Too bad you don’t put names up for guesses anymore, because I totally know what the next game is. Great video by the way, it makes me wonder how much more complex SimCity 3000 is since that’s the one I grew up with.
Good stuff, would like to see more videos about simulation game mechanics and especially how would you start designing these mechanics in terms of programming. It seems like a topic where one could easily fail by trying to implement too taxing and complex algorithms because there's so much to compute. Also Depth Dwellers incoming.
This is ultimately why the mechanics in Afterlife didn't pan out well, because REAL city management is a complex beast and Afterlife's underlying mechanics ultimately revolved around bigger = better, period. It appears, based on this investigation, that Sim City 2000 managed to get around some of the nuances simply by tying most things into land values and then allowing more basic levels of the simulation play out on top of that to affect income based almost exclusively on tax rate versus the physical size of the city (not the actual city size). Creating complex mechanics in any game usually comes down to a LOT of testing to see how the interactions work, how they can be exploited, and balancing all of that through trial and error, but the Sim City series at least had a baseline to start from: Real life city management! :B
@@Pixelmusement And also it's no wonder why many of the simulation outcomes in SC2000 do not make much sense in terms of what humans would intuitively think when you start to measure the actions and outcomes despite the developer's best intentions to make the simulation sensible for humans, there's just too many parameters to tweak with in this game. If you take this idea of tweakable parameters all the way to Game of Life and think about the couple rules that game has, and then think of all the crazy stuff you can do with these rules, it is easy to see how hard it must be to design a simulation with predictions where certain simple in-game actions and concepts will yield certain in-game results. Therefore, in case of Sim City, I think the fact that the developers had a certain blueprint that is pretty much set in stone may have also made their work harder. I mean, how much can you alter the basic rules of a human city until it all becomes a meaningless and boring thing to understand for humans, case Afterlife I assume... Then again, creating an interesting simulation of a human city has to have much complexity in terms of the simulation and its actors. But all that drivel was really about the game design aspect of a simulation game. I was originally talking about the code implementation of this kind of simulation. For example, I think in SC2000 the game has this weird chunked way of updating the simulation. Every few seconds or so we get a new calculated state of the city and parameters, it does not happen in real-time. There's so much to consider. For example, will every building or cell get influenced by every other building or cell in the whole map, or is there a limit on how far these things influence each other. If the latter is true in case of SC2000, is that a decision that was made based on the fact that there's not enough computing power to calculate every objects' influence to every other object even though ideally we would want to do that. Maybe this would be a piece of cake today if we could make use of GPUs parallelism for running the simulation steps. That would be an interesting topic to hear more about, but of course, it's hard to analyze the specifics if you don't have real experience on implementing this kind of simulation game systems.
@@meanmole3212 For the most part, the calculations only really affect various values per 2x2 chunk of the world, however, in order to determine where traffic would be I believe each residential building constructed links to one or more industrial buildings to determine a work routes and thus which chunks have how much traffic. Not sure if commercial buildings or other specific structures factor into this or not.
You haven't went deep enough yet! You don't have to connect roads together. All residential supply is counted in a map wide pool and will teleport through a single tile of residential. In fact most things operate through centralized counters. So if you put a single residential tile on a road unconnected to anything else with industrial/commercial on it, the residential supply from the rest of city will still make it to work. Likewise knowing this you don't have to connect residential together either as well. It's actually a fun way to build as you try to design in as little road as possible within geography constraints to maximize land usage.
One of every 10 soldiers would get beaten to death by its comrades by drawing the shortest stick as a punishment, regardless of their guilt. Used rarely by the Roman legion, but used sometimes in more modern times, like WW1
Happens if you type in some very mild curses a couple of times. I used to demolish churches too as they don't give population, and that makes more to pop in, which sort of sucks
Interesting that everyone is saying _Depth Dwellers_ . I was _sure_ the game in question was going to be _Outpost_ before I realized that _Outpost_ was never released for DOS; it is a Windows game. So yeah, I guess people are right about _Depth Dwellers_ .
