New Sim City game coming out next year. Looks impressive, definitely looking forward to it. The AI looks much more complex and intelligent than ever before.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US

First gameplay video - creating a gambling town
http://youtu.be/YceL2C4TW4Q



Here are a few developer videos released months ago showing the mechanics behind the simulation engine.
http://youtu.be/vS0qURl_JJY
http://youtu.be/MxTcm1YFKcU
http://youtu.be/Hro0BEquiPE
http://youtu.be/_SfcDW2yJiM

10/6/2012 12:54:25 PM

this is relevant to my interests

10/6/2012 1:06:42 PM

Quote :

"The AI looks much more complex and intelligent than ever before."

ummm... AI?

10/6/2012 1:09:41 PM

Trying to determine what your question is there.

Do you have an issue with the scripted commands controlling the behavior of the program that is referred to as "AI" in the gaming industry (despite it not being true AI in the scientific sense), or do you think the AI looks unimpressive compared to similar games?

10/6/2012 1:15:43 PM

i'm trying to understand what "AI" you consider to have existed in SimCity

10/6/2012 1:20:49 PM

Very little. Which is why it's

Quote :

"much more complex and intelligent than ever before."

10/6/2012 1:32:57 PM

The AI that controls the Sims.

10/6/2012 1:59:42 PM

I have never ever allowed requirements for a game (or computer gaming in general) drive my computer purchasing requirements, but if my old laptop can't run this I will buy whatever I have to to do it.

Do want!

10/6/2012 2:41:12 PM

I plan to buy this game

and then run it when I update my lappy
(hopefully Win7 will still be available by then)

10/6/2012 3:53:14 PM

If anything, this games looks to be more cpu intensive than gpu with all of the real time data being used to drive all the AI and scripts with different layers of hidden agents that are all interwoven to some degree.

10/6/2012 4:19:49 PM

I know I'm gonna get flamed for this comment but sometimes I'm in the mood to play a game and sometimes I'm in the mood to play a simulation (simcity, duh!) but I hope that they have a really lightweight option for play because some of that UI looks really overwhelming...for the kids...yeah.

10/6/2012 4:58:16 PM

I will NOT be buying this game. There is literally no offline mode. It has some cool ideas, like a global economy, until some griefer comes in and fucks it all up just to piss people off. If you've pre-ordered, I would cancel it right now. You can't control the road networks between cities in any way, and if the servers go down, you're fucked. Your "sandbox mode" is still required to be connected to the cloud for saves, and you can't go back to a previous point in time; you can only load the latest version, that's it.

again, I will NOT be buying this game. it's essentially going to be SimCity Social, only you have to actually pay for it. hell, it's going to be SimCity Societies, but with a required online connection. Fuck. That.

10/6/2012 5:06:00 PM

loved me some SimCity 3000. once you started making money rather than losing it, the game became easy.

[Edited on October 6, 2012 at 5:09 PM. Reason : ^LAME!]

10/6/2012 5:07:55 PM

I'm not too concerned about it right now. Didn't bother me too much in Diablo 3.

10/6/2012 6:30:06 PM

UI reminds me of Cities XL (which is pretty decent)

[Edited on October 6, 2012 at 6:32 PM. Reason : .]

10/6/2012 6:32:29 PM

Quote :

"I will NOT be buying this game. There is literally no offline mode. It has some cool ideas, like a global economy, until some griefer comes in and fucks it all up just to piss people off. If you've pre-ordered, I would cancel it right now. You can't control the road networks between cities in any way, and if the servers go down, you're fucked. Your "sandbox mode" is still required to be connected to the cloud for saves, and you can't go back to a previous point in time; you can only load the latest version, that's it. again, I will NOT be buying this game. it's essentially going to be SimCity Social, only you have to actually pay for it. hell, it's going to be SimCity Societies, but with a required online connection. Fuck. That. "

Fucking nerd. Nobody cares that you will not be buying this game.

