# City-Building/Transit Planning Sim Recs



## Anderson (Sep 26, 2012)

So, I've gotten to the point that I'd like to give some city-building a shot. Growing up, I'd say that Sim City 2000 was my favorite game for many, many years (the original SimCity was one of my first computer games ever). Sim City 3000 was a good follow-on, with a bit more available in terms of transit management options.

However, recent entries in the series have been a mixed bag, and the trend has been in the "wrong" direction (focusing too much on simulating individual Sims and less on letting me play in the world of managing metropolitan transit policy, breaking the map up horridly so I can't run everything on a single game map, and to top things off the newest version is forcing a "social" aspect into the game). Other games have had other issues (CityLife and its ilk force me to place individual buildings, for example, while Cities in Motion more or less eschews the city-building aspects entirely and has data-hogging issues, while Simutrans doesn't offer many options in terms of the actual city-building itself).

So I'm looking for recommendations for a good blend of city-building and transit planning. Is reverting to SC3K probably going to be my best bet? CiM2 looks interesting, but it's also a ways off. And for that matter, does anyone have opinion on the A-Train series?


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## Trogdor (Sep 26, 2012)

It's not necessarily the greatest transit planning game (or maybe it is? I'm not too familiar with what games are out there of that ilk), and there isn't really any city building involved, but Traffic Giant is worth wasting a few hours on.


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## Swadian Hardcore (Sep 27, 2012)

I must say, I like Cities in Motion when I have the time.


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## Anderson (Sep 27, 2012)

CiM is, sadly, also the graphics hog from hell. I've been trying to run it again today and I can't get some of the cities above a crawl.


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## AlanB (Sep 27, 2012)

Anderson said:


> CiM is, sadly, also the graphics hog from hell. I've been trying to run it again today and I can't get some of the cities above a crawl.


I'd say that getting any city to move at all is a major achievement in its own right. Usually the only time a city moves is during an earth quake. :lol:


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## AmtrakBlue (Sep 27, 2012)

Anderson said:


> So, I've gotten to the point that I'd like to give some city-building a shot. *Growing up, I'd say that Sim City 2000 was my favorite game for many, many years (the original SimCity was one of my first computer games ever).* Sim City 3000 was a good follow-on, with a bit more available in terms of transit management options.


You make me feel sooooo old. :giggle: Back in my day (the dark ages), we didn't even have computers.  But my husband and I did enter the "pc world" early on (started with a PC Jr). Our girls like Sim City but I don't know what the latest version they have (one is married and livnig across country and the other is a freshman in college).

My late husband had Flight Simulator and a train simulator - glad he never tried for a pilot's or engineer's license having watched him on the computer.


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## PerRock (Sep 27, 2012)

Maxis is coming out with a new Sim City soon...

peter


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## MattW (Sep 27, 2012)

I don't see you mentioning Simcity 4 in there. If you can get it cheap, you might want to check it out. It has Trains, Subway/Elevated Rail, monorails and buses. I'd also recommend you head to SimTropolis and get the Network Addon Mod if you go with SC4. The game is a bit of a resource hog especially once you get bigger cities because it was written back in the day of 32 bit computers on single cores.

There's also OpenTTD (completely free) which lets you build the individual roads and track yourself with signals (kinda basic, simple block signals). Frankly, I'd love a simulator with a cross between the two. The customization of the transportation networks in OpenTTD, but the broader "view" of SimCity. Plus some other features like real timetabling.


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## johnny.menhennet (Sep 27, 2012)

Sure not a lot to do with transit - but I have loved "Tycoon City: New York." Hours upon hours have been spent literally building New York, and for city-building games, I think it's pretty darn fun.


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## Anderson (Sep 27, 2012)

PerRock said:


> Maxis is coming out with a new Sim City soon...
> 
> peter


Yeah...it requires a "live" internet connection to play and involves _all_ the negatives of SC4. I'll consider it if I can find a hack so I don't have to screw with putting my games online...but even there, the fact is (again) that I don't want to be futzing with a "region" of multiple cities.

AmtrakBlue: Sorry about that! :giggle:

I'm going to give Traffic Giant a look, at least, to see if it has any advantages over Simutrans...but it seems to be a bit lacking (streetcars can't use dedicated RoW, no subway options, etc.) as well.



