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I don't have any special insight into the internals of both games, so I can't say for sure. I certainly think you could make a tower management game that has a

by morsch 14y ago

I don't have any special insight into the internals of both games, so I can't say for sure. I certainly think you could make a tower management game that has a simulation engine that is just as complicated as SimCity 4 or 5. On the other hand, I think that in principle a game attempting to simulate, to a degree, an entire city is bound to offer more complexity than a game attempting to simulate the goings-on in a single building. I can make an argument from observation: Sim Tower is a 68030/386-era game, and from what I remember, my 68040 ran it very well. SimCity 4, OTOH, can still bring (a single core of) a modern CPU to its knees. Of course it's possible that SimTower was incredibly efficient and SC4 incredibly inefficient, but it seems much more likely that SimCity 4 is in fact vastly more complicated.

zaphoyd 14y ago
Simtower definitely seemed to simulate individuals and had a population cap of 15-20k. Its path finding was drastically simpler though. Every floor (110 floors max) was essentially a single zone that could be crossed instantaneously so each person needed a path only from floor A to floor B. There were strict limits as well about how many transfers were allowed per path and how many total stairs, escalates, and elevators were build able. Sim City 4 allowed many millions of "people" on networks of significant complexity. The SimTower simulation was simple, satisfying, and relatively bug free. It also wasn't complex enough to continue to be satisfying for 10+ years the way SC4 has been.