City size...

[Duw]

Answer me, truthfully:

Is it possible to build a city with 900,000 pop in SCS (Windstorm Gate FTW! :D), and be able to see the entire city.

[Trixin]

I know of people whom have built cities of over a million in a large city tile with SimCity 4. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible in SimCity Societies.

[KurtangleTN]

My own personal city had about 1.3 million people, and it was growing. So It would be an extremely frustrating if it couldn't.

[ManagerJosh]

I think it's a bit early to tell what SCS can or can not do :)

[Romaq]

Answer me, truthfully:

Is it possible to build a city with 900,000 pop in SCS (Windstorm Gate FTW! :D), and be able to see the entire city.

Having built a HUGE region of 40 x 108 'small sc4 cities' in size, I think that the size of a city is a combination of how many people can fit within an area along with how much area there is to be *filled*.

When I was originally thinking of how SC5 might work before there were any announcements, I thought of how development works within the county I live.

We have areas that are not incorporated, and those areas tend to be low on development, or any ‘development’ actually belongs to a state or federal park such as with the Mt. Baker Wilderness Area. Property is bought & sold, but water and power is limited, if indeed it is available at all.

We have incorporated areas that can be extensions of a higher developed area. I think it is the ‘Sudden Valley Neighborhood’ that wishes to incorporate separate from Bellingham. And the city of Bellingham itself is a merger between three incorporated cities that decided to merge.

The term ‘incorporation’ has to do with defining boundaries and having city politics and city services, in my mind. But cities are *not* required to be of a certain size and shape. It’s simply a matter of what ‘works’ for the particular group incorporated. Indianapolis, under Unigov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigov). I would have liked to take my ‘Whatcom County’ region and be able to define an irregular shape as ‘Ferndale’, ‘Lynden’ and ‘Bellingham’, declare those as ‘cities’ and begin building with certain ‘city services’ ready to work for me, and otherwise treat the entire ‘region’ as once piece rather than as a collection of 1, 4 or 16 kilometer square boxes that only bear relationships to ‘adjacent cities’, and otherwise do not even share a common timeline.

So I *think* your ‘how big is a city’ question really relates to the relationship between ‘landmass’, hopefully at least as large as my Whatcom County area (4529.84832 sq. km within SC4), and ‘city incorporation,’ which could be New York or LA. And part of that question is “would Lynden and Ferndale have interaction within SC5, whereas only North and South Bellingham can interact within SC4? Could Ferndale (adjacent by corner, not by side) interact with North Bellingham on such a map in SC4?” How would Marian County vs. Indianapolis, Indiana work? How would LA vs. Orange County, CA work?

Those are the sorts of questions I’m wondering, related to ‘city size’.

--Romaq

[JuliaSet]

In Caesar 4, this question might be answered thusly:

How good/powerful/new is your computer? 3D was a bear on processing power, so you might find your own rig the reason for capping the size of the city.

Maybe the new graphics software that TM licensed will expand the top end of the population number. At this early stage, its nearly impossible to tell what the limits are.

[prof786]

true.

even though children of the nile used an older graphics engine to build, the more your population grew, the greater the city dynamics increased which consequently used more processing power.

so city size can be whatever max the map would allow. whether or not your processor would be able handle so much data is another question.

[offspring_dude]

Yeah, so what you guys are basically saying is, because Tilted Mill feel like using their outdated, amateurish, cartoon 3D graphics from Caesar 4 in SCS, realistically our cities are going to be pretty small. Unless we feel like watching a slideshow.

[prof786]

there is a lot of movement involoved in 3d city builders. you might realize this if you have played any of the recent city builder games that have come out. it's a question of whether we want ot compromise performance for apearance or vice versa. most of us won't have it either way.

[offspring_dude]

there is a lot of movement involoved in 3d city builders. you might realize this if you have played any of the recent city builder games that have come out. it's a question of whether we want ot compromise performance for apearance or vice versa. most of us won't have it either way.
Time and time again developers have proven that compromising too much for appearance detracts entirely from performance and gameplay. Focusing on appearance is the wrong way to go; but then again, it doesn't look as though Tilted Mill have done that... seriously, those graphics are nothing special.

[arcan]

I just hope SCS will allow multi-millions cities !

[Romaq]

In Caesar 4, this question might be answered thusly:

How good/powerful/new is your computer? 3D was a bear on processing power, so you might find your own rig the reason for capping the size of the city.

Maybe the new graphics software that TM licensed will expand the top end of the population number. At this early stage, its nearly impossible to tell what the limits are.

With my 'Whatcom County' region, I went for specific landmark goals: As far East as Point Roberts and as far west as to include Mt. Baker, and from the Canadian Border at Blaine to twice the distance south of Mt. Baker, with some fudge factor for 'how big can I make this go?'