MattW said:


> I don't see you mentioning Simcity 4 in there. If you can get it cheap, you might want to check it out. It has Trains, Subway/Elevated Rail, monorails and buses. I'd also recommend you head to SimTropolis and get the Network Addon Mod if you go with SC4. The game is a bit of a resource hog especially once you get bigger cities because it was written back in the day of 32 bit computers on single cores.
> 
> There's also OpenTTD (completely free) which lets you build the individual roads and track yourself with signals (kinda basic, simple block signals). Frankly, I'd love a simulator with a cross between the two. The customization of the transportation networks in OpenTTD, but the broader "view" of SimCity. Plus some other features like real timetabling.


I've got SimCity 4. Not mentioning it was an oversight; it has three main problems:

1) The NAM is a kludge, as is the SWM. I find myself having to guess quite a bit at the puzzle pieces.

2) The resource issue also comes up; even with 8 GB of RAM on my system, I tend to run up against these sorts of limits pretty badly (I'm _seriously_ starting to think about getting a desktop with an insane amount of RAM next time around, just to accommodate these memory hogs). Some of it is probably graphics, but some is undoubtedly the size of some of these cities.

3) More at issue is the city size/regionalization angle. This is no small part of my issue with the new SimCity game...I like a lot of what I'm seeing, but having to sync with a server to play is by and large a deal-killer for me. Not only that, but what I've been dreaming of since Sim City 2000 is a _bigger_ map, and the trend seems to be to push smaller ones on the user, while the Regionalization trend breaks things up so that I can't move money around for projects or get my transit network on a single map. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but I _would_ like to be able to have a single map where I "back out" a bit and can look at X commuter line running out of town for 10-20 miles without having to "hop maps".


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## johnny.menhennet (Sep 28, 2012)

johnny.menhennet said:


> Sure not a lot to do with transit - but I have loved "Tycoon City: New York." Hours upon hours have been spent literally building New York, and for city-building games, I think it's pretty darn fun.


I really do believe that this game is fun from a city-building perspective. Another I can't get enough of is city-building (island building for those who are familiar) game _Tropico 3. _The game really does give a huge amount of control, and it has THE BEST graphics of anything on the computer in general I've ever seen. Here is a photo I found online somewhat representative of the graphics quality. Pictured are a marketplace, a church, a bank, some condos, tenements, and more.


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## Swadian Hardcore (Sep 29, 2012)

AmtrakBlue said:


> Anderson said:
> 
> 
> > So, I've gotten to the point that I'd like to give some city-building a shot. Growing up, I'd say that Sim City 2000 was my favorite game for many, many years (the original SimCity was one of my first computer games ever)*.* Sim City 3000 was a good follow-on, with a bit more available in terms of transit management options.
> ...


Oh yeah, remember those days. Really kicked off in the 1990s.


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## Paulus (Sep 30, 2012)

Anderson said:


> CiM is, sadly, also the graphics hog from hell. I've been trying to run it again today and I can't get some of the cities above a crawl.


Turning off anti-aliasing and various shading options in the graphics menu really helped with my performance.

CiM2 is also under development, but it's looking like it'll be a major flop. They've got depots and the ability to do timetables (with traffic and such going through a 24 hour day now), but every run begins and ends in said depot, so I'm less than optimistic about it.


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## PerRock (Sep 30, 2012)

Anderson said:


> PerRock said:
> 
> 
> > Maxis is coming out with a new Sim City soon...
> ...


Actually they've stated a couple times that you will be able to play SC5 in an offline mode & not need the connection.

Also no mentioned is CitiesXL which (a does require to be online) but offers most of the stuff and 'modern' SC game does.

While I'm at it I'll put another 'vote' in for OTTD, it's a pretty fun game to play around in & doesn't take that much to run.

peter


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## Swadian Hardcore (Sep 30, 2012)

Is there any transit business simulator which has BRT and trackless trolleys?


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## Nathanael (Oct 3, 2012)

Swadian Hardcore said:


> Is there any transit business simulator which has BRT and trackless trolleys?


Simutrans.

