Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem
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The attitude towards development it has is very much like China - everything is controlled and all land is owned by the government, and the government's job is to manage zoning, roads, schools, education, in order to make people happy. Nobody actually has any property rights - even trees don't grow without government planting efforts. Farmers can't choose their own crops.
This is actually really different than what happens in the real world. Really, if a community doesn't have a school, people get together and start one. Small civic organizations evolve into permanent buildings, training schools, etc. Pickup sports leagues evolve into organizations that commission their own stadiums.
If there is no fire department, a volunteer one starts. People build churches, or start them at home, whenever they feel the need. But in simcity world, everything good comes from the government.
I love simcity, but I do think it's weird that there isn't a mode where you can just let people build whatever they want. I love the built-in, realistic needs people in it have - but where are the entrepreneurs who will actually start a society, or borrow money to build a building on their own? Where are the rebels who start a revolution if the government doesn't meet their needs?
So it is not as bad as you make it sound.
Also in many European countries at least, schools and other educational institutions are commissioned and payed for by the government. The same for fire-departments.
Sports-stadiums, and churches are an edge case, but in most cases at least part of the funding is provided by government, and in most, if not all cases (all stadiums, maybe less so for smaller churches in industrial zones) special planning permission is required (for health and safety, noise, transport considerations, etc).
So yes, there is more paternalism in Sim City than in the real world, but it is not as far off as you suggest (not for Europe at least) (revolutions, or at least riots, would be a nice addition to the game)
I can't imagine SimCity: Libertarian Edition being as much fun if you just sit back and watch entrepreneurial sims do everything themselves, followed by sim corporations taking over your sim world.
Eh. The real world has a lot of examples of people doing exactly that.
And it's so wrong about how the real world works. If a community doesn't have a school the first thing that normally happens is they form a government and elect a school board to figure how to build and fund it. Same with a fire department, even with volunteers there are a lot of expenses that need to be paid by the town. Even the sports team is normally brought to a town via the work of politicians.
What these government-haters don't understand is that government IS the community. It's how a community comes together to get things done.
Hi. libertarian here. I don't hate government. Government is probably a necessary evil.
I hate obnoxious, inefficient, bug-ridden, corrupt, expensive, government. I hate government that says one thing to get elected and then promptly does another. I hate government that ostensibly is an extension of the will of the people and then acts against their expressed wishes.
But I'm not grumpy about it.
But yes, a small government with few to little power is what we need.
That's who would step in. You would reduce the size of government and corporations would just fill the power vacuum.
But we all know who funds the Libertarian party anyway - corporations or billionaires (who own corporations).
Because that hasn't happened already, even with a huge government.
> But we all know who funds the Libertarian party anyway - corporations or billionaires (who own corporations).
Corporations are actually government entities. One of those handy things that help businesses get big enough to manipulate governments.
A business doesn't just apply as a corporation for tax benefits, it also does so for the limited liability. So when they unwittingly contaminate your property, or accidentally poison you with rancid meat, the owner of the corporation won't have to sell their house to settle the lawsuits that follow their companies negligence.
So that government you think protects you from big business, passes the risks that business owner would normally have to take upon himself, onto you.
This is by far the most intelligent community I have come across in all my internet travels, and if there is any group of people who can think of a way for society to run peacefully, it is this community.
Any problem we have as a society that people currently point to government as a solution, can be solved without resorting to threatening everyone with police action.
I'd say that's a lot more than you could ask for considering the exploitation of the region.
I'm not dogmatic: if anarchy can work, I'm all for it.
I was more thinking about how things worked from say 1500 to 1800 in the US. During that time, a lot of the things that originate with government in simcity would have been done independently. i.e. religious schools would be started by local enclaves (sometimes with organizational help of government, which they controlled due to being dominant in that area, but not originated from it). In the US at least, land use was pretty free for most of that time, no zoning. Look at the institutions within a gold rush town, for example - although there was a government, they couldn't control much, the people came first and built lots of infrastructure before there ever was a sheriff or mayor. Rollicking, fast-developing cities from that era weren't restrained by zoning laws, and they developed in interesting (not always good) ways. It is interesting to realize that most of the current buildings in the US major cities would actually be illegal under the current law for new buildings.
Rather than from libertarianism, my ideas for this came from a couple books about city planning I've read recently, "The Power Broker", and "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". Neither one is really libertarian, but rather look at how government power can be used or misused in cities. The latter one particularly is not at all libertarian, and is a strong advocate of government intervention into neighborhood design - but, lays out a smarter way it should be done, based on the author's understanding of the way cities work.
Simcity seems to be designed by someone influenced by the ideas criticized in "death and life" - i.e. very strong zoning laws, top-down control and predetermination for how things will work in every neighborhood, high value placed on "open space" without consideration of usage patterns etc.
Government is the monopoly on force used to enforce a communities policies.
You do not need to threaten people with violence to get things done.
If you are not threatening people with violence to get things done, if all participation is voluntary, then you are not using a government to get things done.
No, really, I would.
I tried the all-rail town, too. There was a persistent alert to "build more roads".
Is there a widely available traffic profiling tool like Sim City without the extraneous "fun" parts?? I assume there's some sort of gui based analysis prog that city planners use?
