Why SimCity 4 is Still Great 20 Years Later

SimCity 4 is a city building game released by Maxis/EA in 2003. It is, unsurprisingly, about building cities, where you can plan out areas, terrain, and infrastructure for your city as the mayor. There are of course many other features that make this game unique which is why I'm writing a blog about it.

One of the most unique things in this game is the Regions vs. city tile feature. You can create full regions, which are 16x16 grids. They hold city tiles, which come in 3 sizes- 1x1 (small), 2x2 (medium), and 4x4 (large). A newly created region will have a mix of these sizes, so they usually contain 16 tiles for cities. The city tiles are where you create the cities in your game, but they are all interconnected in the region- they share road, rail and air networks. In this way, when you make a region, it feels like one large metro area and the city tiles are different "districts" of it. They also influence each other through the economies of the cities, with every city in a region sharing their RCI (Residential, Commercial, and Industrial) demand, as well as being able to share transportation networks, power, and water supply.This allows for a larger scale than other games, and the regions look cool when you just see a sprawl of factories and neighborhoods.

Terraforming is a very important power you have in SimCity 4. You can influence the success of your city with this. Before you establish and name your city, you terraform it. You can put forests, mountains hills, plateaus and any terrain feature you can think of. Since the terrain of your city shows up in the region view, you can reconcile the edges of your city with the other tiles, so it merges into one seamless river or mountain range in the region view, like in the image above. However, once you establish your city and start building, you cannot use the "God Mode" to terraform, instead it costs loads of money to create one small hill.

Traffic is probably, besides supplying water and pollution, the most annoying thing in the game. Traffic can single handedly destroy an entire neighborhood because the commute is too long. Having an entire area full of apartments that could hold 10,000 people hollowed because of "Excessive commute time" is a scourge upon me when I play. This can be solved with different methods- having more public transit like subways and buses is probably the best way, but I always lay out highways and avenues that can handle more cars before I start laying out the city. This is because I'm American and don't care for public transit. However, the laying out roads strategy is not actually a very good idea, as people will have to rely on their cars to get everywhere, which will make traffic horrendous. This is why SimCity traffic is considered (sort of) realistic and reflective of what you build. And you can build lots besides the transit already mentioned.  You can build monorails, airports, parking garages, and toll booths as well as different kinds of roads (one way, avenues, normal streets) to try to micromanage the flow of traffic. But if you manage it well you can fit 4 million people in a tile. That is why it is one of the most important parts of creating a large, successful city

This about the actual building of cities- though not quite as unique, it is still important and makes the game better. There are 8 stages of city progression, and they determine what kind of buildings are built in your city, which can be influenced by many factors in your region-which adds to the depth and complexity of the game. Levels 1-3 are in lower population towns, with suburbs and strip malls and the like. The next stage, medium density, is smaller apartments and offices, and the final one is high density buildings like giant apartments and skyscrapers. To unlock level 8 you generally need a well run city with schools, hospitals, and wealthy people. This means you actually need to try and put effort into your city as opposed to making miserable slums-which will be described below💀💀💀

This is kind of a tangent which you can skip because its not about a specific thing, but I'm gonna go off and tell the story of my miserable region that I've created. It will highlight lots of things in the game, though. It is fun that different regions have different personalities and feels to them- it is an admirable feature of the game. But this region is just terrible. It is my biggest, with a population of 1,000,100 people. 80% of those people live in poverty.  This region has around 20 cities, and 1/5 of the population lives in the aptly named Bigburg, which is the backbone of the region-it deserves it's own story which I will tell here on another tangent. It started out as a small city on large tile, but eventually grew to cover the entire tile. The way it grew and how long it has been worked on makes it unique in that it has distinct districts within it- the rich part is the oldest part of the city in the Northwest, the Northeast is old factories, the central part is a mix of factories and parks, the east side is mainly rows of shacks, the south side is abandoned or decaying giant apartments. The west side is highways. That comes from playing 200 in-game years there. That aside, the point is that it is one of only about 3 cities with rich people in them. The Rich make up about 7 or 8% of the regions population. The poor live in miserable conditions. The vast majority of towns are built in this way- lay out loads of space for apartments or shacks, and then the rest for factories. Factories provide jobs, and all the poor Sims need are jobs and power to their home They will live without running water or utilities. As an evil mayor, you trap them in a vicious cycle. By making the towns charmless, having no parks or landmarks, they are unhappy. But there is no escape. By withholding basic needs- schools, public transit, supermarkets, etc. They have no way to better themselves and move up the ladder. They are trapped in a dead end factory town that is an endless maze of pollution, apartments, and dirty industry. They die by the age of 50, but then the next generation takes their place. They don't care that the water in the river has turned black from pollution (they don't have running water anyway). They only know to work in the factory and die an early death. They live to serve the rich people, because that is how SimCIty was designed.