Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water from the sewage run off of the rest of the city, I created roads and bridges everywhere, there's several 'nice' areas along the non polluted areas of water with large mansions, there's a big bustling urban center full of office buildings and highrises not far away from squat, squalid apartments underneath highway overpasses, schools next to landfills, a lack of hospitals and fire departments, many police departments, i've intentionally clearcut as much of the forest surrounding the city as possible, the next step was to create a small gated community out away from the city, for those with money who can't handle the horrid amounts of traffic and infrastructure...
I may have also accidently poisoned the whole city briefly when trying to build the prison island and killed 30% of the people there, but things have been looking up, population growth is finally starting to rise again, though the health of the population is questionable.
I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones.
If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.
SimCity 4 felt an incomplete and shallow game at start, but I've come to enjoy it greatly with the rush hour expansion of the deluxe edition, which made the city dynamic enough to feel compelling to work with.
back then it was hard to find in depth technical commentary of the game internals, so I don't know how much my feeling match reality
Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets.
For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before.
I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!
That's NYC, isn't it?
An example that comes to mind is Factorio, where solar panels are more tricky to operate than generators, but minimize conflict with the ingame fauna. Earlier versions of Rimworld were programmed to have men be either gay or straight, but women to be bisexual. I think both of those gameplay mechanics illustrate (or at least point to) the author(s) idea about the world.
For good games, I don't think so. The #1 concern of any video game is "is it fun??".
Case in point: Factorio oil is infinite and a renewable resource (pumpjacks never run out). This isn't there because of some preconceived notion of infinite oil. This mechanic exists because planting new pumpjacks is far more annoying than planting iron mines / coal mines. In fact, pumpjacks are basically the only endgame mine that cannot be automated with blueprints.
As such, its best to have pumpjacks pump infinite oil for the rest of time. Because it'd be too an annoying of a game if oil ran out.
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In the case of Factorio solar vs nuclear vs coal: the game developer made them different enough to make the difference fun to think about and fun to play with. But I don't believe it necessarily reflects upon the political opinion of the creator.
First game I played, I just made far-off copper mines that would only mine during the day.
(Then I learned it's just as easy to run power lines along RR tracks)
And you can say, "You don't need to play the game that way," and you'd be right, but it is still part of the obsession with the game.
There is some scientific truth to it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-34744903
Or maybe Micro Adventures: https://alastairhumphreys.com/microadventures-landing/
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=37.79184,-122.33...
Humans are social animals. We need to have contact with people outside our families.
Living in the country / distant suburbia doesn’t give enough social contact to be healthy, I think, at least in the U.K. In the past I imagine small villages were much more sociable, because people weren’t commuting out, and families lived in the same place for a long time.
So overall, I think living in a city is psychologically better for you. Not necessarily in the centre, but close enough that you can easily get there, can access lots of social venues and find people you get in with.
Of course that was pre COVID. Now is the time to go spend that year in the country, you’re not going to miss out on anything.
Sounds like China as well
The Alphaville Herald was dedicated to it; the blog continued on for years, after the sim was shut down. This Salon article references the mag https://web.archive.org/web/20040217030353/http://www.salon....
Alphaville is one of my favorite pieces of internet history but it wasn't ever really documented. It's hard to find anything about it now.
IIRC it ended with the Celts, Vikings, and Sioux facing off in thermonuclear war in the year 3991.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...
https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_i...
There's a bug that lets you delete a building tile but keep the building there in memory, meaning you can build over it but have all the same pops/crime/etc.
Lots of megopolis SC maps use this exploit.
It's essentially a grid-based parallel computer.
Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.
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Maybe OP posted this after working from home in quarantine for one week too many.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqZWxCv-_5I&list=PLIsqJzeZeG...
Interesting game to max out, not sure if anyone has tried though...