It's permanently half-finished and available in multiple variations (such is the life of open source / free software projects), but it's my absolute favorite transport sim. The "experimental" version of Simutrans with pak128.britain is my favorite right now. However, the 'standard' version with pak128 is also highly entertaining. The 'standard' version with pak64 is the most polished, but has some quickly-noticeable game balance problems (the others have game balance problems too, but it takes a lot longer before you spot them).

It's based on concepts from Transport Tycoon, but it's gone a long way since then.

The graphics aren't super fancy, and it's not much for city-building, but it's a brilliant transport sim.


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## Nathanael (Oct 3, 2012)

Trogdor said:


> It's not necessarily the greatest transit planning game (or maybe it is? I'm not too familiar with what games are out there of that ilk), and there isn't really any city building involved, but Traffic Giant is worth wasting a few hours on.


Traffic Giant is definitely worth spending a few hours on, but the inability to do any redevelopment coherently renders it primarily a "bus management sim".


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## Nathanael (Oct 3, 2012)

PerRock said:


> While I'm at it I'll put another 'vote' in for OTTD, it's a pretty fun game to play around in & doesn't take that much to run.


I was fond of OTTD but then I switched to Simutrans (which is actually extremely similar to play).


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## Nathanael (Oct 3, 2012)

Anderson said:


> while Simutrans doesn't offer many options in terms of the actual city-building itself).


If you're a programmer, you could change that. :wink: I might actually fix that some time, though I have other priorities. I realize the codebase is hard to work with though, thanks partly to all the German-language comments. (I've been trying to fix that among other things.) However, once you get past that, it's a very adaptable codebase, all object-oriented.

There's actually a more comprehensive city model in Simutrans than you might imagine, with commercial, residential, industrial, and entertainment/government buildings. It doesn't have zoning yet; that would be an interesting addition.


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## Anderson (Oct 3, 2012)

I know the potential is there; it's just ill-used and buggy. In particular, the game lacks any system (at least, as far as I can tell) for an area to get denser as time goes by, resulting in an extreme sprawl tendency starting in the 1920s in some builds (at least, of Simutrans Experimental).

I'm just wondering...how much programming time would it take to get some decent options worked in there?


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## Swadian Hardcore (Oct 5, 2012)

Nathanael said:


> Swadian Hardcore said:
> 
> 
> > Is there any transit business simulator which has BRT and trackless trolleys?
> ...


Checked out Simutrans, but cannot find info on either BRT or trackless trolleys.


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## Nathanael (Oct 13, 2012)

Anderson said:


> I know the potential is there; it's just ill-used and buggy. In particular, the game lacks any system (at least, as far as I can tell) for an area to get denser as time goes by, resulting in an extreme sprawl tendency starting in the 1920s in some builds (at least, of Simutrans Experimental).
> 
> I'm just wondering...how much programming time would it take to get some decent options worked in there?


Hard to tell. The problem really is all that German in the code. I go into some parts of the code and they're really easy to change, I go into others and they turn out to be really hairy, but I can't tell in advance because all the comments and a bunch of the function names are in German.


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## Nathanael (Oct 13, 2012)

Swadian Hardcore said:


> Checked out Simutrans, but cannot find info on either BRT or trackless trolleys.


pak128 has trolleybuses and trolleybus electrification. BRT is constructed by putting "gates" at the end of the road which only admit your buses. (It has a few fairly serious bugs.) Traffic signal preemption is not yet present.


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## Nathanael (Oct 13, 2012)

Anderson said:


> I know the potential is there; it's just ill-used and buggy. In particular, the game lacks any system (at least, as far as I can tell) for an area to get denser as time goes by, resulting in an extreme sprawl tendency starting in the 1920s in some builds (at least, of Simutrans Experimental).
> 
> I'm just wondering...how much programming time would it take to get some decent options worked in there?


Following up a little more, the propensity to build upward vs. the propensity to sprawl is currently controlled by a very simple percentage factor. This is easy enough to change, though if you tell it to build up you'll have to add more high-density buildings to the pak.

However, what's not programmed is a propensity to build near to well-served transit stations. The "grow here" engine only works at a city scale. This would be significantly more work to program. It's all in the 'get bigger' subroutine, but the hard part would be figuring out how to search for "near a well-served transit station".


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