There’s a simple cheat for it.
Build bus stops. Don’t build subways. Can’t lose.
SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
101–110 of 252 posts
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.
You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.
You can see how much of a challenge it is to go into interesting game mechanics in 3d by looking at the development of Satisfactory.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#103I love SimCity, never forget the first time I played it on an Amiga 500.
Then one day my friend lent me his 512KB ram upgrade and it was a different game :-)
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want free-form zoning, where it's not tile based; CS can do something kinda like it but it's still just tiles in the end, with empty space between. Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.
Free-form city blocks is also high on my wishlist for C:S2. Without it you can't make convincing European style cities.
Soviet Republic: Workers and Resources has this. It is an incredibly deep city builder and sim with very well modeled systems. The realistic mode requires fuel for vehicles and workers for construction. You don’t simply plop buildings down or define zones that magically fill in.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
SimCity 2000 is definitely my favorite. I'm surprised someone hasn't made a version of it with a larger map (or infinite map).
Take that one step further. Start with a virgin earth. With sufficient, but finite, number of players, and a modelled global population, you build cities that effectively compete with each other for population. In other words an alternate history of population and human development. A multi-player Sim Earth.
Isn't that just (multiplayer) Civ 4/5/6 on a Earth-shaped map?
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#106I think SimCity 4 is the best city simulator game. Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter ; however.
All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.
City builder games explicitly don't try to be as realistic as possible. They are meant to be fun.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#107A time before micro payments. Games built by artisans that loved their product and gave it their everything. Great times.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.
It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
But everything is relative. I started gaming in the early 1980s and so those 1990s/early 2000s games had incredible graphics compared to what I was used to. And I'm sure people who grew up earlier on things like 1970s Pong would think my 1980s games had amazing graphics. The argument "Games back then cared about gameplay rather than graphics" ignores that every era has tried to make graphics as good as possible; I'm sure the future will look at our nearly-photorealistic graphics of current games and find them quaint compared to their holographic graphics or whatever.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting. Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
High content, big budget, games still exist, e.g. Elden Ring + Zelda (as someone mentioned) are two recent releases. There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play. T…
just mentioning that Humankind got fixed up and it's a fantastic and innovative take on Civ. The reviews don't do it justice.
Re: SimCity 4 was released 20 years ago
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's because surprisingly, it's still a marketable/profitable game. If only it weren't, then maybe it would eventually be open sourced. Only flaw I find is that due to it's age, it wasn't really designed with maximum concurrency in mind, and doesn't utilize the full capabilities of modern hardware, so the simulation slows to a crawl after a certain size.
The game actually does support decent threading, but it relies on old RDTSC behavior and will crash on modern CPUs if you allow all the threading to run. I nagged EA a lot to Open Source SC4 or allow fans to fix bugs on Windows version, but they are stubborn :( The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit…
Similar with the Sims 3, the Mac version is 64 bit the windows version is not and thus becomes unplayable after a given length of savefile.