Power, water, etc. randomly chose a direction at a junction, so even basic grid would make it impossible to power a building on the other side of the city, even if the power demand was there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvq6zAMJfOU.
Traffic and pedestrians were attracted to available houses/work, but randomly every day, rather than having a defined home/work location. I built a pedestrian heavy city and would watch crowds of pedestrians head for the nearest available house on a street, before the whole street filled, and they turned around for the next nearest. Same for work, shopping, despite there being plenty available.
Cities Skylines seems like the successor to SimCity, but even that has some deep-rooted flaws in traffic management and agent flow. Some mods exist to help coax it a bit, but it's still just a broken approach at scale.
Traffic and routing is hard, I get that, but there has to be a better way. Building a city around the routing flaws is not that much fun.
That and 32gb of RAM
Word of warning: if you're one of those people that likes to install a lot of mods keeping everything up to date and non-conflicting can be an pain the rear. There is, of course, a mod to keep track of which mods are out of date or could cause issues, but that's really a band-aid on top of a larger problem. The game is old enough now that many popular mod authors have long been abandoned their projects or otherwise moved on so you end up with things like "MyPopular Mod" and "MyPopular Mod UPTODATE" or "MyPopular Mod FORKED" or "Use this instead of MyPopular Mod".
If I take a few weeks / months between plays this usually ends up with me having to take 30 minutes to an hour to get the mods up to date and tested. Not a huge amount of time, but when your gaming time is limited it's something to take into account.
(Don't use Steam.)
He also has some fun youtube series' where he builds up a region by following a "story" he makes up (or sometimes uses viewer polls). So rather than building a super optimized city, it gets a very natural layout as he pretends to play out rivalries between developers, mayoral or policy changes, etc.
How single agents path is also weird, like how much they walk. I think I remember that homes were also not persistent?
When separating city blocks completely fires would not get extinguished. Either the fire station assigned is random, or only a few actually can send cars out. Which breaks down in a city not fully connected by streets.
Haven't played for a few years now (last run was with the industries dlc), but also haven't read about patches adressing such issues.
I had a similar reaction, after a city of mine completely broke because of simulation errors I gave up on it for a while. Then revisited a bit later to write an article about all the dlcs. It felt a lot more stable then, but that might be because I did not test the edge cases again.
Biffa has some good videos on traffic solving: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCYzO4HZxgXc2UJQD5bIo8AQ
It works somewhat realistically but you have to learn the limitations of the simulator if you want mass transit besides busses used well.
I also really liked CityPlannerPlays - quite educational but more on actual city design.
The built–in tools are also somewhat hit and miss, and that is partly driven by what information the game holds on to and what it throws away for increased efficiency. Agents know their destination and chosen route, but they don’t remember where they are coming from. Thus, when you click on a building to show the associated traffic routes it can only show routes with that building as a destination.
The exception is service buildings like fire or police; each one supplies a fixed number of vehicles, and in theory the tool could show what all of those vehicles are doing. It still just shows the routes that end at the building though, so you end up seeing just those service vehicles that are going home and people who are going to work at the service building. In principle, mods can fix some of these oversights. I use one that shows what each service vehicle is doing, for example. Another mod that I really like allows you to select a stop on a mass–transit vehicle route (a bus stop or a metro station or a ferry station or whatever) and see where everyone who is currently waiting at that stop is going. Very useful.
That said, I think Cities: Skylines is the best SimCity we’ve ever had. It is everything that SimCity 2013 should have been. I recommend it to everyone, but especially people who ever enjoyed a game of SimCity, or has enjoyed any city builder of any stripe, or who think that games are only for children.
In a real city people would just drive around that madness and make a left turn at the next block.
Alternatively, you could use it to build dioramas. With enough mods it is one of the best tools for building digital city dioramas and best of all, the simulation still mostly works, so you get to watch people live in the city.
Overall definitely a fun game, lets you build much more natural-looking cities than Sim City, with the only downside being that the road network has a greater impact on the simulation and requires more micromanaging than I would like.
The Sims displays the other end of this spectrum, where agents path deliberately (while still considering their needs), and the difference in simulation scale is immense.
Simple fact is, pathfinding is a performance bottleneck that hasn't been solved yet. We are still using algorithms from the 1960s, and no hardware acceleration exists.
SimCity has always been more of a spreadsheet with houses on top.
Maybe your game doesn't change much. Lack of good pathfinding is what's constricting that the most. If good pathfinding existed, games in general could become more dynamic.
Especially if the moving entities in your game aren't supposed to be omniscient. They could gradually learn about what good enough paths are.
Real-world performance isn't that determined by the form of the time-complexity.
But we got thousand times faster CPUs than at Sim City 2000 times.
And they have multiple cores. And if that is not enough there are GPUs with even more compute.
I'm picturing an alternate history where in addition to dedicated graphics cards, we also start building dedicated common algorithm cards - NVidia and AMD duking it out over whose hardware-accelerated sorting implementation performs best, Phoronix benchmarking how each companies' Linux drivers handle A* etc :)
In SC2K the graphics do not depict individual cars or people, and I have no idea if in later games there is a correlation between individual cars and people and "trips" (or if trips are still used as mechanism in later versions - although from what people are writing, it seems they are).
