Biggest problem I have with SimCity 4

And other games of this series. What I find absolutely infuriating (alright, mildly inconvenient) is the lacking documentation on the buildings/zones/actions you build/perform in the game, and the effect they have on your city. I go into budget and check out available city ordinances. All of them have short, funny, tongue-in-cheek descriptions that explain what benefits they will give me in return for budget money. Less pollution, less garbage, less water, more people use municipal transport. All of them look good, I think, and click them all. The total expenses come up to 1000+, but oh well, the revenue I'm getting from my 20% tax on Dirty & Manufacturing Industry will more than cover it.

And then, suddenly, it turns out SOME of the ordinances have drawbacks. The campaign for less pollution/garbage also decreases demand for Commercial Offices. Water Conservation hits High Tech Industry. Power Conservation decreases Mayor's rating. Um, SimCity 4, this is the sort of information I want to read BEFORE putting an ordinance into effect, not AFTERWARDS while accidentally browsing Strategy Wiki. Higher education also happens to decrease crime, even though this isn't stated anywhere in the game. Yes, I know it also happens in real life, but how am I supposed to know that the game takes this into account? Crimes at the airport and country club (which are huge) cannot be stopped, regardless of how many police stations you build. Who could have thought?

Why the creators of SimCity chose to omit so many important points from their game is beyond me. If you're writing a joke parameter for each "special building" you have in your game (many of which are amusing), you should also bother to explain effects which actually impact the growth of my city.

 

Agreed.

 

Isn't that what they invented manuals for ?

http://www.giyf.com/ + simcity 4 manual pdf = no help ?

 

IMHO, like Raapys said, this is a gaming problem in general. Paradox Games were seriously guilty of this until CK2, for example. Important modifiers and mechanics like "White Man ", Technology Research dependant on province numbers and others were totally hidden from the player. Hell, combat in EU2 had so many modifiers hidden (which were exposed in EU3) that to me it was pretty much lolrandom "Send in troops, see how they fare" except sliders.

Its like most devs are too lazy to write more than one-line of explanation. If they hired me (IN CASE SOMEONE READING THIS IS A DEV - YES I ACCEPT PAYMENTS IN DOLLARS!) I would make a totally kickass explanation that would make everyone understand.

One thing I liked in Master of Orion 2 is that when you saw something different, a decent explanation was just a right click away. I don't remember any "hidden mechanics" in that game.

 

The Simcity 4 manual is a piece of toilet paper filled to the brim with the same 'funny' descriptions the game has.


It has one extremely short paragraph for the ordinances and 3 pages for the shitty 'My Sim' features no one over the age of 12 gave a goddamn about.

 

Reading manuals and online guides doesn't help very much, because of SimCity 4's complexity and lack of adequate documentation, half the time it looks like the game is violating its own rules, leaving me at a loss and hoping the inexplicable problem will go away on its own (it often does).

Example 1. For absolutely no reason demand for all types of Commercial zones drops completely. Two months (in-game) pass, and it goes back to normal levels. Then it keeps fluctuating between extremely high and extremely low demand, with zero input on my part. What the fuck?

Example 2. My advisor keeps telling me there's a lack of proper industrial zoning in the city. I find a place in my overpopulated city and build four squares of high density industry. Ten years later, these four squares remain mostly empty, and the advisor keeps spamming me with the same message. Yes, there's ample power, water, and transportation, zero pollution, very high desirability, but industry just doesn't grow there. Huh?

Example 3. The education map shows there are regions of my city that are in deep red, i.e. Negro levels of IQ. Strategy Wiki says that overlapping school bus coverage provides no additional benefit, so I build elementary and high school that completely cover the region of stupidity. Fifty years later (!) the region is just as low-IQ as it used to be. WTF?

Example 4. No matter how I build the city, the center ends up filled with skyscrapers, and the edges with stand alone housing. Even if both zones are High Density Residential, with equal access to utilities, schools, police, etc, skyscrapers just don't appear outside of city center. Why?

Example 5. Due to dense population and lots of traffic, city avenues generate a shit-ton of air pollution. Strategy Wiki tells me to build some parks and plants some trees... well, the parks don't help at all (plus there's no room for them), and planting trees just isn't feasible because I'd have to move the cursor around with the mouse button pressed for two hours. No way to get rid of pollution, fun.

Playing the game is 60% fun, 40% have no idea what I'm doing.

