pressure

Damn. I like to think of myself as being good at managing resources from gaming experience but I've never gotten to a point where I've got so many resources I don't know what to do with all of it. It's been a life and death struggle in every game. I mean I only take the nastiest (by which I mean prettiest) maps but still. I remember soon after SC4 came out I was thinking about how cool SC5 could be, like, for example, if bridges took more than just a tiny chunk of the billions of dollars you can run up on cheetah in 10 mins, or if there was actual repercussions to bulldozing a few houses in the way of a new highway project. Granted, no highways or traffic in Banished. But bridges matter when you're fighting for every pound of food, or stone, or timber, but not all, and every home that you might want to bulldoze houses valuable members of the community. I also like how if you just sit and wait and try to build resources your whole town just multiplies, fills the available houses, gets old and dies.

Awesome video. Can't say I can argue with really any of his points. I did always think the Genesis was better hardware; guess I was the lil kid swallowing the marketing line that SNES was kiddie and Genesis was Resolutations n $%&^!. RADASS. That was the saying back then right? But if you wanted adult you played PC and consoles came down to simple fun, as it still stands. I was a little spoiled and always a contrarian. Knew a kid that had a Robbie and later knew a kid that had a Virtua Boy. Never anybody 3D0. Anyways I did have 32X and Sega CD and both were easily a big step up from either system hardware wise. No killer games tho. Saturn and Dreamcast had games. 32X and Sega CD no support. I'm still the contrarian tho and still love Turbografx 16. Inferior to SNES and Genesis but came way before both. Anybody that had a Wii and fucked around in the virtual console shop knows how fun and insanely wacky some of their franchises were. Jackie Chan 10 years before I or anybody in the US knew who Jackie Chan was. Anyways, Link to the Past, FFIII(XI), Super Metroid. Not even a competition.

Glad I subscribed to this thread -- almost forgot about Synekism! Still excited to see how the game progresses. Keep it up!

I refused to support it when it came out. It was insulting to call it Simcity. Even for the developer, Tilted Mill, it was crazy casual. Funnily enough, Maxis went with the Tilted Mill system of using agents for everything (like Caesar IV) in the new Simcity. Which also sucks ass. Now that a few years have gone by and I've relaxed a bit, I'm a little curious about Societies but I refuse to add one more penny to EA's balance sheet.

Came here after a post on the official Simcity forum asking about kickstarters for citysims that are NOT the bucket of crap known as Simcity 2013/Simcity Societies 2/Simplicity/P.O.S. I'll post a link to your game there (including, of course, that your game is at a very early stage of development). I'm sure I'm in the minority here but the lack of textures is no problem for me. I love the minimalist graphic style of Frozen Synapse and Synekism doesn't look TOO far away from that right now. And you can really end up with some cool looking textures of your own when you zoom out with the solid-colored block buildings as they are. Let us know if there's any way other than testing that we can support the game.

Badass, man.

Yo builders. Searched for every term I could think of both here and on the stex, no luck. Way back, 5 years or more ago, I had a mod (which most likely I got from here, possibly from BSC) which as far as I remember moved CO caps up a level. So the original lvl 5 cap was made to be the lvl 6 cap with the mod installed, lvl 6 cap -> lvl 7, etc. The idea was to fix the hole that can develop in the middle of a city when CBD building growth lagged behind R buildings. That particular mod would work, and so would anything else that does the same, or allows the user to set cap levels. Or anything else I'm not thinking of. TIA!

I had thought that was the direction they were going in. There was some kind of connectivity between sc4 and The Sims where you could input your sc4 citizen into The Sims, but I don't think it was in your own city so it was basically worthless. What couldn't happen is to have both sims running simultaneously at both the city level and the individual level, which is what would make that idea cool. Just not enough computing power yet. I really miss SimCopter and what was the other one? SimRacer? Where you could fly and drive through your cities 1st person. Or was it 3rd? It's been a long time. But it let you get inside your creation in a whole different way. I mean, what would be wrong with letting the SimCity fans play the role of level creator for a whole other set of casual game players that would have fun doing whatever stupid crap inside your city? Like Little Big Planet where the point is to play inside of fun levels somebody else has sweated and toiled over creating? They'd make hardcore and casual happy and make two streams of income off of only one product, or a full stream of income from only half a normal development budget if explaining that way made the suits happier. Now that I think of it, a damn good idea.

Welcome dude. I've been here forever and probably have about as many posts as you. =] Everything in SC4 strikes me as conceptual as opposed to photo-real. I like that myself but it does lead to goofyness if you try to compare sc4 to real life. As for your comment on an overhead planning view, I just turn the "zones" view on when I'm planning and everything that hasn't been plopped goes away. You still don't get the simplicity of a 2d view, but at least all your zoned obstructions are gone. And to officially re-add my opinion: screw EA, to put it in terms that won't get me banned. I'm not saying that because they make bad games; I'm saying it because they're EA and people need to do things to their mommas that would get me banned for describing. SC4 is a geek game, in the best sense of the word. EA does NOT do geek. They buy geek game developers and dismantle them (exceptions for biggies like Bioware but EA's fingerprints are still all over the Dragon Age and Mass Effect sequels). What we need for SC5 is a developer from somebody like Paradox. You know, the kind of game developers that actually develop actual games.

I see that the post on the cxl site is new, but the pics aren't. Were different pics to come?

Could be glass half full or glass half empty. What's for sure, though, is that buying 2011 will directly finance the continuing development of CXL. So if you feel like the game is missing something important, buy it so you and everyone else has a shot at getting that missing something! Not sure when/if GEMs will be released, but I'm sure everybody remembers the Rush Hour pack and how it completely transformed SC4, both with in-the-box content and material that supported further modding (which is still active today). Beta guys - have snow or sand resources been added yet? If not, I would think each would be unlocked with its corresponding GEM.

This is great. Props on the journal so far. Add me to the list of people that would like to see these principles on a somewhat larger scale. My city, which I may post a bit of later, was planned (somewhat unknowingly) under new urbanism, and I've had to turn away slightly from it because of the resident's #1 complaint: traffic noise. Either I've unsuccesfully used new urbanist principles or I've hit a SC4 simulation speedbump because everybody's commute is far too long, regardless of how close employment actually is to a given residence or an abundance of accessible mass transit. A third option is that new urbanism doesn't work, but that's just not the case in my experience. Downtown Denver, Colorado appears a great success story considering accounts I've heard of the way it was 30 years ago - a ghost town after 6:00 pm, like many other business districts I've witnessed. The experiment continues as the Denver metro area embarks on one of the biggest mass-transit projects of all time. I'm excited to see the results. It's not all perfect though - crime has risen with population and the bar district (lodo) is like a WTO meeting riot every weekend. You can see the cloud of tear gas from 10 miles, and smell it from farther. I'd like to see if you have any more success than I, so I then can steal it!