It's good to be mayor! Let's Play SimCity 3000!

If they're going to offer you a house, it needs to be on an enormous hill to show your importance. There don't seem to be any big enough, so build one.

Is there no legit way to DL this, then?

*lightbulb!*
*facepalm*

I second this.

Big hill, a moat, and Bowser for security.

While SimCity 2000 will always be the "classic" in my book, 3000 is so far and away the best SimCity. Maybe the single best Sim game ever. The jazzy soundtrack and the soft pastel colors are really what make it. The game is absolutely beautiful to behold, even today.

No, but I'm fairly sure it's in various compilations that are still being sold in Wal-Marts the world over.

Assuming you don't count SimGolf (since that's a Sid game that just got wrapped up in Sim clothing), I'm inclined to agree. They took just about everything wrong with 2000 (specifically the over-finnicky water pipes) and fixed it, while adding tons of new stuff.

Sure, I kinda miss the arcologies, but those were a bit too out there for my liking anyway.

Honestly, it's a pretty big crime in my eyes that Maxis' back catalog isn't on Steam.

Having played both 2000 & 3000 I have to agree, 3000 is the much better game. Everything just feels more polished and finally tuned and lots of the annoying things that bogged down 2000. I never played SimCity 4, but it seems like 3000 is the best version of the game. It's worth getting if you can find a copy.

I do wish it was on Steam, along with so many other older games. Take advantage of the long tail.

So which is it SIR? Are you PRO-Arcologies, or are you against America?

And later on our program: Sven: Llama lover, or Llama lover?

- Eddie

Shouldn't this be against Canada?

Man's got a point there.

Anyway, the whole arcology deal was just... goofy. Sure, it's nice to have a reward at the end of the day when you've maxed out your city, but a Mario Statue was just fine for me. Colonies of 80,000 Sims? Stat-padding and nothing else.

Canada: We're Little America! *sob* I'm sorry Mr. Trudeau, I'm so sorry *sob*

- Eddie

Simcity 3k is the best of the ones I've played (which is 1-3) if I'm discounting nostalgia for the SNES version. I remember not liking two specific things though: the way they did the residential demand variation is unfun*, and the required number of hospitals+schools for good education takes a big chunk of space once you have high density zones.

*If I recall correctly, the way it works is that there is a deterministic residential demand based on your city, and each year has a deterministic % modifier based on which year it is (acting as "random variance", essentially). Most of the years the % modifier just adds a small bit of random noise to your city, but there are several isolated years with absurd modifiers going down all the way to -90% (trying to recreate the feel of recessions/depressions I suppose). It is frustrating when your city nosedives on schedule just because the game says so. The list of modifiers loops around every 25 or 50 years or something too, so it's always the same story.

I think the amount of schools is fairly realistic since they're apparently K-12 institutions (I will concede they take up a bit more land than they probably should), but you're right that the Hospital math is more than a bit funky.

I also support this.

I really only played Sim City on the SNES with the money cheat, but I could not figure out Sim City 2000. I wasn't too good with managing the city, but it was fun to play with the landscape and read the newspaper updates.

The Sim City board of advisors (NSFW language) from Something Awful always comes to mind when I see Sim City 2000 and later games.

That's lame. I expect a little better from Maxis (even if they are owned by EA now)!

So did anyone else play SC4? If so, was it just me or was the city budgeting in that game much more difficult to manage than in previous titles? It was all I could do to keep myself afloat most of the time.

I've played all but Societies. The thing about 4 is that, to me, it was less of a city management game and more a transportation simulator (much like Sim Tower started as an elevator simulator). The budget management and whatnot were actually pretty easy, to me, but I spend most of my games getting yelled at by the transportation guy, that traffic was ridiculous. So I spend the game just building more and more and more roads. I'm sure I could take a city, build just one house, power it, and then fill the entire city with roads, streets, highways, railroads, and subways and whatnot and it still wouldn't be enough.


