Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: Flipside on November 18, 2013, 07:45:25 am
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Yes, I know, I'm a corporate whore who deserves to be shot at dawn for buying an EA title....
Now we've got that out of the way, not a bad effort from Maxis to turn the game into something a bit closer to what people were looking for with the original game and dealing with the biggest complaints about the it. Whilst you don't have any more space to build in than previously, the introduction of Megatowers means that you now, at least, have the opportunity to add some level of design to your city. The new ability to build under elevated roads etc also helps with this.
I've yet to fiddle about with Omegacorp stuff, but the Academy, allowing you to research new buildings and techs to reduce pollution and deal with illness and crime more effectively does ease the constant strain that services seemed to be under, also helped by improved pathing for vehicles.
On the plus side, this is a massive improvement to several aspects of the game.
On the minus side, it really shouldn't have cost an extra £25 to get the game to this stage, it feels like this is the game they should have released in the first place for £35-£40.
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Does it get rid of the hobo-utopia issue?
If not, then the simulation is still faulty beyond measure.
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If the 'Hobo-Utopia' issue is problems with your parks filling up with homeless people, then Megatowers are, I think, designed to help deal with this, it gives you a large increase of living, shopping and working facilities on-map, rather than having to build a special project.
I haven't played a city long enough yet to encounter any issues, but if I come across any, I'll post them here.
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I think the question was more related to the basic insufficiency of the underlying simulation aspects in the original and that emergent behavior results insanity.
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I think that's an aspect of having an AI that tries to do it the "proper" way, with intelligent individual actors and mechanical agents trying to get their own **** together and it all comes together at a larger scale of a city. For decades people have lamented how lamely botched / cheated AI in games usually is, and when they do try to make it correctly, we now blame them for the consequences of this resulting in less than stellar non-linear results more often than they should.
I think it's a step forward though. They'll learn how to code this AI more and more effectively and eventually reach a state where the game is not only playable but it will surprise us in many incredible ways due to this bottom up kind of AI.
I've always had this notion, and when the first problems came through I wasn't much surprised (though a little disappointed). It's also why I didn't buy the game. I'll perhaps buy the 3rd or 4th generation of this new SimCity.
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I'd say it's still not at the level of SimCity 2000, which is still a superior game in nearly all respects, but yes, I think as the game moves more towards individual modelling, instead of statistical, things do tend to have a habit of a forming a kind of of 'cock-up resonance', where a tiny imbalance swings more and more wildly and mucks up everything.
Since I've only been playing it for about 6-7 hours in total so far, I've seen no evidence of this, but that doesn't mean it's fixed. I think the initial idea was to move 'The Sims' series and 'SimCity' closer to each other, which I'm in two minds about.
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if we're going to start talking about the quality of simcity 5 i suggest you all read this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=84224.0), especially battuta's post at the start of the third page.
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Ah thanks for that. I was kinda amnesiac regarding all the moral shenanigans going around at the time. It was hilarious.
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I actually considered not even posting this thread and trying to give people feedback on the expansion because I was worried this would turn into another 'EA Sucks' thread, which is something we are all already perfectly aware of, it's certainly why I never stated on that thread that I had chosen to buy it.
That post says nothing whatsoever about the quality of SimCity 5 as a game, merely an opinion on EA's behavior, which people are, of course, free to make their own decision over. What I am trying to do here is provide feedback on Gameplay, not programming practices.
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The Eurogamer article, OTOH, to where that thread does provide a link, gives a review of the game (4/10) and why it is so badly broken. So perhaps you can test on your end if the troubles that the article mentions have been solved or not, that would be a good indication if Maxis has done anything in the right direction or not.
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Sounds like an idea, I'll take a look, see how it matches up and post a comparison here.
I will say that Maxis, in their defense, have always been very good when it comes to updating and modifying games. Sims 3, for example, is almost a completely different game from release with just the patches installed, and the SimCity pathing enhancements and ability to build under roads are patched items that apply to the game whether you have the Expansion pack or not.
