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[Siquo]

PTW because ONE of these projects must succeed sometime, right?

[Skyrunner]

Hedge a hundred bets, one's gonna win, right? D:
Though this one seems like the one that has the lowest chance... just an ideas thread to talk in :3

[Djohaal]

They got a project going on slo'mo at simtropolis IIRC. Only one dude working on it though.

[Rose]

I like the idea of different industries needing different resources. Weather they're random or not isn't too much of an issue, but the main thing being that different resource availability results in different looking cities, for example lumber mills appearing in heavily wooded areas, provided the city allows it, or having a booming steel industry in your city.

[Rose]

Hedge a hundred bets, one's gonna win, right? D:
Though this one seems like the one that has the lowest chance... just an ideas thread to talk in :3

If nothing else, it takes the discussion out of the SimCity 5 thread.

[miauw62]

Altough you'd probably need to simulate that at a certain point, importing it from other countries becomes cheaper than digging it up yourself. Altough that may be a bit too industry-y and global-y for a city-builder game.

[Rose]

Alternately the mines run out and the town's main means of income is gone and you're left with a ghost town.

Depressingly realistic anyone?

[miauw62]

Well, Belgium has (more like had, heh) a few towns with steel factories simply because they had big coal mines. Until it became cheaper to import coal than to mine it.

[Rose]

That works great for primary industries, but there's plenty of towns in america that sprung up around coal mines, and then died out again once the coal mine ran out.

[PTTG??]

Don't make a contemporary city-builder; modern cities are boring grids with little overarching connectivity.

Rather, consider a science-fiction space colony. Firstly, it is isolated; they must make everything they use themselves (thus, more interesting production chains). Second, a colonial governor may be unquestioned master of his domain. You want to spend six years worth of taxes on a monorail connecting two houses to a windmill? You got it Boss. Third, if needed, a small science fib can cover a large gameplay annoyance (The same mines can make copper, iron, uranium, or tin, because nanites).

Then there's subtle things like the concept of growth being more fitting to a science-fiction setting than the modern-day western world.

And, of course, it's always more fun to play with science fiction tech than modern tech.

[Rose]

That... is really a good point.

Though that's more of a flavor thing. The underlying game mechanics would be the same either way.

[Skyrunner]

The right mixture of statistical, analytic simulation and  agent-based simulation is important too. O.o Too much stats, you'll get Sim City 4 and its disappearing useless freight. Too much agent-based and you'll get small cities with low framerates.
Actually, I think someone already said this.

* Skyrunner goes back to lurking.

[PTTG??]

I guess it really depends on what your "agents" are. If an individual is an agent, you can only have a million or so people in your city. If instead a "household" or "dormitory" is the real agent, then perhaps you can increase that to tens of millions of less tangible people.

[Jopax]

Yeah, those are settings, heck, I'd love a Wild West themed city builder, don't need big stuff or cities, just give a lot of charachter and atmosphere, alternatively something similar to Colonization (Sid Meir), starting up towns and cities along the coastline and developing from there (tho that's a bit too similar to Clockwork Empires I think).

Anyways, I think what we need to agree upon is the general direction of the game and what are going to be the core gameplay elements. Everything else, including the setting is purely thematic and should be easily modifiable once we get the basics in. Stuff like different buildings and techs should be down to editing descriptions and models along with their corresponding modules that affect the gameplay itself.

While we're at it, production and processing, I think we could do something with agents (again not sure how or what exactly, not too versed into programming personally so this is just a general idea of how it could work). Buildings of all sorts (there could be special cases I think) could take in resources (in different manners, from the ground/nearby area, generated by itself, from transports) and under a set of conditions (powered, has workers, other factors like time of day or the weather) generates a number of resources per tick which are then sent off down the line to other stuff that needs it.
This would probably be pretty resource intensive but I'm guessing if we're focusing on the gameplay we could optimise this as much as we can while having the isometric graphics approach which wouldn't be so demanding.

[miauw62]

This is planned to be open source anyway. Wich means that a random modder may decide "I want science fiction!".