I actually really loved this game, but it was weird and super easy (even with the added challenge mode). The idea of buildings generating Special Sims and "items" that would actually impact your citizens and city was cool (like having Abstinence Advocates shut down your bars and taverns), as was the idea of the "values" but plopping down buildings and having 100% control over everything made it extremely sandbox.
Ah memory lane. I’m probably viewing this through an overly optimistic, younger me lens. However, I actually find this game to be very nostalgic and a very interesting approach to city builders. It had a fun look and it was interesting how you were able to place individual buildings with each one having a purpose. Most city builders give you a very vanilla city (assuming you don’t install 300 mods). I love how Societies allowed you to give your cities various personalities with some of them being quite wild or dystopic. And I loved how it wasn’t just cosmetic but had a real impact on how the city operated. I would have loved to see this concept developed more. Great video! Subscribed.
I'm actually playing this game atm. And having played all the previous titles since childhood, I still enjoy this one pretty much today. I didn't play it before, so it isn't due to some nostalgic effects. It's just a genuinely enjoyable game. It's not too complex. It's more relaxed then the other titles. It's less challenging and I would imagine those might be the very reasons it's got such a negative ratings.
When I played this game as a kid, I always thought of it a puzzle to solve: Getting all special sims once just to see what they did, how many vigilante stations do i need to make crime buildings acceptable, ohh this building interaction turns any buildings to the government category, i wonder what that's for! As an adult, I still dont know why I would turn a building government. The only thing that affects is the news station, reducing profits. There is the syndicate category with 3 buildings in it and no synergies. On the one hand, I really want see all those interactions in a wiki somewhere, on the other, I know a list with all of them will just erase the one joy I remember from this game.
This is actually a really good game once you get the difficulty and challenge modes that were included in the expansion. It's different than the standard SimCity, but it also has a lot of new things to offer. It's a pity they weren't included at release because I think it would have changed the reception it got. I hope we'll see that elusive medieval mayor game at some point because I think Tilted Mill has a lot to offer.
I like that your sims looked like they're environment. I would make ramshackle ghettos and the people would look absolutely dangerous and poverty-stricken
The main draw was seeing every type of "society" the game offered (Cyberpunk looked the coolest imo). The gimmick eventually gets old and there's nothing else to the game.
Honestly would've probably loved this game if it didn't crash once you reached a certain point...even if not totally realistic it was an interesting concept that afforded a lot of ability to curate your own city vibe...
I regret spending my money on this as a kid. I paid full price for it and played it for a few days before giving up on it. Looking back at it, it reminds me of a more advanced version of SimTown.
That's a pretty accurate way to describe SimCity Societies haha. I do like it, but it's an incredibly flawed game and I am not at all surprised by its negative reception
Yes, you mentioned that game runs worse the longer you play, but I guess you didn't figured out why. Sometime ago I was playing it for months and noticed several things: Each working sim is a an individual entity, that requires individual processing power in processor. What it means, that if your PC can't handle an X amount of sims, they will lag and won't calculate their travel check at correct time, which will cause them to be too late to get to work or venue, as the game's time goes independently from their "reaction time", meaning that despite you correctly placed buildings so they could get to their tasks on time, they will still get late, because of processing lag. Time speed multiplier. I think that if you play the game at default max speed, you may corrupt the timing patterns of the sims, making them fail to start and finish tasks on time. I modded the config file to super speed and noticed that after playing a game at modded super speed, their task patterns fail to initialize, pretty much corrupting the sims task timing. they will just stand in place doing nothing, getting angrier. I think that running the game at high speeds even at default multiplier settings - they may make incremental task timer corruption for sims as well. and worst of all, if you leave the game at normal speed after such interaction - sims won't restore their task pattern. And game is slow paced to begin with... I don't know what kind of timer configs I need to mod to make it tolerable, but now you know, this thing affects sims. So my best guess, that for least amount of sims timer corruption is to never run game at max speed, whose multiplier is 1.625, or something like that. Either way, if you'd make a perfect city building formula that would work on highest game difficulty, that same formula of the city would fail on someone's slower PC, because sims may have lagged a bit and their timing got desynced with actual game time. Or your own perfect city would flop on itself as time goes on. You change nothing, just observe perfectly built city, but city will eventually fall on itself, because some sim lagged and got late for work, meaning he got late to relax in venue, resulting in him becoming an angry protestor, at which further action will just domino your entire city to crumbles. In a nutshell: Each Sim has individual action rendering in CPU, If you play game at max speed and slow CPU - your sims task timer gets corrupted, they will lag, get late, get angry - destroy the city. If you wanna play simcity societies at grand scales, you gotta mod the heck out of it. And yes, you can make game map much larger, if you modify certain .cfg file, but it will require much more processing power.
