Use Cases

[Romaq]

In software engineering and systems engineering, a use case is a technique for capturing functional requirements of systems and systems-of-systems. The use case model uses Actors and use cases.

For the purpose of this thread, I really want to describe 'actors', that is, people who will hopefully buy SC5, or people who bought SC4, why they did so, and why they may have quit playing. So I’ll describe ‘use cases’ in the general sense of the term within this thread.

My wife Mikaela actually made the first purchase of SC4. I asked her explicitly what she remembers of SC4, why she bought it, and why she currently doesn’t even have it installed on her machine. As she remembers SC4, there were several issues:

1. It became too frustrating to have to continually focus on the city budget, dropping and raising budget settings for individual civic buildings. “They were always hollering.”
2. When I dumped in lots of custom content, it made it too confusing for her. She just wanted to ‘try it out’.
3. She wanted to work on a city with me, but even with both of us having separate legal copies of the software on two separate computers over a home network, there was no ‘simple’ means for us to enjoy SimCity play together as a couple.
4. She lost interest in Sim City 4 and drifted back to playing Ultima Online, because she could interact with other people within the game.
5. She believed that Sim City 4 and the ton of custom content were slowing down her machine’s performance. Since she wasn’t interested in playing SC4 anymore, it was simply easier for me to remove the software than to educate her on why SC4’s existence doesn’t impact performance.

I believe these are some of the issues that Tilted Mill is trying to address. I’ll save *MY* use-case and that of a friend who bought SC4 because I had it for later. TM may find it useful if people would post what made them pick up SC4 initially, why they continue to play it if they do, and why they or a friend STOPPED playing SC4. It may be helpful to one’s cause to bring polite, specific issues to the discussion as well.

--Romaq

[Sim Nation]

I was at a friends house , both in our late 20,s . He handed me Sc + SC Rush Hour with words similar to ," here have this, you will like this its to hard for me". I realy didnt want to type that as it reinforces why sc is going easier but i suppose i goto speak truthfully . My written english , use of english language is not brilliant , maybe not even good, but i have a 138 iq ,and love mathamatics ,numbers ,i love to play with numbers . I love the mathamatical stratergy especialy when applied to pc games,ie budgets etc and problem solving ,balancing ,juggling .SC4 is not difficult but it lets me do these things,for fun , also my population is a number and i enjoy watching it grow.Wierd i know , but i never said i wasnt , maybe i been playing sid mier, willy wright games to long these guys have been messing with my mind for 15 years plus , so another reason i took to it was because will wright made it , plus i love the build ,but im sure i could get as much pleasure out of other games that are as mentally challenging , even if still quite simple.The bugs in SC4 ie the 65535 , made the game more challenging , how can i push it beyond , beyond it try to do that with every game ,i made C3 scenarios i doubt the tm team could even complete. So if tm make a sim game with max pop 1 mill i will find a way to get 2 mill , and this is what keeps me interested .As regards other aspects of gameplay , well i dont interact with the sims ,u drive-it or my advisers , i just purely use it to build and manage my cities .
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[Romaq]

Thank you, SimNation. It sounds like you and I have more the same type of play with SC4.

--Romaq

[Azeem]

I've been with SimCity since the first one as I've mentioned on several threads here. The SNES version of SimCity was what appealed to me the most, however, because it had many of those interesting rewards structures (and Bowser attacks :D ) that were non-existent in the PC version and even far outnumbered those in SimCity 2000.

What I like about SimCity is the ability to build a city filled with all sorts of things that constitute your average urban empire. Watching a tiny little hamlet become a large sophisticated metropolis has always been fun from SimCity classic straight up to SimCity 4. I liked to put my own personality into things - start off organized and then just sticking stuff everywhere and somehow manage to keep things in one peice. Basically, wind up with a virtual Los Angeles that's totally bland in some parts and then spectacular at other parts. :p The thing I liked most about SimCity 4 was its truckloads of custom content; I like having pretty Korean buildings all over my city, even if they do virtually nothing and their maintenance cost drains my budget (the lot maker on Simtropolis [kimdongyung was his name, IIRC], by the way, should really consider giving them more useful paramaters :o ).

