6 ms·

The Real Mayors of 'SimCity'

71 points by samclemens 12y ago

iyn 12y ago
It's tangential to the article, but if you like(d) SimCity, you should definitely check out Cities: Skylines [0][1], it's a really well designed game. Another semi-related thing, I'm curious if/when we'll live in a time when every decision is run on some world simulation before being "implemented". Does anybody know how often/if Expert Systems[2] are used in politics/business? How would you approach designing such "simulation", what would be the hardest problems? [0] http://www.citiesskylines.com/ http://www.citiesskylines.com/ [1] Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
- patmcguire 12y ago
  Yeah, Cities: Skylines is incredible. I had an oh shit moment when I realized that every car was a simulated independent actor, at it works.
  - iyn 12y ago
    Yeah, it's incredible. But AFAIK, it's not only cars, agents are everywhere in this game. If I recall correctly, latest SimCity also was focused on agents, but it seems Skylines devs are better ;). Good discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2rm5k2/cities_skylines_dev_diary_6_simulation/cnh4tet https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2rm5k2/cities_skylin...
    - XorNot 12y ago
      SimCity used agents in places they're totally inappropriate though. Like power generation - that was simulated as agents which travelled along powerlines and jumped into the nearest empty building each tick. Which of course utterly fails to capture any of the detail of an electrical grid.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  Don't get me wrong, Skylines is basically a good game to me, but as someone that has been playing the "Sim" series of games since the original SimCity, I think they missed many of the lessons learned by those games and really could have released a much better game. Most of my qualms with Skylines are sort of "nitpicking", but they are pretty glaring: 1) the annoying tweet bird with no option to disable (at last check) because the devs felt it was central to their design 2) terrible UI graphics (I know this is subjective, but...) seriously; the UI graphics are not very polished compared to SimCity 2000 or SimCity 3 even and look like they were made by a programmer 3) funky road placement; the road placement tools have a lot of the same "floaty" feeling that SimCity "5" did that has lead to much frustration (see the skylines subreddit for various complaints about this) Personally, I wish someone would create a modern version of SimCity 2000 instead using a voxel engine. I miss the precision of placement that it had and the simplicity of various systems. With that said, they did get a lot of things "right" as far as I can tell, such as traffic simulation, map size, and general performance (mostly thanks to Unity really....) and their friendliness to mods, no extra drm, etc.
  - iyn 12y ago
    I agree that they have a lot of things to improve, yet I'd argue that Cities: Skylines is the best city simulation so far (disclaimer: I loved SC3000, I hated SC4 and 2013). But maybe I'll change my mind, I'm playing Skylines just to relax once in a while so I haven't had a chance to hate it yet ;). One thing that's great is the community (and Colossal/Paradox attitude towards people that mod the game). The game is pretty new and there is already tons of different mods, it'll be interesting to watch how this evolves over time. So, you say that you don't like Chirpy - you may be interested in this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=405791507 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=40579... (fun name, isn't it?). AFAIK, there are already multiple communities that build mods, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding
    - binarycrusader 11y ago
      I was of a mixed mind with SimCity 4; there were certain things about it that were much better and other things not so much. I enjoyed the Rush Hour expansion more than the original SC4. One thing that SC4 did extremely well though was music and general presentation, although I'll admit to missing much of the original composer's music for SimCity 3000/2000. SimCity 2000 had a lot of great mechanics but a fairly terrible interface -- somewhat understandable given its original incarnation as a dos game and certain UI mechanics hadn't come along yet (such as being able to use the scroll wheel or panning around). But I'll always fondly remember when I upgraded to a SoundBlaster AWE32 just so I could get "real midi" music from SimCity 2000 :-)
- stdbrouw 12y ago
  Most of these kinds of simulations aren't expert systems but microsimulations (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsimulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsimulation) and they are actually used quite a lot for certain kinds of problems, like figuring out the indirect effects of changes in taxation. It is often possible to check baseline accuracy (does it at least work in current conditions?) but as for predictive accuracy, well...
  - iyn 11y ago
    Thanks for the link, I haven't heard of microsimulations.
patmcguire 12y ago
There were a lot of jokes about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan because it was the same as the opening settings of Sim City 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan#Comparisons_to_SimCity_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan#Comp...
mdisraeli 12y ago
Something similar was done by journalists for the UK 2015 General Election. They took Democracy 3, an indie game with a very complex neural net simulation, and attempted to find out how the various main parties' policies held up: http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/116017 http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/116017
doctorpangloss 12y ago
Strategy in SimCity & Cities: Skylines wouldn't survive politics. The games greatly reward spending all of your money as quickly as possible, and deficit-spending on services until your city grows into positive income. In other words, spend as much money as quickly as possible building and supporting zones, since they make money; then, even though your budget is negative while you spend on the services to support those zones, you will have not wasted precious dollars on services you can pay for in deficit. This is a really tricky part of the game, and extremely nerve wrecking. If you neglect to spend exactly right, you end up with $0 and no way to fix a mistake once you hit the play button. On the other hand, your city will grow as quickly as it can given your budget. You could say this is a really accurate model of real life. If you have an efficient way to spend money, should you spend all of it? You could say that governments rarely have efficient ways to spend money, but they always have a most-efficient-among-the-options way to spend it. If there's anything to take away from the simulation, it's that cash surpluses don't make sense. Not for governments, not for Apple, not for virtual mayors or StarCraft commanders, not for anyone. A cash surplus is a symptom of playing the game wrong, not a problem with the game. And in our politics of austerity, that's really crazy.
- sukilot 12y ago
  If you have good investment opportunities, you should not sit on cash. If good investment opportunities are coming soon, you should sit on cash. The trouble is that many forms of wasteful consumption are disguised as investment, in politics.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    I would strongly disagree that they're "disguised".
- martindale 12y ago
  This is absolutely correct, but the underlying assumption is that the player can play the game perfectly. This just isn't possible in a world of infinite variability. Human-controlled centralized management cannot outperform a decentralized, non-planned, ad-hoc market in these cases.
comrh 12y ago
Democracy 3 might have been a better choice to mimic politics.
gohrt 12y ago
The article seems phony. It claims things that aren't possible in SimCity, like: > took money from SimProvidence’s budget and gave it to folks living in low-income housing to allow them to upgrade their living situation. SimCity doesn't have any model of "low-income housing" "giving money to folks". Money is only spent on police, fire department, and transportation, all city-wide.

