For a very long time, I have loved simulation games. I like playing and watching simulation games of all types, from extraordinarily specific ones like "mid-1980s East German Transit Bus Simulator" to really generic mainstream ones, such as SimCity. I love the heck out of SimCity, because it's a really interesting opportunity to work with a different type of creativity than I would normally have the opportunity to. In addition, SimCity in particular plays very well with my interest in infrastructure and systems.
So, when the "New SimCity" was announced and an opportunity to sign up for the beta was presented (what seems like almost a year ago now) I was incredibly excited.
I followed along happily as details such as the new GlassBox simulation engine were announced and as details about what the geography of the new SimCity would be like, etc etc. When it came time to play a beta, I was incredibly excited.
The first and second betas were all about ironing out gameplay issues, and as such, EA wanted everybody to restarted and try different aspects of the game each time. Given that there was only an hour to do everything each time, I played along but wasn't too worried about the end results. The third beta, on the other hand, was epic. It was a single four-hour chunk of the game in which you were free to do anything you pleased. The result? I found out that the new SimCity (which I'd pre-ordered just after playing the first beta) is going to be life-ruiningly fun.
During the betas, I developed an interesting play style that I'm going to need to give up when it comes time to actually play the game, I'd draw out a grid and then fill it with zoned Residential, Commercial, and Industrial areas as quickly as I could, and I'd play the whole thing on the fastest speed, referred to in Sim* parlance as "Cheetah." In the four hours I was able to play, when Eisbrecher wasn't crashing, what this meant I was able to achieve was just about 260,000 residents, a university with a department (and one completed research project), and I was pushing the limits of the utilities I had installed and been continuously upgrading.
In total, I had three power plants, a maxed wind plant, a non-maxed wind plant, and a growing coal power plant. I also had both a city metro bus system and a shuttle bus system (I wonder how well these two things integrated, just as a side-note.)
Playing the game at high velocity like I did presents a few… "challenges." It's really interesting to see the growing pains that such a large city has. I didn't pay much attention to it, but the entire original part of my city got to pretty extreme density and was ultimately connected by only four small stub roads. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea, but it wasted a fairly good chunk of space and meant that some kinds of upgrades were ultimately unavailable to me.
Many of the areas in my city were at maximum density, which is both good and bad. It's bad because as density goes up, resource needs go up big-time, and one of the biggest issues I had was that I ended up building several dozen duplicates of things such as these sewage outflow pipes, which are really meant for the start of a city before you can build the sewage processing plant. I ended up not being able to build the sewage processing plant, however, because I chose what are probably considered to be the "wrong" set of ministries/departments for my City Hall.
This issue is much of what led to the City Hall, my University and the High School (along with that second block which has my transit facilities, a library, and secondary police, fire, and medical centers) have so much green space. It is "difficult" – no, nigh on impossible to determine how much space these things are going to need later on, so I built a large set of blocks with nothing zoned. This meant I'd run out of room to actually do more things, without actually running out of physical room on the map.
The game comes out for real later on this week, and I'll definitely be playing it a lot once that happens. I haven't decided what machine to run it on yet, I'll probably reformat Eisbrecher with Windows 7, since it has been having a few problems with 8. (This frees my 8 license to use on something like Topham or MILVAX, so that may happen.) Those are just implementation details, but it serves to remind that I should act fast. When I do start playing the game, I suspect I won't go quite so quickly, and I do need to figure out something between the "tiny grid" and the "huge grid" – ideally with some better places to put my utilities and growing facilities like the schools, services, town hall, etc. The good news is that once I'm no longer on a time limit, I can try out a bunch of different things.