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I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely
by chongli 3y ago
I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare.
Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
SimCity 2000 has almost none of that. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. So you can sit back (with a cold beverage of your choice) and enjoy a nice relaxing time playing mayor and seeing your little city develop before your eyes!
- gruez 3y ago>My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player. You don't have to do that. Leaving the sliders at defaults work just fine. You only need to tweak them if you wanted to micro-optimize spending, which rarely needed given how easy it is to make a profitable city to start with.
- iJohnDoe 3y ago100% agree. Fond memories of SC 2000. The open creation of any layout you could think of was my favorite aspect of the game. Anyone have a particular recommendation on how to play SC 2000 today on Windows 10?
- genocidicbunny 3y agoGOG has SC2k available and it should work just fine on Windows 10.
- Moru 3y agoAnd it downloads AND installs in less time than it would take to insert the CD into the drive, not to mention finding the thing... Modern wonders :-) Gonna play some tonight!
- nilptr 3y agoIf you can find the Win95 version it's preferable over the GoG DOS version. You need this guys patchers tho: http://www.krimsky.net/patchers.html http://www.krimsky.net/patchers.html
- genocidicbunny 3y agoI thought 3000 was the best showing, though perhaps that's looking at it back later when performance is not as much of a concern. It felt like an upgraded SimCity 2000, rather than a big change in game mechanics that 4 was.
- JonathonW 3y agoSame here— SimCity 3000’s the one that really hit the right spot gameplay-wise for me. Prettier and deeper and more polished than 2000 without departing too far from 2000’s core mechanics or simulation approach.
- ido 3y agoI still occasion play 3k!
- qball 3y ago>without departing too far from 2000’s core mechanics or simulation approach SC3K is similar enough in structure to SC2K that it can actually load SC2K city save files directly; SC3K being a relatively strict superset of SC2K in terms of available elements and their sizes certainly doesn't hinder that backwards-compatibility at all. The only things that would actively break when you did this were related to maximum terrain steepness for underground elements (metro, water pipes), 90-degree rail connections would sever (at least, graphically), and hydroelectric power generators as they're the only power building not implemented. The arcologies were also dropped from SC3K, but to be fair those were mostly just designed to be population boosters in SC2K- something that wasn't necessary in SC3K now that the simulator was allowed to keep track of more than 250 buildings (or at least, so the manual and the query tool say).
- BearOso 3y agoI wasn't aware of a 250 building limit. Is there anywhere I can read more about this? Searching turns up empty.
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- _Qeomash_ 3y agoSimCity 2000 is definitely my favorite. I'm surprised someone hasn't made a version of it with a larger map (or infinite map).
- bruce511 3y agoTake that one step further. Start with a virgin earth. With sufficient, but finite, number of players, and a modelled global population, you build cities that effectively compete with each other for population. In other words an alternate history of population and human development. A multi-player Sim Earth.
- devman0 3y agoThe ability to import a SimCity 2000 map in to SimCopter was amazing for the time, imo. I remember flying around cities I had worked really hard on thinking how the cross over between the two games was really cool.
- nateberkopec 3y agoI did the same with Streets of SimCity.
- mcaravey 3y agoAbsolutely! I remember adding a bunch of rail to my cities just so I could do more train rescues or catching robbers on the trains. It was huge fun at the time…
- Mezzie 3y agoI will always fondly remember the ridiculous SC2K maps I made for SimCopter + Streets of SimCity. Hills and road ramps everywhere.
- alerter 3y agoI agree that 2000 was a cleaner overall design. Adding realism for the sake of it is a dead end. That said, there are a lot of games where the details of the simulation compound on themselves in interesting ways (Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, DC:Barbarossa, Shadow Empire, Paradox games). I enjoy those sorts of games, more minimalism and abstraction isn't always more fun.
- thom 3y agoAgreed. A lot of simulation/strategy games seem to increase their fidelity over time, at the cost of fun. I’ve bought every Football Manager game for almost 30 years but these days it feels too much like an actual job. I’m intrigued what the best alternative is - I personally enjoy Paradox games, which generally expand with numerous DLCs so you can opt in to additional complexity on an incremental basis.
