I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals.
I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.
Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".
It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.
EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
The playable area was tiny and the game was weird in the way it cycled boom and bust development seemingly at random. And then despite the game selling incredibly well they abandoned it after launch and never really improved the game much.
The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. It wasn't. It was all faked and not even convincingly well.
I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding.
It's funny you mention wanting to solve transportation issues, because that's exactly the reason why I bounced so hard off Cities Skylines. At a certain point, it just turns into a "play with the roads" game. No matter how many forms of transportation you utilized, it just turned into bottleneck fix after bottleneck fix. When you tried to implement serious logical solutions (ie dedicated bus lines), you were met with more chaos. But add several roundabouts in succession and suddenly traffic fixed.
I do agree with the depth, something Cities Skylines was really lacking. Most of the logic of the game was quite shallow, and the people really don't live anywhere near as "deep" lives as in SimCity (2013). I'm hoping this is something they address in the sequel, but seeing as the community has rallied so strongly around the idea of creative designing vs functional planning, I'm not holding my breath.
I've played with Cities: Skylines off and on many times over the years and often do give up in frustration with endless traffic problems, but I think it's down to two main things: one, traffic management is very much "endgame" type content, as you can build a nice self-sufficient little zen garden community without really worrying about it much. But to get big cities it must be dealt with. And two, once you've already built a city, it's way harder to implement good traffic flow. This is painfully evident all the time in the real world.
Now I use a mod to unlock all the map tiles (actually, the entire map) at game start, and I build specifically around my envisioned future transportation needs. It's still a challenge, and I highly recommend the traffic management mod mentioned elsewhere in these threads, but it is not an insurmountable one.
I really agree with this. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a city past a certain point due to transport.
I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense.
I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly.
At this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding.
There's really two types of "City Games" - city painters and traffic simulators, Cities Skylines is basically the second with a bit of the first, whereas SimCity 4 became the first with a bit of the second.
There is also the puzzle kind like Urbek, which has a nice SimCity feel but you need to make sure that building type X is (or is not) within Y squares over several levels of development. And more along that line there are a bunch like Farlanders that aren't really builders at all but pure puzzle games that happen to use buildings as graphics.
its been years since I played but one of my favorite mods for skylines is "traffic manager: president edition" which let you do fine grained control for lanes and various traffic situations. I know its more 'fiddling' with traffic but it let me solve bottlenecks and issues that just wasn't possible in the base game.
You might enjoy Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic.
It's really rough right now, and frustratingly manual in places, but it does a good job of simulating resources at least. If you play in Realism Mode then vehicles and resources are dispatched and consumed realistically. (People too, but they teleport home at the end of their job and they don't appear to take transfers for public transit)
Openttd is a great logistics simulator, but it's not really a traffic simulator. Traffic by it's nature requires a lot of independent agents deciding how to use a shared resource, and the resulting conflicts, like Braess' paradox[0]. As far as I've seen, the only game that does well at this is Cities Skylines.
OpenTTD on the other hand is my favorite part of factorio.
I've personally found it pretty easy to get around. In particular, just build long stretches of roads without any intersections. Just "s-curve" like a snake, especially around industrial centers (all traffic originates in industry, and don't seem to "return" to industry in Cities Skylines).
Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
In contrast, OpenTTD encourages hub/spoke model and recycling of centers. I think its sizes are off but the overall gameplay loop is correct here.
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OpenTTD's "traffic" is pretty dumb, but its infinite. As long as you've got high station ratings, the station will expand and traffic will increase. It doesn't matter what design you have, the traffic increases until you can no longer support it.
So OpenTTD is somewhat self balancing. The stronger a player you are, the more traffic you generate. The weaker a player you are, the less traffic you generate.
> all traffic originates in industry, and don't seem to "return" to industry in Cities Skylines
It absolutely does come back? I've had major traffic headaches from returning trucks. If I don't build rail for trucks, my cities are usually screwed over by that.
> Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
The unique thing about car traffic vs station demand is that the overall speed depends on the quantity of cars on the road, with maximal throughput occurring before a fully occupied road. That's how you get weird effects like Braess paradox.
OpenTTD is much better at simulating public transit systems, Cities Skylines is better at simulating traffic.
> It absolutely does come back? I've had major traffic headaches from returning trucks. If I don't build rail for trucks, my cities are usually screwed over by that.
Don't the trucks go into the Cargo station, and then disappear?
In OpenTTD, if you have a truck -> rail station, the truck drops items off, then have to return to Coal/Forests/whatever to pick up items again.
In Cities: Skylines, the truck hops onto the train, and then vanishes. Its been a while since I've played Skylines, maybe I'm mis-remembering?
> Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
Or maybe I'm just abusing the behavior of cargo stations too much.
The cargo-station "teleports" traffic somewhere else, and seems to magically erase return traffic. Use / abuse of cargo-stations seems key in making cities grow larger.
