SimCity review in progress g21

I've played SimCity for 34 hours, but I feel like I'm only just getting to know it. As it's an always-online game, I need to test the live servers tomorrow, but that's just the start: I haven't yet surpassed 200,000 residents, built a coal empire, coordinated with other cities to build a Great Work, or tried the sandbox mode. I have a lot more mayoring to do before I post our final review on Friday, so until then I'll be posting my notes here as I analyze the simulation. The fast and dirty path to 30,000   I'm getting pretty good at launching cities. Like rolling RPG characters or trying to fix a router, it's tempting to restart. SimCity's early game is when I'm free to build creatively and experiment–to finally get it right—and it's terribly addictive. The midgame is more stressful. At 30,000 residents, I'm cramming infrastructure into increasingly cramped quarters, trying to balance my taxed services long enough for my residents to stay happy and my buildings to increase in density. The challenge becomes profit/loss analysis and crisis handling more than building. To illustrate this 0 to 30,000 progression, I've started an example town called Murder Bucket. I'll be filling in my observations and criticisms shortly. More to come here! The climb to 150,000   Rectango eventually failed. SimCity starts out easy. You lay out a few roads, zone your RCI (residential, commercial, and industrial), plop down a coal plant and water tower, and everything's peachy. Residents are moving in and you're making money—lots of money if you get the RCI ratio right. Low-tech industrial plants have plenty of workers, shops have plenty of customers, and your residents are happy to be both. It doesn't last—SimCity is hard. It's a juggling act, and every few minutes it throws a new ball at you. If you don't catch it, you drop all of them. At first it's just RCI, power, and water. Then it's sewage treatment and garbage management. Then the fires start. Crime rises. The kids want to go to school. Traffic becomes a problem, so you increase road density to keep it flowing. It works, but now those little suburban houses are transforming into apartment buildings. Your population is growing and your services are failing, so you build more and more until your plot is completely gridded. But there's still something wrong. There's always something wrong, and this cause and effect seesaw keeps the game engaging–the goal might be perfect homeostasis, but if getting there were easy, you'd just be watching. The problem with problems Uh-oh. Every bit of infrastructure comes with a talking head (what is that beautiful house?) who just loves to nag. Your water pumps are polluted. Waah. Your industry wants better educated workers. Boo-hoo. These complaints are all part of the juggling act, but they're also incessant and frustratingly inconsistent. If you build water pumps near dirty industry, for example, they'll start distributing icky brown water. But if it's just a little polluted, my pumps will claim that the water is "safe." My advisers and citizens, however, will not agree, and will prod me until I go on a manual hunt (I haven't found any way for the adviser to just show me the problem) for that one old water tower that has a teensy tinge of industrial pollution under it. There's inconsistent communication like that all over SimCity. One household loves that there's plenty of shopping, while their neighbors ask "where's the shopping in this town?" That may be a symptom of the simulation's complexity—each Sim living in your city must travel to work and shots, and one might have hit a traffic jam on his way to shopping while they other avoided it. Even so, the mixed messages are confusing, and it isn't always clear how to solve a problem. "Too much germs" is the number one complaint among my residents. I don't like the syntax or how ambiguous "germs" is as a complaint, but it means they don't like my dirty low-tech industry and want more clinics or advanced hospitals with their optional anti-germ add-ons. Still, I just can't seem to build enough medical services to please everyone. It could be my traffic is just so awful that ambulances can't get anywhere, but I'm not sure—the hospitals are treating patients, and I can't just keep upgrading them and stay in the green. So maybe I need to build more schools to educate my residents and increase the tech level of industry. Every time I do that, however, the industrial sector starts complaining it doesn't have enough educated workers. So, like with hospitals, I fill my city with community colleges. And they still complain. In these situations, which don't happen with every city, I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, but the game isn't communicating it well. More to come as here! Becoming a metropolis   I'll update this section when I've finally had enough success to get to metropolis status.

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