Sim City should be a recommended game for those taking Geography, especially in HS.
When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late.
Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Alert isn't going to work here.
Just so you're aware about the new SimCity, it requires a constant internet connection to play, and there's no way to save/load previous versions of a city. You can't mess around and experiment without doing irreversible damage, which was a big part of the fun.
Yeah, until they shutdown the server shortly after the next Sim City is released, making your old game unless. EA has a habit of doing things like that.
I usually play Sim City by finding the unlimited money cheat and getting a large amount of money before I start. I can then build whatever I want. I enjoy the city design part of the game, not the economic part.
I doubt that this way of playing will be possible in the new Sim City.
The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while I'm playing?
I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.
I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.
I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.
It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.
That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.
Something like that, yes. Watts seemed like the most universal unit to use. The point being that even if they're really efficient, they'd still be using 25W x the number of concurrent clients in power, which is just absurd especially since they're not charging monthly. They're not doing any kind of complicated simulation on the server side.
If I recall correctly, this is only the case for the beta version of the game so that people can become familiar with the gameplay but won't be the case for the retail version.
Wait, so what happens if I build lots of nuclear plants then let them all melt down? Does that affect neighboring cities that other people are actually playing?
Any idea how they are going to handle griefers then? I can't imagine they are just going to ban people who habitually don't take care of nuclear plants placed on the map's edge.
Ah EA, creating a 'market' of open source clones, like CorsixTH and surely one of Sim City. This time we're being pushed to the clone before the original is dead.
[...] As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures
of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the
consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate
your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes,
tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine
condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip
Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its
Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No."
The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved
games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your
region.
Spreading around saved game files and using tools to mess with the games memory to cheat is something that has prevented a true Ranking system and online play in almost all games.
These server-side requirements would mean that the $ is stored server side and it will be harder to cheat.
It was pretty much either have always on connectivity or require punkbuster and disable many online cooperative features.
How does "ranking" work for a sandbox game? The concept wakes no sense. Simcity doesn't have kill/death ratios or something. You can't have a global leaderboard, because there's no winning. It's not clear that "cheating" is even a problem. If you want to play online with your friends with unlimited money, go ahead! Why the hell not?
Maybe they are trying to teach kids things like debt to income , budget management, loan basics, and concepts like "there is no redo in real life" rather than basing everything on a kill/death ratio.
You can easily develop a way to rank how productive, profitable, clean, and happy cities in a game like SimCity are. If you weigh these factors and provide a number then you have a ranking. Maybe global leaderboard was a bad example but there are numerous other features that might require this kind of online only gameplay that we haven't experienced yet.
I say don't knock it until you try it. Not the beta, not the videos of others playing, the real game.
If the new strategy really kills the game then I'm sure someone will create a fake server patch or method of playing offline.
There a lot of great, fun games with no redo. The entire concept of a roguelike is based on death being permanent and having to start over. FTL, Spellunky, The Binding of Isaac and Dungeons of Dredmor are all recent examples of games that embrace this unforgiving play-style.
However, I think forcing this into Sim City is just a bad idea, and contrary to my expectations from such a game.
I would argue that every single-player game is forced to allow infinite saves and redos, by the fact that virtualization with memory snapshotting exists. (For a networked game like this one, you must just first reimplement a "private server" for the client to talk to, and then run that within the same virtualized container, so that a snapshot tracks their combined state.)
FWIW, Geography major student do have access to professional traffic simulation software (e.g., TrafficSim, SUMO, .etc) if they are interested in research topics related to traffic. I am not sure what algorithm Sim City uses, but I am assuming they are not as complicated as these professional software.
Perhaps that's the point of your suggestion, to lower the entry level to these field, or for a broader audience.
Well he specifically said he was particularly referring to High School students, not college undergraduates majoring in Geography with access to sophisticated, professional traffic simulation software.
A better (and perhaps cheaper) solution would be to use either Cities in Motion which has a good transportation model, or Cities XL (I'd suggest the 2011 version for price and performance over 2012) which has a good balanced play as the cities grow in size. These seem from initial new SC exposure, to be better models for teaching and from a learning perspective. As well the saved games feature (hardly a feature, more a necessity for most of us) is far more valuable for teaching lessons, which the new SC lacks.
There is also Mobility (http://www.mobility-online.de/en/informations/generalinforma...). It was designed by a university and auto manufacturer so they put a bit more thought into their traffic algorithms. I feel it is a bit eurocentric because there are a lot of things they do in Europe which we do not do here as far as traffic management goes, but it is an interesting simulation/game to fool around with. Since the German federal government also played some role in its development, you will see more of a bureaucratic approach to the game.
When I first started playing, I was reacting to situations - fires, disasters, as they happened, which was already too late.
Or I'd build all the fire stations in a nice row, or police stations all in a ordered block of land, then get frustrated when they all jammed each other trying to get out and answer calls. My tactics from Red Alert isn't going to work here.
Can't wait for the latest SC!