SlightlyMadman

That's a very good point. The more I play, the more I notice that the special sims can have a huge impact on your city. I think one of the biggest mistakes TM made with the game was not emphasizing them enough. It would be great to see a screen that listed stats on the special sims generated (beyond # of criminals, and total hippies and zombies generated), so we could really look at it and see things like: "Oh, I've got a lot of hippies. I need to add more venues, especially ones that spawn bouncers."

First off, if you don't like SCS, you're entitled to your opinion, but I'm posting this for those of us who have actually been finding enjoyment in the game, but want more of a challenge balancing the city budget. If you want to talk about how much the game sucks, please feel free to do so in one of the other topics devoted to the subject, thanks. I'm guessing most of the people here who are playing SCS, use TM's maintenance mod. It goes a long way towards adding some challenge to the game, and it can actually be quite rough to get a big city going on the "Challenging" difficulty level, but it still becomes a cakewalk once you get the city going. At some point, the cash coming in overtakes the maintenance by leaps and bounds, and the game gets too easy (and therefore boring). In an attempt to look at the image further, I loaded the xml building data into a spreadsheet to crunch some numbers, and came up with some interesting results: http://atzok.com/games/simcity-societies/ Assuming 5% maintenance, normal difficulty, only content sims, and ignoring hours of operation, and average values across the board, a workplace will bring in almost twice as much net profit as it costs to house and entertain its workers. If you look at the charts, you can also see a huge disparity in weekly net profit/cost between buildings. For instance, the Mechanized Farm brings in $820.31 per worker per week, whereas the evangelical center only nets $150. For the most part, workplaces open more will generate a greater net profit, making them a good value. Interestingly enough, the police and fire workplaces are mostly at the top of the charts, making them more profitable even than Corporate Hives and Drone Nexuses. This is a big clue as to why the game can start out so easy, as these are usually among the first workplaces many build. Ultimately, the root of the problem is that the profits were not balanced with maintenance taken into consideration, and the reason buildings like police and fire are so profitable, is because they were made cheaper to build. My goal in working this out is to eventually re-balance the cash values, so that an average set-up on normal difficulty would result in housing and venue costs per sim coming very close to workplace income. This means that, in order to grow a city significantly, venues and happiness would need close scrutiny such that your sims aren't given more than they can use. A venue that's never being visited should drag down your economy until you demolish it. Another major area of improvement is in paying close attention to buildings with effects that result in happiness or profit benefits. These should ultimately result in a loss on their own, made up for by the fact that they're increasing profits elsewhere. A town with nothing but police stations and luxury homes should never be profitable, as you're paying maintenance on an idle police force. A town with tenements, a few steel mills, and several police stations, on the other hand, should work out well. In summary, what I'm saying here is that this game can actually be made interesting and challenging, beyond the simple building toy that it is now. It may never be as complex as SC4 (and ultimately, maybe it shouldn't be), but it can still represent many of the same challenges, albeit in a more abstract manner.

I got to try the game out for several hours last night, and I'm still not planning on buying it, but it was actually kinda fun. A good XP or a trip to the bargain bin will make this a worthwhile purchase, IMO. I found that the trick to the game is not to think of yourself as managing the city, but as managing its citizens. It's basically more of a macro-management version of The Sims, than it is a city management game. It's also extremely pretty to look at, once you turn off that awful restricted camera.

Yes, thank you for the constructive post, FieryUnicorn! I have to say, I agree with you completely. Everything I see about this game screams "budget title" to me. I would even go so far as to say I'd pay $30 for the game (although it sounds like I'd probably still be disappointed), and if I found it for $10-20 in the budget bin, it sounds like I'd be pretty happy with the purchase. As it stands now, they're charging $50 for a glorified building block sim, and that just doesn't seem right.