When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late.
Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Alert isn't going to work here.
Can't wait for the latest SC!
I doubt that this way of playing will be possible in the new Sim City.
[...] As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures
of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the
consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate
your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes,
tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine
condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip
Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its
Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No."
The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved
games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your
region.Spreading around saved game files and using tools to mess with the games memory to cheat is something that has prevented a true Ranking system and online play in almost all games.
These server-side requirements would mean that the $ is stored server side and it will be harder to cheat.
It was pretty much either have always on connectivity or require punkbuster and disable many online cooperative features.
Fine EA. I'll accept it.
You can easily develop a way to rank how productive, profitable, clean, and happy cities in a game like SimCity are. If you weigh these factors and provide a number then you have a ranking. Maybe global leaderboard was a bad example but there are numerous other features that might require this kind of online only gameplay that we haven't experienced yet.
I say don't knock it until you try it. Not the beta, not the videos of others playing, the real game.
If the new strategy really kills the game then I'm sure someone will create a fake server patch or method of playing offline.
I would argue that every single-player game is forced to allow infinite saves and redos, by the fact that virtualization with memory snapshotting exists. (For a networked game like this one, you must just first reimplement a "private server" for the client to talk to, and then run that within the same virtualized container, so that a snapshot tracks their combined state.)
However, I think forcing this into Sim City is just a bad idea, and contrary to my expectations from such a game.
Psychologically speaking, failure is not a good teaching tool. Learning is much more effective through experimentation and success.
I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.
I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.
It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.
That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.
I believe your city will impact theirs and vice-versa.
Perhaps that's the point of your suggestion, to lower the entry level to these field, or for a broader audience.
This is interesting. Urban planners out there, do these types of simulations occur before an area is zoned?
And so you get what you get.
Microsimulation of Seattle traffic: http://ncg.nuim.ie/i2maps/projects/transportation/index.html
Foot traffic simulation: http://ncg.nuim.ie/i2maps/projects/simcampus/index.html
(They conclude that it will not have such an effect, even though there are already vacant retail spaces right across the street from the Safeway site.)
But just because the studies are done doesn't mean people will make the decisions that optimize everybody's lives. Every town wants the tax revenue from a new big box store, even if it means destroying the retail economy of the next town over.
I'm still purchasing this game, but I do wish EA would consider not forcing you to connect to their servers at all times.
As for the article, really interesting. Sounds like proof of the power of SimCity's engine. Would be more interesting to see him fix his issue.
Absolutely buying this on release day - gorgeous game and IMO a large improvement over previous installments. The only things that bother me is the limited size of the map (unsure if it's a beta thing or not) - if I can't build a megacity I'm going to be sorely disappointed.
Traffic model, economic model, new zoning model, and new utilities model are all IMO simplifications that make the game more fun, but does not remove depth. For those who haven't followed the game: power, sewage, and water no longer require power lines/pipes/etc, and travel along roads. They propagate along roads outwards from their generation source (water towers, power plants, sewage plants, etc) until their capacity is reached. There's a great animated overlay view that lets you monitor the state of each of these pretty easily.
The biggest pleasant surprise was how well it ran. I pushed all settings up to max and it didn't even flinch. SimCity 4 in contrast got insanely slow when your city became even slightly large - even on today's hardware.
The ability to monitor cashflow is also a welcome change. Instead of having to dive into your balance sheet to figure out your fiscal position it now shows a very clear flow rate (negative or positive) next to your balance.
The other major drawback to Sim City 4 is that there is a bug which prevents rich ($$$) Sims from working in the High Tech industry. The only way to fix this is to use a 3rd party mod.
The short version is, your sims must find a reasonable commute from home to work, otherwise your economy stagnants and unemployment runs rampant. SC4's pathfinding heuristic disallows a sim from going backwards to go forwards.
This creates many transportation deadzones and a lot of unintuitive bottlenecks. You will literally see sims live directly next to a subway station that takes them directly to work, but they will drive instead.
There is a mod to fix this, but the performance impact is expectedly awful.
It's not as bad as you described it. It's even worse.
The hack the creators of SC4 used to get around the problem of traveling the same path twice in one trip is responsible for a large waste of CPU cycles. Essentially, the hack allows the Sim to "forget" how he got to a certain location and start a new trip to the final destination. The downside is that this is that all of the information from the previous leg of the trip is lost, and the algorithm must run again. There isn't a 1:1 ratio between the amount of citizens and CPU cycles wasted, because as your city grows the path each citizen must take becomes more complex and consumes more cycles.
You can read more about it here, at a third party fan site. [1]
[1] http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=fcff28ec82...
In any case the new SimCity looks fantastic, maybe we can exchange our simulation model (Aimsun) for their graphic engine :)
I rarely if ever play games and I'm certain this will be a terrible time suck.
If every spoke is timed so it takes the same amount of time, you can minimize how long people have to wait. Make everybody get on at one end of the bus and exit at the other and hub stops can be short.
You'd have to walk to the nearest hub and from the one closest to your destination. But you need the exercise anyway.
And charge tolls for passenger cars that vary with demand, something that would work without recreating the roads.
Hopefully there's a 'rush hour' style expansion that lets us simulate cities other than Los Angeles.