I'd want a lot more than a faithful remake of SC4 (although SC4 would be a great starting point) -- the SimCity games have always, to a degree, been games that follow suburban California's zoning laws, and they're really great at making sprawling California suburbs.
Just a few things I'd want to add to city games:
- Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones.
- Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively.
- Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together commercial and residential plots, when many residential buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making them effectively "light" density commercial contained within "dense" residential).
If we are assembling a city builder wishlist, then the biggest item for me would be richer concept of time. In SimCity and its ilk, time handling is really simplistic. Even huge infrastructure projects finish pretty much instantly so making dramatic changes is not that disruptive, and there is nothing to simulate the changing of eras so your cities end up having fairly monotonous texture.
What if as your city evolves it would change from old-town narrow cobbled streets and weirdly shaped buildings to early modern brickwork, then brutalist concrete monsters, and finally modern sky scrapers and suburbs, or whatever, so different neighborhoods end up feeling different based on the era they were built. And if/when you need to remodel/improve the area, you'd have to take the existing stuff more into account and plan for the potentially multi-year construction project with the construction traffic and potential street blockage etc.
SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems.
The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
> SC4 has some rudimentary water pollution mechanics with agriculture being among the worst polluters. It was pretty easy to avoid just by having a separate water towers or pumps for your farms and city and make sure you didn't connect the two systems.
That's there, but it was pretty dumb -- it didn't take terrain topology into account, so you wouldn't have to worry about making sure agricultural zones didn't wash into rivers/lakes/oceans that might otherwise be used for water supply.
> The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
While I love modding in general, I think something so fundamental as being able to put up a "bus stop here" road sign should be included in the default game. As it exists, a bus stop or subway entrance take up as much space as a small home.
The NAM is a great mod if you're looking to get into SC4 today, but it really should be included in any new release for the knock-on compatibility benefits (you don't have to worry about another mod somehow breaking NAM).
> Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
Skylines is definitely worse at it. The base game is a little too bare-bones for me (generally, I like games where the simulation is a state machine where you can tweak inputs vs directly messing with it), and the transportation options are lacking even when compared to SC4. I've tried to get into it a few times, but I keep bouncing off.
NewCity is quite fun (if rough, due to its alpha state.) The whole game revolves around desirability and density; one can choose to make a low-services sprawly city or one can choose to make a high-value dense village.
Though the mixed-use scenario there is a bit iffy (mixed-use is a separate zone that only develops in areas with sufficient density/traffic to warrant it)
SimCity is very much a product of its time. They went with the dominate development paradigm of the late 80s and I guess they've stuck with it because the game has sold very well. Why mess with the cash cow? If there ever is another version released, maybe the features of the competition will spur the project managers of SimCity to expand into the modern era.
SimCity as I knew and loved it is completely dead. The last entry to the franchise was a mobile game released in 2014. I can't see the series being much of a cash cow for EA anymore.
Just a few things I'd want to add to city games:
- Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones.
- Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively.
- Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together commercial and residential plots, when many residential buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making them effectively "light" density commercial contained within "dense" residential).