10/6/2012 6:52:15 PM

EA will care when the rabid fanbase that kept the franchise alive tells them to fuck off. I don't want a game where I have to spam my friends in order to play the game. That's what this thing is going to be. The whole point of SimCity has been that you can do damned near anything. This thing? Not even close. Building a big city? Not possible. But hey, you can make an R2D2 shaped city, fuck yeah!!! Modding? Forget about it. Everything that actually made SC4 a great game, that has people still playing it today, 10 years after EA forgot it even existed... yeah, that's gone.

seriously, you want a game that you can't actually save and go back to previous saves? You want a game where some dickhead somewhere else messes up your "stand-alone" game? At least when someone is being a dick in a FPS, you can go to another map or another region. Here? He can fuck up the ENTIRE game FOR EVERYONE. And you can't do a thing about it.

but hey, I'm just a nerd. I haven't read the shit ton of forums where people are bashing the fuck out of the FaceBookification of this game. I haven't seen where everyone and their mother is saying "why do I have to play a supposedly disconnected sandbox game while still being connected to other players." And when EA sees how much money they are losing, are they going to make you pay a subscription for a supposedly stand-alone game in order to keep paying for the servers? Think about that. or, do they just forget about it and pull the plug one day, and now you can't play your stand-alone game.

10/6/2012 7:00:18 PM

How would someone mess up everyone's game?

10/6/2012 7:11:34 PM

Wait, it will be tied to Facebook and I can't save at multiple points?

Is that confirmed?

10/6/2012 7:30:14 PM

It is confirmed that you can't restore to a previous save. there's only one save, and I think it's an autosave at that.

it's not linked to Facebook, yet, but if you want to do some of the cooler things, you have to team up with people to do it. aka, spam your friends.

as for how some jackass in Kalamazoo can fuck with YOUR single-player game, it's because the "resources" in game are tied to a global "market", that is affected in real time by everyone else who is playing the game. SO, some dickhead in Kalamazoo finds a way to dick with the system, and now you can't build or do anything because everything is too damned expensive. Griefers will now be fucking you over, EVEN IN "SINGLE PLAYER" MODE, and you can't escape it, because there is no such thing as "offline mode." The resource market is always connected.

As of right now, there's no subways, so good luck building anything resembling a large city; not that you could anyway, because the largest map is smaller than the "medium" sized maps in SC4. But I'm sure subways will be released in a nice $30 DLC pack, after you already paid 60bux for the base game. No need to offer basic parts of the game in the first release, when you can just charge for it later



Don't get me wrong, I think multi-player is an interesting thing and could bring some neat new choices in gameplay. I can even understand, from a DRM perspective, requiring people to be connected before they start playing, even if I think it's a shitty business model. But, in a supposedly stand-alone city-building game, having to connect to game servers continuously for key elements of the game? That's bullshit. It's a complete departure from what the game has been, with little gain for the change.

10/6/2012 8:46:42 PM

Oh, that's how Cities XL is with resources from neighboring cities. It works just fine, you have to select where on the globe you want. Is there not a single player where they automate that? In Cities XL for single player it would make fake cities, or you could build a second one and trade with yourself.

Doesn't bother me at all.

10/6/2012 8:49:55 PM

Nope, there is no completely disconnected single player. Other people are ALWAYS affecting your game

10/6/2012 8:50:55 PM

I like that. I always got bored of Sim City because I would google the cheat codes and this way I can't.

10/6/2012 8:55:18 PM

^ lol, that was always my problem

10/6/2012 9:11:27 PM

the fuck? what does that have to do with a single-player game not being single-player?

10/6/2012 9:11:59 PM

Well the assumption is that there probably won't be cheat codes

10/6/2012 9:31:56 PM

He's saying that, since it's all online, he won't be able to cheat as easily, which is a good thing to him.

Also, I would like applaud you for either 1) your intense love of Sim City or 2) the fact that you live such a charmed life that video game changes affect you this much.

10/6/2012 9:35:41 PM

I like this, but then, I'm not an antisocial fuckface.

10/6/2012 9:36:44 PM

^^AHA, I got beat by at least four minutes. What was I doing? I'm watching the game, but how did it take me four minutes to write that post?

I pretty much have to write a post, command-x it, double check to make sure nobody new has posted while I was writing, and then actually make my post.

