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Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

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Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#31

Post by scott31 »

ghastmaster wrote: post #12

The image reminds me of Guangzhou, China. I recently looked at google earth images of Guangzhou. I then looked at images of New York City. It is incredible to me that we in the U.S. think of New York City as a sprawling metropolis when not far from the city center it is mostly single family homes on plots of land. Whereas Guangzhou has many more high rise buildings for miles and miles. Get the ruler in Google Earth a…

> The police state has essentially eliminated free will and allowed the city to maximize its size while reducing quality of life to a minimum — and still maintaining total control over the citizens.

Sounds like China as well

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#32

Post by troutwine »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #22
Kye wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purchased on the credit card of carbon release. We might get lucky and see some technological or social innovation negate or stop the coming disaster, or civilization could snap back to where it was centuries ago.

The worst part is not the horror of mass extinctions and runaway greenhouse gasses might eventually resolve itself on geologic timescales, but that the society that rebuilt might find it impossible to get out of the stone age; much less through an industrial revolution: we've pillaged the highest-yield mines, germs have been developed into antibiotic-resistant superbugs, we've extracted the easiest-to-reach stored hy…

I do wonder how much our extractive technological culture would play to the benefit of a child society that intended to learn from us. There'd be an awful lot of material at the surface that could be recycled or repurposed, if we're talking a reboot on the order of centuries. Idle thought.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#34

Post by grawprog »

rightbyte wrote: post #16
grawprog wrote: post #5

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water fro…

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. 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…

Skylines, at least without the mods, feels like an incomplete game in general. It's fun, but it's lacking the depth I expected. Though reading about all the addons and mods, it looks like they add in just about everything I felt was missing, it's just a lot of money to drop on a game I don't really have enough time to get that into.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#35

Post by dragontamer »

Uehreka wrote: post #19
dragontamer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Huh? Pumpjacks give less oil over time. They never really run out, but eventually you’ll stop running regular trains to an oil depot because your reservoir tanks take hours to fill. Unless you have a small base and dozens of oil fields, you could never run on depleted fields alone, and thus you’re constantly needing to expand and seek out more oil fields (just like the other resource types) mimicking the way that mai…

> They never really run out, but eventually you’ll stop running regular trains to an oil depot because your reservoir tanks take hours to fill.

Speed beacons + Speed Modules + Infinite Productivity gets you pretty far.

> Pumpjacks give less oil over time.

Back in 0.13, they dropped to 0.1 oil/second. Today, this minimum has been grossly buffed, greatly reducing the number of depleted pumpjacks you need in endgame. The output is also improved by infinite-productivity research, increasing their output the longer your megabase runs.

There's also Coal Liquefaction, which came a few years after 0.13. That also reduces the need to find new pumpjacks (and again: because coal mines use electric mines, its possible to automate mines with blueprints).

So Coal runs out, but is far easier + automatic to expand compared to oil. So you just turn your coal into oil products.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#36

Post by Cactus2018 »

ghastmaster wrote: post #12

The image reminds me of Guangzhou, China. I recently looked at google earth images of Guangzhou. I then looked at images of New York City. It is incredible to me that we in the U.S. think of New York City as a sprawling metropolis when not far from the city center it is mostly single family homes on plots of land. Whereas Guangzhou has many more high rise buildings for miles and miles. Get the ruler in Google Earth a…

Guangzhou, China timelapse

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/#v=37.79184,-122.33...

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#37

Post by Lammy »

rightbyte wrote: post #16
grawprog wrote: post #5

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water fro…

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. 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…

Sim City 3000 is my favorite too for all the same reasons and I really wish SC3U shipped with multiplayer like the leftovers suggest it would have: https://tcrf.net/SimCity_3000_Unlimited/Unused_Multiplayer_T...

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#39

Post by bluedevil2k »

Kye wrote: post #17
bluedevil2k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's cool and trendy to trash our current society and treat it like it's the worst time to be alive in human history, but in reality there's never been a better time to be alive in the history of our species. Poverty, infant mortality, childhood mortality, crime...all at all time lows. Literacy, income levels, food quantity, public health...all at all time highs.

Purchased on the credit card of carbon release. We might get lucky and see some technological or social innovation negate or stop the coming disaster, or civilization could snap back to where it was centuries ago.

This is a perfect example of the trendy "everything's leading to a doomsday" sentiment among some people on this site.

"We might get lucky" - humans have overcome every adverse condition in our 2 million years alive, why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.

"stop the coming disaster" - again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.

"could snap back to...centuries ago" - this has happened once in the past 2000 years, you really think you're going to be alive when we enter a 2nd Dark Age.

I think it's the same sort of thinking with the "Jesus is coming back in the next 5 years" religious crowd. You want to feel important and part of something bigger than yourself, something planet-wide, so you're almost looking forward to being a part of it so you can feel like you're part of history.

Re: Magnasanti: The Largest and Most Terrifying SimCity (2010)

#40

Post by thiagoharry »

scott31 wrote: post #31
ghastmaster wrote: post #12

The image reminds me of Guangzhou, China. I recently looked at google earth images of Guangzhou. I then looked at images of New York City. It is incredible to me that we in the U.S. think of New York City as a sprawling metropolis when not far from the city center it is mostly single family homes on plots of land. Whereas Guangzhou has many more high rise buildings for miles and miles. Get the ruler in Google Earth a…

> The police state has essentially eliminated free will and allowed the city to maximize its size while reducing quality of life to a minimum — and still maintaining total control over the citizens. Sounds like China as well

No, the economic growth in China is in fact vastly improving the quality of life there.
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