Maybe because the game is based on American cities
But heavy industry is still zoned for sure.
That said, yes, the lack of mixed zoning is one of the more unrealistic parts of city builder games, and one of the most often requested features in the Cities: Skylines community. However, it should be noted that separation of functions is a notion very fundamental to the modernist (1930s–) school of urban planning, and this originated from the entirely reasonable desire to genuinely improve the human condition in cities by separating residential areas from a polluting industry.
Because single-use zoning, together with the ideal of a single-family house for everyone and the use of personal automobiles for transport, turned out to be unsustainable in more ways than one, and because polluting industry is now relegated to a Someone Else’s Problem, mixed use has become (or is becoming) fashionable again, with current ideals and best practices in planning clearly diverging from those of the modernist era.
Another unrealistic idea is, of course, that of a city designed from the ground up, which, although there are indeed real-world examples of fully planned cities, they are very rare. Many players do prefer to start with a tabula rasa in these types of games, and it’s of course much less work for the developers to create maps devoid of existing human population. I, for one, would love to see more maps where the starting point is an existing town, or a group of disjoint villages scattered on the map!
Nb. the notion of planning as a profession emerged in the West mostly during the 19th century, before which cities had, for the most part, grown more or less organically. The need for central planning was in many cases precipitated by fires which could easily destroy neighborhoods or entire towns. Building fire-resistant cities in the era of predominantly wooden buildings necessitated measures such as firewalls between adjacent buildings, streets wider than the alleys of old, and separating neighborhoods with wide, tree-lined esplanades or boulevards. Conveniently, the destruction left by fires also provided the opportunity to realize these measures when rebuilding.
I read the rest of your comment and nodded along approvingly, but I don't have anything else to add other than that I also liked fiddling with existing towns and cities in these games. In SC2k I really loved the scenarios, free-form citybuilding is definitely good but to have a specific constraint and a goal was a really fun challenge.
Those who live in rural areas will be a little bit more familiar- it is not impossible to buy some farm land while working with the local municipality governments to re-zone from agrigultural use to residential use, so that you can build a home there.
The notion that commercial can be split into "light" or "heavy" or that industrial can be split from commercial at all probably isn't something the average person has much awareness of, even intuitively.
I do not know if in the later versions, there is a correlation between visually depicted cars/people and trips (or if trips are used at all, although from what people are writing here, it seems they are).
An important optimization in these games is to avoid crossroads and junctions, because walkers tend to randomly choose a direction at junctions. This would make it a coin flip which of the two roads would get food or religious services, possibly causing all kinds of chaos. One of the best layouts as far as I recall was just a big block with a circular road going around it, because this forced the walkers to walk past all buildings in the block reliably.
This is what you end up having to do in SC2K.
You must direct the traffic, by not offering junctions.
I think if you assumed such a thing in the first place your premise and assumptions were massively flawed.
You're saying the game isn't playable because it was too different to real life? Did you notice the Superhero who arrives to fight natural disasters or the giant aliens who can invade? Or the fact that you can magically position fire "trucks" where you want instantly?
It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect a 1993 game to not choose a random route at a junction; it should use a basic pathfinding algorithm (which were well-known, even in 1993) to choose the closest one.
Of course it is limited by performance but optimization is hardly a good counter-point to intuition in this kind of game.
The number one bottleneck in real traffic is intersections. Some people think optimal city design should mix zoning types at a finer level.
To your point though, we can't really demonstrate what's better when the agents are acting stupidly. I'd like to be able to learn what would work in the real world too.
So, all bets are off when a fantastical element is introduced? We should no longer expect any internal consistency, and the work is entirely above critique?
Why didn't Frodo take down Sauron in his X-wing?? I saw the walking trees, so I know that anything is possible.
The answer is because we expect internal consistency. Ok, so there's a superhero in this game system. Doesn't change the fact that it's supposed to simulate traffic, and that this is one of the fundamental systems the game is built upon. Oh, it doesn't actually simulate traffic? Yes, this is a problem: it's a traffic simulation with superheros.
That’s it, no more internet for me today. And I haven’t even had lunch!
No it isn't. Traffic played basically zero part in the game and certainly didn't influence "success" or "failure." Traffic was 99% for visual effect. When I played Sim City 2000 I never put any work into optimizing for traffic and my cities were effectively "perfect" in terms of crime, life expectancy, citizen happiness etc.
Someone that spent years building an optimized city. Six million residences.
So it went from “can this house reach a job” to “simulate this house driving to work” - the difference comes from a high density doing one check to doing multiple.
I came to the conclusion the game was fundamentally flawed, due to limitations in the transport simulation.
The game simulates "trips" emerging from each zone type, and a sufficient number of those trips need to reach particular other types of zone, for the origination zone to be successful.
However, at each junction, the trip randomly selection one of the routes.
So if you build, say, a round-about, or a subway system which is a loop with branches, it's death and ruin; trips have no idea where they should get off (this branch leads to industry, for example), and some trips just keep going round and round until they reach their max travel distance and fail.
You could show this issue clearly by building a square block of road tiles - each tile then having four junctions. Traffic would go into this, and never emerge.
In other words, the transport simulation is too different to real life to be playable. You had to build your transport system to fit the simulation method, if you wanted a viable city.