Although, now I've learned that the transportation path finding is kinda dumb. The game looks for the shortest path, but not the fastest, so highways and avenues can get completely ignored. Maybe if I played it again with that in mind I could do better.

I actually have a copy of the Arcology book. It's definitely pretty fantastical, but I think it's totally fascinating as well.

Still, I think this is easily the best SimCity game. It looks nice and has great music and lots of fun options that weren't in 2000 (several of which have already been mentioned, like selling out your city with NIMBY projects), while just barely avoiding being overwhelmingly complicated.
I did this once, setting up terrain in the editor that was just a gigantic mountain with a 2x2 peak and a little space down on the ground to get my city to the point where I could build the house.

Wasn't that the one that Garnet (I think) on Retronauts talked about the pathfinding mechanic being broken out of the box and the user community patching it themselves? That'd fix the problem, I think.

I skipped 4 because it came out when I was largely using my crappy old Thinkpad that didn't have 3D graphics, and I was happy with 3000 anyway.

I completely forgot, but yeah, there is a user patch for it. I should get it and try the game again and see if it could be any better. But that whole transportation thing just really sucked away any enjoyment I could have gotten out of 4 in the first place.

This LP has me interested enough to see if I can get 3000 running on my netbook. Might be fun to watch tv while destroying a small town...

I think the transportation thing is pretty realistic, because, realistically, that and garbage collection are the two most important interactions people have with their city. A mayor would be dealing with that crap more than anything else, although not to the level that SC4 portrays it as from my way of understanding it.

I really enjoyed SimCity 4 and I've got a big old region saved with lots of cities still sitting around on my hard drive. I think my biggest problems were never transportation (I agree with the above, this is really the heart what SimCity should be about and I don't mind the challenge). The issues I had:

Budget adjustment was stupid. It's optimal to fund each individual building up to the capacity it needs, but no more. You pay for what you have bugeted, not what you use. So you had to constantly adjust the funding on each building or waste a lot of money.

Several buildings were just too damn small, elementary schools come to mind off the top of my head. Without large versions you end up having to build dozens when your population density increased.

But there was just something about watching the sckscrapers go up, even when they blocked your view of a bus stop...

Having been to the World's Only Arcology several times, I can tell you that I am firmly anti-arcology because they are filled with dirty stupid hippies and also the weddings that they hold there are boring.

SC4 won't stop yelling at me about schools and hospitals. There aren't enough! There are too many! They need more funding! You are funding them too much!
I still hear it in my sleep.

I'm pretty sure that Maxis themselves fixed it later, in the expansion pack, given that the expansion pack was entirely about the transportation side of things.

Of course, then the fans created a whole new add-on to make the traffic management even deeper.

Oh, wow. I LOVE SimCity more than words can convey, and I...well, I love this LP. I consider myself pretty experienced with this game (i've been playing it since i was 6), so if I were you i'd consider rezoning the old town areas to medium density, and plop in a few big parks (maybe park squares) to raise land value and MAEK IT LOK PRETTY. Like they did in London.

This is really making me want to play a SimCity again. I played 2000 forever. I think the first PC game I ever bought was the original with that goofy copy protection scheme of typing in city populations off a red sheet.

Surely there must be a version that runs on a Mac. I'd prefer not to play the SNES version I bought on VC because I demand more complexity.

I'm pretty sure I originally played 2k on a Mac. Though, whether there's a version that runs on a current Intel Snow Leopard Mac, that I don't know.

The problem with that is that you'll utterly kill your tax base by doing so. SC's economics always have favoured density - while you can kinda make up for it via industrial taxes in 3K, it's a tough balance, especially when the city starts to get bigger.

Anyway, nice condos are prettier than the medium-density buildings. Those almost all look like housing projects.

BORING.

I would create zones based on NES sprites.

- Eddie

This LP is no longer delivering enough Simcity goodness! I'll be installing 2000 or 3000 tonight onto my little netbook in order to get the recommended daily dose of city management!