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EDIT: Ah, I misremembered. Seems like the return traffic does need to be accounted for. In any case, the industry -> Cargo Train terminal is really all you need to design against. With a proper industry block (or S-road / snake-like road), all industry goes to cargo train, and all of them return to industry, with no intersections potentially wrecking them.
> (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections)
Intra-branch connections are your mistake. Don't do that. If you're purely a tree-shape, there's no Braess paradox because each neighborhood (or housing unit) only has _one_ path to the rest of the city.
The minute you have 2, 3, or 4 different paths to reach the same house, is the minute that paradox starts to bite you in the ass. So just avoid it completely with a 100% tree-like branching behavior. One path means you have absolute control and force the little cars to go down the exact paths you want.
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Yes, roads and intersections will saturate. At that point, stop building in that neighborhood and build another branch of your tree.
I don't think I ever found a reason to do a non-tree design in the game, aside from simulating realism. But if you're just designing neighborhoods to minimize traffic and maximize population, a pure tree is the obvious approach.
IIRC, there's no residential-to-residential traffic. Its all residential-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-residential. That's why a pure tree works. Or industry-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-industry.
OpenTTD sadly does not simulate passengers as unique agents. Transportation demand can be very unidirectional and not make logical sense.
Personally this isn't really a negative. I've found that I only care about "agents" when the scale of the game focuses on caring about individual units. Once you get beyond that, I don't think the simulation necessarily is more interesting just because it uses unique agents. And conversely, I've never thought while playing SC4 or similar game that "This game would be better if it simulated all citizens as unique units".
A number of games simulates unique agents: Tropico, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital, Ceasar 3 / Cleopatra etc. etc.
Its a different game entirely compared to games like Sim City or City Skylines. I've noticed that these "individual agents" games are very "unstable". They're only designed for a limited number of agents before everything goes to crap.
As such, "individual agent" games tend to be scenarios that you play for a short time, rather than trying to play for months on the same map (like Sim City or City Skylines or OpenTTD can be).
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Tropico Boom/Busts grow too variable and uncontrollable. You'll eventually have an island-wide boom/bust collapse that probably triggers the instant-loss endgame (aka: Soviets and/or USA invades).
Ceasar 3 / Cleopatra are reasonably stable, but definitely a smaller map and designed for scenario play instead.
Seconding this, if you dropped OpenTTD because of the simplistic passenger/cargo routing (i.e. take any cargo to any place and pay is only based on how far you took it) then definitely give the CargoDist option a try.
Every passenger (or mail or manufactured good) has a unique destination in your system that you need to get it to. They are roughly balanced based on demand (two stations in large cities will generate a lot of traffic between them, but a small town will only generate a small amount of traffic to and from a large city). It makes the transport routing game way more interesting and more like the routing of passengers in more traditional Sim City type games.
Beyond just that, the ability for passengers to "route" themselves (Take airplane from CityA -> CityB, then rail from CityB -> CityC, then bus from CityC to CityD... and back) is the bigger, more important effect of the CargoDist feature.
That means you can form "Hub and Spokes" for passenger traffic, and the individual passengers are smart enough to figure out how to route themselves to their ultimate destinations.
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Its the most "realistic feeling" traffic mod I've found of any of these games, honestly. Even Cities Skylines seems rather basic in comparison.
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I play on Passengers/Mail as CargoDist, and then all other traffic (Coal, Wood, Cargo, Oil, etc. etc.) as default / original rules.
I also set the "symmetry" of CargoDist to 80%. That is, 20% of traffic is one-way, which seems to be correct in my opinion? I think it defaults to 100%, but it doesn't make sense for _ALL_ traffic to be bidirectional (ie: for all agents to make a return trip each time).
EDIT: I do think that a "big mod" to OpenTTD under a new name would be beneficial to the project. Something that redefines OpenTTD's sizes (each square is supposed to be a square km, but it doesn't "feel" like it. Roads aren't a square km wide after all...). I think that if each square were 10m x 10m nominal, and then for all other parts of the game to be redesigned off of that (scaling up docks, rail depos, cities, etc. etc. as appropriate to this new size), would be really all that OpenTTD needs. Plus CargoDist Passengers/Mail by default.
> Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
> Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
That's kind of insulting. If you were to ask me "what's an environmentally friendly piece of mobility infrastructure that should count as a park" the answer is very obviously a bike trail.
> A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
this is hilarious, but sadly sums up gaming these days
> Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Perhaps not as bad as all the BP solar arrays and windmills in SimCity Societies!
Game came out 3 years before the New Horizon spill.
> the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with)
This shredded the last bit of trust and goodwill Maxis had with me.
Cities Skylines is alright but my problem with it from when it launched is after about an hour into the game it stops being challenging and just becomes a zen city-builder-themed garden. There's really no chance of losing once you build any kind of cash flow, and as a result there's no obvious goal other than 'make big city' and then subsequently 'manage the traffic'
SimCity on the other hand is challenging to keep going throughout. You need to make thoughtful choices on what you're building next and where or else due to some quirk of the Agent system you're going to be on the brink of collapse (Why won't the power go down this one street??)