71 points by samclemens 12y ago

iyn 12y ago

It's tangential to the article, but if you like(d) SimCity, you should definitely check out Cities: Skylines [0][1], it's a really well designed game. Another semi-related thing, I'm curious if/when we'll live in a time when every decision is run on some world simulation before being "implemented". Does anybody know how often/if Expert Systems[2] are used in politics/business? How would you approach designing such "simulation", what would be the hardest problems? [0] http://www.citiesskylines.com/ http://www.citiesskylines.com/ [1] Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

patmcguire 12y ago
Yeah, Cities: Skylines is incredible. I had an oh shit moment when I realized that every car was a simulated independent actor, at it works.
- iyn 12y ago
  Yeah, it's incredible. But AFAIK, it's not only cars, agents are everywhere in this game. If I recall correctly, latest SimCity also was focused on agents, but it seems Skylines devs are better ;). Good discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2rm5k2/cities_skylines_dev_diary_6_simulation/cnh4tet https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2rm5k2/cities_skylin...
  - XorNot 12y ago
    SimCity used agents in places they're totally inappropriate though. Like power generation - that was simulated as agents which travelled along powerlines and jumped into the nearest empty building each tick. Which of course utterly fails to capture any of the detail of an electrical grid.
binarycrusader 12y ago
Don't get me wrong, Skylines is basically a good game to me, but as someone that has been playing the "Sim" series of games since the original SimCity, I think they missed many of the lessons learned by those games and really could have released a much better game. Most of my qualms with Skylines are sort of "nitpicking", but they are pretty glaring: 1) the annoying tweet bird with no option to disable (at last check) because the devs felt it was central to their design 2) terrible UI graphics (I know this is subjective, but...) seriously; the UI graphics are not very polished compared to SimCity 2000 or SimCity 3 even and look like they were made by a programmer 3) funky road placement; the road placement tools have a lot of the same "floaty" feeling that SimCity "5" did that has lead to much frustration (see the skylines subreddit for various complaints about this) Personally, I wish someone would create a modern version of SimCity 2000 instead using a voxel engine. I miss the precision of placement that it had and the simplicity of various systems. With that said, they did get a lot of things "right" as far as I can tell, such as traffic simulation, map size, and general performance (mostly thanks to Unity really....) and their friendliness to mods, no extra drm, etc.
- iyn 12y ago
  I agree that they have a lot of things to improve, yet I'd argue that Cities: Skylines is the best city simulation so far (disclaimer: I loved SC3000, I hated SC4 and 2013). But maybe I'll change my mind, I'm playing Skylines just to relax once in a while so I haven't had a chance to hate it yet ;). One thing that's great is the community (and Colossal/Paradox attitude towards people that mod the game). The game is pretty new and there is already tons of different mods, it'll be interesting to watch how this evolves over time. So, you say that you don't like Chirpy - you may be interested in this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=405791507 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=40579... (fun name, isn't it?). AFAIK, there are already multiple communities that build mods, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding
  - binarycrusader 11y ago
    I was of a mixed mind with SimCity 4; there were certain things about it that were much better and other things not so much. I enjoyed the Rush Hour expansion more than the original SC4. One thing that SC4 did extremely well though was music and general presentation, although I'll admit to missing much of the original composer's music for SimCity 3000/2000. SimCity 2000 had a lot of great mechanics but a fairly terrible interface -- somewhat understandable given its original incarnation as a dos game and certain UI mechanics hadn't come along yet (such as being able to use the scroll wheel or panning around). But I'll always fondly remember when I upgraded to a SoundBlaster AWE32 just so I could get "real midi" music from SimCity 2000 :-)
