Both are great ways to play, and SC4 seemed to have a great balance, especially with the modding community. The conflict has become one between people who want a complete sandbox game (generally awesome, loyal sc4 players whose RHW networks make me drool) and people (whose first sim city will be this one) who want a more problem solving/simulation game. I would actually love to see more realism in the simulation. Think of it as a puzzle to respond to an unknown landscape (assuming optimistically that there will be interesting preset maps.) instead of conveniently placed mountains, rivers, and coastlines.
You can view the city as a new type of ecosystem or even a mini-biome, and our human actions feed into the system which responds. Its natural geography and geology is important in a city's conception. In reference to terraforming, a city is more than just its residents and human impact. That, dear sir, is not conjecture.Ĭan we all just stop speculating and just wait for the damned thing to come out before we hate on it? There is no place in the world that operates in this way, urban sprawl is natural growth, and buffer zones prevent that entirely. It doesn't do that in the direction they are taking it, so to me it doesn't reflect the nature of city builders by a long stretch. SimCity 4 has a much more realistic approach towards the region view, it's not perfect sure, but it's a simulation of real life and that IS how real life operates. For a group of developers which have spent so long making the AMAZING glassbox engine, intended to demonstrate more reality, the actual city building and region structure is a totally bizarre choice to make. Random small 2sq km plots of land which will necessitate specialization. I do not understand for the life of me how this is meant to be realistic. It will mean that you will have one small blob of skyscrapers as a 'city', one small blob or dirty industry as another, and another small blob as a university/high tech place. This exactly, the buffer zone isn't problematic, it isn't ANYTHING.