How is it possible that we have several thousand people living in the city, and less than a thousand people in the work force, and almost no unemployment? We try to match the number of jobs in our city to the number of households currently available but it seems like every family of four workers come with up to a hundred other citizens who do nothing at all except add to the population ticker. We've yet to make sense of the housing situation or the size of the labor force. To make it less realistic, putting out fires isn't something the firemen do on their own it's actually a special action that the player has to choose each and every time there's a fire to be put out. Maybe the firemen are extorting money from the locals. Fire stations, for instance, actually make money for your city and benefit from the same commerce boosts that actual businesses enjoy. The problem is that the buildings just don't work according to city-building logic. All your municipal services are treated exactly like businesses, producing and consuming societal energies and in some cases creating specialists that can impact a larger area of the city. The city services follow this kind of abstraction to the point where they almost don't even seem recognizable.
Power stations are handled the same way just put them down anywhere and they'll automatically start sending power to every building on the map.ĭon't worry. It's almost as if the developers are admitting that they couldn't get the buildings' energy levels to balance on their own so they added this easy way out. Now it's true that most of these decorations are small enough to fit into the empty spaces where your buildings don't quite match up, but it seems cheap that they don't have to be anywhere near your homes, workplaces or entertainment venues to have an effect on your Sims. These decorations don't do anything but add a few more points of a specific energy type and they don't even need to be located near anything important. You can boost your energy production by building special decorations anywhere in your city.
Simcity complete edition vs simcity societies free#
Fortunately, you're not ever limited to one building theme in the game, so you're free to mix and match for the sake of function or appearance. The fact that they're missing from the "Normal" city theme is simply hilarious. And since a Cyberpunk city functions just as well without Spiritual energy, do you really need it in any of the other city types? The real deficiencies become apparent when you discover that simple things like bus stops and police stations don't even exist in most of the city styles. The Cyberpunk theme doesn't even have any buildings that produce Spirituality, for instance, which calls into question whether or not the need for a particular energy type extends beyond the requirements of the buildings you choose. There are even a few doubts about whether or not the different energy types impact one another. It's true that some of your Sims will visit certain buildings and become Specialists of one type or another and can then influence other Sims but the extent to which this kind of indoctrination affects the big picture is pretty small. Basically as long as your Sims have a place to sleep, a place to work and a place to play, it doesn't matter one bit whether or not they're living in a totalitarian police state or a hippie commune. What's worse is that the energies only affect other buildings, leaving your Sims out of the equation entirely. With these sorts of confusing energy assignments, you'll spend most of your time viewing buildings not by their name or purpose but by their energy levels. Why they're different isn't really clear. An Alien Artifact Lab consumes Knowledge but an Astrophysics Lab produces it.
Even so, the game's not even really consistent within itself here. I guess I can understand that a city expends Authority energy whenever a member of the community decides to become a police officer. A bank, for instance, produces Authority energy, but a police station consumes it. Some buildings consume energies that you'd think they'd produce.
To begin with, we're not entirely sure how energies are assigned. Balancing the competing needs of Creativity and Authority, Prosperity and Spirituality, and Knowledge and Productivity seems like a really engaging concept but it's handled in a way that's not very focused and doesn't even allow for any real gameplay. Rather than forcing players to muck about with strategically placing police stations, setting tax rates and hooking up plumbing, SimCity Societies puts all the focus on managing societal energies - six different ideals that are produced and consumed in varying quantities by hundreds and hundreds of different buildings.
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