!

I've been making some good progress on the very earliest version of the game. You can read about it here. And here's a screenshot: Note that the grid-based 2D style is likely to eventually be replaced. But in the early stages I have decided that it is more important to get to the state where I have a "complete" game as quickly as possible, and then repeatedly iterate with new features, modifications, and totally replaced components. I'll surely "throw away" a lot of early work in the process, but I have no doubt that the project will be better for it. Trying to figure out how to get from nothing to the final envisioned version in one direct step would simply be untenable. Also, if anyone wonders about the zone colors, for now I'm trying to align more with industry standards (to the extent that there are standards) than with SimCity standards. I'm curious what people's reactions will be.

That looks awesome! I've spent so much time playing Pharoah before; I could probably have a ton of fun with 1849. I think my biggest issue that makes it difficult to play Pharoah today is the small screen size and some annoyances with the UI. That's a typical issue with me and old games. If 1849 provides similar core gameplay but with a more up-to-date UI, I'd totally dig it. (Oops, sort of a gold rush pun.) Voted for you on Greenlight. By the way, the link you provided didn't seem to work, but I found this one that did: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217009121 It looks like they already have early access through IndieGameStand, though I don't know what the details are, and how it'll play out with a full release and the possibility of getting on Steam. https://indiegamestand.com/store/788/1849/

Continuing on with I'd like to discuss traffic simulation this time. I've spent the past couple weeks working on a prototype simulator to get a feel for what is technically achievable. (I'll have some preliminary results posted later this week; you can read about of my few early bugs on my blog.) But more important than technical feasibility would be practical value: How much (and what kind of) detail would actually maximize entertainment, in the face of certain tradeoffs? I would classify the tradeoffs into three broad categories: Performance, Interface, and Mechanics. On the performance side, naturally the more detailed a simulation gets, the slower it will run when attempting to run as fast as possible. For interface, it's sort of a tradeoff between ease-of-use and and creative power. And for mechanics, it's largely a matter of feedback from the game to the player: Can a player understand what's happening in the simulation, why it is working well or poorly, and what one could try in order to improve traffic problems? Running at max speed, how long would you be willing to wait for the simulation to process one in-game year? (What counts as an in-game year can be fuzzy, but you can loosely base it on other city builders you've played.) Would you be more forgiving if it were a large city? For example, what if a city of 100,000 people could simulate a year in 1 minute, but a city of 10 million, while playable, would take nearly 2 hours? Or would you prefer the SimCity 4 style where you could focus on just one segment of the city at a time, and thus get more predictable performance regardless of how large the overall city were? The tradeoff would be that the simulation for most areas of the city would be frozen or vastly simplified during that time. Regarding interface, I'm not sure I have any specific questions at this early stage. The ideal is obviously to achieve both ease-of-use and creative power simultaneously. I am optimistic that with effort, and with a lot of feedback and ideas from players, the ideal can be accomplished. But for now I think that just having an idea of priorities would be helpful to me. Judging from past discussions and player activity, it seems clear that a capable interface for designing highway interchanges, rail yards, bus/subway routes, and similar complex structures would be very welcome. What type of transit-related structures would you most like to see have a well designed interface? Finally, I have a concern that if the game mechanics contain too much complexity, even if the computer is able to process all the details, and even if the interface allows easy creation of complex transit networks, the result will be an incomprehensible mess of data, and an overwhelming array of options available to the player. But I also suspect that different types of players will judge this point of excess quite differently: Aesthetic builders would love to have a myriad of options. Functional tinkerers on the other hand would probably do better with just enough options to provide proper control over the behavior of the simulation. So from this suggested distinction, which transit network features would you like to have mostly for aesthetic purposes, and which are desired primarily for behavioral control? Which ones are important for both reasons? (For example, I suspect highway interchanges would be.) Other features to consider might include rail yards, lane count, intersection styles, road surface styles, specialized lane use (bus lanes, no trucks, et cetera), pedestrian routes, and I'm sure many more.

Very valuable feedback in general, thanks! As for the specific of more types of traffic, I'm in agreement. Freight in SimCity 4, for example, was nice, but not all freight leaves the city. Businesses and industries are shipping stuff between locations all the time. Certain commercial services are making house calls in residential areas. School buses are everywhere. Shopping is constantly happening. (I was surprised when I discovered that commercial zones SimCity 4 do well only if people drive by them on their way to work. Huh?) In addition, I think it would be fascinating to have other events too, stuff that isn't just routine day-to-day traffic. Weekend traffic is different from weekday traffic. Holidays can have various effects on traffic patterns. Seasonal patterns are often relevant. One-off tourist events (Olympics, anyone?). Heavy construction. Snow storms, heavy rain, dense fog, or other "minor" disasters. None of that is going to ruin a city necessarily, but how the traffic network is able to adapt to those various events can definitely affect citizens' opinion of the city and their quality of life. The trick of course would be to enable the player to comprehend the affects of these various events. But I think something as simple as providing a list of recent events and being able to limit any particular graph or map overlay to a specific event would be sufficient. For example, if you look at the congestion map, it will by default show the average congestion over the last n simulated days. If you want to just look at weekday congestion, that'd be an option. Or you see that their was a snow storm recently; limit the congestion map to show what congestion was like on the day of the storm. (Depending on randomness, it was most likely a weekday, but might've been a weekend, which would change how congestion was affected.) My hope would be that this would give each city a strong sense of personality and history; each city could feel more unique. Trying to experience the joys of creativity usually fails if you don't feel as though you can create something that is unique in some relevant way.

