Genius!
SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
111–120 of 217 posts
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#112I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going. The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that). Sure, there's some…
> I don't like where the genre is going. Got an opinion on Timberborn? I think it's a great city builder, plus a fluid dynamics simulator where if you guess wrong everyone dies.
timberborn doesnt have the beavers figuring out for themselves what to do, and operate with agents pulling jobs you the player put on a queue rather than statistics.
its a lot more like dwarf fortress than sim city
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#113I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going. The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that). Sure, there's some…
I've commented this many times, but I definitely want to see more isometric grid games like SC3k, RC2 or TTD. They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map. Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.
it's so frustrating in Cities Skylines without mods, that it's so common difference in height causing so much placement issues
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#114I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going. The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that). Sure, there's some…
I think the simulation in Cities Skylines is also quite advanced, or not? The simulation is much more the reason why it requires powerful hardware to run on, much less the graphics.
Cities Skylines has pretty decent simulation and it uses quite a bit of raw CPU horsepower, but it only really shines with tonnes of mods (just like SimCity 4 before it).
Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#115SC3K had a masterfully executed advisor system that felt both classy and warm. Ditto its music and art. Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/ (that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)
These are all amazing. Thank you.
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This looks great, I just bought a copy. While it's downloading I'm perusing the listing, and I'm curious if this supports generating a large image/print of your finished city, like you could in SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, which shipped with SC2K). One thing I particularly loved was printing out very large maps of my city to go on the wall :) Edit: I like the music a lot, and the little tutorial guy is endearing…
That's a super cool idea. Actually we have an internal thingy to export your city to blender, then we can have nice images like this one: https://microlandia.city/assets/press/keyart/t21.jpeg Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)
Spent a bit of time with it.
Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.
"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.
Other than that, I'm really enjoying it.
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#117I'm surprised a bunch of tech professionals are totally fine with downloading random .dll's and patching executables. How do you know this is safe?
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#118I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same. I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...
> I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D You recall wrong. The only 3D SimCity game was the one released in 2013 that was simply titled "SimCity" but is frequently called "SimCity 2013" to differentiate it from the original classic. 2K, 3K, and SimCity 4 were all 2D games.
I believe 3k and 4 used 3D assets "in the editors" but the actual created tiles were 2D.
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#119> I will not pay for the same game twice. I firmly disagree with that point. If the game is well-made and enjoyable, the developer probably deserves some extra cash thrown their way. Games remain one of the best bang-for-your-buck when it comes to entertainment anyways. ($50 can get you DAYS of enjoyment, compared to going to a movie theater, theme park, or other paid attractions) So yes, go ahead and purchase an enj…
The copies of Stardew Valley are not free but you can just buy them on every device you have I have 436 copies of Stardew Valley.
Re: SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
#120Loved SimCity growing up. Would it be possible to automate porting the windows version into a mac or web version? Like giving a long-running agent the task and some tools to check/play the game on both platforms?
SimCity 4 has a native Mac build, it's on Steam. Most of the modding community uses Windows now though since the .dll hacks became feasible.
SimCity 4 not only has a native Mac build, but it has an applesilicon one (I believe you have to enable a beta flag somewhere).
Pretty impressive for a game released in 2003.
Oh my goodness SC4 is 23 years old. I'll go be old in the corner.