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Comment by nearmuse | Hacker News Reader

> Magnasanti’s water and power needs are supplied by neighboring cities, eliminating the need for much of the related infrastructure.

I call cheating.

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It is not cheating, since no rules were broken.

That said, that power and water isn't free. The city must be paying through the nose for all that power and water.

It has been a while since I played SimCity 3000, but IIRC those deals become extortionate after you hit a certain scale.

Well, mixing functional and OO programming is practical, but for some esoteric problems where you want to go purely functional you might say it is cheating, this is what I meant. I guess anyone would think it would be cooler if it was self-contained.

One man's cheating is another man's clever use of game mechanics.

Yeah, I see no cheating here. IIRC, as soon as you brought a water pipe to the border, you were offered a deal from your neighbors to buy/sell water. Same for electricity, roads... The guy just exploited something that was already there.

Because pollution doesn't travel across city borders (In SimCity 4 at least), you can build a bunch of coal plants in your neighboring city, set up a neighbor deal for power in your "real" city... boom, clean air. For your citizens, at least.

This is the kind of stuff I mean. I don't know if it would work but neighbors could strike all those controversial deals with gambling and toxic waste plants etc. You could also export trash as far as I remember.

Sounds like real life. Trains of poo leaving daily from new york, for example.

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