I'm not sure how fun "a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff" would be, considering how small each city is. A lot of the fun is playing at the region level.
I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay.
And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95.
(yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed because of bad decisions)
I'll wait till I get the "Gold Edition" or whatever that includes all these expansion packs and the original game for the same price as the game costs now, a year down the road.
I think you might be waiting in vain. Unlike most other franchises, The Sims in particular seem to have an extraordinarily long half-life when it comes to DLC cost. I'd be rather surprised if Sim City was any different, given how well it's sold despite terrible PR work.
I'd love that too, but have you seen Sims 3 and its DLC? One of the reasons I cancelled my pre-order was because I realized that EA would undoubtedly milk SimCity customers for as much as they could. I wanted no part of that.
Considering that about 90% of the gameplay comes from interacting with the other cities in the region, I really don't think this would work out as well as people think it would. The cities are small enough that you can't supply all the power/water/garbage/people/industry out of one town, and it's the EA servers that are maintaining the connections between them.
The question would be whether a single PC has enough computing power to run the entire region. It looks like the new SimCity engine actually simulate behavior of each car/person and resource transportation. Would simulating all the agents of the entire region works?
I don't know if that argument works economically. EA has to support something like 100,000 simultaneous users, so if the server side needs more than one PC worth per user then their EC2 bill would be off the charts. (I see nwh made this argument earlier.) I suspect that inactive cities in a region are simulated with a lower level of detail.
Since players can run at different speeds, I'm going to say that inactive cities are simply not run and exist in a paused state. They probably produce/consume resources at a steady rate from their neighbouring cities, based on a statistical average.
EA does not have to simulate the cities now, each cities are already simulated/view only by the owner of that cities. EA only have to relay information between cities.
But they would have to do it if you can actually control other cities in the regions. If you play one city and then switch to another city for, say, 1 game year, what's going to happen to your previous city? Does its time stop? Would AI have to take good care of all cities?
It doesn't seem like the game is that taxing on decently good processors. It seems like you should easily be able to do those calculations if you have some extra cores lying around.
One thing to keep in mind is that even in big, 16 city regions, only subregions of 4 cities each are actually connected by roads and rail. In fact, these subregions are practically autonomous, except maybe for air travel (I don't know). This is why you have 4 great works per 16 city region. So first thing to do would be, if there are actual calculations taking place between these subregions, cut that off.
Now we only have the interconnections of 4 cities to deal with. Only 1 of these cities is 'active' at a time (the one you're currently playing on). I don't see why you couldn't do a rougher simulation of what is happening between your active city and the three other cities. You don't have to track agents from other cities to the active one, just have a counter that keeps track of total population.
I may just be a naïve computer science student, but this doesn't seem terribly hard to do if you already have everything else in place. And it couldn't possibly be slower than what they currently have: I've watched one streamer have 3 cities within a subregion all have different values for progress on a great work. They weren't synced up at all. It was just silly. On one local machine, there's no way this could happen.
Or perhaps the city sizes are kept small due to the "connecting" stuff they're doing, and stand-alone cities could be larger if they didn't need to live online.
The agent-based simulation is probably much more CPU expensive than the statistical model in older SimCitys, which might also have informed the size limit.
It really seems like this is the point they decided that social play is core to the gameplay. I imagine the conversation is something like 'how hard would it be to implement regions locally?' 'a lot of work' which gets translated into nothing works locally to the press.
I'm sure Sim City "Megatropolis" DLC is soon coming that doubles the default city size. Only $19.95 or whatever they think people will pay.
And don't worry about the traffic jams from bigger cities. Sim City Subway edition will comes out soon after. Only $15.95.
(yes I am very cynical and angry about this and making bitter sarcastic comments. This is a game I've wanted for a long time but is so flawed because of bad decisions)