- trackflak 3y agoWe already have OpenTTD and OpenRCT. Maybe someone somewhere is creating an C++ remake of our favourite isometric city simulator, with multiplayer support!
- pqb 3y agoHow the multiplayer mode would look like? Do you think about competing against the other real player? Or maybe collaborating with some friend? I am asking, because I think I haven't seen the multiplayer support in any railroad/transport-tycoon game. I remember in Railroad Tycoon 2 and then in Sid Meier's Railroads [0] we could play against NPC. Same as us, NPC is establishing a company and we may buy all his stocks to win. [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7600/Sid_Meiers_Railroads/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/7600/Sid_Meiers_Railroads...
- trackflak 3y agoIn OpenTTD, each player controls a rival transport firm and you compete against each other on the same map. AFAIK you can also arrange a buyout of your rival, similar to Railroads. In OpenRTC, each player gets full control over managing the same park from a shared pool of funds. Mayhem may ensure if you set your game to public and don't configure permissions carefully. In my mind, such an OpenSC2K's multiplayer would work like the latter. Each player managing the same city. Though if they removed game engine restrictions, it would be nifty if each player could manage his own city on one big shared map, similar to OpenRTC.
- rpcope1 3y agoProbably a lot like Simcity 2000 Network Edition.
- iggldiggl 3y agoRailroad Tycoon 2 definitively had multiplayer support.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoI've often dreamed of making a city builder MMO. But to do it right, I'd want it to be the scale of a moderately large nation like the USA. You'd buy plots of land one square mile as you expand. The game world would be seeded with a major highway and railroad system that you could not remove, just add connections to. I'd want traffic to be simulated in the same depth as Cities: Skylines, and have freight have to move over a thousand miles to reach destinations. But most importantly, I'd want the entire game world to be seamless. You should be able to pan from one side of the country to the other. But such an ambitious game would require immense processing power. I don't know how I would scale it.
- billfruit 3y agoThe problem with city building games is that they are far too gamified. In reality construction takes years, even decades for many infrastructure projects. Because of that, the challenge of solving the problems of 25 years in the future is not well represented in many such games.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoTry Workers & Resources, it's more about managing a whole supply chain and being self sufficient than spending money. You can tackle it at different levels but at the most complex you're making the cement then trucking it to the building site.
- billfruit 3y agoYes, but what about the time involved, does it simulate the construction taking 15 years.
- Sakos 3y agoThey also make a lot of assumptions about how cities are designed. The first thing I noticed when I started up Simcity 4 again this week for the first time in 20 years is that it's all single-use zoning. The rest of the world outside the US says hello.
- DonHopkins 3y agoAbsolutely! SimCity 2000 was a masterpiece, striking the perfect balance between the immediate grokability and comprehensible simplicity of the original SimCity "Classic", plus the judicious addition of rich immersive CD-ROM quality graphics and sound. SimCity 2000, much like Hunter S. Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark of game design. It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects. It marked a technological zenith, fruitfully applying the latest technology in a way that later versions fell short. It was an inflection point in simulation game design and immersive production values, having reached a point where any further elaboration would only lead to diminishing returns. It struck the ideal balance of complexity by remaining true to the original SimCity Classic, while learning from the oversimplification of SimAnt and the overcomplication of SimEarth. And just like the high-water mark described by Thompson, the peak of SimCity 2000's game design was a place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Subsequent versions, despite their technological advancements, could not recapture the magic of that moment. They were like the Las Vegas of today, where with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark of game design that was SimCity 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk In a 1996 talk, Will Wright dove into how the designs of SimAnt and SimEarth both influenced SimCity 2000. During a Q&A session, a student asked what he was making next, so he also gave a sneak peek into his current project, Dollhouse, which was later renamed The Sims. Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu). https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
- iancmceachern 3y ago100% agree, simcity 2000 will always he THE simcity for me.
- caycep 3y agoahhh that brings me back
- Arn_Thor 3y agoFor me it's SimCity4. 3000 has a place in my heart always, but 4 wins out in replayability--even today--because of its dept and the neighboring cities. Making a thriving gigantic region of interconnected cities is forever satisfying.
- joshz404 3y ago2000 and SimTower. And SimCopter! Oh the good ol' days.