SimCity’s Sims Don’t Seem That Smart After All
This is a huge problem, as big as the server issues and the DRM.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.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 with no intersections, since the AI deals so spectacularly poorly with them. Which is to say, the entire city is a single, long, winding road. This forces your dumb sims to have no choice but the right one.Some apologists have claimed this is simply the rules of the game, but I still maintain that SimCity fails unless it maintains some semblance to real-life cities. If the only way to play the game effectively is to build something that bears zero semblance to any real city, then it has failed.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 grossly over-build your fire and police departments because their pathfinding is awful and random.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.