Expansion idea

After years of laying on the shelf, I recently dusted off my copy of SimCity 3000 and found I really liked the game. After a couple of weeks I ordered SimCity4 and very happily realized it was not just about building one city. That's my fav gaming concept, something I love about Civ. I have an idea for an expansion. What if you could zone different type farms such as corn, wheat, cotton, etc.? To take this a step farther, what if you had different soil and weather types such that certain crops would only grow well on specific soil types and weather conditions? Of course you would not have to include weather but it would allow for the economy to vary based on years of ideal conditions versus droughts. To make it even more interesting what if these soil types and weather conditions were generated randomly when creating a city and no city would necessarily have every soil type.

Of course this would necessitate trade between the cities and also do something else - cause those "ahhhs" when you click on your soil map and see rich bottomland, ideal for growing corn or drier plateaus for cotton.

Yeah I know all of you who played those trading games years ago are thinking boring micro-management. That is not what I have in mind. Rather than constantly move goods you would simply setup a contract like you do for power or trash. In addition to the RCI indicator you would also have a SD indicator for supply and demand. While all cities would demand all goods, they could get by on a very few and an important element for growth would be how well the city was supplied. I would not get into quantity too much either other than have a percentage of the good for sale. Say if you sold all your corn, then the producing city would obviously suffer. Of course you would need the ability to initiate contracts, unlike the current system.

Just to make things a little more interesting what if the game engine randomly and occasionally created certain industries such as mills that would produce clothing? Now let's assume that industry was not in the city that could grow cotton. More trade. I admit this might seem kinda bland but the devil is in the details. There are many possiblities other than just seeing where something grows well, producing it and selling the excess to your neighbor for big bucks. For one, you would likely have to decide which of your cities would grow large and which remain small because there would likely never be enough of all goods for all cities. Also if weather is included, you would have to decide which would suffer from lack of supply. Rioting in the streets, anyone?

Then there is the idea of trade routes. Although not necessary other than having connections, I think it might be fun and require a bit of strategy to entertain the concept of the shortest route - also the idea that a city would benefit from goods carried thru a city and not used by the city - commerce.

Now if you are getting a little bored with modern skyscrapers, what about a medieval or ancient scenario? I would love to see a camel caravan traveling across a dry and windy desert, winding from oasis to oasis to some ancient port. Of course there you would not build a road but build a trail which would be set down by an adventurer. This notable person(s) would be born randomly in one of your cities and would act just like a road builder. Needless to say his/her birth would be something to celebrate equal to the fireworks on January 1.

Wow, sweet ideas man!! I would LOVE to see that stuff in SimCity! Especially that whole part of expanding the agricultral sector. I've always felt that the game was sort of incomplete in that respect. I never really saw a use in building agricultural industry because it takes up so much land for so few jobs, and no benefit from it. If we were able to grow/buy/sell/trade crops, I think it would add a whole new dimension to the game

It would also make things more random and interesting because if you had a random generation of soils and such, it would be out of your control as to where it is and how much of it is there, which would make the cities even more challenging to manage, trying to adjust to natural occurances. I think that is something that is missing from the series, and especially after Societies (which I've decided I won't try anymore).

Thanks zilla! You made my night.

I loved the farms when I saw them in SC3 and began thinking then of how they could actually be used. There are so many possibilities. Coffee for example. Everyone knows it has to be grown on high altitudes and is labor intensive. Does the city that produces it remain poor so that coffee can be cheap to all your other cities or do you charge high prices for it and only the rich can afford? Maybe that's taking it a bit too far but is an example of something that could be done.

Like you I was disappointed when I read about Societies. I thought SC4 was headed in the right direction and Societies just took a wrong turn. (:

This post has been edited by Roads on August 12, 2008 12:53 am

^That almost sounds like a smaller version of SimEarth.

But yeah, I don't see why all of this couldn't have been put into SimCity. I mean, this is how the real world works, and if a city is going to survive it has to have trade. The way it is now, a few businesses and industries show up and magically things happen that makes demand increase or decrease. I think it would be a great idea to have much more fine-tuning of the inner-workings of a city. Being able to trade cheap materials to a small farming community in return for cheap food for the workers of the industrial city, and be able to decide to which cities each thing will go to and for how much.

