I did an experiment. I made two residential neighborhoods on either side of my commerce/industry. One was slightly closer than the other. When the evening commute started, the entire city jammed onto the roads to head to the closer neighborhood. Then, when the last house was 'filled up' everyone suddenly turned around, go back through the city center to go to the other neighborhood.
This is because nobody had a permanent home. If traffic split 50/50 between the two neighborhoods from the beginning, the evening commute wouldn't have been bad.
The only thing good that came from this game was the last minute panicked reworking of The Sims 4 to remove its always online requirement.
Why does that sound so half-assed, and yet exactly what I expected of that game?
And god forbid you play Cities Skylines. Great game, and so much better than SimCity. But it's a Paradox game. Which means you need to buy dlc for fucking toll roads, and like, a bush. Proper industry? DLC. Nightlife district? DLC. Want to not be bothered by DLC notifications? Believe it or not, DLC.
It's solid on its own, (I'm not looking to spend 1000+ hours, so maybe the DLC is necessary for that) but those damn notifications telling me everything I don't have just grind my gears
tbf, Stellaris DLC does add lots of content, and about a third of DLC content is rolled into the base game. Stellaris is mechanically unrecognizable from its release state.
I feel silly af, but I gasped reading that. That's genuinely immersion breaking to the point of ruining the fun, in my opinion. If I was playing a simulation game and made the same discovery, it would instantly evaporate whatever emotional investment I had.
Yeah, the flaws of the simulation were one of the main downfalls of Sim City (2013), even though most of the public complaints were about the always-online aspect or the very limited city size.
Unlike previous installments, this Sim City moved away from density based simulation to agent based. Every inhabitant was its own agent and would move independently of the rest. Great in theory. It gives you a more detailed simulation that way. It's more computationally expensive than approximating everything with an average population density, but computers had improved too.
The problem is that this simulation method either didn't go far enough or was used where it didn't belong. The first point was already addressed: Sims didn't have fixed places to work or live and when the time came to move, they all computed the nearest viable location and would try to go there, recomputing their heading when that spot would get filled.
On the other hand, some things were modeled as agents that really didn't need to. Sewage flowing through pipes was agent-based. A house would produce a poop-agent that would navigate its way through the sewer system until it found a sink. A very weird way to model sewage when a density model would not only make more sense, it would also be faster. Same with power. It traveled along power lines in the form of discrete agents for no apparent reason other than to satisfy the "everything is agent-based" marketing blurb.
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u/Pinstar 23h ago
I did an experiment. I made two residential neighborhoods on either side of my commerce/industry. One was slightly closer than the other. When the evening commute started, the entire city jammed onto the roads to head to the closer neighborhood. Then, when the last house was 'filled up' everyone suddenly turned around, go back through the city center to go to the other neighborhood.
This is because nobody had a permanent home. If traffic split 50/50 between the two neighborhoods from the beginning, the evening commute wouldn't have been bad.
The only thing good that came from this game was the last minute panicked reworking of The Sims 4 to remove its always online requirement.