novaseeker

Yeah I'd say it's more like "Sim Districts Online" if we're going to name it descriptively.

I think it's as was written above -- the intention was not to create a simulation game like SC4, which was considered too niche and too hardcore (too small an audience), but rather to take the "basic idea" and repackage it as an accessible, mass market game for a large audience. Of course, that has nothing to do with all of the bugs and things that are not working properly, but the overall design of the game was definitely not intended to be much like SC4.

They won't leave in this game if you leave taxes low enough. I mean, some will leave, but if you bulldoze, the land will redevelop and fill up again quickly due to the demand created by the low taxes.

I think that the *idea* behind this design was to permit radical specialization within each of the region's "districts" (I think this is more what they are, rather than cities, really) by not requiring them to be internally balanced. The trouble is that, as has been pointed out in this thread, this doesn't really work, because the way regions are currently working it seems hard to manipulate sims into commuting between districts for work, shopping, tourism and so on in a reliable way, so what you end up with are districts that are largely independent and internally imbalanced at the same time. I have found with the "all R" experiment I did that the most important factor was taxes. If you keep the taxes low (say 6%), you can pretty much boost R demand in perpetuity, such that when sims move out, you can doze, and new developments will come along very quickly. If you add parks and libraries and some services to the mix, higher wealth ones will come, too (they seem even more gooseable by taxes than the low income sims are). Taxes seem to enable the player to goose demand to a very strong degree -- probably too strong. I also found, however, that my districts that have been more internally balanced, to some degree, grew denser faster due to higher household happiness levels (more shopping, more jobs), and particularly attracted higher wealth sims faster and also more quickly into higher densities. So it seems like this path is still "better" but that the other path is also "possible" if you want to build a low-service, low-wealth district.

I would hold off for now, given the price tag as compared with the issues the game currently has. As compared with SC4, it's just a quite different game. SC4 is more of a pure city simulator, is more in-depth, has massive cities, and is now modded up to the hilt and so has tons of features, customizations and so on. SC4 is a more challenging game from the get-go, as well. SC13 is hampered by bugs and design issues. One hopes that some of the most irritating bugs (traffic issues, recycling center failures, intra-regional shipping and related trading etc.) will be resolved in the near future, but some of the other aspects (map size, RCI model) likely will not because they are fundamental design issues. For example, Because SC13 is designed primarily to be a cooperative/competitive online game with leaderboards and challenges and so on, it's hostile to customization and modding (viewed as "cheating" in a competitive online game), and therefore you are stuck with the provided maps and grids, and that's it (in the same vein, allowing terraforming as in SC4 would also be viewed as "cheating" because it removes the level playing field). It also seems likely that the glassbox "agent" simulation model (which in itself is looking rather dubious in some aspects) is a significant technical reason why the grid sizes for the "cities" are so small -- making them larger would likely overtax the simulation. Hopefully with some optimization they can eventually increase grid sizes a bit, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Having smaller grids is also a fundamental part of the design of the game, apart from the engine. That is because this game is designed not around building a big, impressive self-sufficient city, but around building a "district" or "suburb" which is specialized in one thing, and relies on the other cities in the region for other things it can't provide for itself and its own sims. The grids are too small to do everything, the game makes you pick and choose. The whole idea being that you are supposed to be cooperating with 2-14 other cities in your region, each having its own complementary specialization. So, it's a fundamentally multiplayer design from the outset, even if a player chooses to play all the cities in the region themselves. This basically characterizes the gameplay, and makes it fundamentally different from SC4 or the other prior games in the franchise, because you're really not building a city, but a relatively small district that plays a specialized role in an interdependent region of districts. (Of course it doesn't help matters that much of the regional level gameplay isn't working very well at the moment, but that falls into the category of bug rather than design). So, I'd recommend holding off due to bugs, and even then taking a hard look at whether the game that this is (which is quite different from previous versions) is really what you would like to play in light of the design of this specific version. I will say that when it is working the game can still be fun, but it's also very different from SC4.

It depends on happiness. Parks are a key element, I have found. I have had two cities in the past week with quite a bit of high density. The first one was one where I actually tried to to RCI, and I ended up with a lot of high density, high wealth residences with gleaming skyscrapers at around 120k. The second one was an experiment where I tried to create a slum with minimal services, no jobs, and no shopping (but some parks). This one also has high density, but is already larger in pop with fewer high density buildings, and they are all low wealth.

I am mostly waiting to see what Maxis does to address the issues with the gameplay at the moment. I like many aspects of the game -- it's slick and can be fun. I don't like the broken aspects, however, so I am waiting to see what happens with it. I haven't given up on it, but I am playing mostly Anno and some SC4 while I wait to see what is done here.