Obviously there's room for improvement on the SimCity front, but my point is that if you're looking for a challenging city builder, Skylines is not it unless you wanna spend time configuring mods.
It depends on what you're looking for in a Sim game. There's no Ender Dragon to kill in City:Skylines, so the objective of the game is whatever you make of it. At heart C:S is really a traffic management game. Cash flow usually isn't an issue, but getting efficient traffic flow and minimizing traffic jams becomes a major issue when you build up a dense downtown area.
It's on my bucket list since, but I was afraid of falling down the rabbit hole, same as Anno, Civilisation and other cool games.
I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise.
As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again).
On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.
Is there some backstory to the crucial-ness of Cities Skyline? I thought they’d had a pretty good thing going for a while by then, with their various funky history simulators.
I don't think that has any merit, Paradox have launched and developed a bunch of successful (in their genre) games, and owns multiple studios while doing the publishing for even more. It's a successful company and would have been without Cities: Skylines as well.
Probably parent meant the developer of the game, Colossal Order, which only developed Cities in Motion before, which was successful in it's own right but not on the scale of Cities: Skylines. But then "other X games wouldn't have existed otherwise" doesn't make sense, because Cities: Skylines is the latest game they've launched, and it was in 2015.
> while their others series are solid but with a more niche player base
Might have been so in the past, but Paradox games are relatively mainstream, although they seem a bit niche.
Hearts of Iron IV is the 32th most played game at Steam right now (https://steamdb.info/charts/), while Cities: Skylines is on spot 56. Might have something to do with recent news or released addons, but still, other Paradox games are wildly popular and Paradox would surely do just fine even without Cities: Skylines.
More interesting stats comparing Hearts of Iron with Cities: Skylines
> Cities: Skylines - 18,280 players right now | 24,541 24-hour peak | 60,386 all-time peak 8 years ago
> Hearts of Iron IV - 32,652 players right now | 44,193 24-hour peak | 70,997 all-time peak 5 months ago
Cities: Skylines is published but not developed by Paradox.
The games Paradox itself develops are the grand strategy games in the Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Victoria, and Imperator: Rome lines. The flagship games here are the strongest games in the genre, and even among the broader category of strategy games, they're definitely in the most-played games, with the main competitors being the Civilization, Age of Empires, Total War, and Mount & Blade series.
I think they improved their Clauswidtz à lot in the past 3 years.
Really night and day in term of bugs. Idk what they did, better hire, better process or more people on it (or all 3), but it made multi-player bearable on EU4, and great on Hoi4/stellaris (I do not like the game that much, but it's a better MP game than EU4, let's be honest.)
I struggle to get into CS because of the number of DLCs. I have no idea what ones you need to have a SimCity 4 experience, and they're all really expensive.
The way CS does content updates, part of the update is free and part of it is paid. So, organically the best way to figure out what to pay is to play the game, see which features you like, and get the DLCs that expand the areas of the game you like the most. (I also recommend this method because if it turns out you dont like CS after all you arent too badly in the hole)
They do occasionally go on sale, so you can always just wishlist something and come back later.
> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game.
SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.
Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.
The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
EA really did screw up a lot of franchises around that time period. I was just watching some retrospectives about Dead Space, and the pattern plays out time and time again with pretty much ever big series they bought.
It seems like EA's MO in the early 2010s was to buy the rights to a successful game, strip the stuff that makes it unique, add some more cover shooting, multiplayer, and boobs, spend $100mil on advertising, then close the studio when they didn't get a return.
Yea I think the article understates this. From my recollection players were not swayed by the multiplayer arguments and saw it for the DRM that it was.
This is exactly the problem. The shift to online always, and "free to play" casino-style micro-transaction hell-holes is still a garbage experience. And this is multiplied when you have kids, and you want to just buy them a good game.
Thankfully, a lot of other studios have rejected this. Even though Cities: Skylines has its long list of paid DLC (some great, some meh), at least you don't have to buy them, or have internet to build a city by yourself.
Lastly, and this is anecdotal but, if you make a good game, and respect me as a player, I am more than happy to shell over money for it. I'll pay for quality. Penalize me, nag me, treat me like a child or a criminal, and my money is going to a competitor who doesn't. (I've always felt it was absurdly insulting to plaster anti-piracy rubbish on DVD's...that someone just paid money for. It's the same with games.) Forcing paying customers to suffer because some people steal things, is a losing strategy.
it would kill the series for most but some happy whales and have docents of micro transactions and would be celebrated as huge success by EA management and biggest failure ever by everyone else
I wonder if they had let people host their own servers the game would have flourished better. Require an authentication from the central server once when you start the game to appease the DRM cultists if you must, then let players themselves provide server hardware if they can and want to. With central servers there is just no way for discrete communities to really form, since everyone is funneled into the same pot, and that is against the game's core design.
Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)
My impression was that the 2013 SimCity was effectively single player if you didn't connect the game to any of your friends, but that it had always-online DRM which they tried to excuse as something other than DRM.
You could certainly play it single-player, but it wasn't good as a single-player game. It sacrificed far too much. It was meant to be a multiplayer game, and it showed.
I remember seeing a review of a guy playing online, upset that EA wouldn't boot a group of trolls that built cities all around his city, and made their cities to be extreme pollution generators, and then they never played again.
Seemly this happened to multiple people, trolls were all too happy to ruin serious players cities by spamming pollution near them.
Yeah, it's certainly a problem and isn't unique to any particular online multiplayer game. It's why I stopped playing online multiplayer games unless it's just with my friends.
There are too many people out there who make it their mission to ruin other people's fun.
Correlation does not imply causation. Requiring an internet connection is correlated with poor game sales, but is not the cause of the poor sales. The actual cause is poor programming. You see, when you require an always-on internet connection to play a game, most programmers would implement that by having an ugly, in-your-face loading screen where the game "connects to the game servers" and "downloads your profile" and then "uploads your profile" and it always takes much longer than it should. That's what people don't like.
I'm sure that's a large irritant, but the complaints I hear about requiring an internet connection are usually around things like not being able to run the game without an internet connection (remember, there are huge numbers of people that don't have an always-on internet connection), being booted from the game should the connection drop (there are even larger numbers of people who don't have a reliable internet connection), and things like that.
I would never buy a game that requires an internet connection (especially always-on) for a whole bunch of reasons, including those. Ugly connection screens or taking an annoying amount of time to connect wouldn't be the deal-breakers for me, though, if the game were good enough.
I want to believe, but I doubt. Even if they do, I may not bother buying it considering they have taken after EA for offering the shell game and then packaging up things inspired by modders as DLC. $256.00
The only way skylines 2 gets released is if they find a way to ramp this behavior up.
All game companies end up the same way in the end. Capitalism demands it.
It's all but confirmed now, there's an article with the logo.
Honestly I don't find the DLC behaviour that annoying with CS. You can get most of the DLCs on allkeyshop for $5 each. I've probably spent about $100 on the game and DLC and have had many hundreds of hours of gameplay for that, which compares extremely well with many games which are $60/70 and you get a 10 hour campaign max. $/hour CS comes way ahead.
CS is a poor replacement for the otherwise incredible game that is sim city 4. The issue being that the traffic and population simulation engine in CS isnt very good.
There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
I find that CS does a good job with road construction and design and I think the traffic simulation is largely on par with Sim City 4. Other parts of the simulation are weaker and the game really doesn't have much challenge as a city management game. It is a better sandbox though.
I might go so far as to say C:S is a traffic and transportation simulator. The city building parts are all there, and they're reasonably fun.
But the ultimate limiting factor with my cities was transportation. No matter how much I worked on mass transit, I couldn't get more than 80-90% of my citizens to use it, and the remaining cars eventually choked even fancy road systems into tailbacks and gridlock.
To be fair, this is a problem with real cities, too.
In Cities Skylines every car takes the theoretically fastest route to get to their destination. This is somewhat realistic as this is how most people IRL determine which way to drive as well, however the cars will follow this even when it is clear that the route they will take will have a major backup or congestion and another route is only marginally slower and will be completely empty. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, drivers don't reroute when a direction slows. They will stick with the route they are going until they get to their destination.
Sounds pretty realistic then. I remember reading somewhere that NYC is around ~60% public transportation, and Hong Kong is around 70-80% public transportation. So maxing out around 80-90% in the game doesn't sound too outrageous. Unless you just get rid of roads entirely, which I'm sure would be a popular idea on HN.
Comparison/discussion of Simcity 4's traffic simulation really requires considering the Network Addon Mod, IMO. It's been in development for years and adds an extraordinary level of sophistication and interactivity to the traffic simulation. It also considerably raises the game's system requirements, but I think SC4+NAM is still the best city management simulation ever built, by a long shot.
I sunk a lot of time into Cities Skylines too, but the simulation has too many fundamental flaws under the hood. Drivers don't make proper use of turning lanes. Everyone moves in at the same time at the same age to new residential zones, and then dies at the same time. Etc. It's a good game, but the underlying simulation is hamstrung. I'd agree it's a more enjoyable "paint a city" sandbox, but trying to challenge myself with it as a game the way I did with SC4 doesn't feel as satisfying.
> The issue being that the traffic and population simulation engine in CS isnt very good.
IMHO C:S is only playable if you use the TM:PE mod. (Traffic Manager:Presidential Edition) It gives you the tools to completely solve the traffic problems.
Whether this is an argument for or against your point is a matter of perspective.
It won't change anything about the population sim, just traffic.
There exist other mods that change the population sim; I'm not familiar with them. C:S mods ... well there's a ton of them. It's a pretty deep rabbit hole.
