One of the things in the beta that I really liked was the way city services work now. Here are some of my observations form the beta. Tell me what you think of the way city services work now. And to the haters: please try to stay on the topic of city services. You can talk about city size, the graphics, how EA is evil, etc. in the other topics dedicated to those subjects. This topic is for you for hating on city services and related topics.
Area of influence and capacity
In Simcity 4, schools had a round circle of influence. This means kids either travel by airballoons to school or they swim rivers/ climb cliffs/ cross highways to get there . One of the biggest improvements in the new Simcity in this aspect is that now kids travel by road. This makes you think completely different about how to place schools. Apart from the kids who live within walking distance you can also use schoolbusses. In SC4 this only increased the magic circle of influence but now you actually place the busstops. This allows a single school to serve large parts of the city. What I really like about this system is that it is more realistic, has more depth AND is easy to understand even for beginners. Place too many stops (watch hypnotoads videos on how not to place busstops ) and/or have to few busses and your kids will take too long to go to school. Not only that but also the location of the school and the reliability of the road access to the school are important.
Another thing that has been improved over SC4 is the way the capacity of schools work. In SC4 you had a simple slider which you could set to a single teacher with a small class to a lot of teachers for many students. Of course in real life, it is often classrooms space that is missing, not just extra teachers. Now, you have to actually add new classroom buildings if you want to expand your school. This makes a lot mores sense and creates more interesting dilemmas. If you put your school in a central place to serve as many students as possible, you might not have the room to expand. Heh, an actual problem in SC that real life mayors deal with, imagine that.
How city services are more intergrated with the city
In one of my beta cities I had an industry district connected with a long single road to my residential district. I also had a fire station near my industry. This is of course the typical SC4 setup if you like clean residential zones. I was just done increasing my zoning when a fire broke out in the residential district. Because I already build a fire station (after a fire destroyed my previous beta city) i felt safe and was not paying attention. A little while later the fire had spread and my city was burning. As I zoomed in to find out why, I discovered that my increased zoning had resulted in increased traffic on the one access road between the R and I zone. That in turn caused a daily traffic jam which stopped the fire trucks from reaching the R area.
I really love how more connected city services feel to the rest of the city. In SC 4 when fires break out, your trucks are usually there on time or you can just plop a new one (they are much more expensive in the new game). Also buildings like schools just give a boost to a mysterious circle around the building. Now the buildings actually interact with the rest of the city and can create of have problems because of stuff that influences other buildings. Playing SC4 again the next day, made me miss the services already. They are so much more shallow in SC4.
This makes it all the more unfortunate that because of the small map size, these design challenges become much easier then they could be. Networking is so much more important in this game that the smaller city tiles sizes really hurt what the game could be. I am hopeful for the future. If Maxis can deal with the size issue and release modding tools, this game has the potential to blow SC4 out of the water based on how much more realistic, complex, interactive and rewarding the city services system is alone.
