In the second part of the series about my visit to Monte Cristo I’ll discuss an important part of CitiesXL, the online gameplay, or “Planet offer” as Monte Cristo calls it. I know some of you aren’t looking forward to this feature, but I think it has the potential to add a lot of fun to the game and increase the addictiveness. It also opens up the possibility to build in gameplay-elements never seen before in a city builder, or even other genres. The planet offer will be a monthly subscription, with a small fee.
Tokens
In my previous article I mentioned a thing called “tokens”, but never really explained what they did. A Token is the unit of all the things your city can produce, from workers in all classes, to energy, tourism, heavy industry, waste management, and even cash. Every building in your city produces and consumes a certain amount of those tokens in the different categories. For example, a residential building will produce unqualified workers tokens and cash (taxes), but consume energy and waste treatment tokens. A factory consumes workers, waste treatment, energy, and commercial tokens, but produces heavy industry ones, etc, you get the picture. Tokens allow the game to simulate a simplified version of a large economy and give the player an easy overview of the production and consumption of all resources without having to worry about units like kWh, m³ or tons. The ratio of production and consumption of tokens is displayed in a display at the top of the screen.
Trade
The city economy is based upon a worldwide system, that means that if a factory needs a certain amount of tokens, it will be available somewhere, but at a higher cost than if it were be produced locally by other businesses or the government. When your city doesn’t produce enough electricity tokens, your buildings will have to buy it from somewhere else, but they pay more to get it, which means the desirability to build new things or stay in the city will decrease. In the single player part of the game, players will have to balance their token economy by building the right buildings and setting the taxes right, just like in the past (whether it was by building a neighbour with the right supply in SC4, or building that industry area at the border of the map in city life, it’s quite the same, you had to do it yourself.). Players who play in the online mode can trade tokens with other players on the same planet. When you want to trade with another player you can send him (or her) your offer, for example: “I’ll give you 10 workers a day, if you’ll give me 10 waste treatment tokens a day. Our deal will last a week” (yes, you can trade people for garbage in CXL 
). Online token production and consumption will change once a day, depending on what you did with your city in the meantime. All deals are measured in real life days and can be broken by one of the players at any time. That means that you’ll have to have some trust in the player you’re trading with, because you’ll become dependent on him, and he on you. The trading with other people gives online players the opportunity to specialise their cities, and sell their surplus tokens to other players, and receive the tokens they can’t produce themselves. All the trade options are available both in the game and via a web interface in your browser so you can manage your city wherever you are.
Blueprints
Every now and then a player gets the opportunity to build a blueprint building. Those buildings are major landmarks with some special abilities like the wonders in Civilization. (I can imagine the statue of liberty will bring in a lot of tourists and a large skyscraper a lot of commerce, etc.) These buildings have to be built in stages that cost quite a lot of time and a huge amount of resources. The resources needed for a stage will be subtracted from your token balance and won’t be available anymore for use in the city or trade that day. When you don’t have enough resources for a stage, you can’t build it at that moment. To get more resources you can try to improve the production in your city or ask another player to trade with you for some. The blueprint management will also be manageable from your browser.
The Planet
As I mentioned earlier, you’ll build your city on a planet and you’ll share that planet with other people. In the planet view you can see the planet in a Google earth kind of overview. On the right of that screen you can view stats about your planet and the cities on that planet, you can sort them on all city stats available like tax levels, production of certain tokens, happiness, size, etc. You can even view those stats for other planets in the CXL universe, and compete with them in this way. You can also see stats about the players on that planet, nationality in % etc. Maybe planets with a lot of Dutch will trade more, and French planets will attract more tourists, you never know.
Playing the tourist
Every player will have an avatar; you can walk around the cities of other players and chat with them, comment on their city and arrange trade agreements. This makes it a bit Second Life-ish, but with more fun and things to do. Philippe mentioned the possibility of a car production GEM, where you’ll be able to design, manufacture and sell your car design to other players.
Of course you don’t have to keep up with your city every day, but to keep things a bit realistic your city will slowly go backwards in production and wealth after a certain amount of time of inactivity. At some time it will reach a steady point. Philippe told me that cities will be removed from a planet after about 6 months of inactivity, but it will still be available for you to download or play with it after that time if you come back, you can even place it on the planet again if there’s a free slot!
So much for the second part of my report of my visit to Monte Cristo. Next time I’ll talk about the other large change in the city builder world, the part of the game Monte Cristo calls “gameplay extension modules” or GEMs. With the online gameplay, the GEMs enable MC to create a game that can be modified and grow to a lot more than only a city builder. One thing I won’t talk about is custom content; I’ll leave that to Dirk from Simtropolis. Also, please note that I saw an early version of the game, the planned release is still a couple of months away, and a lot can change in that time, especially with a completely independent studio like Monte Cristo and the time they spend to listen to their potential customers. Please ask questions if you have them!
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