This is my first post on ST but this grabbed me a little. Im another who has been worried about the direction of SCS, is that why maxis have given the development to somebody else. SCS look to me to be too "cute", bit like The Sims or WoW (Lvl 80 undead or ork with rather huge axes should never look cute). It looks a very micro managed, and just plain wrong. I like the idea of the higher res grid, thats a must, but i still think no grid works better, I'll come back to that. Kill the full 3D idea for gameplay unless u fancy a crack at some 64bit programing to fully use the SLi/Crossfired cards u would need. Keep the regions and just make them work, its a system resources thing again. Dam if u made it 2D like the 1st born and it played and SCS did not we would be laughing. Use 5 lvls of weath, make crime relative to the area and make the transport work properly, like the 1000s or people coming out of your airport using hotels near to them and make the comerce work right, not just work on demand, when u want loacal shops and not offices. Split the types of air polution in smoke/smell/noise and use a flight path system for air ports (a lovley place called Eton gave me the idea for this, its next to Heathrow but its not in the direct landing/takeoff path of the flights, the money in that place is silly BTW, its a different world to most)
Has anybody throught of a new way to build roads, i think a system simular to the beazer tool in many graphic design packages would work great (the reason to loose the grid), so before building you could strech and bend the road before you place it, u could ask the road in certain areas to dig out mild hills, or have raised embankments along side highways (motorways) to cut the noise (we dont use elevated highways much here btw Americans) u could leave space either side of the road for later expansion into dual carage ways. The inside this boundry u would give it a tag, in the the UK they call these areas estates. U would then ask the interface to fill this area with a number of buildings of a certain weath and density; fill your average estate with homes for 3000, in 500 buildings with 10 (local) shops in 2 rows, weath would still work with land value. You could even select what buildings the game could not use in that area (for asthetics). When the estae was full and demand was good agents would ask your permission to develop that estate, u could even add items or open area into the estate as it was built, open area for space later on for schools, parks and so on. You would do this for all estaes and it would also place the streets as it does for u now, You would select the exits for the streets and their width. As things get dense in CO zones u would have a lots of roads and a lots of estates, they would because more like city blocks.
And for special buildings you have like landmarks or builings which are not placed every day (maybe bring back arcologys) u could use an insert button, instead of hundreds of buildings being in the menu all of the time, u could even add them to the menu for ease of use, or add new menu bars. With all these new options u would need to turn off a lot of thing to give breathing space. , if you were to add all the Office tool bars in any of the MS Office group you would have half the screen to work with, u adjust the GUI for your situation. I sound really complicated but when u consider a lot of the tools mentioned are used in this idea come from common office tools so it should work for everybody. Sorry just in case this works i had to give the over paid google eyed tw@t with more bugs in his software than a rain forest the credit thing for MS Office .
Ive played SC from the begining and am now very sad that is leaves us, to be fair i think i started playing 3 years after release (1989) but ive played them all. I like a lot of the ideas here. The whole advertising thing could get messy when it gets large but u only need 2 big companys who pay per month for users still playing the game.
SO my points are; Recognise limits and future limits of PCs and our selves Make it different, not SC5 Dont make it SCS Make it work and Finally anybody who does not know who the over paid goggle eyeds tw@t is, you are; too old, too young or stupid - be silent.
