SimCity’s Sims Don’t Seem That Smart After All
This is a <i>huge</i> problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.<p>The game is, IMO, mostly unplayable at this point. I have no idea how they let this one out the door with the pathfinding problem, which in my book is an absolute showstopper.<p>Clever, dedicated, and somewhat masochistic players have found ways to "hack" the poor pathfinding behavior. The most popular format right now is to build a city <i>with no intersections</i>, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This <i>forces</i> your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.<p>Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains <i>some</i> semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears <i>zero</i> semblance to any real city, then it has failed.<p>The funny part is that this loosely resembles the recent Heroku fiasco. In the game your civic services (police, fire, ambulances, garbage) are supposed to intelligently service the city - in reality their pathfinding results in basically random behavior, vastly increasing the amount of capacity you need to build to statistically serve an area. You have to <i>grossly</i> over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.<p>I'm not usually this hard on others' hard work - but this game is a travesty that should never have shipped in this state, even disregarding the server issues. There are core gameplay mechanics that are still fundamentally broken.