"Reticulating Splines". What else. Of all the things to write ... what else than this. Ha ... Memories. Thank you! :D (and now I'll watch the rest. Didn't get past that line. Damn you, the winner is right at the beginning. HAHAHAHAHA :D ... Minutes later ... you said you played it four times in a row. it looks like you've played them all at once, but I assume that's the power of editting. Why didn't you play them all at once, though? Anyhow, what an amazing effort! Thank you! NERD! :D
It shouldn't. There's a pause every time the game advances a month because it's only in that moment where all the calculation magic is happening. THAT SAID, if you have disasters enabled and airports, plane crashes can start fires so you need to be EXTRA careful about where you locate your airport so that the planes can't hit buildings when taking off or landing. (Yes, it's checking this!) This is pertinent because the planes keep moving at all times regardless of the speed setting, but the speed at which they move is fixed no matter how fast the simulation is running!
Well, I do have a pretty good guess of what the next game is going to be. Depth Dwellers. Good luck with recovering from playing that travesty of a "game". You'll need it.
I've been playing _SimCity 4: Deluxe_ since... I dunno, 2010s. I've become so used to that game, that in some ways, I've forgotten how simplistic _SimCity 2000_ is. I'm still very nostalgic for _2000,_ and thoroughly enjoyed this ADG Pro episode, it just took me a little refocusing.
So you actually have finer control over taxes than just the main spinner in the budget. You can also adjust residential, commercial, and industrial taxes separately, or if you want to get REALLY nuts, you can adjust industrial taxes individually on different commodities. It may be possible to fine tune your income this way; I didn't look into it because this all hinges around "demand" levels which randomly change over time and thus would've been difficult to figure out exactly what was going on.
Not extremely well versed on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the industrial tax sliders are largely used to promote different industries. So for example, if you want computer products to become a dominant industry in your city, you can raise taxes on heavy industry, and lower taxes for electronics, thereby increasing interest in your city for that particular industry.
@@Pixelmusement Oh yeah, definitely. I have no clue if it actually works out that way. Honestly, after watching your video I think a large portion of this game is a thinly veiled crapshoot lol. Still really like this one, but I can kinda see why Will Wright was a bit hesitant to make a sequel
Probably? It's tricky to know how though given that there's a whole "demand" system determining how that works, with different industrial buildings being keyed to different industries, all of which fluctuates at random making it very tricky to analyze. :P
"Apart from taxes, city size and meeting demands NOTHING ELSE METTER." This is very significative of what kind of political view is represented in SimCity 2000 through it's mechanics. Polygon did a intersting video on that subject.
Simcity 2000 has no depth at all. I played this game so much as a kid, building all kinds of cities, but unfortunately there is nothing really complex going on in it. It is interesting that the guys at Maxis were influenced by A-Train 3 which has a much more "hardcore" simulation, but apparently they let themselves be influenced only by the most basic things like graphics and the end result is a sandbox where the entertainment is more about aesthetics and creativity than problem solving and strategy.
And i tought this game was way complicated. Still play from time to time since i never got to understand any other that came later and now i know its also very odd on those things. And for the first time i hear about the golden ratio, im such a dumbass lol
SC2K was more like a sandbox - I always thought of it that way. There's of course some simulation, but game is not too hard on you, it's rather hard to fail in this game I think? All those decisions found out here makes sense if you want to make game that is fun to play. In the early game you struggle with money, in the late game you focus more on what you want your city to be like.
Ten Minutes in, you state you hope that people with better education will bring in more money. Here's a Fun Fact! Smarter people spend *less* money in general, especially for entertainment, but also when it comes to taxes! Smarter people try figuring out ways to save money! Education is a factor reducing thoughtless, needless, impulse-driven spending. That's why the vast majority of games out there nowadays, be it desktop, console and mobile, aim at the lowest common denominator. :)
This is incredible, and I am going to make students I work with watch it when we talk about uncertainty quantification and reproducibility. Nice work!