However, while I still play SimCity 4, I only play it occasionally in comparison to a game like "Children of the Nile." On average, I'd play SimCity 4 just 2 hours a week while I play CotN 6 hours; my average gaming time a week, by the way, is just 8 to 10 hours since I have lots of real-life concerns to handle and games certainly don't take center stage in my day-to-day affairs. ;) One thing that SimCity 4 lacked for me was that there wasn't much of a social aspect and that micromanagement in comparison to the previous SimCity games started getting too tedious. People were just numbers and automatons; they had little personality and were defined only by economic levels. What I enjoyed more in CotN was the ability to create a dynamic, interdependent society that lived and worked in a more living and breathing city. I was also pretty turned off by the need to micromanage every little service aspect in SimCity 4 and felt that the traffic management was more a chore than fun. I'm not much of a bean-counter person and much less a math person: I don't like counting tiles, figuring out building radii, estimating how much traffic I could wind up with and how many stations I'd need and where to put them. :o

On a side note, it's amazing how much your tastes can change when you get older. For example, I used to really enjoy RTS games but now I can't really stand most of them.

[Hardin]

So maybe Sim City 4 was too hard. But sc 3000 wasn't. If Tilted Mill only wanted to change the difficulty then they would have gone with the sc 3000 gameplay but they decided to change many other aspects of the game.

[Romaq]

My wife Mikaela's response to http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070612/20070612005415.html?.v=1 was quite positive, and she looks forward to seeing more about the SC5. "When I just wanted to putter, I had to mess with all the city management stuff. Then when you dumped that custom content on me, I just went, 'Eeewwww! Ok I'm done!' "

I still need to come up with my use case, but it'll have to wait for tomorrow morning.

--Romaq

[Azeem]

So maybe Sim City 4 was too hard. But sc 3000 wasn't. If Tilted Mill only wanted to change the difficulty then they would have gone with the sc 3000 gameplay but they decided to change many other aspects of the game.

Actually, I found SimCity 4 much, much easier than any of the previous SimCity games. There's too many additions that make the game easier. Region play allows you to deal with things much easier. Just build a commercial city, a residential city, and an industrial city connected together in the region and then traffic and pollution don't become too much of a concern. In SC3000, SC2000, and SimCity classic, you were confined to only one map and so all of these things are happening at once in the same area. Even if cities are adjacent in an SC4 region, pollution and crime magically just stays within the confines of one city. The thing that I didn't like in SC4 was the tediousness of micromanaging service buildings.

Simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. The original SimCity was extremely simple in basic mechanics, but it was not too easy because there aren't so many ways out.

[Corinthian]

I initially purchased SimCity 4 when it came out, because I enjoy the genre, and Maxis proved they knew how to do it well. I was not disappointed, and had many fun hours playing it. However, after figuring out the "formula" to make a successful city, my interest began to decline. My love for the game didn't, but my interest in playing as much did. Moreover, as I began to understand the formula, so to did the game's fundamental problem begin to bother me. That is, there is little actual culture or diversity in a simmed city. Everything is just a numbers game, in a sense, because you have to appease as many people by spending as little money as possible while connecting the greatest number of services to the widest possible area. Perhaps that is oversimplifying - and Societies may be very similar to that, when it comes down to it - but Societies seems to improve on the model by adding what the model needs to bring the spirit of a city "to life".

Maybe this doesn't appeal to the "hardcore" SimCity fan (doesn't like the idea of social energies, wants power lines and zoning, etc.). But think about this:

When I zoom into a Sim walking through the city in SCS, I expect to see what he's doing, who he is, where he lives, what he wants, what he has, etc. But for me, it would be nice to see some real interaction, too, between Sims - again, to bring the character of the city to life. If the city is a spiritual community, you would expect to see them greet each other with "Have a blessed day" and hug each other or something. If your city was Orwellian, you would expect them to say, "Shh, don't talk to me, they're always listening" and sort of cringing and nervously casting about or something. Perhaps then the Federal Police Sim swoops in and drags them away. But, I can zoom back out, and continue to place buildings to provide services and places for people to live, and so on. The micro-level of watching the Sims interact should be available at any time. But "hardcore" fans need not ever even zoom in to that level. That way, if they want to just manage the city "from above" their interaction with the features they don't find interesting need not distract them from helicopter-view mayoring.

I very much enjoyed the direction that the city building genre took with Children of the Nile -- more of a combination city and society builder, as TM suggested. It appears TM is taking the next step to integrate city- and society-building with SimCity Societies, and it seems very promising to me.