Catmando

My guess is that when modding tools come out some clever player(s) will create something akin to smoncrie's hole digger lots, except hopefully those would let us change larger areas of terrain at a time. Using tunnels and viaducts and such to carve out the terrain bit by bit would be very tedious.

What I would prefer is to have you win the election each time, but with new political promises. For example, let's say your city's pollution is beginning to get out of control and citizens are getting sick. An interest group tries to spread awareness of it, and at a certain point you automatically make a promise to listen to them (because realistically speaking, they're threatening your election). After the election, you now have a promise to cut back pollution before the next election. You don't have to do it, of course, but if you don't your Sims will become unhappy with you. This could be a way for the citizens to incentivize you to make certain choices without necessarily forcing you or anything, similarly to how things like pollution already do that, because with higher pollution you need more hospitals and it lowers desirability and so on.

A mod that makes the economy of the game reliant entirely on the in-game region would be a nice community solution to this (in other words, the game could run essentially self-sufficiently), although I don't think EA would want that to be possible.

My guess is that if we're able to essentially subsidize certain markets (like the coal market), we'll have lower prices available to us, ergo maintenance costs for some kinds of trains would go down. Hard to say just how Maxis will implement that right now, though, since we're so early in development.

I'm definitely that kind of person. I have 6.34 gigs right now (down from 6.4 gigs last week; I've been cleaning out a few stray installers and stuff that the LEX left me), and it's unwieldy in ways I can't properly describe. I think it was mrbisonm that takes the record, though (am I remembering his name right? I always got him confused with you). Last I remember he maxed out at about 20 gigabytes and then went on a two-year organization binge and cut it down to like 12-15 gigs. That was years ago, though, so I may be remembering wrong. What I'm actually going to start doing now, I think, is reorganizing my whole plugins folder into a series of much smaller ones that the game can actually handle: nature, city, surburban, and a folder full of all the shared files, like my terrain mod, water mod, NAM, and so on. This is probably an even bigger undertaking than all my previous organization binges combined, however, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort: I can already cut my folder by 20% just by moving the Miscellaneous Skyscrapers and NDEX folders to some safe spot, and probably upwards of 50% if all I want to do is make a nice semi-urban town. All things considered, however, at least half of the content in my plugins folder is simply not used by me. I'm a hoarder at heart.

Hah, I've never thought of that! I'll have to try that next time I build a city. Also, on the topic of multi-national companies, do you think our cities will all have dealings with the same coal company, kind of like Simland's version of Omnicorp? I kind of hope so, if only to indulge in the pleasure of running Richie Rich and his polluting factories out of town fifteen times in a row.

Well, my guess is that tunnels and underground rail and whatnot will act like interiors, but it's hard to tell so early in development and with so little information about this stuff. Besides, I don't mind if we can't actually go underground and fly around inside the subways or something or if our view of the "underground malls" are only fake. I still think it would be better aesthetically if we had them than if we didn't, and it would be more realistic.

I think suggestions like this are the tip of the iceberg to an underlying idea: having several default levels of a city for building. There's ground level of course, but how about a default level for building underground malls? I know there's some custom content in SC4 that lets us do that, but it's more a workaround than anything. In this first underground level road underpasses and tunnels could go as well. In a level under that could run water, sewer, etc. Finally, in a level under that could run subways. Above the ground we have the default elevated rail level, but why not expand on that? Let that be a default level for elevated highways, road overpasses, and so on. Above that could run high speed rail, monorail, and ungodly high highways, the kind of thing we sometimes seen in really awful interchanges like these: With a few default levels I think we could avoid situations like "Shoot, my highway is going to be four meters too tall when it reaches this other one!" and "Gotta tweak this overpass just right, juuust right...."

Strange? Nonsense! After all, it looks to have a dome, and is that... illusionistic painting on the roof? Why, it's practically Baroque! All it needs is a grand staircase or two and it could sit aside Maderno's façade or the Trevi fountain comfortably.

Perhaps houses of worship could petition to build private cemeteries. The private cemeteries would free the city of maintenance costs, but would of course waste just as much land. It would probably be advantageous for a mayor to let houses of worship handle all the cemeteries, although they would have an artificial limit on size imposed, perhaps. Also, regarding houses of worships and their lack of specificity, I almost always ended up building Catholic churches in my cities. It just so happens that I am Catholic, but I don't build those because I'm biased or anything; it's just that the vast majority of churches I've downloaded online are Catholic, whether explicitly stated in the descriptions or not. Although I did have a region whose national religion was Catholic, though, and I took it to the point that in the center of the capital, just north of the National Palace was a gigantic cross formed by the streets clearly visible from the region view with St. Peter's Basilica (thank you, Debussyman!) and a papal university in it, or so I imagined. I wouldn't mind at all if there were a few religions represented, and Maxis could even skirt around the issues a bit more finely by having, say, a church, a synagogue, and a mosque available. But if all we get are houses of worship I won't complain, I'll just get some more specific ones from the community when they inevitably come out. EDIT: And before I forget, I remember on the Cities XL forum when someone said that they didn't care how it was done, no matter what, they wanted a Jedi Temple in the game. This resonated my inner Star Wars fan and I wholeheartedly agree and still do. Please, Maxis, let there be Jedi!