I kinda wish the graphs I kept up during the split-screen demonstrations were more expressive than they ended up being but oh well. :P
I love how you simulated the Laffer Curve in SimCity. Didn't expect that!
This is a wealth of knowledge! This video places things into a digestible perspective. Thank you for the great content!
Residents perfectly OK with living in a crime-infested hellhole?
...I think you just made Gotham City.
Or NYC...
@@themantimeforgotx ...well at least New York, New York's got good pizza. Gothamites have _no_ reason to live there in canon. :v
Ah, so that's why it doesn't affect population as much as you'd think, people are flocking in for the chance to run into Batman.
@@YukaTakeuchiFan *Maxis Man
Glad you're feeling a bit better!
Too bad you don’t put names up for guesses anymore, because I totally know what the next game is. Great video by the way, it makes me wonder how much more complex SimCity 3000 is since that’s the one I grew up with.
Good stuff, would like to see more videos about simulation game mechanics and especially how would you start designing these mechanics in terms of programming. It seems like a topic where one could easily fail by trying to implement too taxing and complex algorithms because there's so much to compute. Also Depth Dwellers incoming.
This is ultimately why the mechanics in Afterlife didn't pan out well, because REAL city management is a complex beast and Afterlife's underlying mechanics ultimately revolved around bigger = better, period. It appears, based on this investigation, that Sim City 2000 managed to get around some of the nuances simply by tying most things into land values and then allowing more basic levels of the simulation play out on top of that to affect income based almost exclusively on tax rate versus the physical size of the city (not the actual city size). Creating complex mechanics in any game usually comes down to a LOT of testing to see how the interactions work, how they can be exploited, and balancing all of that through trial and error, but the Sim City series at least had a baseline to start from: Real life city management! :B
@@Pixelmusement And also it's no wonder why many of the simulation outcomes in SC2000 do not make much sense in terms of what humans would intuitively think when you start to measure the actions and outcomes despite the developer's best intentions to make the simulation sensible for humans, there's just too many parameters to tweak with in this game.
If you take this idea of tweakable parameters all the way to Game of Life and think about the couple rules that game has, and then think of all the crazy stuff you can do with these rules, it is easy to see how hard it must be to design a simulation with predictions where certain simple in-game actions and concepts will yield certain in-game results.
Therefore, in case of Sim City, I think the fact that the developers had a certain blueprint that is pretty much set in stone may have also made their work harder. I mean, how much can you alter the basic rules of a human city until it all becomes a meaningless and boring thing to understand for humans, case Afterlife I assume... Then again, creating an interesting simulation of a human city has to have much complexity in terms of the simulation and its actors.
But all that drivel was really about the game design aspect of a simulation game. I was originally talking about the code implementation of this kind of simulation. For example, I think in SC2000 the game has this weird chunked way of updating the simulation. Every few seconds or so we get a new calculated state of the city and parameters, it does not happen in real-time. There's so much to consider. For example, will every building or cell get influenced by every other building or cell in the whole map, or is there a limit on how far these things influence each other. If the latter is true in case of SC2000, is that a decision that was made based on the fact that there's not enough computing power to calculate every objects' influence to every other object even though ideally we would want to do that. Maybe this would be a piece of cake today if we could make use of GPUs parallelism for running the simulation steps.
That would be an interesting topic to hear more about, but of course, it's hard to analyze the specifics if you don't have real experience on implementing this kind of simulation game systems.
@@meanmole3212 For the most part, the calculations only really affect various values per 2x2 chunk of the world, however, in order to determine where traffic would be I believe each residential building constructed links to one or more industrial buildings to determine a work routes and thus which chunks have how much traffic. Not sure if commercial buildings or other specific structures factor into this or not.