As it was, I hit the limits of what my 2G rig can JUST manage to swallow with SC4Mapper. It's too big for the SC4 RegionCensus tool to work, and my region takes a LONG TIME to load in SC4. And, of course, when I load any given city tile none of the rest of the region matters. Since the 'size' of a region is fixed to small, medium and large cities, and only fixed adjacent neighbor connections were considered, the size of my region had no impact on actual game-play performance.

That's why when I thought of 'irregular sized city incorporation', I decided that building outside of incorporated areas meant *no* non-manual growth. Growth within a city corporation outside the city one was focusing on could be done by heuristics, much as 'adjacent city neighbor deals' was done, and then the actual implimentation of the growth could be done between changing focus to various incorporated cities.

The more you focus on a specific city, the more cities within the region would have to be managed by the computer, but at least the whole region's time-line could be stepped through consistantly. If the performance was poor, you might have to 'unincorporate' a given city, leaving a ghost town of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings, medium and high density residential. Only a few low density commercial and residential buildings could survive unincorporating a city, but then the CPU can ignore those buildings for the sake of managing those left still incorporated, and there is no 'automatic' growth.

The allowance for city incorporation can be a factor of current city size, swallowing neighboring land as cities grow. The placement of housing outside of an incorporated area may reach a limit where the residents seek incorporation. A city might reach a size (and the CPU might notice too much impact) where the citizens start demanding a split in the city management, so you have one huge city break into two incorporations. With more incorporating, you have a split in focus and you can start using heuristics 'tricks' to manage the impact on the CPU.

But that's total speculation on my part, and it may have nothing to do with how TM actually solves the problem.

--Romaq

[mightygoose]

well i think the sc4 record for highest populaton is in the region of 120 million....

[Duw]

Yes, I am talking about region play and small-ish cities. If it takes forever to load or limit me to <100K, there is no way I am playing a city builder like that.

[Romaq]

well i think the sc4 record for highest populaton is in the region of 120 million....

That sounds about right for a region that can actually be played in and posted as a CJ.

The population for an SC4 region would be a factor of how much LIVABLE space it has. My ‘Whatcom’ region has quite a few cities totally under water, and it also has quite a few cities with elevation too steep to make city building practical. Mt. Baker alone occupies four ‘large city tiles’. But if I ‘gamed’ the system with four city types (farm, dirty industry, high-wealth/ hi-tech, low-wealth commercial) and then set up the pattern that has each city compliment the other… AND set cheat mods for demand, I should be able to blow away the 120 million record easy. But what would be the point? I’m certainly not going to PLAY 270 Large City tiles or be able to make a decent CJ out of it. So part of the ‘how big’ question really becomes ‘how much interesting play can I get out of it?’ It was actually disappointing to see ‘750 sims’ traveling by bus out of one city block to the neighboring city. 750 just became a stat number, and once they left the city for the border that was the end of that. Where do they work? Looking at the neighboring city, they traveled by bus to a factory. 750 was just a number. It could have been 50 million ants, but there was nothing by which to grasp individuals out of the statistic. That’s the sacrifice in shifting from individuals within a group to statistical numbers being processed.

--Romaq

[Romaq]

Yes, I am talking about region play and small-ish cities. If it takes forever to load or limit me to <100K, there is no way I am playing a city builder like that.

Oh, my Whatcom County Region is simply too huge for a single person to get good game play in depth. I did it simply more to see if I *could* than to actually 'play' the *whole* thing. And, in fact, some cities are simply unplayable: they are under water, under lake or over terrain too rugged to be useful. But I also wanted to be able to play certain specific areas such as Ferndale, Lynden and Bellingham, and THOSE I can get into with some depth, more or less.

But the entire region takes minutes to load and holds more than a gig of memory in SC4 JUST to make the region visible. Clearly, if someone wanted to actually ‘do’ something with it they would *have* to split the region into something much more manageable and sane. But Mt. Baker dominates the skyline of this local area, and I wanted to see with my own eyes how big a big region can really get and what territory it can hold. So I found out. And it currently has a population of ZERO for the entire region.

So is my Whatcom County region a ‘big city’ or a ‘tiny’ city? Definitions of ‘big’ count.

--Romaq

[NappySick]

Dos sim city 2000 , was a single city tile no region , with arcos it was possible to get a city of 9.1 million, a later version made 21 million possible , i didnt play 3000 , but in sc4 maybe a city of 2.6 million possible without nam , but the region means you have many cities connected so regional population can be as big as you can make , if you run out of cities you just added more . The pop of a SCS city is anybodies guesss right now .

[Need_Help]

You won't know, since it can have more than thousand people in a building, so if the population in the building is high, even a few buildings can make the city very crowded and has many people. The game is still in early stage, as you can see, there is almost no car in the street. Be patient, I believe that they still dont know how many people can the city fit.

Thanks :)