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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

SC4 is broken. Try it in SimCity 3000 or 2000.

SC4 intentionally made it stupidly easy to make the city work financially and also killed what I thought of as "the game god." It's all ooh, shiny and can be fun in a largely superficial manner. But I don't think it works well as an actual city simulation anymore.

(SC4 followed the company acquisition. It has a more polished, corporate feel and it's cool that it has things like recycling centers. But I am not really a fan.)

I cannot find an article about it, but one city uploaded it's data to SimCity and got surprisingly solid city modeling results. This was before the joke that is SC4.

Edit: Geez, can we not downvote the comment I'm replying to? I left out the fact that I primarily play SimCity 3000. It's a perfectly reasonable reply that prompted me to fill in missing details that I hadn't thought to include in my original comment.

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Wrt downvoting: I’ve seen some really trigger happy downvoting on other comments as well, even though the argument was cogent. It would be nice to reserve downvoting for clearly stupid comments.

It's a reasonable comment, but I think it's being downvoted because many believe SC4 was the most difficult game in the franchise. It's been a long time since I've played any of those games, but I recall a good bit of backlash about the new SimCity being too easy compared to previous games.

Wait - I thought downvoting was for the quality of the comment and not the content? Is downvoting for when people disagree? Wouldn't that hide dissension?

You can down-vote for whatever reason you like. You are trusted to justify it only to yourself.

This has been widely hashed out over the years. You can use downvotes to express disagreement.

I have no problem with that generally because I would rather see downvotes than see every single person who disagrees feel compelled to pile on with petty BS. But in this case, the comment called attention to a defect in my earlier comment -- my failure to specify which SimCity -- and allowed me to add the missing information.

Since my reply with the additional info has substantial upvotes, I think it's wrong to punish the comment that elicited that reply from me. It has too much of that "you win an argument by making the other guy lose" vibe.

I hesitate to say this explicitly, because past experience suggests it will result in a temporary pile-on of everyone and their brother nitpicking the hell out of my comments, but I really don't want to discourage good faith comments that nudge me to address defects or omissions in my comments. I don't think that improves discussion here. I think it makes things worse.

"Don't shoot the messenger."

I've been playing it a lot lately. It is the most difficult, so long as you abstain from playing "missions" and don't install mods. But if you play the missions it becomes very easy. And the most popular gameplay mod is a mod to make the transit system easier.

Also simcity 4 isn't meant to be a 1:1 mapping from game to real city anyway. Most buildings in simcity4 can hold a multiple of what they would contain in real life; it is a model of a city, not a real city, after all. So it stands to reason that they could just cut out the parking lots for aesthetic purposes.

The ridiculously itty bitty size of SimCity 4 city regions make it impossible to model urban sprawls. That's part of what makes it difficult, and frustrating. Having to zone parking lots would just make it worse. I really wish they'd remove that limitation -- enough years have passed since its release that today's CPUs can certainly handle it.

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