I honestly think if these ideas were implemented into SimCity 4, it would be just about perfect

edit: SimCity was going good until Societies came along. They totally messed up on that one I hope the series can still come back though.

This post has been edited by zilla352 on August 12, 2008 01:04 am

Totally agree.

As the A-Team use to say, "I love it when a plan comes together." It is the concept of how much you can affect the outcome. Laying down zones and roads in consideration of traffic and pollution was a good idea. For those of us who want more complexity and variety - I hope we are now a majority.

Oh, I think now we are after the last game to come out. They were out for a new generation of SimCity players, and I think they got a bunch of 10 year old kids in, but left all the old fans behind. I think now more than ever there is a push to get an even bigger and better SimCity out, with many new options where we can get into the very heart of a city. The only reason why they won't do it is because they fear nobody will buy it for being too complex. Not that it couldn't be done.

If only they knew

zilla I've been thinking about this statement and you settled something in my mind I was unsure about. It occurred to me that the player might only need to set sell or buy prices but not both because he could set it up where there would not be enough conflict to make it interesting. Really tho, a natural conflict exists between buyer and seller anyway as you clearly pointed out. Likely tho it would need pretty thorough testing to make sure the game engine didn't allow you to easily produce gobs of product.

Maybe that could be done with the game engine creating more poor soil than anything else. The only other way I see it could work is for the AI to set both buy and sell prices based on supply and demand but again as you pointed out that leaves the player out of the loop. Also I think most of us can agree that an AI (my experience from other games) can be brutal causing more frustration than fun.

Very true. Not only does it often ruin anything you may have planned it is also very difficult or sometimes impossible to reverse what the AI decides to do. I would much rather have control over the trading aspects of it, and leave the game to decide things that should be more random, such as weather and soil types. Those two things should NEVER be put into player control, at least I think, because then it would be too easy to make everything perfect.

And you also made me realise another thing. You mentioned pollution a couple posts back which I think could become much more an involving part of the game. Say you have a bunch of dirty industry in an area that you decide to develop into farmland. The crops may have a hard time growing there because of the highly polluted soil, and unlike SC4, the pollution would actually remain there long after the industries left, and you could create programs to revitalize areas of your city that are polluted and need to be cleaned up. There are so many details it's impossible to get into it all.

Yep the possibilities are just about endless of what could be done. Actually if there are many fans like us who like complexity, it could be a real boon for the game company. Rather than try to incorporate everything in one expansion or game, they could simply begin cranking out expansions. It is a win/win situation for both company and customers. Expansions could be produced faster and cheaper than a full blown game and we users could buy just the ones we liked.

I have several in mind.

Exactly! They do that already with The Sims, so I don't see why they wouldn't do it in SimCity. Rush Hour was an awesome expansion, if only they would have done a few more I think it would have been much better off. It's actually a very good business plan IMO.

This hit home last night as I was watching my land being gobbled up with farms. It is really an excellent point.

Another problem with building farms in SC4 is the huge amount of pollution they create. Water pollution around farms is unbelievably high, which makes it difficult to keep water clean. But then again, I suppose that is actually very realistic. Now if they made that pollution affect the environment, that would be something.

Yeah I think after farmers started using pesticides and especially crop dusting with airplanes, the environment was adversely affected. There is a kinda interesting story about this that happened many years ago here in Alabama. I can't remember the name of the town but they have a statue to the boll wevil. For many years, probably a century or more I guess, cotton was king here. Even when I was a child there were cotton fields everywhere. In the fall each side of the road would be lined with cotton where bits of it had blown from pickups and farm tractors taking it to the gin.

Back to the story. In this particular town the boll wevils got so bad they destroyed so many of the crops the farmers could no longer make a living. It forced them to seek an alternative and I don't remember what this was either but I think peanuts. Anyway the new business was so lucrative, they erected a statue to the boll wevil.

Hey that gave me another idea! It kinda goes along with my last post about pollution, but if you had those farms like on a river or something, then the pollution should be able travel downstream. Also, it is sort of unrealistic the way pollution cannot travel between cities. If they could just add that into an expansion, such as a "Realisticness Enhancer" expansion, or something like that

That way everything you do in one city will truly affect the cities around you.

Yep, the bigger picture here is that you are essentially creating SimState but creating it bottom up instead of top down the Civ does. If you have enough variables you could create a vastly different state from the one you created previously or from the one someone else has created. This idea screams replayability.