DxWnd has been working miracles getting this game to run on Windows 10. Even got the infamously incompatible 1.5 working with some tweaks. I found the game to be actually rather relaxing... until the code held together with duct tape and twine rears its ugly head.
after playing this game for some month, I learned what fails this game. The AI. Each is sim that goes to work is an actual individual who requires processing power for himself, meaning that once you get X amount of sims that your PC can't handle, they will lag and and freeze in place much longer than needed, resulting in them getting late everywhere, which means they don't produce income, they get angry, eventually destroy the city. What also contributes to their task pattern corruption is time speed. I noticed that sims will permanently stuck in place once you mod the config file for super speed. I guess it just bottlenecks the incoming tasks to which they can't respond at once, so they just stuck. I suppose same goes even for the default max speed, which is 1.625x speed multiplier, that may as well incrementally corrupt sims task timers. So yeah, to play this game with grand plans, first you need to mod some configuration files and probably avoid playing on super hardcore difficulty as it requires pixel perfect building placement, but such thing can't be done if sims happen to lag once in a while, destroying your perfect city planning.
I played it using the disc that I still have from when I was a kid so I'm not entirely sure. I think you can buy it on Origin or EA Games or whatever their platform is called now. I don't know if it includes the Destinations expansion pack. That being said, you can most definitely find it elsewhere on the internet I'm sure, especially since EA doesn't appear to care much about where it's distributed and since Tilted Mill has seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth.
I can't speak to the CD version of SC4 on Windows 10, but I know the Steam version works. Obviously that doesn't help with what you have, but just wanted to toss that out there. Thanks for watching and I hope you have a good time simulating your cities!
As a SimCity player since the original, I just skipped over both this and 2013, so it's interesting to see. It looks like it was the right choice to make :D I was actually quite excited about SC2013 until I found out how small the cities would be though. This seems more of a descendant of SimTown than SimCity however, another game that I really didn't like.
When I read up on this game in 2007, I was totally bummed out. We were hoping for a sequel to SC4, not a reboot. It was the exact oposite of what we wanted, so I never bought it. I even forgot that it even existed. Then came CitiesXL. It was on the right track, But its dynamics were too simplistic. The zones might as well have been ploppable buildings, because you got what you zoned for regardless of demand in the city. It was ok, bitvit still fell short of expectations. Then came SimCity. The reviews looked great, the dymanics looked interesting, but then came the deal breaker: always online for a genre that is a _single player game_ The temptation was there to buy it anyway, but I knew it wouldnt be worth it, and in hind sight, it was the right choice. Then, finally, when I thought classic city builders are dead forever, came Cities Skylines. Having been disappointed so many times, I was skeptical at first, but the more the devs revealed, the more I loved what I saw. Finally, a game worthy of the title of "sequel to SC4". Its 7 years later and the game still feels new. People moan about the dlc's and say they should work on a sequel instead, but seriously, it is difficult for me to imagine how anyone, including Colosal Order, can top what they've produced. I think it will be more than a decade before a better game is produced.
I don't mind isometric games like SimCity 4. CityState also had that in the first game. Societies is ANNO and I don't mind it either. SimCity BuildIt is also poppable and a combination of those two. A reboot of this game with something interesting in the future. (Doubt.) At least the game felt alive back then. Every sim has its autonomy. But nothing like Cities Skylines. Still neat though.
The main thing that make this game absolutely unplayable for me is the fact that if you plop a building onto an uneven terrain, the game will automatically generate an ugly cement platform at the base of the building. It's like the game directly offends my inner autism. 😅
SImcity Societies like SC@013 and CSKL as city builder lacks customization itS what see is what you get nothing more ! At the time all may be a little released hardware not up to spec, RAM mayor factor for performance. You should lik to like the developer intended, less free, no little more comfortable features !
I actually really loved this game, but it was weird and super easy (even with the added challenge mode). The idea of buildings generating Special Sims and "items" that would actually impact your citizens and city was cool (like having Abstinence Advocates shut down your bars and taverns), as was the idea of the "values" but plopping down buildings and having 100% control over everything made it extremely sandbox.
Well said!
