Wednesday 12 February 2003

Pic of the day: Snapshot of the neighborhood where one of my Sims lives ... after she moved to Sim City. Size slightly reduced. Pretty detailed, don't you think?

Sim City 4

You will get bored with this game. It may take weeks, or months, possibly years. But you will get bored, or die trying. Because there is no other way out: You will never finish it.

The most striking attribute of Sim City 4 is its sheer size. And I'm not just thinking disk space, though unfortunately that's a point too. The game comes on 2 CDs and also allocates a lot of disk space for your future building pleasure. On the other hand, if you don't have the disk space for it, you almost certainly don't have the other specifications either. It is a very machine-intensive game. There is a reason for that, though.

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The game is still called Sim City, but would now more aptly be named Sim Cities. The most striking difference from earlier games is that there are now a large number of rectangular game areas, each roughly equivalent to the City screen of old. The neighboring cities (or counties, as I think of them) are fully playable, though you can only play one at a time.

For instance, if you already have a city in one area, you can open a neighboring area and build a road to the border. You will then be asked whether you want a connection. This was also the case as far back as Sim City 2000, but then the connection was just an abstract vector. Now, you have to actually save your new county, load up the neighboring city, and there continue the road until it connects to whatever zones you want to hook up to. If you are starting a new village, you probably want to be able to work in the city, so you connect to the industrial and commercial zones. If the distance is long, you may consider train. Train is also good for the industry that wants to push its product to market.

In the same way, if one of your cities has excess electricity, it may be a good idea to run a power line from there to a new village in the neighboring zone (or even 2 zones away) instead of building a new power station at once. Supposedly, you can even do this with water. According to my advisers, you can make a deal to deliver garbage across the city border too, but I have looked in vain for a menu choice for this. (Edit: I found it in the budget details! Yay!)

By tying the city screens together, it becomes less important to balance zones. You can have a surplus of industry in one city and residents in another. If the communications are good, the Sims will happily commute. Bob Newbie does that, for instance.

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Oh yes, that’s Bob Newbie of The Sims fame. If you have that game installed, SC4 will offer to import your Sims from there. Sadly it is not perfect. Children become adults, men become women. But it was an attempt. (It seems to not be fixed in the patch either.) There are also some ready-made Sims in case you for some odd reason don’t have the People Simulator from Maxis.

You plunk the Sims down in a house of your choosing, and they will keep you informed on important events in their lives, such as graduating, getting a new job, and moving. They will also whine about traffic, pollution and other problems they encounter, but so do the more anonymous newsflashes. There is a separate mode in which you track your Sims instead of doing the usual zoning and infrastructure stuff. You can follow them trying to make their way to work in the morning and back in the evening. Your number of named Sims is limited, but you have pointers for each of them pointing in the direction they currently are.

Still, the Sims bit seems unfinished and perhaps a bit tacked-on. I guess this is the direction the game will develop next time. The Sims has also grown larger, with the addition of a much larger neighborhood in the Sims Unleashed add-on. And there is the unused technology from Simsville, the small town simulator that was canceled. Already in SC4 you can see pedestrians walking around in the neighborhood, and zoom pretty close to their (more or less) pretty homes. It is easy to imagine that the two games will blend further in the future.

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Certainly the region feature has been a long project. As I mentioned, some hints of neighboring cities were found already in SC2000. But then, they were just statistics. Now, they are alive. In effect, you can now create a colossal city if you fully develop all the counties. Whether you want to do that is another matter. With the introduction of the Sims, focus has changed from maximizing population to seeking happiness for the inhabitants. Given how much Sim City influences popular thinking, this is probably a good thing. I just today read a game review in which the reviewer confessed that playing Sim City had bent his career in the direction of urban development. He may not be the only one.

In light of this, it is probably a good thing that this version of the game is the most realistic ever. And I don’t just mean the graphics. The futuristic skyscrapers with a hundred thousand citizens seem to be gone, but this is less of a problem now that you have so much more area to develop. And money is more of a constraint than it used to be: For instance, I discovered soon enough that even small parks cost upkeep now.

The best approach now is probably to start with a rural community. The Industry zoning now has a choice exclusively for agriculture, the least dense industry zone. Agriculture zones are cheap, and they don’t employ a lot of people, but they don’t produce much pollution and they start up very quickly. Add a small residential zone for the workers, a windmill to produce electricity, and preferably a primary school. Education is rather important over time, as it allows better careers and more income, and non-polluting industry. But immigrants are very ignorant: A high influx of new people means your education level will plummet.

All in all, this game starts out at a slower pace. But with patience, and by pooling the resources of your counties, you should be able to create a living, breathing world where your Sims will love to live.