> "in that the game is a lot less sophisticated than EA would have you believe, but does that make it huge ?" Sure. It's one thing for the game to fail to live

> "in that the game is a lot less sophisticated than EA would have you believe, but does that make it huge ?" Sure. It's one thing for the game to fail to live up to the complexity the fanbase expected, it's another for the game to be broken when played the way the designers intended. SimCity is a game, it is only a simulation insofar as simulations are entertaining. When the nature of your simulation means that players are constantly having to dodge and weave around the dynamics of your simulation in a distinctly un-fun way, you've failed at the basic task. > " assuming each of our sims has something like that I can't imagine how you would make that 'real time' unless you had like 100 machines dedicated to each city." Indeed, and I commented on this earlier - the choice of using agent-based simulation was IMO a disastrously wrong one. The limitations on agent population and agent complexity (due to hardware constraints) results in a simulation that is unintuitive, inaccurate, and most importantly, not fun. Previous iterations in the series had macro-level simulations which created less unintuitive emergent behavior and whose performance allowed a greater level of game complexity. At the end of the day, the goal wasn't to create an agent-based simulation of a city, it was to create a pseudo-simulation of a city that happened to be fun to manipulate. On that front IMO SimCity 2013 is a huge failure. Players want to come in and build cities - cities that resemble their real-life experiences to some degree. Whether they're out to create a farm town, a sleepy suburb, or a skyscraping metropolis, differs, but practically none of them are looking to study the quirks and edge cases of pathfinding implementations and model their gameplay around arbitrary rules that have no bearing in real life. There are exceptions of course, the guy who created Magnasanti in SimCity 3000 took optimizing around the extreme parameters of the simulation to heart - he created the densest, most populous city possible given the game rules. It resembled nothing like what a real city would look like, but it functioned within the game's rules. Players like that are also few and far between. Most people are there for the cities, not the metagame.