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Comment by steve_coral | Hacker News Reader

I'd be very interested in a city builder where there are meaningful social, cultural, and political dimensions. Games like SimCity and Cities: Skylines have robust, detailed models for aspects like traffic and power distribution, but the actual social modeling is relatively basic. At points they seem more like complex cellular automata than cities (see Magnasanti in SimCity 3k)

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City simulators seems to a large extent exist to reinforce the idea that cities == cars. It bores me.

Cities Skylines have a good walking and cycling modeling alongside an excellent public transport system. You can totally create a city with really little trafic. Even industrial trafic can be done essentially via rail or via seaway. It seems that most (all?) actors in the game will prefer your infrastructures over the road as long as they are more efficient. You can now even add toll gates on the road to make the incentive even stronger.

That because most cities right now are road/car-based. Maybe once Cytopia is further developed walk-able cities can be designed.

As the sibling says, Cities Skylines definitely does a better job than its predecessors of legitimizing non-car strategies for managing transportation. However, as the player, the path of least resistance is absolutely to just do roads everywhere and bulldoze buildings and houses to widen roads (just like in the real world). I don't think CS has much/any modeling for the longer-time-horizon benefits of an active-transportation city, in terms of culture, health, pollution reduction, and so on.

So yes, it's a major step forward in terms of it being possible at all, but it's something you have to be pretty intentional about— and maybe that's reflective of the real world too. But it's always nice when media (games, books, movies, whatever) inspires us to dream bigger than we might otherwise have done.

I am a fan of city simulators and I found out the reason for this is all of them copy the USA style zoning system in their rules.

USA style zoning is just stupid and is a major culprit of cities needing cars.

As far as I know there is no major city simulator that simulates non-zoned cities that are full of organic growth instead of the player, like a US mayor, deciding where people are allowed and not allowed to live and work.

In Infraspace there's no zoning as such (you can do it yourself to some extent with their "districts" feature), it's still early access alpha though with hopefully a lot more to come. For some production you need so many of some of the buildings that it's easier to slap them in their own area.

It does have trains, but they are fairly limited use right now and it's pretty car focused.

I'm trying to just do one super long road in my current game.

Infraspace is not a citybuilder that allow organic growth.

I am talking more about a potential game where cities would grow like in real life, with people moving in voluntarily, and building stuff voluntarily, and the government focused more on building infrastructure. As far as I know there are no major game like that.

Closest to it in a sense is a space game (Distant Worlds, where you build the military ships and colonize planets, but the population builds commercial stations and mining operations, and the population have their own civilian ships for immigration and tourism)

Cities have zoning mostly to figure out how to provision infrastructure for an area. Not to get people to move there involuntarily.

One of my biggest gripes in most city builders is a lack of mixed zoning, and realistic dense zoning. Most CBDs are dense mixed zone and that is really the heart of what makes a dense inner city area operate. There usually is no "dense commercial" zone in most cities, it's low to medium density specific use and then dense mixed use. Exceptions abound of course.

Check out Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's essentially an Eastern European factory town simulator, which means walkable tentament blocks linked by bus lines directly to massive industrial blocks. It's also the dark souls of city managers, which means get ready to have everything crashing down because your heating plant ran out of coal in the middle of winter and now everyone is too sick to mine more

You can build whole cities without cars in Cities Skyline. With mods like TPME banning private cars is easy. You can still allow services (police, fire engines, ambulances, etc), good trucks, buses and taxis but can also disable any of these on a per-road basis.

I like to create areas that have no cars in my cities. Add lots of pedestrian and cycling paths, lots of trains, metro, ferries, etc and just watch oodles of people using public transport or cycling everywhere.

It's such a satisfying game.

I think Pharaoh does a good job at that, although it is quite old. Currently getting a remake though. Cultures: 8th Wonder of The World is leaning heavily into the society aspect as well. However I did find the controls to be extremely irritating by today’s standards

Yes, something that has the in-depth city building mechanics of SimCity with the social modeling of Pharaoh, Caesar, or Europa 1400: The Guild would be incredible.

Don't forget Zeus in that list! Think it was the third iteration in the Caesar->Pharaoh-> city-building genre.

Were the later Caesar games better for that stuff? I remember playing Caesar II back in the day, and even as a kid feeling that it was a bit on the shallow side— like the main objective at city level was just to get as much tax revenue as possible, and that meant getting your housing to be more luxurious, and that meant exposing the housing to as many amenities as possible. But the exposure was basically just making sure there was enough of everything close by that the walkers spawned by each building would find their way to each residence before their previous visit had "worn off".

That's funny... I never heard about Pharaoh until last night when I read a retrospective (1),and now I read about it first thing in the morning :-)

1: https://scientificgamer.com/in-praise-of-pharaoh/

The Tropico games may interest you. I had a lot of fun playing them when I was younger (think I played Tropico 1 and 3, but not sure exactly).

I recall them being quite tricky and including political/social aspects (you need to appease your people to be re-elected etc), but since I haven't played them in years that stuff might not be as deep as I remember.

Do have a look though and see if it'll suit you!

I played some Tropico 4 and 5 in recent years and had a decent time of it. I think I ended up in a love/hate relationship with the mission structure, though. On the one hand, having a series of shorter "scenarios" with concrete goals is good for gameplay and helps give shape to the overall game in a way that old-school endless city builders lacked, plus it fits with the deeply cynical lore of the game, about you playing as a wannabe dictator bouncing between banana republics and doing the bare minimum to keep them afloat as you line your own pockets by sending cash to the Swiss bank account.

But that structure also meant that I struggled to feel as much long-term ownership over what I was creating. It felt like I could get away with cutting certain corners that I shouldn't have if the game forced me to sit just a little bit longer with the consequences of my actions. Maybe that's just a sign that I was playing it right, but I felt like I would have had a better time if I'd been just a little bit more accountable.

>'d be very interested in a city builder where there are meaningful social, cultural, and political dimensions.