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SimCity Societies (Page 2 of 2)
- October 30, 2007 13:28 PM PST
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Predictably, most cities require power, which involves juggling cost, output, and pollution. For instance, coal plants are cheap and energy rich but cause major pollution, while solar farms are more expensive and pollution-free but only yield 20 percent of a coal plant's oomph. Importantly, instead of needling you about where to place power structures, you can drop them anywhere in Societies, making power management a simple balance game and no longer a complex daisy-chaining logistical one.
Adding individual buildings is a key feature in Societies.
Eventually you'll end up noodling with structures like Venues, which entertain your citizens, Workplaces, which provide your citizens a place to labor and generate "simoleans" so you can purchase more structures, and Decorations, which produce social capital to counterbalance structures that consume it. In a "romantic" city, for instance, a condo complex saps "knowledge," which can be offset by dropping a few knowledge-producing woodland parks and chess tables.
Easy Does It
A simple achievement system adds some purpose to your activities, offering optional goals like extra productivity or knowledge if your city meets certain population and value quotas, but also unlocking upwards of 170 buildings from a staggering 500 total.
Curiously, the game seems to achieve plateau quickly in terms of citizen happiness, and the only time you need to play the balancing game is when you yourself initiate a change by adding or subtracting something. Random disasters like meteor showers or killer storms can throw you a curve depending on the difficulty setting, but they feel a bit like arbitrary spectacles. In fact, aside from disasters, Societies feels like a pretty hard game to fail at. Is that the sound of EA homing in on a more populous casual-oriented demographic? Probably.
Ahh, the easy life.
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