The thing that always held CS back for me was the UI. I reinstalled it again recently to see if some five years of patches since the last time I’d played might have given Paradox time to hire some professional game UI designers, but I left disappointed.
Compared to the sophistication of Maxis' UIs twenty years ago, CS' clunky interactions, awkward visual hierarchy, and downright amateurish typography are indeed a poor replacement.
The interview snippets make it clear that SimCity 2013 was hopelessly compromised from minute one
If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA:
1. Make it "unpirateable" even if it compromises gameplay
2. Make it depend on EA's online service, b/c we need to sell that even more than we need the game to succeed
3. Make sure it can handle a steady trickle of "expansions" like The Sims
If you are going to implement those mandates, you are gonna end up with something bad. Even if SimCity 2013 had not been otherwise brain-damaged or screwed up, just EA's goals for the product were damning.
(Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)
Looks like they first asked “how can we suck the money out of customers?” instead of asking how to make a milestone game. They repeated that a few more times as I recall. Not sure how they do it now.
I think if SimCity wasn't such a complete disaster, City Skylines wouldn't have taken off how it did. The big misstep I think they made is hinging the gameplay around multiplayer. While SimCity thought that collaboration would be done through "neighborhoods" and "resource sharing", City Skylines took the opposite approach and introduced collaboration through Steam Workshop.
The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
Skylines isn't even a very good traffic manager (the Cities in Motion games that came before it are much better in that regard) -- it's a good city _builder_, but not a good city _simulator_.
You have mods that greatly increase the difficulty, and make the simulation way better than simcity4. And traffic is working the way we European think traffic works in the US.
Although to be fair the dlcs improved that quite a lot (not enough Pol Sim, but I understand why)
You won't die alone, I'm with you on this one. I've said before I wish I could play Cities Skylines with the agent simulator replaced by the purely statistical model from Sim City. Though thinking about it again, maybe it could be modded in...
I personally believe that the SImCity version of multiplayer could have been impressively successful had it not supplanted everything else in the game. I like the idea of building cities that somehow interact with the cities my friends build, or whatever everyone else is doing. I like the idea of a game that asynchronously "breaks the meta". It just has to be a good SimCity game first and then have that stuff layered on top. SimCity 2013 was never a good SimCity game to begin with.
Definitely could be cool to have an intermodal aspect. Trains/trucks coming and going with excess resources from your and other's cities. Large warehouse zones on the city periphery...
But for me, Sim City/Cities Skylines isn’t about resource generation as much as it is about just… building and expanding a thriving city.
I like the way CS approached this and made it a thing you can do to earn extra money, but it’s not strictly necessary (your industrial areas will auto-import everything they need).
An intermodal layer could also be a part of the expanding of a city and help to make it thriving as well.
Just in keeping with the times, look at the landscape of warehouses that surround the periphery of our major cities. What is that stuff? Amazon Prime "last mile"warehousing? Some other leg of an intermodal network?
(And I suppose server farms would be another element — perhaps a modern Sim has already added that feature to city expansion.)
Perhaps SimPort needs to happen — simulate the international container-ship and port traffic (+ rail, + trucking) and make it all about resource management, canal bottlenecks, supply-chain fragility... (SimSupplyChain — now there's an exciting title.)
If no one has written that game/sim, let me know. Maybe I'll play with the idea.
FWIW, the game is called simply SimCity, and the HN title is the same as the title on the article, so, no, not really. HN also tends to put dates on articles that aren't from the current year. If you're totally unfamiliar with the series, it doesn't matter. If you're a little familiar with the series (like me), then you know that the original was released more than a decade ago and pretty much defined the genre, so you know this isn't talking about the original game titled SimCity. If you're familiar with the series, then you know exactly what's being talked about.
Before reading the 2nd sentence of the article, you seem to have been mixed up about if this article is about the SimCity that came out in 2013 or the one that came out in 1989. I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series (and I'm glad you read further to learn more about the series!). But, even in that case, in isolation, you know that 2013 was a decade ago (and not 1989).
> I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series
This almost exactly describes what I thought before I started reading the article. (And the whole reason I started reading was because of this confusion.) Except I didn't think "1999" because I don't know what year the original SimCity came out, I just know that it was more than a decade ago.
Maybe "Simcity (2013)" to be extra clear. After all, SimCity 2000 came out in like 1994. OTOH the ambiguous naming was intentional by EA. They faced the consequences for all the other bad decisions made around the game, so any confusion about the rebooted name is on them IMO.
But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
That's what I _thought_ but the article title had me doubting it, so I clicked it and only then realized that there was another game in the series with the same name and it came out in 2013. Kind of felt like I was tricked by a clickbait title.
Strictly speaking, it's true, but when multiple games with the same name are released, it's convention to use the year for the newer one. (It's also generally convention to not use the year for the original one when the newer one is a remake of the older).
So SimCity (2013) would be the most expected way to refer to the game.