Ah memory lane. I’m probably viewing this through an overly optimistic, younger me lens. However, I actually find this game to be very nostalgic and a very interesting approach to city builders. It had a fun look and it was interesting how you were able to place individual buildings with each one having a purpose. Most city builders give you a very vanilla city (assuming you don’t install 300 mods). I love how Societies allowed you to give your cities various personalities with some of them being quite wild or dystopic. And I loved how it wasn’t just cosmetic but had a real impact on how the city operated. I would have loved to see this concept developed more. Great video! Subscribed.
I'm actually playing this game atm. And having played all the previous titles since childhood, I still enjoy this one pretty much today.
I didn't play it before, so it isn't due to some nostalgic effects. It's just a genuinely enjoyable game. It's not too complex. It's more relaxed then the other titles. It's less challenging and I would imagine those might be the very reasons it's got such a negative ratings.
When I played this game as a kid, I always thought of it a puzzle to solve: Getting all special sims once just to see what they did, how many vigilante stations do i need to make crime buildings acceptable, ohh this building interaction turns any buildings to the government category, i wonder what that's for!
As an adult, I still dont know why I would turn a building government. The only thing that affects is the news station, reducing profits. There is the syndicate category with 3 buildings in it and no synergies. On the one hand, I really want see all those interactions in a wiki somewhere, on the other, I know a list with all of them will just erase the one joy I remember from this game.
This is actually a really good game once you get the difficulty and challenge modes that were included in the expansion. It's different than the standard SimCity, but it also has a lot of new things to offer. It's a pity they weren't included at release because I think it would have changed the reception it got.
I hope we'll see that elusive medieval mayor game at some point because I think Tilted Mill has a lot to offer.
I like that your sims looked like they're environment. I would make ramshackle ghettos and the people would look absolutely dangerous and poverty-stricken
Question: Have you thought about doing a review/retrospective of SimCity Creator on the Wii and DS?
The main draw was seeing every type of "society" the game offered (Cyberpunk looked the coolest imo).
The gimmick eventually gets old and there's nothing else to the game.
Honestly would've probably loved this game if it didn't crash once you reached a certain point...even if not totally realistic it was an interesting concept that afforded a lot of ability to curate your own city vibe...
I regret spending my money on this as a kid. I paid full price for it and played it for a few days before giving up on it. Looking back at it, it reminds me of a more advanced version of SimTown.
That's a pretty accurate way to describe SimCity Societies haha. I do like it, but it's an incredibly flawed game and I am not at all surprised by its negative reception
Yes, you mentioned that game runs worse the longer you play, but I guess you didn't figured out why.
Sometime ago I was playing it for months and noticed several things:
Each working sim is a an individual entity, that requires individual processing power in processor.
What it means, that if your PC can't handle an X amount of sims, they will lag and won't calculate their travel check at correct time, which will cause them to be too late to get to work or venue, as the game's time goes independently from their "reaction time", meaning that despite you correctly placed buildings so they could get to their tasks on time, they will still get late, because of processing lag.
Time speed multiplier. I think that if you play the game at default max speed, you may corrupt the timing patterns of the sims, making them fail to start and finish tasks on time.
I modded the config file to super speed and noticed that after playing a game at modded super speed, their task patterns fail to initialize, pretty much corrupting the sims task timing. they will just stand in place doing nothing, getting angrier.
I think that running the game at high speeds even at default multiplier settings - they may make incremental task timer corruption for sims as well.
and worst of all, if you leave the game at normal speed after such interaction - sims won't restore their task pattern.
And game is slow paced to begin with... I don't know what kind of timer configs I need to mod to make it tolerable, but now you know, this thing affects sims.
So my best guess, that for least amount of sims timer corruption is to never run game at max speed, whose multiplier is 1.625, or something like that.
Either way, if you'd make a perfect city building formula that would work on highest game difficulty, that same formula of the city would fail on someone's slower PC, because sims may have lagged a bit and their timing got desynced with actual game time.
Or your own perfect city would flop on itself as time goes on. You change nothing, just observe perfectly built city, but city will eventually fall on itself, because some sim lagged and got late for work, meaning he got late to relax in venue, resulting in him becoming an angry protestor, at which further action will just domino your entire city to crumbles.
In a nutshell: Each Sim has individual action rendering in CPU, If you play game at max speed and slow CPU - your sims task timer gets corrupted, they will lag, get late, get angry - destroy the city.
If you wanna play simcity societies at grand scales, you gotta mod the heck out of it.
And yes, you can make game map much larger, if you modify certain .cfg file, but it will require much more processing power.