With what we've seen of modularity in constructing the game's buildings it wouldn't surprise me at all if we could hand-design zoned parks, i.e. adding fountains, trees, paths, etc. I think a more fluid form of what we see in Simcity 4's modular uber-packs would be ideal. I love designing and constructing the parks, although it's a pain in the butt waiting a full minute for the parks menu to open, as you can imagine. Just last year I made a modular university for my city. I don't remember who made the university or who made the particular park pack I was using, but they worked together almost flawlessly and I filled sixteen city blocks with various university buildings, paths, gardens, etc. Naturally, it would've been far easier if I could've just plopped down the pieces of the university, zoned the whole area a park, and added all of the little details via the options available for park amenities.

Here's something I haven't seen addressed yet: better cemeteries. Firstly, cemeteries should be merged into the healthcare menu. Secondly, they should also become zoneable. Cemeteries should need to be periodically expanded to accommodate the age and population of one's city, like the city's landfill. There will also be a cremation facility for lowering space issues, akin to the recycling center in Simcity 4 which handled waste so that landfills wouldn't fill so quickly. Cemeteries should also play a larger role in health, as having a preponderance of dead bodies in one's living space increases the likelihood of catching certain diseases. Cemetery costs would be relatively low, as Sims pay for their plots, which covers most of the costs. However, cemeteries would also take up a lot of space, potentially valuable real estate.

I almost fully agree, with the caveat that each person has not one private itch but about half a dozen. Personally, mine are the retention of a grid, of disasters, and of the classic Maxis humor, and the expansion and simplification of modding and custom content creation, of terraforming tools, and of transportation customization, in no particular order.

It seems discussion is waning. Here's something that may be of interest to you guys: Remember this picture? I was analyzing it a bit, and I don't think it would be premature to make the assumption that what we see is what we'll sim when the game comes out. A few features of the road and transit system we can get from this image: Gridded roads are possible.Curved roads are possible.There are either three types of roads here or two forms of one kind and one form of another kind: we see a typical two-lane road, as well as a four-lane road, what we would call an avenue. In addition, there's a boulevard running right through the city, the one with trees lining the center. This suggests a few possibilities: the boulevard could be a customized version of the avenue, the boulevard is a separate kind of road, or the boulevard is made up of one-way roads with some zoned parks in the center. That last possibility is a rather depressing thought to me, but is evidence by the fact that the trees abruptly stop at the top left corner of the picture, as if the mayor decided not to zone it any further (it seems to be near or at the edge of development, although more buildings can be seen just outside the range of the picture). It's also possible the boulevard is a kind of wide avenue and zoning, say, residential made it look like a boulevard. Since there's not much zoned in the top left, there are no trees. I wish there was a more definitive answer about this one—the one thing I didn't want to do is speculate.There is an elevated train running through the city.In the far right middle an avenue bridge is running over both the river and another avenue.A little bit below the avenue bridge is a road bridge whose mouth is right on the avenue. This was difficult to achieve in previous Simcities (at least for me). It seems to work flawlessly in that picture, however.

Dear God, I had a dream last night that Maxis announced a fully featured offline single player mode. I'm not sure if this is a good omen or a sign I'm completely obsessed with the new game.

I don't mind waiting longer for some content so long as a standalone game is delivered to me and I don't have to pay for the final features or something. I've been waiting for Minecraft to finish for almost three years now, and I have a feeling I won't stop waiting anytime soon. There's plenty to do as it is and the future, fully free content is only going to make the deal better. It's a win-win for me buying early and playing as it is tweaked.

Well, the whole idea of us coming to a consensus about it is that it would ideally better represent the community than any one person asking the questions. Taking a vote on which issues most urgently need to be addressed would be a nice way to reach a consensus, at least among registered users on Simtropolis visiting the Simcity 2013 forum (nothing is perfect). I don't know how to contact Maxis, though. Even then it comes down to Maxis actually wanting to or being able to answer the questions. I wanted my post to deal with the feasibility of making such a list, though, not the feasibility of getting the questions answered, because as I see it and as I think we've shown that's a whole 'nother ballpark.

There's no reason why we couldn't just make a list of good questions now and pray Maxis takes notice. I think it's plausible they too noticed everyone was basically asking the same thing on Reddit.