I actually clicked on it thinking it meant the original SimCity which I adored, not realizing that was many decades ago, and expecting it to be some interesting argument that SimCity was somehow so good that it proactively ruined every city sim game that would come after it.
And which one launched a decade ago? How about we combine the three bits of info and see what we think we have... name = "SimCity", launch = 2013, reception = disasterous. Only one of those matches the '89 game, so it's clear which one is being referred to.
With the frequency with which older articles are posted to HN, it's easy to imagine this was an older article (re)posted. I'm old enough that I remember the original and SimCity "2000" and had no idea there ever was a 2013 version.
This is my feeling too. The title as it stands without a date clarifying that it was the SimCity from 2013 makes no sense. If I knew there was a 2013 version, it would probably make sense, but before clicking into the article and reading a little, I had no idea. And the only reason I clicked and read was because I thought "surely there's a mistake in this title".
Nowadays SimCity seems wholly replaced by City Skylines. I had to look up when that was released, but it turns out the release of City Skylines was directly caused by the failure of SimCity:
> "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."
I recall playing on launch day and being shocked to discover that, aside from the internet connectivity requirement, the entire UI was written in HTML using WebKit [0].
I'd been looking forward to SC2013 for years and it was beyond disappointing.
I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
SC4 (which I still fire up on occasion) has playable regions; in fact, that was the top-line new feature for that installment.
Graphical polish would have been nice, but what the game really needs today is an engine upgrade -- it arrived just before the broad adoption of x64 and multi-core consumer CPUs, so it can't take full advantage of modern systems.
Such a shame, I was very excited for this game and though hated it I did enjoy the graphic style, it looked great. (What a palava with the "online" simulation that was found out to be faked)
Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop)
Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.
Ah, that's the interesting bit: the actual simulation was 100% local. Networking was actually only required for region play, and I don't think it even communicates in real-time; just occasionally syncs certain variables between cities.
The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
I’m not necessarily morally opposed to always-online DRM (I mean it is their game, they can do what they want), but it is a strong signal that they are not afraid to make technical decisions that they know people will hate in the interest of monetization. Bad sign!
Considering they can't even keep MLS operating for older games, always-online DRM is basically a guaranteed the game won't work within 3-10 years when the company decides to turn off the server. Based on many company's record with this, it's basically a guarantee that they won't patch the game to bypass the DRM check (or make the MLS modifyable and/or default to a fan-supported MLS).
In that case, I do find it morally objective to say the person is "buying" a game. If anything, they're renting the game.
> Ah, that's the interesting bit: the actual simulation was 100% local. Networking was actually only required for region play, and I don't think it even communicates in real-time; just occasionally syncs certain variables between cities.
I think you're right, but the misconception comes from the fact that EA actively played up the fact that they were doing work "in the cloud", to make it seem more powerful and advanced of a simulation (and to justify their reliance on the always-on network DRM).
Didn't someone write a patch the day it came out that stripped out all the phoning home in single player and the game played perfectly ok in single player. I seem to remember it being a large embarrassment to EA at the time due to EA saying that parts of the single player were run on the remote servers. City Skylines is better and I'm not going back so water under the bridge.
Yes. EA responded to the always online complaints by saying the game couldn't possibly run offline due to servers processing information. It was then 0 day cracked showing it was a complete lie.
the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client
I remember that's what they said, but I doubt it was ever the case. Wikipedia says the cloud functionality "enable[d] cloud saves and multiplayer functionality", and shortly after launch it was determined you could patch the game to run offline for an indeterminate length of time. To me, it was pretty obvious back then that it was purely an attempt at copy protection.
Beyond that, the game was just bad. The simulation just didn't live up to the hype, and while it did have a lot to live up to given its fantastic predecessor, SimCity 4 was old by then, and people expected a big upgrade. Specifically, I remember "sims not living persistent lives but rather going to the nearest available workplace for work and nearest available house after work" (Wikipedia again) as being a huge deal in the community back then. And then there was the limited play area, which was just ridiculous when you consider what people want from these games.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers
That was bullcrap. Soon after launch a crack showed up that made the game playable without a server connection, for the features that didn't actually need a server connection. EA just lied.
Not to mention that they made an official patch available 1 year after launch that enabled a proper offline mode :)
But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game.
As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
Most of the game worked perfectly fine offline with a minor hack released shortly after the game came out.
There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers
While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
I remember following every update to this game prior to launch. I hated that it required an Origins account and all that but I signed up regardless just to play this game. And I recall having a good time with this game... for a while.
Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest.
It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.
> "Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. "You were unblocking the dam and then the flood goes and hits the next dam. Then everybody scrambles, tears that one apart, ok, but it keeps going".
Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there.
The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta.
And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
KSP2 seems like it might be like that.. It seems quite star-citizeny with final AAA graphics and audio, but the core mechanics and UX rather fucked. I reckon it could take them years to fix it if they do. Fixing the core core stuff in a game with final assets already done is like repairing an engine thats running.
