First off I wanted to point out that this thread is completely unrelated to my other Sim City thread. This thread is discussing the actual game itself, not the business strategy surrounding it.

First, lets talk about how the game counts populations. (SOURCE) The games glorified simulating engine basically breaks the entire game and destroys the point of strategically building a city. Population in the game is inflated, or, after a certain pojnt the game radically inflates the population for no reason. The magic figure is about 500, or when there is no medium density buildings. When the total population is below 500, the total population = the number of workers plus shoppers. After 500, they beefed up the total population exponentially. For example, in larger cities, the ratio is 1:10. So basically they inflated the populations of the game to make your cities seem more impressive.

Your population counter might claim that your city has doubled in residents, but the number of AI agents actually being simulated has only increased by a small percentage of that. This causes a plethora of problems such as taxing inconsistencies and vast epidemics of worker shortages. However, this problem pales in comparison to the issues put forth by the games horrible path finding.


Alright, lets get to it. We're going to talk about the core traffic simulation of the game. The following analysis is by
a person over at the EA forums who noticed something very paculiar.

One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.

"Workers aren't commuting."
"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."
"Tourism is broken."
"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."

The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.

"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.


Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.

Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.

Ultimately, the problem is that the developers have decided to handle sims like they handle any "mindless" power-agent. This results in mindless sims, and mindless services. Mindless services reduce the actual quality of the simulation. Since no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house. The next morning, that agent sets out to find "high-wealth" work. Then after work, may end up in a medium-wealth home with 2 kids! There's no rhyme or reason for the way they behave, OTHER than just taking the shortest (not quickest) path to the nearest open space.

Police services suffer from this as well. They converge on the first crime committed, and ignore the second crime until one car rushes off to deposit the criminal-agent in jail. THEN the other cars can respond to the second crime. There's no zones, and there's no actual "prevention."

Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire. The only thing you get for having multiple fire-trucks is that they put the fires out slightly quicker. Really, you can have the exact same fire coverage quality with only one of each type of fire-unit. "Fire Marshalls" are COMPLETELY random, and just seem to roam around picking whichever building is "most at risk," ignoring the fact that an entire neighborhood is high risk, and the next "most at risk" is on the other side of the city... Which gets them stuck in traffic.

TLDR? Lets do a rundown. The Glassbox engine in sim city can be paraphrased as a "Pathfinder". Or, traffic just looks for the nearest location. This makes it impossible to organize areas into wealth districts. This makes it impossible for government agencies to function properly. This makes it a joke to watch trading take place between cities; there is allways crowded areas at the enterance to your city no matter how many enterances you make. Casinos only work if you put them right next to the enterances. Basically, in the end, the game is not simulating anything. Heck, the entire point of the game, having a large city; is artificially fabricated by exponentially increasing the population on the counter regardless if the actual population registered by the Glassbox engine is significally lower. To sum it up, this is not a SIM city, this is a pathfinder city.

Here's an interesting little video demonstrating the traffic problems found in Sim City.

 

Why the hell did they release an unfinished product? Glad I didn't buy it.  

Posted by Jester Lapse

Why the hell did they release an unfinished product? Glad I didn't buy it.

 

Posted by Rexx

That sums it up.  

Don't worry I'm sure they'll let you buy the functional part of the game as DLC  

All this Sim City advertisement kind of makes me want to buy it, well at least after the game is all fixed up and what not.

Games being broken on release isn't anything new either, we just have all these blogs/sites/Internet to find out quicker.