One of the more stunning announcements in PC gaming this year came when EA announced that Maxis would not be developing the next version of SimCity. The fact that it also would no longer be the city planning simulation that fans have obsessed over for so many years made the ruckus caused by staunch SimCity fans no surprise. Instead of "realism" the game would focus more on the social aspects of city living. Each structure was to relate to one of several societal influences such as creativity or authority. In theory, EA and developer Tilted Mill hoped to make it a much more friendly experience to new players. EA sent over a copy of SimCity Societies to check out for ourselves after getting only the briefest of hands-on time with the game at a recent EA event.
One of the biggest differences from all SimCity games in the past is the removal of zoning. Instead, players will choose and place one of hundreds of buildings that will remain rather than grow and shrink according to the immigration and emigration of citizens. Instead of zoning, the buildings are broken up into housing, workplaces, and venues. The most difficult part of this aspect of city planning is the fact that each of the buildings has a different footprint size. Hopefully they'll add some indication and sorting function for that, but it can definitely be more of a challenge fitting all of the puzzle pieces in than it used to be when we only had to drag a zone and watch the buildings grow.
Every city will need a balance of each building type to stay at peak efficiency. Housing obviously provides a place to live while workplaces offer up jobs and venues provide a place to relax after a hard day. Cities won't just stop functioning because of a lack of one of the buildings, nor will players ever have to worry about their budgets being in the red (buildings can't be placed if there's not enough money in the treasury), but unhappy citizens won't attend work, which hurts the amount of money that you can make, which hurts the number of buildings you can place down. The game isn't about perfect management of public works and economics. It's about playing around with the different types of societies and their combinations.
When choosing a building to place you'll be presented with a lot of options, some of which will be blacked out until certain parameters have been met. Those that are available will show how much they cost in terms of money and societal value. For instance, some buildings will add spirituality to your city and some will use that energy up. So when you're looking to build a city, it helps to look down the line to buildings you're eventually planning for. If a building requires certain amounts of spirituality and prosperity and you really want to use it, you'll have to place buildings that generate both. In some cases, especially in prosperity, there aren't a ton of buildings that generate that type of societal value so you'll have to look into the future to see which buildings do provide a positive flow of prosperity and try to reach those buildings.
Thankfully, searching for the type of building you want is fairly easy. Clicking on any of the three building type icons will bring up only those types of buildings. From there, they can be sorted using the societal value icons or by selecting from a drop down menu of city types such as a "fun city" or "prosperous city" so that buildings of all value types that would go into creating such a town will show up on the building select window. We're hoping they also include a drop down menu for the society value types as well so that it can always be selected when opening the build window, but the sorting functions are good enough to facilitate finding the appropriate structure and seeing what needs to be done to unlock buildings further down the line.
One of the most challenging aspects of SCS is the optional objectives laid out by the developers at Tilted Mill. These include all sorts of combinations such as needing a certain amount of one of the societal energies (creativity, authority, etc…), a certain amount of population, and a specific level of happiness. Many of these trophies will take a considerable amount of time to reach, but come attached with specialty buildings that will become unlocked once the award has been achieved. These will definitely give players something to aim for.
While SimCity Societies is certainly different than what SimCity fans are used to, it's not without its interesting aspects. Hopefully EA will be releasing a demo before the game is released this November so that fans have a chance to see if they can appreciate the changes for themselves.
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