Originally posted by: The_Dalai_Llama I have a feeling this thread will head south and go negative fast... I'll start, I guess. They need to add a lot of stuff... I mean a LOT of stuff in order for me to buy SCS, but this game wasn't intended for me so life goes on.quote> It appears you're correct, I was hoping there were enough people here like me who see the potential for a fun game that we could have some constructive conversation. Please feel free to lock this thread if it keeps up like this. To add more constructive conversation, I'd also be happy if they added some interaction with The Sims 2. I was actually surprised not to see it in the first place, since it seems like such an obvious companion to the everything else in the direction they took the game. Even something as simple as a one-way import of your neighborhood, with sims and houses intact, would be really neat.

Like many people here, I'm upset by how disappointing SCS seems to be, because I was honestly hopeful that it would be a fun game. The screenshots I see still look really cool to me, and I'd really like to enjoy this game, but I simply will not buy it until they add in a few features that I consider critical. I suspect I'm not alone in this, so what features would you need to see in a patch or expansion pack to buy this game? For me, I'd need more transit options (at least rails and highways). If I think of it as a sandbox city designing program, instead of an actual game, I could have fun with it (much like I play The Sims 2 sometimes just because I like building houses, even though the game itself is horribly boring), but not without proper transit. If they patch this into the game, or release a gold edition that includes a transit expansion pack at the current price, I will buy it.

Thanks for the impartial review. The failings of this game seem to severe for me to drop my money on it right now, but it sounds like a decent expansion pack could really make this into something interesting. I'll stick with SC4 for now, but keep an eye on it for the future (and let's be honest, there will almost definitely be numerous expansion packs, seeing as that's EA's new modus operandi).

Last night, I tried adding a brand new city bordering my supply city. I started it on easy, so it had the full 500,000 simoleons, minus what it cost me to make some roads, power lines, and zone some residential. Even though it had no power at all, and the supplier had a vast surplus, I could not get it to accept the deal from either end, after going back and forth 5 or 6 times. Initiating a garbage deal was no problem, as usual. I've installed a few plugins before starting this new city. The latest NAM update, some wall and park mods, mostly really minor stuff. schm0, have you installed any new plugins recently?

I've been running Vista for a while now, and SC4 is actually one of the best performing games on it. Any other games I have with fancy 3D tend to have problems (this isn't actually Vista's fault though, it's because my graphics card doesn't have updated drivers). Sadly, that's about where the good news ended for me. After a couple days, I completely ignored the interface niceties. Having to click a popup 1-3 times whenever I try to launch most applications is driving me absolutely batty. I'm tempted to turn off the user level security, but at that point I may as well just install XP and have more memory available (Vista takes up about 600mb as soon as it boots).

I'm having this exact same problem, it has me stumped. I've never had any issues with it before, just in a brand new region I created. I have a gigantic slums city, where I want to stash my power plants. The cozy suburban city next door is successfully shipping its trash out, but I can't get it to buy power. My slum is producing at twice its needs, I have 2 highway, 1 train, and 3 power line connections between them. I clicked on the power overlay and the power lines are connected properly to the rest of my city (in both cities). The suburban city has over 100,000 simoleons, so that's not my problem either. My suburbs is now having blackouts, and my slums is now out of money because it's paying for the new power plants I just built that it doesn't need! I even tried running power to another adjacent city to the slums (an agricultural community), and it won't work there either.

I had the exact same issue with NAM radical when I was using it. I ended up putting it back down to the more conservative settings because the sims just do bizarre things to get to work when there's almost no limit on commute.

I actually stopped playing a year or so ago for the exact same reason. NAM has come a long way since then, but not long enough. I started playing again the other day, and I still have the same problems, just less of them. I'm going to switch to one of the extra speed versions of the plugin, which I hope will help. The reason you never had there problems in previous versions is because they were simpler. Will Wright said himself when talking about Spore that the problem with SimCity is that it just got too complicated. Think of any simulation that comes close to the complexity of SC4. It's actually quite impressive that the game does as much as it does. The problem is that the closer something comes to reality, the more glaring the differences become. That's why eve good computer graphics can bother us if they look a little fake, when we're perfectly able to suspend disbelief with totally unrealistic cartoons (like anime, for instance). I think if you take a step back, remember that it's just a game, and be willing to try some radical (albeit unrealistic) solutions, you'll find that the game is fun again. It's working for me, so far.