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Ok, at first glance, I'll say this:
On the upside -
1) With regards to Hospitals etc not treating patients, this has been greatly improved even in the original now, emergency vehicles react faster and pathing is better, but I would say that the range of these building is still a little small.
2) Graphical Glitches are something I haven't encountered for quite a long time, probably about 3 patches ago. Maybe I have got lucky in that respect.
3) I've actually never had trouble getting onto a server. I'm not a big fan of the always online system, but I can't say I've ever had problems with actually logging in, once again, this may be luck.
4) Traffic congestion has been addressed by Skyways between Megatowers, which allow your citizens to travel to/from work without using the roads. It's not a perfect solution, but then that's 'sort of' the point, I'm not sure they wanted to get rid of congestion entirely. There IS, however, still a problem with people travelling to/from work in other cities until you can build railways and other public transport.
5) The exchange of utilities and cash and the co-operative building of Wonders has been patched to a much higher quality.
On the downside...
1) Still no Undo function that I can find
2) I'm still not certain the Education system is working as it should, I'll need to look a bit further into it.
3) You still get criminals and arsonists wandering in from other cities, even if that other city has no crime to speak of.
4) The water table still doesn't refill fast enough, but I think there are technologies that can be researched to improve matters.
5) It still takes forever to get rid of ground pollution from your early-game sewage works, but once again, technologies are available for this.
In summary, a lot of the main concerns raised in that article seem to have been addressed to a greater or lesser degree on the surface. I'll try to post more over the next couple of days when I can play it a bit more thoroughly.
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:yes:
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If the 'Hobo-Utopia' issue is problems with your parks filling up with homeless people, then Megatowers are, I think, designed to help deal with this, it gives you a large increase of living, shopping and working facilities on-map, rather than having to build a special project.
I haven't played a city long enough yet to encounter any issues, but if I come across any, I'll post them here.
The Hobo-Utopia (IIRC) is when you have a tax-free city filled with nothing but residential sections, resulting in complete happiness and no negative events -- forever.
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Ah, I've never needed a city to do that, I'll give it a go at some point.
I'd say, though, that sounds more like a 'Black Box Exploit' in the Simulation than an actual game-breaking fault in it. It is still a bug, but only one that can be produced if the game is played in a way the designers had not anticipated, I've played a few games where this can happen, little tricks that people learn that can 'alter' the way the game is supposed to run to give the player an advantage.
Doesn't mean it's not worth fixing if it hasn't been already, but, I think part of the problem here is that the more complex a simulation is, the harder it becomes for it to cope with values that are outside the anticipated norm.
Edit : Or to put it another way, it shows this kind of City can break the Simulation, but not that the Simulation is inherently broken.
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It is still a bug, but only one that can be produced if the game is played in a way the designers had not anticipated, I've played a few games where this can happen, little tricks that people learn that can 'alter' the way the game is supposed to run to give the player an advantage.
HW1 unlimited capture anyone ? :p
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Edit : Or to put it another way, it shows this kind of City can break the Simulation, but not that the Simulation is inherently broken.
That it is possible to get the sim into such a state is a pretty clear sign of it being broken, in my opinion.
I know, I know, this is just an edge case that is a result of many interconnected systems combining in just the wrong way, but it still seems like a clear-cut case of not enough testing and insufficiently enforced constraints.
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Thing is though, if that is the case, I'd say there are very very few Simulations that aren't 'broken' in that way. I do agree that it is a problem, but I think it's a problem across the board that not enough houses when testing their games think to themselves 'What happens if we push things to the extreme?'
Edit : Another example is the X3 series, the game runs great for quite a long time, but even with all its enhancements over the years, it's still possible for the late-game market to clog up or fly wildly out of kilter because Egosoft never really had the opportunity to test a single game after several hundred hours of play where the player has a huge Empire. They ended up fixing this with things that operated 'outside' the simulation, 'Goods from God' etc, but the Simulation on its own really struggled to cope.
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This is not an 'extreme' case, it's one of the most obvious degenerate strategies in a game like SimCity and a well designed game would absolutely have measures preventing it. It's like when a mission in FreeSpace lets you win by just flying away from the fight and waiting it out, except in this case it's the entire game.