There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also,
https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1.
Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.
I'm hoping that KSP1 gets an open source engine re-implementation, ideally with optional physics fixes. Performance and physics jank were the two problems with KSP1 and it sounds like KSP2 didn't address those at all.
I mean, adding trees to a rocket game? Who asked for that? All they really seem to have done is make the game require a more expensive GPU for no good reason.
I was thinking it would be cool to make the real KSP2 using the rigs of rods engine (same one used in beamNG drive more or less) rather then awkwardly simulating intra-vehicle forces by having the vehicle made of an arbitary amount of seperate rigidbodes, instead make it from one mesh but with soft body phsyics.
Note: Juno new origins is sort of a KSP sucessor. Its rock solid, but the ships are 100% rigid which definitely affects gameplay and decreases the challenge and fun perhaps.
this felt like the apex of the post facebook/zynga monetise everything always online era
ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
I never thought about it, but that is so true. It also seemed like it was roughly the peak of bad DRM as well as trying to curtail resale of console games.
It had so much promise. It was rocky to start for sure. The playable area was so annoyingly small and I felt like I wind up in the same pattern every time. I did play it again a few months ago. It has so much promise, still, as a base for the next level. Ultimately it feels like you have to graduate to using megatowers as the cities pretty much could only advance if you included them... and they were limited by count and eventually those would become stagnant.
If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding.
Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.
One thing I think the article leaves out, that is critical, is the damage done to the franchise image by SimCity Societies (2007), SimCity 2013 was the second bad miss in a row for the franchise (and a big part of Societies problems—on top of radical and not well recieved changes to the basic concept—were performance/reliability problems, which IIRC, included a persistent connection requirement even though it was single player.)
How can a company be as bad as EA at managing computer game production? It’s absolutely mind blowing. You think they’d have learned by now, but this story has been repeated for the decade since Sim City. As an EA shareholder I’d be absolutely fuming if some EA exec believed that shipping an unfinished game on an arbitrary deadline would be more important than shipping a good game.
It's even more mind-blowing when you remember what EA was at the start. It was a breakaway company that showcased and honored game developers as artists and game development as art, and for a while produced some of the best games on the market.
Then it turned into everything it was opposed to at the start.
Upon launch, I was of course disappointed with the state of the server and the online only nature of it. But the larger problem for why this game was a failure was the simple problem of way to little space to build a city. The whole concept of a few 1km x 1km city patches in a shared world to build in was flawed from the start. I want to build gigantic cities with elaborate public infrastructure and rivers full of sewage. Cities: Skylines simply was a much better fit for what makes the city building genre appealing.
I find it a bit shortsighted to center the blame for a boring game on its launch date debacle. Many other games with similar problems at launch became hits.
I grew up playing Sim City 2k and 3k (never got around to the latest one, but wasn't really interested after reading reviews).
I'd like to see the entire city builder genre challenged by changing the perspective from city planner/god-mayor, to those whom they serve.
Imagine, instead of a birds eye view, you could only build from the perspective of a pedestrian.
Maybe in certain instances you'd have to see a wider swath of land for planning purposes (transit as an example), but it would be interesting to see how the forms of cities created by users change from this new perspective.
I think I'd prefer something more similar to a Factorio setting (e.g. still top-down, but the camera actions/limited to your area as the "pedestrian").
However, I'd also like the insertion of balance against the "god" part too - like eminent domain costing goodwill or stability points. Too unstable or not enough goodwill, and the citizens start acting antagonist against the player on some level (e.g. higher crime/fraud, causing less taxes, protests, people leaving, etc)
Almost like city-state on some level, but less about the political compass and more about city government interacting with the local population.
The problem with these city simulators is that they're relatively simplistic, and it's easy to work out a "formula" that lets you get basically infinite money and do whatever you want (the "city painter" mode). Which can be terribly fun, but it's not so much a game as more of an open-world building toy.
This is the problem with most strategy games too, like EU4. It's all about min-maxing against the stats.
As frustrating as it can be sometimes, I prefer playing with fuzzier logic based on randomness. There's a great breakdown on EU3 vs EU4 that highlights this.
In CS, it'd be like if the economy went up and down randomly, affecting taxes or expenses, or if citizens randomly changed behavior patterns (e.g. started driving more when previously walked or vice versa).
I've been enjoying Workers and Resources because of some of this fuzziness is introduced by construction taking time and resources.
I moved to city skylines, which I like, but I miss something from SimCity. First CS forces roads everywhere, this is the biggest con to me, I would love to experiment with biking only neighborhood with mass transit. The other problem is that it's too easy. I love the constraint of having no money and struggling with public opinion. Like "You want to build a train line here? You will have major unhappiness from it". Skylines is good in sandbox mode, but misses a lot in "rogue like" mode. I would also like more terrain diversity.
Maxis had a really cool integration ecosystem for a period. I remember flying my sim copter in my sim city. Driving cars around Streets of Sim City - in my city.
