Posts Tagged with SimCity Societies

Patch number three for SimCity Societies has finally been released, and while a lot of people are still reporting all kinds of trouble this one seems to have done the trick for me. I’ve only had two crashes since the patch was installed, and I know exactly what caused both and how to avoid them. Under normal play, the game is smoother than ever (though still a bit choppy at even lower graphical settings). Unfortunately, I had to reinstall the game to get it to work properly and ended up losing my awesome small-town/futuristic city in the process. ;_; I’ll have another post, with screenshots, once I get a decent city going again.

If you were at all interested in this game but crash reports scared you away, now might be the time to give it a try. You can pick it up for around $30 pretty much anywhere, and it has my vote as best SimCity game ever… when it’s not crashing. There’s even an expansion planned that hopefully won’t break anything. If we’re lucky, it might even fix some remaining issues.

Talk about infuriating. SimCity Societies is the best Sim game I’ve played in a long time, but I can hardly play it with all the problems going on. The game is so graphically demanding that even my relatively powerful computer can’t run it at high detail settings. So, no problem: turn the settings down. Then my city starts to grow; it currently covers about one-third of the map, and the game crashes everytime I play, seemingly at random. Could be ten minutes, could be half-an hour, all that’s for sure is that the game will die

Then I find out from some random forum that it could be the auto-save feature, so I disable auto-save.

And you know what? The game ran almost perfectly. I still couldn’t turn the detail settings up, and it still froze once or twice, but I managed to play for nearly an hour with no crashing. Then I went to quit and… the game wouldn’t die. I had to manually kill it with Task Manager, then reboot to fix my display settings. Now I go to play it and—who would’ve thought—the game crashes before it even loads.

I don’t know what the hell Tilted Mill did when they made this game, but maybe some kind of beta testing would have been nice, to work out all the crashing bugs? The truly sad part is that Societies is a great game, and a large number of people who have purchased Societies are still reporting similar issues after two patches.

There’s a new SimCity game out, and a lot of people aren’t impressed. I’ve been a fan of SimCity since the original (which I played way back on the Super Nintendo, of all things), and was a little skeptical of Societies at first. To be honest, I wasn’t even all that interested when I first heard about it: the SimCity games have gotten’ increasingly complex, with each new iteration adding layer upon layer of new things to consider until the mess that is SimCity 4 finally drove me away. I like the idea of building a city, but I’m not really concerned about the intricacies of garbage management, class warfare, or department budgeting. SimCity 2000 was a nice balance: it was more complex than the original, but that complexity was balanced well enough that it was still possible for the casual Sim player (like myself) to create a successful city without micromanaging every detail. SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 made it nearly impossible for the casual gamer to pick up and play the games. The best I could ever manage in 3000 was a modest city with around 200,000 residents, while SimCity 4’s insane “region” system and incredibly high system requirements (not to mention psychotic level of detail and micromanagement) prevented me from ever playing a successful city. Societies abandons the downward spiral of increasing complexity to take a more open and enjoyable approach to city building (for the casual Sim gamer). Purist would no doubt hate the game, and judging by the large number of lousy reviews, that seems to be the case.

Don’t let that fool you: SimCity Societies is a great game, and it’s greatest strength is that it really isn’t anything like the SimCity’s of old. There are passing similarities, but everything has been stripped down and simplified. Cities still need power, for example, but you don’t have to worry about laying power lines and connecting all of your structures together: pick a plant, drop it down, and go. Zoning has been completely removed; instead, you build individual structures from four categories—Homes, Workplaces, Decorations, or Venues. Each has varying effects on your city’s values (Productivity, Prosperity, Creativity, Spirituality, Authority, and Knowledge), which function as another kind of resource besides power and simoleons (money). Certain buildings require some amount of the Authority value, while others might produce a certain amount of Authority. Buildings are classified by theme—Small Town, Cyberpunk, Industrial, Contemplative, etc—but you can mix-and-match, choosing to theme your city based on certain motifs and values or create a unique mixture.

Homes provide housing for your Sims, and each house increases your workforce. Workplaces give your working Sims a place to… uh, work, which generates money for you city. Venus give your Sims a place to relax, increasing their happiness. Decorations have various effects, but mostly serve to both personalize your city and increase certain values (the Wall Mural increases Creativity, for example). All of this information is presented right up front, and it doesn’t take long to grasp the basics. Make sure your city has power, homes, workplaces, and venues of any type and you’re good to go.

To stress the creative, open-ended nature of Societies, the developers even included two modes of play besides Normal: Unlimited Simoleons, which frees you from worrying about city funds and lets you focus strictly on values, and Free Play, which removes all restrictions and let’s you go all out to build the city of your dreams. A lot of reviewers have complained that the game is in fact too easy, leading to a recent patch which added Strategic modes of play.

If there was anything to complain about, it would be system requirements. Societies is the first fully 3D SimCity game, and it’s a beast. The buildings and landscapes are colorful and animated, but the game slows to a crawl even at a modest resolution with low detail settings. My computer is no slouch when it comes to pushing polygons, but Societies easily overpowers it. This might be just as much a problem with optimization as system specs; Societies has also crashed three times since I started playing yesterday.

Overall, SimCity Societies is the most open and creative SimCity game in the series. Those that long for the complex, detail-oriented city construction of old can stick to SimCity 4 (and you can have my copy if you’d like it). The rest of us can enjoy the new, creative possibilities with Societies.

Update: I’ve been trying to take a picture of my city to break up the massive wall of text above, but the game keeps cashing. Whatever it is, it’s definitely a problem with the game. Two patches have already been released since the game came out in November (less than three months ago); here’s hoping they fix whatever’s causing this in a future patch.