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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

I think SimCity 4 is the best city simulator game.

Cities Skylines is an excellent city painter; however.

All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy. For example, if trying to demolish an apartment, you need to solicit 400 approvals and gain local support before doing so. Or to build to a railway you need to buy out all of the land and organize environmental studies for every square foot of it before laying track.

IIRC there was a soviet sity simulator that had some of that; but the games usually just wash it away with "cost to bulldoze".

It would be fun to have a game where you have about as much control as a "real" city and mainly what you do is pull levers behind the scenes to get people to do what you want.

SimCity meets Dwarf Fortress, perhaps.

All in game achievements should be around negotiating bureaucracy. You should be able to look at a city and have fond / traumatic memories over all the compromised mess. Campaign mode should include trying to build new subway expansion downtown, ranked on time. Cheat code activates is maximum authoritarian mode for old school bulldoze everything / eminant eminant domain / rich petro state pay with migrant worker experience. Or maybe that's just easy mode.

Bureaucracy slider should range from China (easiest) to New York City (hard) to San Francisco (nightmare).

City builder games explicitly don't try to be as realistic as possible. They are meant to be fun.

> All of these city games need to simulate bureaucracy.

hehe, I tried to do that, but with a walking sim: https://rafsters.itch.io/all-hands

(inspired by a meeting being a retrospective to a meeting about a meeting)

While this would be more realistic the majority of players would stop playing the game. I would argue this is just like you not having to build each street in a 3d game by yourself you also don't need to fill out every form, etc. by yourself. I just image you have a lot of employees doing that for you.

What you do is make the normal game play like CS or SimCity, but you have options to turn on "difficulties" that would basically enable different aspects/gameplay.

For example, you could add "federal/state requirements" where a new freeway/rail line/whatever would appear on the edge of the map and you have to get it to the other side, making connections as appropriate.

Big disagree, I think that sounds super fun. Remember there's a significant enough number of people that play long haul truck simulators.

Yeah. I think people saying more realistic interactions would not be fun or popular are lacking in imagination. The real problem with those games is the divorce from reality of bulldozing.

Imagine bulldozing is as expensive, complicated, and despised as in real life.

Then imagine having to fight against infrastructure cost overruns. You play a city building game, and you don't have access to roads (cars haven't been invented) so you want to put rails everywhere. You do that, but then you realise later how expensive and complicated it is to remove some rails to put down roads.

Imagine the game stopping, and telling you that the cost of roads will double when you unpause the game. You'd have to manage putting down more road than you need and the consequences of overreach.

It could be super fun.

I saw someone playing that way, they could ONLY bulldoze "city services" like roads (so they could replace a road with one with more lanes that fit in the same space, or one with bike/tram lanes) but they could NOT bulldoze zoned properties, and tried their best not to remove even things like police stations, etc.

I think they had a rule saying they could rezone or bulldoze a building that was abandoned; but that of course led to accusations of intentionally forcing buildings to be abandoned (which is a real thing that happens).

I'd rather have a city builder that doesn't involve starting a utopia from scratch, I want to show up to an existing rural area and industrialize it, convert an unwalkable nightmare dominated by highways into a medium density sprawl, etc.

Most of them have some form of "scenarios" to play which are somewhat like that, but not exactly.

Cities Skylines just turns into "transportation mode simulator" for me. Still fun, but it is not the same thing.

It makes sense, given that its developer also developed Cities in Motion 1 & 2, which are _especially_ transportation mode simulators.

What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town.

I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections.

I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congestion charges on roads, even if it’s just a text input with its own DSL like you have with minecraft command blocks. Then you could really break out of what the developers designed and start actually doing simulations.

Cities skylines has the policy builder feature like you describe. One of the policies you can implement is congestion charges. You can set the policies city-wide, or in certain districts. In the latest builds with the newest DLC, you can even ban cars completely with pedestrian only districts/roads.

Huh interesting. I haven’t really touched it since 2016 so it’s probably different now.

Imagine a city builder where you can't convincingly recreate the rebuilding of Tokyo after WWII

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CS gets way closer to "car free" than anything but the original SimCity (where you could just use rails instead of roads everywhere) - you need to use the Parks and paths and some pretty sneaky design, but you can get upwards of 80% using walking/transit. Takes a lot of work, however, and some mods.

I actually found it the opposite. The more I intelligently laid out alternative transport the more that it got used, lessening traffic. But yes, the default mode is to just optimize traffic everywhere.

It's possible to make a car-free city in CS. It just can't start as one.

There's a Tropico game, I think it's Tropico 4, that is very realistic in that you don't need to literally make roads and asphalt all the things, and roads don't need to be car-centered; you just make buildings and people will walk, and you add a road network to make things more efficient, but it isn't required

Also curved roads and buildings don't need to be right besides the road, etc.

Sim City 4 is more like a suburbia simulator imo

I want free-form zoning, where it's not tile based; CS can do something kinda like it but it's still just tiles in the end, with empty space between.

Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.

Free-form city blocks is also high on my wishlist for C:S2. Without it you can't make convincing European style cities.

Soviet Republic: Workers and Resources has this. It is an incredibly deep city builder and sim with very well modeled systems. The realistic mode requires fuel for vehicles and workers for construction. You don’t simply plop buildings down or define zones that magically fill in.

It sounds like it is biased towards micromanagement, but still might be tons of fun. Thanks for the recommendation.

There's also Foundation, a medieval city builder that works like this.

CSL as a virtual model hobby is a great way to save space and money.

The cool thing is you can paint your cities and still play the traffic management game, down to timing the signals at individual intersections.

I want a VR version that supports mods

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean with painter?

At a certain point in Cities Skylines you stop having any real challenge to make money or to keep your city running, so it becomes pretty much a sandbox. You can make the city look pretty much however you like instead of being bound by the needs of the city. In effect, you can just paint whatever kind of city you like onto the terrain. There's still a little challenge to deal with transportation but its fairly trivial to solve when you have effectively unlimited money in the game.

Exactly this - the "how do I not keep going bankrupt" part of the game is relatively short (similar to the "how do I not starve the first winter" in Dwarf Fortress) and with a bit of care you have so much money rolling in you can just do whatever you like.

Ah, right, that’s pretty recognizable from my gameplay, thanks :)

Pocket City is a much simpler City Painter with practically no gameplay at all, except for an annoying drag through "quests" to build 1 of everything.

Agree with this. There isn't really much challenge in managing the city itself after a certain point. You're just expanding.

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