kmarano wrote:I sat down for the first time this weekend and really dedicated myself to playing this game. I found it enjoyable although I do feel like there needs to be more in regards to goals. The constant chore of increase population and thus improving infrastructure does get a bit tiresome.
I totally agree. Managing infrastructure is a tedious job, especially when first being elected to a new city, and facepalmed how bad AI mayor did their city planning. This part is tolerable, since it's a one time thing (unless losing future mayor election), the real tedious part is tuning civic building budgets. Automatic managing budget option doesn't do a good job of keeping the city happy, it's as bad as other AI mayors (this reminds me of the old COO control options, if I allow its autonomy, it just crash my well-balanced corporation in a few months). I think it's somehow related to their political expertise (but I am not very sure), some of the mayors in my party do poor jobs, others don't, and I cannot control which candidate I get who has the right skills and personality. The end result is I have to manually tune every civic building budget every few months, to keep them at good terms, as well as balancing the income and expenses by reducing upgrade budget. And my party members are just clones that can replace each other without real "personality", nor I care for any of them.
Sometimes I find limiting population growth when it reaches enough size is wise, or rampaged unemployment would start occurring. And a healthy Wage Rate or economic growth doesn't need huge population, but with increasing GDP growth, this is more important in the late game when the city is mature. At that point, city infrastructures don't need to be constantly added or fine tuned regularly.
kmarano wrote:
I think it would be interesting if you were able to make the city you are creating more integrated into the global economy. I think this could be achieved by the private sector and public sector working together to meet certain supply demands or research goals. For example, the government offers subsidies to the private sector to research a new product and be the first to market.
In a way, specialized product class R&D in university has similar effect.
http://www.capitalismlab.com/university ... ation.html
It allows a competitive edge for certain class of products per University. And it's not cheap, usually needs millions a month to have significant gain. However it's still not the same as "subsidies". Which I think might be something like boosting its brand awareness, reduce taxes for certain products (although tax system needs to workout all the bugs it has now), or even more practically reduce freight cost to other cities, or "increase" freight cost from other city to protect local production, etc. Even better if a functional tariff mechanism to gain more tax, or help reduce the global competition. What would you suggest to add that would make the game more fun?
kmarano wrote:
This could be done for a number of different items. Additionally, the public sector could offer incentives to drive job growth or improve employee training. Happy to discuss more if you have any questions.
Public service provide some structural improvement sounds fun. Like reduce overhead cost by providing enough public services (or in reverse, poor public services lead to more overhead cost). Better training speed due to better education, or the right type of education for specialized type. In a way, "landmark" is currently act as a booster like this, where its bonus sometimes can provide certain specific benefit.
http://www.capitalismlab.com/landmarks.html
However it's quite limited, and feels weird and ridiculous that a landmark can do that. (like boost certain firm type to level 2, competitiveness 30%, etc. and it's civis broad operating cost reduction, not private sector overhead reduction).