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This is not an 'extreme' case, it's one of the most obvious degenerate strategies in a game like SimCity and a well designed game would absolutely have measures preventing it. It's like when a mission in FreeSpace lets you win by just flying away from the fight and waiting it out, except in this case it's the entire game.
It's an extreme case.
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There's a Eurogamer review, which gets it 6/10, which I think is about right considering, as I stated in my first post, that this was how the game should have played on release, not requiring another outlay of player cash to get to this level.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-15-simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-review
As has been stated in the review, space is still a problem etc, but the number of irksome bugs that plagued the original seem to have been massively reduced (but not completely eradicated yet).
I'm beginning to feel there's a little more 'EA Hate' being directed towards this game than it actually deserves.
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It's the case where the player looks past the narrative and roleplaying fluff to the game's raw mechanics and plays to win. This is bad. A game's systems should mesh with and reinforce its semantics, not render them meaningless.
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But in the same way, I've played several strategy games where you could tank your base to oblivion with cheap defences and sit and wait for the AI enemy to run out of resources.
There's always a way to break the simulation if you are totally determined to win.
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And in this case that way is so incredibly obvious it should have been preëmpted right at the start of the design process.
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I wouldn't say so, I own the game, have played it for ages, and never once felt the urge to build an entirely Residential City with no taxes. I wouldn't be able to afford to keep it running. You'd need a considerable amount of liquid funds to build it and a couple of other cities producing lots of cash to sustain it.
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The only way I can see such a scenario being possible at all is if one of the basic interactions of the game — the interaction between zones — is completely malformed. An all-residential city would be impossible if the game was well-designed, and yet it isn't.
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I wouldn't say so, I own the game, have played it for ages, and never once felt the urge to build an entirely Residential City with no taxes.
This is because you know what a city "should" look like. That's external to the game, not internal to it. The game is simulating reality because you desire it to, not because it does so effectively. Approached from the standpoint of someone who studies the mechanics of the game it becomes a very obvious strategy.
I'm reminded uncomfortably of Outpost in this discussion, honestly, and the Red Light Districts for Residential Units tactic, where nobody has a place to live and crime is rampant but nobody cares because of the increased happiness generated by RLDs. It actually worked, if you could keep the luxury goods flowing in enough quantity, but it was a failure of the basic simulation on the same scale. Any time "everybody is homeless but happy because prostitution" becomes a legitimate strategy, something has gone wrong. The same applies here.
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To be honest, I still haven't made a city that does this, so I can't even say for certainty that this is a 'thing' that happens when you do.
I'll try it in Sandbox mode a little later on today and see how the city behaves.
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One could also question the idea that if a real city had "homeless" that were happy because of "prostitution" and other kinds of degenerated bribes like that that it wouldn't "function" in a way. I am not so optimistic, and perhaps some (obviously not all, not even the majority, but perhaps a tiny few) results of a given simulation like this, weird as it may seem, might not be "unrealistic" just because it deviates so much from our own realities.
In our real world, you'd have extreme outside pressure to get out of that kind of hellhole and let the paradigm deviate towards what the rest of the world is doing.
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Can you make a dystopian megacity with giant hive blocks that can be only policed by Street Judges?
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Can you make a dystopian megacity with giant hive blocks that can be only policed by Street Judges?
Alas no, whilst crime prevention does include the use of Guns (which is rather rare for a Sim title) it's as an effect only.
There would be something strangely gratifying from hearing a distant cry of 'I am the LAW!!' followed by gunshots and screaming :D However, on the plus side, you can attack your own city with a giant Mech ;)
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Now that I think of it are their any dystopian city simulators? It be a hoot trying to administrate some BladeRunner/Hengsha/MegaCity1 esq municipality.
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If someone ever blended SimCity and something like Syndicate Wars, I'd buy it like a shot.
Edit: Come to think of it, SimCity Societies tried something along the lines of that, but failed so hard that it damaged the entire genre for years, but that wasn't because it was a bad idea, it was because it was utterly terribly implemented.