I think this maybe my all time favorite Maxis game.
I dunno... Sim City 3000 is pretty good too... It's a tough call between those two! :B
@@Pixelmusement: I skipped over _3000_ and went directly with _SimCity 4: Deluxe._ I think _2000_ and _4_ are both great for their own merits.
You haven't went deep enough yet! You don't have to connect roads together. All residential supply is counted in a map wide pool and will teleport through a single tile of residential. In fact most things operate through centralized counters. So if you put a single residential tile on a road unconnected to anything else with industrial/commercial on it, the residential supply from the rest of city will still make it to work. Likewise knowing this you don't have to connect residential together either as well.
It's actually a fun way to build as you try to design in as little road as possible within geography constraints to maximize land usage.
I LOVE your content. Favorite RUclips channel.
Heh, funny that 10% tax decimates the city, given the origin of the word "decimate"...
One of every 10 soldiers would get beaten to death by its comrades by drawing the shortest stick as a punishment, regardless of their guilt. Used rarely by the Roman legion, but used sometimes in more modern times, like WW1
Oh man. It's still possible to run the Win95 Special Edition. It's the "same" game literally but so much cleaner and nicer.
I always liked the DOS version so much more! better UI and specially music. I always found the W95 music way inferior!
Jim the Transit Advisor is always gonna warn you about not funding 100%. Makes sense. XD
This is a really cool series
I remember building a city that suddenly built a TON of churches. Like churches on every block. Must have been the land value.
I've heard about this happening; I'm not sure what circumstances lead to this. :|
God blessed your soul
If my memory is correct, it happend after typing the "cheat codes" "darn" and "heck" too often
Happens if you type in some very mild curses a couple of times. I used to demolish churches too as they don't give population, and that makes more to pop in, which sort of sucks
Interesting that everyone is saying _Depth Dwellers_ . I was _sure_ the game in question was going to be _Outpost_ before I realized that _Outpost_ was never released for DOS; it is a Windows game. So yeah, I guess people are right about _Depth Dwellers_ .
"Reticulating Splines". What else. Of all the things to write ... what else than this. Ha ... Memories. Thank you! :D (and now I'll watch the rest. Didn't get past that line. Damn you, the winner is right at the beginning. HAHAHAHAHA :D ... Minutes later ... you said you played it four times in a row. it looks like you've played them all at once, but I assume that's the power of editting. Why didn't you play them all at once, though? Anyhow, what an amazing effort! Thank you! NERD! :D
What else? Maybe look back at my original review of this game to see another line taken from its mountains of in-game text! ;)
Y'know, I was going to ask if I'd regret cutting back on my transit funding, but it looks like you have me covered.
thanks for including the music
Oh... Depth Dwellers, nice!
Great video. I’m curious if changing the speed affects the profit calculations over time.
It shouldn't. There's a pause every time the game advances a month because it's only in that moment where all the calculation magic is happening. THAT SAID, if you have disasters enabled and airports, plane crashes can start fires so you need to be EXTRA careful about where you locate your airport so that the planes can't hit buildings when taking off or landing. (Yes, it's checking this!) This is pertinent because the planes keep moving at all times regardless of the speed setting, but the speed at which they move is fixed no matter how fast the simulation is running!
Well, I do have a pretty good guess of what the next game is going to be.
Depth Dwellers.
Good luck with recovering from playing that travesty of a "game". You'll need it.
I've been playing _SimCity 4: Deluxe_ since... I dunno, 2010s. I've become so used to that game, that in some ways, I've forgotten how simplistic _SimCity 2000_ is. I'm still very nostalgic for _2000,_ and thoroughly enjoyed this ADG Pro episode, it just took me a little refocusing.
Interesting. One thing, that I'll have to listen closely on second rewatching: What does the industrial tax sliders do?