Haha, don't worry; no death threats from me. I love turn based. But I don't believe I've ever really considered doing a city sim using a turn based model before. On a technical level, many of the options I'm considering would work out to be more or less turn-based (the traffic simulation among them), but I still always envisioned typical real-time style of presentation. Making it truly turn-based would have some interesting implications. Off the top of my head, I imagine that the variety of available player actions and the scale of a single turn would need to be balanced so as to reduce the number of turns where the player does nothing but hit [End Turn] again. Otherwise, the game would frequently feel pointlessly tedious. Then again, even if I stick with a real-time presentation, thinking about it from a turn-based perspective could help inspire some solutions to the already existing problem of waiting for things to happen. If the game runs fast enough, sure, you can just run it at cheetah speed for a minute or so and then get back to spending money doing stuff, but it still feels a bit like you just wasted all that time in your city's in-game history. Finding meaningful ways for a player to always be doing something relevant and engaging is on my list of design considerations, and with the turn-based perspective, I think you've given me another tool in my toolbox!

Yeah, at this point I am definitely considering ways to create a statistical simulation that can be conveniently and believably translated into a visual representation when needed. I remember when I learned how SimCity 2000 chose the density of its marching ants, based on proximity to traffic generators. Drove me crazy seeing a long highway with heavy traffic near the origin and destination, but nothing in between. That's a system I emphatically do not want to resort to. While I do want to make the game relatively easy to play for more casual players, I do have the luxury of prioritizing complexity more than Maxis, as I don't have to sell something like 2 million units just to consider the project a financial success. Heck, 10,000 purchases in a year would be a definite success for me; 100,000 would be wildly successful. So I think my approach will be to ensure early on that the core of the simulation supports a relatively high level of complexity. From there I can incrementally improve the interface and balance the game to be playable and enjoyable even when only utilizing just the simpler game features. (As you might infer from this approach, my current plan is to pursue an alpha-funding approach, releasing the game for a cheap price as soon as it provides a sufficiently playable and fun experience, and then improving it from there. Existing players would receive all updates for free, and the price for new players might increase over time with major updates until reaching whatever I might consider to be an appropriate full price.) Indeed, even though the grid gets in the way of the numerous non-conforming parts of a city, it is super convenient for the majority transit network design. (Or at least would be if it could handle straight diagonals better.) I want to get away from the traditional fixed grid altogether, to properly enable the freedom that a gridless system can provide. But the convenience of the grid must still somehow be maintained. I had an idea a while back about letting the player configure virtual grids that could be used for snapping roads to them. After watching some Let's Plays of SimCity 2013, I realized that the guideline system moves in that direction, but I think it's too simplistic to really capture the balance of power and convenience provided by SimCity 4. I might talk about that more in the future, but the core of the idea is that virtual grids will work like guidelines, but will be configurable (angles, curvature, distance between each cell, blending style with nearby virtual grids, et cetera), can be present even in the absence of existing roads (or when overlapping non-conforming roads), and can persist for future design work that should properly match the flow and alignment of the existing city. Holy awesome information, thanks! So far I've been focused almost purely on route assignment, working under the assumption that I could come up with simplistic but sufficient models for the other three steps. (Not that I was aware of this 4-step model before now, but I can see how a lot of my thoughts fit very naturally into this model.) My assumptions may be off, however. I'll be studying this stuff in more depth! I'll admit that I'd been wanting to do an agent-based system, because I really want to have the simulation generate emergent behavior, rather than fake it based on patterns we've already observed in the real world. But I'm probably overlooking a large selection of statistical and/or aggregate models that still have plenty of internal feedback and can generate the type of emergent behavior I'm looking for. I also need to keep in mind this advice originating from Sid Meier: "The player should have the fun, not the designer or the computer." You all can keep me in check.

