SimCity Wiki Guide

Release Date	Unknown
Platforms	PC
Developer	Maxis
Publisher	Electronic Arts

First released in 1989, the newest non-numbered SimCity was announced on March 6, 2012. SimCity is the revitalization of Electronic Art's classic city-building franchise. Built using Maxis' GlassBox engine, SimCity is a PC exclusive and promises to deliver "the most sophisticated simulation of its kind," according to Senior Vice President of EA's Maxis, Lucy Bradshaw.

When will SimCity be released?

The details for SimCity's release date remain hazy, putting the launch window sometime in 2013.

What's are SimCity's major changes?

There are some major changes made in the latest SimCity. Here's a concise list.

• SimCity will require an online internet connection. Neighboring regions will affect your city.
• Curved roads and other features instead of a rigid grid layout.
• Free-roam camera that allows you to zoom in on specific buildings or rotate the camera around. No more fixed camera.
• A cool detail added to the game is that the audio reflects the scenery. The audio changes as you zoom in closer to the citygrounds, where you'll hear the familiar or expected sounds of a bustling, sprawling metropolis. Conversely, zoom out of the city to hear the idyllic sounds of calmness, of being away from the city.
• Buildings change over time, improving their efficiency and use.
• No more archaic charts and graphs to monitor the progress of your city. They've been replaced by modernized infographics.

Will SimCity have multiplayer?

SimCity has multiplayer and requires an internet connection to play, regardless of whether you open your borders to other players or not. Every SimCity player is a part of a larger game world. You can't jump in and modify other player's towns, but no one's actions occur in a vacuum.

Groups of players are divided into regions. Players in a region directly influence the other cities around them. Things like pollution will directly affect neighboring cities.

Cities within a region that are connected via roadways can also exchange citizens. Maxis acknowledged that an interchange of labor could result in situations where two players in a disagreement could withhold labor from one another if they desired, using it as a bargaining chip.

Leaderboards

SimCity will include leaderboards that track just about everything. Maxis plans on taking into account which players produce the most goods, as well as noting the cities with the highest levels of happiness and sadness. Leaderboards can even track which cities have the highest death rates. [1]

Will SimCity be available on other platforms?

For now, it has been announced as a PC-only game. It will be played through EA's Origin service, but will be sold in other markets like Steam, as well as at retail.

How will the new engine change SimCity?

SimCity's GlassBox engine allows Maxis to accurately represent what's going on in real time. If portions of your city are off the power grid you won't see lights in the structures as night falls, and if your garbage disposal system isn't up to snuff the trash will start to pile up on the streets.

The new engine also offers up new options for how you lay it out. You can now make curved roads, just clicking where you want to start and dragging to the point you want the road to end.

The Glassbox Engine

You can also quickly zone areas for industrial, residential or commercial development with a quick mouse drag, watching as a host of workers come in and erect the buildings. You can also switch your view so the map becomes color coded, showing you exactly what sections have been zoned for which purposes. The three types of zones are industrial, commercial and residential.

The new visual engine allows for modular buildings, allowing you to tell what sort of additions your city's structures have at a glance. You don't just upgrade buildings and see a few numbers on a spreadsheet change, you actually get to see your additions reflected in the world you've created. [2]

What About My Precious Charts and Graphs?

Many core gameplay concepts remain untouched, but how you get the information you need to make decisions has been entirely reworked. Kip Katsarelis, SimCity's Lead Producer acknowledges that the previous games were really dense, and the wealth of information given to the player was hard to consume.[3] To combat this Maxis has completely reworked how you get pertinent information.

You still can view charts and graphs, but a lot of the data is conveyed in ways that take advantage of a player's innate knowledge. For instance when you're trying to figure out if your city has power, you can click a small power button on the screen and there's an immediate graphical change. Instead of seeing your city with an array of symbols, you see through an intuitive colored lens, painting areas that aren't getting power red and the ones that are green. You can quickly drag and drop in new power plants or connect areas to the grid with lines, watching how the colors rapidly alter to reflect your changes.

What Sorts of Stats are Important?

Well, the biggest thing you have to worry about is keeping your citizens, known as "sims," happy. Happy sims are those who can pay rent and go all-out with their consumerism. If sims can't pay the rent, they'll eventually become homeless. Having a lot of homeless can cause additional crime, and this can spill into other cities in the region.

Lots of financial problems for sims also means they won't be happy. You can't "lose" in the traditional sense in a game of SimCity, but unhappy sims will leave. Less population means you'll have less sims to work, meaning your infrastructure could be affected.

Additionally you'll have to worry about making sure your sims are safe. Pollution can make them sick, so you'll either need to stymie it when it occurs, or make sure you have adequate health care options to take care of them. Likewise you'll need police stations to prevent crime, as well as firehouses to respond to emergencies and the occasional arsonist. One of each won't suffice for a big city, so you'll have to make sure they're dispersed in such a way that no area suffers.

How Do I know What I Should Be Doing?

Part of your job is responding to the needs of your people. You need to pay attention to their happiness, look for actual signs in the world that something needs to be changed (like stacks of garbage because your trash infrastructure is failing, for instance), and plan for contingencies. You never know when a tornado or earthquake could hit, after all.

Sometimes you will have more clear-cut goals, though, thanks to the mission system. Like The Sims 3, SimCity will give you goals you can choose to ignore or take on. It might be something specific like "build five new parks" or "build a police station," or as complex as "lower crime by 10%." The system is still being worked out, but they don't want players to feel like they're operating 100% unsupervised.