[Flipside]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

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.

[Flipside]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

And in this case that way is so incredibly obvious it should have been preëmpted right at the start of the design process.

[Flipside]

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.

[Phantom Hoover]

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.

[NGTM-1R]

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.

[Flipside]

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.

[Luis Dias]

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.

[StarSlayer]

Can you make a dystopian megacity with giant hive blocks that can be only policed by Street Judges?

[Flipside]

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 However, on the plus side, you can attack your own city with a giant Mech

[StarSlayer]

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.

[Flipside]

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.