stdbrouw 12y ago
Most of these kinds of simulations aren't expert systems but microsimulations (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsimulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsimulation) and they are actually used quite a lot for certain kinds of problems, like figuring out the indirect effects of changes in taxation. It is often possible to check baseline accuracy (does it at least work in current conditions?) but as for predictive accuracy, well...
- iyn 11y ago
  Thanks for the link, I haven't heard of microsimulations.

patmcguire 12y ago

There were a lot of jokes about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan because it was the same as the opening settings of Sim City 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan#Comparisons_to_SimCity_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%E2%80%939%E2%80%939_Plan#Comp...

mdisraeli 12y ago

Something similar was done by journalists for the UK 2015 General Election. They took Democracy 3, an indie game with a very complex neural net simulation, and attempted to find out how the various main parties' policies held up: http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/116017 http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/116017

doctorpangloss 12y ago

Strategy in SimCity & Cities: Skylines wouldn't survive politics. The games greatly reward spending all of your money as quickly as possible, and deficit-spending on services until your city grows into positive income. In other words, spend as much money as quickly as possible building and supporting zones, since they make money; then, even though your budget is negative while you spend on the services to support those zones, you will have not wasted precious dollars on services you can pay for in deficit. This is a really tricky part of the game, and extremely nerve wrecking. If you neglect to spend exactly right, you end up with $0 and no way to fix a mistake once you hit the play button. On the other hand, your city will grow as quickly as it can given your budget. You could say this is a really accurate model of real life. If you have an efficient way to spend money, should you spend all of it? You could say that governments rarely have efficient ways to spend money, but they always have a most-efficient-among-the-options way to spend it. If there's anything to take away from the simulation, it's that cash surpluses don't make sense. Not for governments, not for Apple, not for virtual mayors or StarCraft commanders, not for anyone. A cash surplus is a symptom of playing the game wrong, not a problem with the game. And in our politics of austerity, that's really crazy.

sukilot 12y ago
If you have good investment opportunities, you should not sit on cash. If good investment opportunities are coming soon, you should sit on cash. The trouble is that many forms of wasteful consumption are disguised as investment, in politics.
- XorNot 12y ago
  I would strongly disagree that they're "disguised".
martindale 12y ago
This is absolutely correct, but the underlying assumption is that the player can play the game perfectly. This just isn't possible in a world of infinite variability. Human-controlled centralized management cannot outperform a decentralized, non-planned, ad-hoc market in these cases.

comrh 12y ago

Democracy 3 might have been a better choice to mimic politics.

gohrt 12y ago

The article seems phony. It claims things that aren't possible in SimCity, like: > took money from SimProvidence’s budget and gave it to folks living in low-income housing to allow them to upgrade their living situation. SimCity doesn't have any model of "low-income housing" "giving money to folks". Money is only spent on police, fire department, and transportation, all city-wide.