While games like simcity are good in many aspects found I always that they lacked the element of competition. While thinking about that found I out that for competition there should be other AI controlled cities who can interact with your city in various competive ways. Like maybe diplomacy, trade,.. but have yet no practical idea of how to implement taht and let that interact with city. So this design has 2 big aspects who are very interlinked: The city similator and interaction with the AI cities. I have already made a simple city similator in the past and am thinking of using the same basic design: Every area of your map contains a set of variables(actually an array but doesn't matter here) like crime, pollution, urbanes(is it in middle of city or in middle of desolated land,...) those values where influenced by various buildings around them(most have a limited sphere of impact), some of those buildings evolved over time wich also changed how they effect there surroundings(for example the biggest level of industry is an economic dream but an enviromental disaster in that game). Except those local values are there also global values who influence the game like: budget, poppulation,... Buildings can grown but to get from one level to the next need they to meet certain local value criteria and also some global(for example flats will not appear until you have a big poppulation). But off course can this basic engine be expanded and am I also looking to new orgininal ideas to implement it. I was maybe thinking of also implementing a transportation model, so that some zones can only grown if they can reach another zone in a certain time frame(every part of transport infrastructure will have a certain movement time cost: for example: waiting on bus 20 mins, passing one area with bus: 1 min, passing one area with dense trafic: 5 mins,...). But am not sure or I will implement that, but knwo already way I could quite easily implement taht with curret negine. Are they maybe other suggestions? So I'm looking for suggestions on how to expand the basic city similator game, new original ways, settings to implement it. And aslo to ways to implement intercity competition. Any suggestions? Btw, keep in mind when giving suggestions that I make games just for fun in my free time and have to make everything myself. [edited by - kolpo on April 18, 2002 8:03:27 AM]

im pretty sure in simcity 3000 other cities would interact with you.

In simcity 2000, too

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Original post by baumep
In simcity 2000, too

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Oh now I remember it from sc2000. But that fact that I didn't really remembered it means that it hadn't taht great of an impact on gameplay and there is no sense in focusing a game on something that doesn't really influence gameplay or makes the game more fun so I will burry this game idea for now I think.


[edited by - kolpo on April 18, 2002 5:18:28 PM]

As far as I remember, other cities in SimCity2000 had two influences: you knew their number of inhabitants, so it was motivating to try to "beat" them ->this has much more impact in multiplayer gameplays.
And you could build (expensive) railways and freeways to other cities: this gave you a bonus for economics,etc. This sort of interactions could be developped (for example a common jail, a common advertising campaign for investors,etc, or selling/buying new territories,selling industrial zones, blah blah) (the other cities may be present in the map in order to make interactions more obvious and easier). Some ideas of interactions may be found in games like RailRoad Tycoon, or maybe even Civilization (only the economics part of course)