A winning solution for SimCity
m.ammoth.us
m.ammoth.us
I don't think any irony or toleration is going on here, at least not more so than the players in Madden "tolerate" being forced to play football again and again. The players in Madden also fail to express concern about overpopulation but I think that's just the nature of a limited simulation. I'd love to play more sophisticated games, but SimCity just isn't there yet.
It's a sandbox game, the cost function you try to optimize says more about you than it does about the game.
Perhaps more interesting would be how the optimization was performed. If I remember correctly, the manual from the original SimCity hinted at formulas used in the underlying simulation; I'm sure some dedicated players have reverse engineered such information for the newer games.
Popular (almost de facto standard for SimCity fans) mods have sprung up to correct this, and with modern hardware there is really no performance hit.
Transportation is now, IMHO, the toughest part of the simulation - even fixing their pathfinding, it's still wildly unpredictable what your sims will do, and creating a mega-city generates a lot of congestion that so far I've been unable to avoid.
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/
http://code.google.com/p/micropolis/
It looks like the creator of Magnasanti optimized his solution by hand using pencil and paper, first finding modular arrangements that worked well, then assembling them in a predetermined overall design ("inspired by the Wheel of Life and Death"), which makes this more of an art project than optimization exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if there were still better solutions that sacrifice, for example, aesthetics or regularity.