Dan Moskowitz, Senior Software Engineer at Maxis gave a talk at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco a few days ago. You can read about it here:



http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/29/4161422/simcity-pedestrians-teleport

It goes a long way toward explaining their thinking behind SimCity. This quote sums it up the best:

""I can't overstate how completely evil complexity is, especially in a sandbox game," he said. "Constantly ask yourself: What can I remove from the game?"

as well as this paragraph from the article:

"Moskowitz took a deep dive into how GlassBox works and why SimCity behaves the way it behaves. In short: Maxis spent years of trial and error deciding how deep the simulation should go and the answer, in terms of fun, was: "not very.""

As I said in other posts, those of you waiting for a "patch" to turn SimCity into a more accurate city simulator are going to be waiting a very very long time.