Comment by jokoon
17 days ago
I haven't played a lot of Sim City, but in my mind, factorio is more a simulator than sim city.
Simulating means there is granularity about how each element can be seen and touched by the player.
In sim city there are a lot of shortcuts and simplifications. It looks like you have a city, but the more you play, the more it's just a decor, because the game shows a representation, but doesn't let you see the details.
So you see a car, a house, money, a school, but there is no day planning for citizens, they don't have a lifespan, citizen A or B doesn't have a commute with job C or D, they don't have children that you see grow up, you don't see those citizen bring back groceries or corn going out of the farm.
The problem is simulating granular elements of a city or even a village would require a lot of memory and computing power, even today, so back in 1990 or 2000 it was just not possible to have a granular village or city.
I want to see a mixture of The Sims and Sim City, but you can imagine how difficult it is to design such a game.
I think Cities Skylines 2 has simulation down to that level, where individual residents have houses, jobs, kids, go to school, can die eventually. etc. But it doesn't really seem to add anything to the gameplay and the game didn't get great reviews.
There’s a common rule of thumb in sim game design: “never simulate anything more than one layer of abstraction below what the player can actually observe”