I’m not an expert or qualified to talk about games design (you can check out all my sad blogs about tycoon game design to the right side!) And this is purely a theory.

What makes managing a city addictive?

All us city builder fans have heard of RCI! I.e. Residential-Commercial-Industrial. It’s an important aspect of most city builder games, where balancing or not balancing the three could make or break your city.

For those who don’t know, your city is largely made up of zones, where you allocate land for people to live, shop, and work. If you had a high demand of residential, it meant you needed more workers. A high demand of commerce meant your citizens wanted more places to shop. And a high demand of industry meant you needed more jobs and goods. It’s more complicated than this, but that’s the general idea.

The addictive aspect came from balancing the demand of one zone, then realising that in doing so, another demand bar has now changed. Perhaps you had a very high residential demand, so you met it by zoning lots, and then your commercial demand increased due to the new wave of shoppers. This would then require more goods to be produced from factories, increasing industry demand, who would then need more workers.

The terrifying change!

In the original games, zoning cost money. Higher density zones; for example, going from houses to large skyscrapers, cost considerably more money. This meant that you could not just build a tiny village with huge skyscrapers early on, as it would be too expensive.

In SimCity (Maxis/EA, 2013), and Cities: Skylines (Colossal Order/Paradox, 2015), zoning is free. So the entire aspect of carefully balancing each zone is gone- just screw it and build loads of all three! Zoning was a key part of the core game loop, so with that no longer the focus or the challenge, other aspects of the simulation had to be focused on. Add on top of this the volatile nature of the old statistical simulations, as opposed to the modern agent based ones, it was tricky (but fun) to balance them!

To be fair to SimCity, they did introduce road types for each density. For example, a small dirt road can not have huge skyscrapers next to it. For that you would need a high density avenue, which is much more expensive. Cities: Skylines does not have this, so it is entirely possible to have large buildings next to cheap dirt roads from day 1.

One could make the argument that roads are expensive in the new games, and you have to build zones next to roads, making them necessary; therefore, zoning still has a cost. The cost comes out of the roads now instead of the zones themselves. However, in the case of Cities: Skylines, there’s no cost for higher density zoning. And for both SimCity and Cities: Skylines, you have to build lots of roads anyway so swapping out zones or building a bunch of dirt roads cheaply and adding a huge area of new development is all too easy.

Remember that in the older games, it was possible to build zones away from roads. Roads were less important, so it was possible to spend a large amount on zones and less so on roads; whereas, in the new games, that balancing act has gone.

Does that make the new games bad?

SimCity yes, Cities: Skylines no! SimCity was already infamously bad (though I did enjoy it when it first came out!) and Cities: Skylines still has very addictive traffic management and an array of expansion packs that help focus the game in new areas beyond RCI. This includes building resorts; managing weather and disasters; more customisation over the appearance of your city; and recently, park management.

But I do believe that this change to the zoning mechanic, which was once crucial to balancing the core simulation loop, has had an impact on how satisfying the whole city-management aspect is to play. It may be the reason why people can look at Cities: Skylines, one of the most complex mainstream games ever made, and say It’s shallow or it’s too easy!