SimCity was the worldbuilder and they let you play in that world in a variety of ways. I must have spent hundreds of hours playing these as a child: these were basically my Minecraft.
What happened to their vision? Was the EA acquisition the beginning of the end, or did the magic start disappearing earlier?
One of the final statements is rather telling of modern corporate culture: "We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter."
Torpedoed by one bad business decision after another, despite being a promising game.
Speaking on Sim City, is there a chance anyone has a collection of Japanese Sim City 4 bat files? I saved a bunch of bookmarks but link rot has destroyed most of them, hoping someone collected them all.
That release certainly marked the end of the SimCity line for me. Making it require the use of their servers when you only wanted to play it single-player was intolerable, but it was an inferior single-player game (compared to its predecessors) anyway.
I still play SimCity 2013 today, and despite its flaws, I much prefer it over Cities Skylines. SimCity feels alive, with a great soundtrack, good looking visuals even today, and I love the futuristic expansion pack.
Skylines feels less like a game I want to play in my free time and more like a city planner tool. The graphics style also somehow feels much colder and more outdated in comparison.
I honestly think SimCity 6 with bigger cities and updated graphics would be a massive hit without changing much else - the multiplayer aspect of sharing resources, contributing to pollution, workers and students, etc is really unique and should be kept.
> We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter.
I get that games have to release at some point or else some devs will be perfecting forever. But I can't count the amount of times a game was a flop at launch (and never recovered) because they needed to hit an arbitrary date and it wasn't fully baked.
Wouldn't the best interests of the shareholders be having a financially successful game?
If the release date keeps getting pushed back, then that suggests that the problem isn't that the game needs more time to get fully baked, but rather there's some more fundamental issues in project management or project development that's hampering it. Continuing to push the release date back at that point is unlikely to improve matters, and pushing the result out as-is is actually likely to maximize revenue (the reviews won't get better, and you don't have to maintain marketing buzz for as long) while minimizing the losses from extra developer time.
In these days of 100GB games I’m still in awe of how much fun I had from a game stored in 128KB (SimCity on the ZX Spectrum in 1990). And it was perfectly playable in 48KB.
They contacted video games influencers/youtubers (in 2013, always ahead of their time in marketing, that's the only thing EA is good at), invited them to play the game at their HQ. At least one of them confessed he was threatened to not publish the video after sending them the script and refused to change major parts. He wasn't paid the thousand dollars either (at the time influencers were cheaper :))
I want to build cool cities full stop. I think what was more the problem is that a LOT of studios realized that a sim city clone works better on mobile hardware, because that's where the target audience is at.
Since then they did realize it and I was playing it with my fiance for hours and hours on end. With the multiplayer with multiple cities.
Graphics and disasters where not so much the problem in 2013 but they more or less screwed the game by liming it so miuch
I can recommend TheoTown, available for all major platforms, even on Android and iOS, completely for free. It has a plug-in system, tons of decorative objects. Controls are good, too. Plus, it has some endgame content that makes it quite fun.
If there's a limited free mode and for a single fixed price you can unlock the full game, that would be the perfect price model for me. The description doesn't make it clear whether that's indeed the case and what that price would be, though.
At least on iOS, this "freemium" model is actively worse than a paid game for end users -- paid apps and subscriptions can be shared among family members, but in-app purchases cannot.
Do you have multiple user accounts on an iOS device these days?
As far as I know, Android apps can't be shared with other accounts, but all our tablets use my account, so they can all use my apps. Unlike with Steam, where they need their own account and their own purchase in order to play simultaneously.
Not multiple accounts on a single device, but you can group into a "family" that can share purchases, and can play simultaneously.
So my partner and I can each play Civilization VI on our own tablets at the same time, but if I were to purchase one of the add-on packs in the game, that could not be shared (as there is no store-level way to distinguish a consumable sale like a free-to-play game's fictional currency).
You can share purchased apps, games, movies, TV shows, and e-books and audiobooks from Google Play with up to 5 family members using Google Play Family Library.
it's optional, you can unlock everything without paying and without much grinding.
the "diamonds" are mainly used to install mods from the mod store, however, you can get the same mods from the official forum and drop them into the mods folder without any issues.
again, you comment without knowledge. this is not a freemium game. it can be played for free with no significant limitations.
I gave up after reloading it for the third time to see if the next chunk of invisible text would suddenly appear. (iPhone/iOS, Safari, Content Blockers off)
I guess people might argue this all day but I think Cities: Skylines is mostly that, with the rather large caveat that you can't start separate games on the same large map at the same time. You can still get mods (easily, from the steam workshop) which open up the entire terrain, and then use one of several different approaches to build multiple towns on the same map.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff that's missing, but they both scratch the same itch for me.
The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and it could only be someone with knowledge of the volume of preorders. That's not going to be developers, but rather someone in the corporate hierarchy.
I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".
I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.
Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".
It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.
EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.