So you actually have finer control over taxes than just the main spinner in the budget. You can also adjust residential, commercial, and industrial taxes separately, or if you want to get REALLY nuts, you can adjust industrial taxes individually on different commodities. It may be possible to fine tune your income this way; I didn't look into it because this all hinges around "demand" levels which randomly change over time and thus would've been difficult to figure out exactly what was going on.
Not extremely well versed on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the industrial tax sliders are largely used to promote different industries. So for example, if you want computer products to become a dominant industry in your city, you can raise taxes on heavy industry, and lower taxes for electronics, thereby increasing interest in your city for that particular industry.
I mean, that's the LOGIC, but whether this plays out in that manner at all or not I have no idea.
@@Pixelmusement Oh yeah, definitely. I have no clue if it actually works out that way. Honestly, after watching your video I think a large portion of this game is a thinly veiled crapshoot lol. Still really like this one, but I can kinda see why Will Wright was a bit hesitant to make a sequel
@@WayOutGaming Sure, that's the logic. But there's only so many industrial building tiles in the game.
I'm going to guess the next game is depth dwellers
Can't remember if the individual industry taxes actually mattered
The mechanics were improved upon in 3 and 4
Probably? It's tricky to know how though given that there's a whole "demand" system determining how that works, with different industrial buildings being keyed to different industries, all of which fluctuates at random making it very tricky to analyze. :P
"Apart from taxes, city size and meeting demands NOTHING ELSE METTER." This is very significative of what kind of political view is represented in SimCity 2000 through it's mechanics. Polygon did a intersting video on that subject.
Wait, Polygon did legit journalism? That's a new one.
@@lilwyvern4 Drone
Good insights
Aparently trees also reduce crime but increase your fire hazard risk.
Trees more specifically increase the land value and I believe the simulation is set up so that higher land values have less crime by default. :B
So we essentially learned today that the game is completely broken
Mmm... more-so that it's more easily exploited than it first appears and that things aren't as interwoven as it seems. :B
@@Pixelmusement I’d love to see this experiment done with Sim City 3000 and 4!
Simcity 2000 has no depth at all. I played this game so much as a kid, building all kinds of cities, but unfortunately there is nothing really complex going on in it. It is interesting that the guys at Maxis were influenced by A-Train 3 which has a much more "hardcore" simulation, but apparently they let themselves be influenced only by the most basic things like graphics and the end result is a sandbox where the entertainment is more about aesthetics and creativity than problem solving and strategy.
Yep I did some testing of my own back in the day and came to the same conclusion. It's a shame! Haven't played it since.
@@rickyspanish4792 It did come with a HUGE manual though, explaining how it all worked, and it was considered a "Desktop Toy" not a game.
Cave dwellers?
And i tought this game was way complicated. Still play from time to time since i never got to understand any other that came later and now i know its also very odd on those things. And for the first time i hear about the golden ratio, im such a dumbass lol
To be fair, I didn't know about that ratio either until I started making this video! :P
SC2K was more like a sandbox - I always thought of it that way. There's of course some simulation, but game is not too hard on you, it's rather hard to fail in this game I think? All those decisions found out here makes sense if you want to make game that is fun to play. In the early game you struggle with money, in the late game you focus more on what you want your city to be like.
5:45 Unemployment isn't the only variable nor is it the most important in determining the reasons for crime in real life, so it doesn't surprise me.
I loved this game when I was younger and I'm so cut that there's no port from 16 bit to modern systems. Travesty, I tells ya.
Ten Minutes in, you state you hope that people with better education will bring in more money. Here's a Fun Fact! Smarter people spend *less* money in general, especially for entertainment, but also when it comes to taxes! Smarter people try figuring out ways to save money! Education is a factor reducing thoughtless, needless, impulse-driven spending. That's why the vast majority of games out there nowadays, be it desktop, console and mobile, aim at the lowest common denominator. :)
There are plenty of educated people who get the better jobs only to spend that income on cars, houses, etc..
@@jrherita lol ... I guess you've tried and that's all I can ask for.