I actually like this idea, and I'm surprised it hasn't been suggested before. I have reservations about some of this, though. There's a fine line between micromanaging that's enjoyable and produces a result that's worthy of the time put into it and micromanaging that's simply tedious and distracting. I think if we had to lay down telephone poles for every street in a city manually or something along those lines it would get tiring very quickly. It would be even worse if we had to micromanage which carry which services and whatnot. I think telephone poles should grow up along streets and roads by default (as with your postboxes suggestion) and can be laid alongside, say, country roads or highways where necessary. Mobile phone masts can be built manually throughout the map; according to wikipedia, cell phone towers can be spaced about once every 2-3 km in rural areas, so that covers, what, almost an entire city tile? And in urban areas, they're very close, with more than one per square km. That shouldn't be hard to emulate if the towers have a certain capacity and everything. Now, a quick way to designate which areas of the city get which services would suffice: zoning a certain area of the city to have high-speed internet (perhaps because it is high-wealth) would be all right by me. I don't like the idea of having to manage a national post service, though. I don't want this to become OpenTTD. The micromanaging in that game drove me crazy, and the interface made it impossible to enjoy. I think having to plop a few post office buildings to adequately cover the city would be fine, but I absolutely don't want to sit for hours on end trying to make sure my city's mail trucks aren't getting too old and making sure the seaport is still receiving and exporting mail.

Interesting idea, OP. I hadn't really thought about any of this yet. A few thoughts: Public safety's rating has to take into consideration other things, as Nonny Moose alluded to. It should be a balance of several factors, like fire and police coverage. It should also take into consideration things like the city's risk of power plant failure... if your coal power plant is running at 110% with 5% of its life left on it in an industrial zone unprotected by the fire department, your rating should feel the effects of that. That said, I wouldn't want it to be too complex. If the game has to do clunky equations every second just to display a simple number I'd rather the power plant risk be left out of it, but ideally it would factor in too. Assuming several things factor into it, we should be able to see those individually. Actually, here's another possible approach. I recall reading about desirability essentially being turned into a 3D bar graph where you can see on your city the desirability of each building based on the height of said bar. The same approach could be taken with this safety rating, with different buildings having differently sized bars based on the factors I mentioned above. Naturally, this bar would itself affect the desirability bar, since no one wants to live in an area where there's a higher chance of fire or crime. Other considerations I don't feel like expounding much on include health, which we saw as a factor of desirability in Simcity 4, and risk of economic collapse, which we'll probably see indirectly in the new game if our economies are based on a single dwindling resource like coal. I think it goes without saying physical and economic health are very important to the safety of the public.

A Simtropolis-hosted or at least Simtropolis-made one is what I had in mind after browsing this thread a bit. I find it very unlikely EA will bother with something as nice as a printed manual, but I don't see why the community couldn't create one. It would need to be a lot more comprehensive than the current Omnibus, though. I liked the concept of the Omnibus, but I never found it very helpful. It had some information that might've been helpful to newbs and then some higher-level stuff like guides on BATting that I never followed very well. I did like some of the other articles. There was one about terraforming coastlines that I thought was nice. More importantly, I found information lacking overall. If an older, simpler game can have a several-hundred-page manual of small print and graphs galore, how could Simcity 4 be summarized in a few dozen pages?

The problem with that session was that, as far as I could tell, about 50% of people were asking the same thing, and that was questions about multiplayer. Worse, Maxis's answers ended up being the source of a lot of the anxiety I was talking about: rather than talk about offline mode, they talked about single player mode. If we give them very clear, explicit, simple questions, I think it would be a lot more effective. That opens the door to better questions about the gameplay rather than forty people asking the devs in slightly different wording "Will we need to be online/need Origin/etc.?" I'm interested in a lot of aspects of the game that haven't been talked about as much as I'd like, but all this worry over multiplayer is pushing everything else onto the backburners.

I don't really think this is necessary or, for that matter, optimal. I would prefer we get together as a community and come up with a list of, say, ten questions that most urgently need to be addressed by Maxis. Fairly simple questions, easily answered but vital to ease the anxiety we all have. A few suggestions: 1. How comprehensive will the offline play be? (Emphasis on the word offline, not single-player.) 2. Are city tile sizes like 2x2 km set in stone or expected to be changed? 3. Is the transportation customization expected to be at least as varied as vanilla Simcity 4? (Other comparisons rather than vanilla: Simcity 4 Deluxe, SC4 with basic NAM, SC4 with NAM/SAM/RHW) And so on. I couldn't see more than an hour spent answering these questions and a shift in attitude early on from "oh dear God what if EA wants to screw us over!" to "Hey, these sounds great!" might be beneficial in the long run for the reception, and, of course, the sales of this game. It'll also lower the collective blood pressure of this forum.

Let's expand on this even further. Don't just give us one road as a template, give us a half-dozen or so, akin to the ones in Simcity 4: street, road, avenue, highway, etc. Left click to select one and use on the fly, as a lot of casual users might do, or right click to edit the properties, with the option to save as a new type. If a lot of options are available this should probably work hand in hand with the idea of custom-made menus discussed in another thread.

The ampersand is a nice choice, but I don't think anything like that is necessary. It's not too hard to press Alt-21 to get § or to remember what the keys are.