10/6/2012 9:57:18 PM

Quote :

"command-x"

lol macs

10/6/2012 9:58:55 PM

isn't burro a libertarian?

Is he just butthurt that he'll be able to get fucked in the game the same way he wants real life to work?

10/6/2012 10:04:52 PM

^^LOL

I'm annoyed they got rid of the apple symbol. It was so much fun to "apple-n" stuff.

[Edited on October 6, 2012 at 10:07 PM. Reason : ]

10/6/2012 10:05:00 PM

From what I can tell in soap box, burro lives in his own world, so it makes sense he wants to do it here too

10/6/2012 10:12:40 PM

LOL

10/6/2012 10:13:55 PM

I agree with him that it should have a truly single player mode with the ability to return to a previous save.

10/6/2012 10:36:07 PM

me too, I just wanted to have a laugh

10/6/2012 10:40:51 PM

Same here

[Edited on October 6, 2012 at 10:43 PM. Reason : Although I don't mind if single player is related to other cities]

10/6/2012 10:42:59 PM

Quote :

"I like this, but then, I'm not an antisocial fuckface."

too bad the entirety of the people who would actually want to buy the game are antisocial fuckfaces, not the morons who play CityVille and YoVille and FarmVille and ChefVill and ShitVille. Look no further than Diablo III to see what happens when you try to make an intrinsically single-player game into a forced-multiplayer-game. it doesn't work. Hell, TheSimsOnline is a total flop. But hey, let's try to make the same mistakes and see if it works this time!

10/6/2012 11:23:27 PM

it'll probably work

10/7/2012 12:01:48 AM

it really won't. they've stripped the game of so much in order to make this online thing work. all the increments up to SC4 retained the same elements of their predecessors, while adding more and more value to the game. Then they tried to dumb it down for Societies, and we saw how that went. Now they are trying to dumb it down to the level of CityVille.

No subways
No zone densities
No terraforming of any sort
No saved games (really? no saving a game. what the fuck?)
Small ass "cities"
Parts of these small ass cities are completely un-buildable
No making your own regional connections
Crippled "single player" mode, that's not even playable offline

At some point, it's not even SimCity any more. GlassBox looks cool and I like the new things it offers, but if you have to give up so many other basics to the franchise to get it, then no thanks, I'll just stick to SC4

10/7/2012 12:28:03 AM

wait wait

no truly single-player offline mode?

fuck that, it does sound like SimCity Societies, just with the ability to actually zone shit again

10/7/2012 12:31:14 AM

Fuck it. I'm going back to legos.

10/7/2012 1:51:27 AM

If I buy this it offsets your boycott.

10/7/2012 11:16:48 AM

Quote :

"some dickhead in Kalamazoo finds a way to dick with the system, and now you can't build or do anything because everything is too damned expensive."

from the gambling town video, it looked like the lowest end residential/commercial/industrial was all free to build

10/7/2012 1:30:11 PM

the concept videos look pretty cool, but I'd be shun off with any facebookification or EA trying to do too many DLC's and I can see how they could do that with all the crap they've been doing in the past few years. And I thought the killing feature from SC3 and SC4 was the fact that the large map size wasn't large enough for my playing styles.

Or the very least let me allow to build my own cities in a state and control the whole state; kinda like a cross breed of Civ5 and SC4 with each city having their own set of resources that you control. Fuck multiplayer.

10/7/2012 1:52:21 PM

So what are alternatives other than this ans Cities XL

10/7/2012 2:37:01 PM

The only thing that comes to mind is Anno 2070, but its not exactly just a city building game.

10/7/2012 2:59:23 PM

aaronburro's criticisms, while some of which are troubling, are of a game still in development. I have been looking forward to this game for a while, so I hope they are just waiting to implement stuff like subways and ways to fill in the dead space between cities for later.

The lack of an offline mode doesn't bother me much. But that's just me.

10/7/2012 4:35:26 PM

in that gambling town video, i like how the train comes into the station, then turns around 180 degrees in about a 20 foot radius

10/7/2012 4:50:53 PM

Spinning train cars are old school sim city

10/7/2012 5:31:08 PM