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I appreciate the sentiment and always suspected as much about SimCity. My goal for Citybound is really a meta one: to be flexible enough to try out any number of government and planning styles and for the simulation to be tweakable enough to set up any real-life or imagined political context for a city.

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That's good to hear. I think making it open source is already a step in the right direction. City planners who were critical of SimCity at the time often pointed to the game being a black box, so you couldn't examine, much less tweak, the assumptions built into the simulation.

If that is truly your goal, it is a noble one, but in that case baking the pathfinding into the roads seems like a bad design choice. People get lost driving in a convoluted city a lot even with GPS, but much less so in a regular blocked city.

Making them get lost is as easy as picking a random turn instead of the correct one with a certain probability.

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