DxWnd has been working miracles getting this game to run on Windows 10. Even got the infamously incompatible 1.5 working with some tweaks. I found the game to be actually rather relaxing... until the code held together with duct tape and twine rears its ugly head.
after playing this game for some month, I learned what fails this game.
The AI. Each is sim that goes to work is an actual individual who requires processing power for himself, meaning that once you get X amount of sims that your PC can't handle, they will lag and and freeze in place much longer than needed, resulting in them getting late everywhere, which means they don't produce income, they get angry, eventually destroy the city.
What also contributes to their task pattern corruption is time speed. I noticed that sims will permanently stuck in place once you mod the config file for super speed. I guess it just bottlenecks the incoming tasks to which they can't respond at once, so they just stuck.
I suppose same goes even for the default max speed, which is 1.625x speed multiplier, that may as well incrementally corrupt sims task timers.
So yeah, to play this game with grand plans, first you need to mod some configuration files and probably avoid playing on super hardcore difficulty as it requires pixel perfect building placement, but such thing can't be done if sims happen to lag once in a while, destroying your perfect city planning.
Is there a download for this game somewhere? I can't find it on steam.
I played it using the disc that I still have from when I was a kid so I'm not entirely sure. I think you can buy it on Origin or EA Games or whatever their platform is called now. I don't know if it includes the Destinations expansion pack. That being said, you can most definitely find it elsewhere on the internet I'm sure, especially since EA doesn't appear to care much about where it's distributed and since Tilted Mill has seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth.
I got a simcity pack at a thrift store and it had simcity 4 and this game but 4 doesn't work at all on windows 10 so all i got is this :(
I can't speak to the CD version of SC4 on Windows 10, but I know the Steam version works. Obviously that doesn't help with what you have, but just wanted to toss that out there. Thanks for watching and I hope you have a good time simulating your cities!
@TJ of Carolina you should get a no cd patch, when you put the on the exes file, the game will work
As a SimCity player since the original, I just skipped over both this and 2013, so it's interesting to see. It looks like it was the right choice to make :D I was actually quite excited about SC2013 until I found out how small the cities would be though. This seems more of a descendant of SimTown than SimCity however, another game that I really didn't like.
When I read up on this game in 2007, I was totally bummed out. We were hoping for a sequel to SC4, not a reboot. It was the exact oposite of what we wanted, so I never bought it. I even forgot that it even existed. Then came CitiesXL. It was on the right track, But its dynamics were too simplistic. The zones might as well have been ploppable buildings, because you got what you zoned for regardless of demand in the city. It was ok, bitvit still fell short of expectations. Then came SimCity. The reviews looked great, the dymanics looked interesting, but then came the deal breaker: always online for a genre that is a _single player game_ The temptation was there to buy it anyway, but I knew it wouldnt be worth it, and in hind sight, it was the right choice.
Then, finally, when I thought classic city builders are dead forever, came Cities Skylines. Having been disappointed so many times, I was skeptical at first, but the more the devs revealed, the more I loved what I saw. Finally, a game worthy of the title of "sequel to SC4". Its 7 years later and the game still feels new. People moan about the dlc's and say they should work on a sequel instead, but seriously, it is difficult for me to imagine how anyone, including Colosal Order, can top what they've produced. I think it will be more than a decade before a better game is produced.
I always wanted to build a romantic city combined with an authoritarian city to make it look like Nazi Berlin or Soviet Moscow.
I don't mind isometric games like SimCity 4. CityState also had that in the first game. Societies is ANNO and I don't mind it either. SimCity BuildIt is also poppable and a combination of those two. A reboot of this game with something interesting in the future. (Doubt.)
At least the game felt alive back then. Every sim has its autonomy. But nothing like Cities Skylines. Still neat though.
Did you buy this game on origin or got it by other means ?
I've owned it on disc for years actually
The main thing that make this game absolutely unplayable for me is the fact that if you plop a building onto an uneven terrain, the game will automatically generate an ugly cement platform at the base of the building. It's like the game directly offends my inner autism. 😅
This is a better verison then other sim city games for little kids. Less complicated.
I agree. Definitely easier to make a city functional in this one than in 3000 or 4, the other ones I played as a child.
SImcity Societies like SC@013 and CSKL as city builder lacks customization itS what see is what you get nothing more ! At the time all may be a little released hardware not up to spec, RAM mayor factor for performance. You should lik to like the developer intended, less free, no little more comfortable features !
i like this game
So.... it seems to be okay game, just bad SimCity game.