 

Yeah, I had similar problems with Sim City 4 as well (and in part with Sim City 3K, when they initially took that cutesy-funsey route). Some things make no fucking sense either intuitively or through in-game explanations. RE: example 3 though, try libraries and other older demographics buildings, I don't recall ever having red-level IQs. Examples 1 and 2 though, yeah, always pisses me off.

 

I took to building avenues with 3-deep commercial zones facing them, and then 2 or 3 squares of trees behind the commercial zones, then the actual block of Residential/Hi-Tech behind the trees. It does help some with the air pollution, at least it doesn't spread into the residential, and doesn't form one of those giant clouds where, I think, air poll starts to increase exponentially from several sources combining. I also always leave a square on both ends of a smaller block (normally 6-7 by ~13 squares or so) for trees and mass transit, which also helps with air poll a bit in my experience.

My biggest problem has always been how traffic works. The moronic "always take the shortest route no matter what" system is really weird. It's a bit better in that NAM mod or whatever it's called, where sims start to avoid congestion a bit, but it baffles me that nothing was implemented to make sims and freight prefer highways etc when travelling further. As it stands you have to funnel traffic around to force it to take the larger high capacity roads, producing the most unexpected and unnatural road nets simkind has ever seen. I've done this by putting one-way roads into and out of blocks onto connecting avenues full of comemrcial zones, forcing sims to enter a block at one or two points and leaving at another, so traffic always flows on the avenues and brinsg high customers to the commercial zones.

 

Point taken about the manual. I wouldn't know, hence my interrogation. I've pretty much only ever played Simcities 2000, and I learned the basics of it thanks to a friend.

I agree that basic game-mechanics (like what stats or buildings do, for example) should be explained in-game if they're anything but intuitive, with optional reminders, and not left as an additional frustration to the player. Just remember that games didn't have the same screen estate in 1990/2000 than they do now.

More complex basic game-mechanics (getting the best out of a combination of your stats or buildings, for example) can be left to the inquisitive minds of the player. They should be able to figure it out by themselves.

 

Yeah, but this is funny - I had no problem figuring out mechanics of SC2000, and the copy I had was in Portuguese, which I could understand a very limited amount of. There were no random jumps in RCI, or any other hidden stuff. Only minor iffiness I recall came from ports and arcologies, and even then, you could figure things out pretty easily. Oh yeah, and trains. Fucking trains, how do they work?

 

somehow i like how very complex game can be unpredictable because of some obscure mechanics, as long as those don't bring me to lose the entire game. if simcity had been 100% predictable, with some choices bringing always the same, exact, precise consequences, i'd find it boring.

 

The usual cause for this is fluctuations within your residential population and/or demographics. If large buildings loses people, especially middle and higher class, commercial demand can vary depending on how much they create the demand and how much they provide the workforce.

This is complicated by commercial's reliance upon traffic and how far sims are willing to travel. Given that the game's traffic algorithms have annoying aspects to this, it's frustrating. More on this below.

Demand levels can also be stabilized by ensuring that you're developing neighbouring city zones. Neighbour connections generally only have positive benefits.

Depending on land values, those regions may be designated as desirable for High-Tech industry, but you don't meet the requirements to populate High-Tech industry. Also four squares is quite small for a high density industry building to even appear (unless I'm misinterpreting what you mean by square here).

As already mentioned aged population areas receive little benefit from non-adult forms of education, unless you drive in more population into the region to take advantage of those services.

This is largely a function of traffic flow. People like being near commercial services. Traffic drives commercial development. More people create traffic. Try to develop another city centre, and when they bleed over into each other you could start placing some commercial to drive larger development.

Also if you develop a neighbour region to be a suburbia, with many of their jobs within your main region, this can also spur on larger development.

When you start a region I recommend, while you have access to terraforming tools before starting the city, the put a decent amount of trees down to begin with.

Also, try to push as much traffic flow to major highways, and insulate those regions. Or develop more public transit. However, as mentioned early, the traffic algorithm is not that good and they'll likely avoid these. I highly recommend the Network Addon Mod (NAM). If there's one mod to be named it's this one. The mod is highly customizable during installation to get what you want, but the main thing is that it contains fixes that make people much more reasonable in how they travel.

To build on your rant, although advisers hint at it, is that demand has caps which can only be broken by so called demand busters, like stadiums, etc.