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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Another aspect of these games is the subtle scale issues that aren’t readily apparent - even the newest biggest city simulators are fractions of the size of a real city.

Road and rail curves are massive and it’s hard to understand just how big they are without having to actually walking them.

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You can find in developer notes for city sims that sometimes they've tried to keep sizes of roads and parking lots to scale, and then they realize it's all low density and uninteresting, kind of like real aerial photography of a typical US city.

So the difference in scale between real life and the sims is 100% on purpose, as more realism makes the game worse. Just like they don't ask for a long permitting system for anything to get built, or demand a decade of discussion and probable lawsuits before you can move move a road, or rebuild an intersection.

Having played many city building games though I’ve always desired more depth and realism. Like the more I play them the more I want out of them. I wish power lines were limited in capacity and had to be stepped up and down via transformers (Workers & Resources does this) I wish I could make decisions about every intersection and every lane (cities skyline mods allow this) etc. Anyway I think there’s an audience for more realistic games in general, even if most people would find them less fun.

At a certain point these simulators would be so intense that your joy for the game could be your joy for real employment in a city :)

The statement reversed, you might loose your joy because working in the game is no longer fun.

I get you but just want to say: careful what you wish for :)

Well probably more people want to be city planners than the number of city planners society actually requires. Also, I think I would draw the line somewhere way before the real world. I want most of the technical details of the real world without having to deal with the politics. I don’t want to attend town hall meetings and stakeholder consultations in my game, but then again maybe someone else wants that.

I regularly drive what I thought of as a quite winding road. Visitors drive it cautiously. It was funny one time looking at the satellite view and thinking "Wait, where is the tight bendy section?" Everything looked like very gentle curves; probably closer to straight lines.

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