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by mlieberman85 4104 days ago
Did it actually have much of a "realistic simulation" though? One of the main reasons I didn't buy the game is because people tore it to shreds for utilizing the same exact algorithm for determining traffic as they did water and other utilities. Also people pointed out that like people themselves weren't actually simulated in anyway they just woke up in the morning found the first open commercial job to work at and at night left and found the first house to live in.
3 comments
TheCoelacanth 4104 days ago
It was a realistic simulation of a dystopian society in which people had no long term jobs or housing but were simply assigned to one each day based on proximity.
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lightbritefight 4104 days ago
The task rabbit economy model. If they had leaned into that dystopia, it might have been a fascinating city building syndicate game.
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intull 4104 days ago
Well, maybe not "real" as in the "real world", but "real" enough to have fun. SimCity 5 faced an ordeal in trying to be too real; they traded off other vital entities (map size, gameplay features) for getting this simulation right!

It's also been stated that this game has, by default, a very "easy" gameplay which may have contributed to siding to being a bit less realistic but sufficiently real for playing and having fun.

The traffic is a mess, true. They'll patch it up with a better algorithm hopefully. It's still fun though. I recently had a couple of industrial buildings burn to ashes because the firetrucks were caught up in a jam! Now that's quite possible!

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true_religion 4104 days ago
But I'm curious what actual 'realism' did it have?

Like the above poster said, the agent model may have been intended to be more realistic, but in practice you couldn't follow a single sim and see a facsimile of reality: they would go to the nearest workplaces and return to the nearest house even if it wasn't 'theirs'.

So where did Sim City 5 succeed that no others have?

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creshal 4104 days ago
If you have a Windows XP VM lying around somewhere, take a look at Caesar III (should be on GoG). Agent based simulation done right, in 1998.
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