That means the "total population" is likely flavor text which is meant to represent the fiction of the city-perhaps it accounts for children, who aren't otherwise factored in.īecause SimCity was sold largely on the power of its simulation engine, this should have been explicitly stated, but it's not actively hidden and doesn't change my overall appraisal of the game. If you add up the total number of reported workers, shoppers, students, and homeless in a city, you get the correct number-in my 90 house town, the total was 140. The population chart supports this observation. The community is calling these mysterious population padders "phantom Sims." The reported population, however, was 583-a discrepancy of 43, almost exactly half the number of houses. Each house adds six Sims to the population, so 90 houses should give me a population of 540. To test this, I built a city containing exactly 90 low-wealth houses. That ratio seems to increase with population, so that at 200,000 residents, somewhere around 20,000 appear to actually be simulated Sims. 5 people to a city's total population count. "Total population exceeds the actual number of Sims" True - The population count seems to be flavor textĪfter 500 residents, every house of six adds about. This was repeated and elaborated on in many subsequent previews and interviews with developers, both here and at other outlets. They start each day at the top of a flowchart, asking a series of simple questions such as: 'Am I sick? Do I have shopping money? Do I need to find a job? If there aren't any jobs, is there a park to sit in?'" "These Sims aren't as complex as the families we love to torture in The Sims. In fact, the May 2012 issue of PC Gamer US contains our first feature on SimCity, and in it I wrote: Sleuths who have done their research already know there's no conspiracy here, because Maxis has said from the start that this is how Sims work. At higher populations, however, it can abruptly lead to a traffic gridlock and other unintended behaviors, something I criticized in our review. In a way, it's an elegant solution-with little processing per Sim, it encourages the creation of wealth-segmented neighborhoods which satisfy multiple desires. It is true that Sims can go to a different job each morning and return to a different house each night, and that they seem to seek the nearest instance of a building type to fulfill their desires. "Sims don't remember their houses or jobs" True - But Maxis never hid this behavior This is an unfortunate stance, because as I stated in my review, the bulk of my fun was a solo experience. Maxis seems to be leaving out the caveat: you can't play SimCity offline as it was intended, and it's intended to be a connected experience. There's also the Global Market (a shared commodities exchange), leaderboards, achievements, and other standard online game niceties, but there is no evidence that the core single-player experience can't be replicated offline for longer than the connection timer allows.
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