Wow, that is some serious dedication and patience! Maybe one day I can give them a more pleasant and natural experience. The "togetherness" that you mentioned about true cooperative play is indeed one of my primary objectives in considering multiplayer. A sense of togetherness is a very good way to put it, thanks! This ties in really well with a basic idea I had for projects. To take a tangent, I've always been annoyed by the immediate build system of most builder games: Spend your resources to make something, and if you mess up, spend more to destroy your first attempt and try again. So I'm planning to have let a player design projects first, seeing how much they would cost, but not spending resources until the player finalizes the design. I then realized that this could be extended to multiplayer with different players designing different projects. From there, different systems could be employed for approving plans, such as designating one player the "mayor/dictator" who has sole ability to approve/deny, or having a "city council" that votes on projects. I still imagined this just being among friends/acquaintances, but with care (such as perhaps with some of the nuances you mentioned), it could be opened up a little more widely to whomever wanted to submit projects for consideration.

Thanks for the thorough reply! Modularity sounds like a major component of your interests. Mine too. Your approach to breaking down the different categories of modular pieces is very interesting. For example, the way streets add street-side parking to whatever they're attached to is fascinating; I would have never thought of that possibility. Oh man I love the traffic query tool of SimCity 4. If I can't at least get that level of information out of my system, I'll be sorely disappointed. I would like to have at least enough detail in the simulation to more reasonably fake the real-time display of cars whenever the player slows the game down to near-real-time speeds. The cars in SimCity 4 provided an at-a-glance indication of congestion, but the fading into/out of existence really bothered me. Sure, it was just a surface detail that didn't really impact the simulation, but we each have our psychological weaknesses.

I had forgotten all about that game, thanks for the reminder. Never played it, so I didn't realize what the multiplayer was like, but found this YouTube review that summarized it well. It's telling how in the review he notes that one can almost forget they're playing with someone else. My guess is that this was in part due to a combination of weak competition (since the game isn't really competitive by nature) and weak collaboration (since you can't work together to build the same area, only adjacent areas). Yeah, it wouldn't be worth the effort and design impact to implement multiplayer if it wasn't going to actually feel much like playing with others. For those who've played with others on SimCity 2013 or CitiesXL, do they sometimes feel similar? Or does it remain more obvious that you're playing with others? (Sidenote: I haven't played any SimCity 2013, and only a few hours of CitiesXL. I feel like a bit of a fool trying to make my own city-builder without having experienced those two, but they just don't look fun enough to drop the money/time on them, given my personal interests and what I've extensively read about them. But for research purposes, I should probably play them each for at least 10 or 20 hours.)

Gotcha. I played one of the earlier Anno games briefly (1404 I think), but couldn't really get into the RTS side of it. I prefer collaborative games over competetive, and RTS elements tend to be competetive, even if only subtly. But I might give it another try, or acquire 2070, just to better familiarize myself with the system. I almost got 2070 during a recent sale, but a review said the game was always-online, so I passed. But now that I look into it more, it looks like the always-online stuff is optional?

What about a more traditional form of multiplayer, rather than the MMO style that is all the rage these days? That is, there is no central server, no large persistent world with numerous players (mostly strangers). A player simply starts a new city or loads one of their existing cities from a local save file and then sends their friends the connection info. The friends play together for a while, building on the same city as a group (maybe with a shared budget, maybe separately somehow). When they're done for the day, the city is saved on the original player's local machine just like any normal single player city. If one friend wants to keep the city running in the background for friends to join and leave as they wish, that's cool (maybe it can auto-pause if no one is connected). If someone wants to publicize a server on a forum and get an ad-hoc group together, that'd be an option too. By letting the players operate the smaller-scale servers, they get a lot more power to determine exactly how they want to play with others. To my knowledge, this style of multiplayer hasn't been tried for city builders. (At least not modern/large city variants; there might be a few that focus on smaller fantasy villages or sci-fi colonies.) But judging from the multiplayer activity of other construction sandbox games like Minecraft or Terraria, it seems like it could be quite popular, especially if the city builder provided numerous avenues for aesthetic customization. Does that kind of experience happen to intrigue anyone?

So you two would be pleased with the large, persistent worlds of the MMO model, as long as it were implemented well? I can definitely see how the context of a larger world could really help make each city feel relevant. It wouldn't just exist in a vacuum, but actually fits into a larger system. Is that one of the major qualities that you would hope to get out of multiplayer? Also, is it a dealbreaker if an individual player can observe the full details of only one city at a time, and must exit one city to load up the full simulation of another? Because city builders involve so much data and number crunching in the simulation, it's hard for me to think of a way to seamlessly transition from one city to the next unless the simulation itself were severly simplified. That also means that interactions between cities would exist on a much more abstract level than the details within the simulation. Economic interactions would need to work with summarized quantities (e.g., demand for workers, available students, sewage capaciy, et cetera), and running a full traffic sim across city boundaries would be infeasible. (That's probably the major reason that SimCity 2013 limits the number of intercity connections.)