• a new disaster in the form of a UFO attack
• several fixes to the Strategic Gameplay modes that were introduced with the second patch
• fixes to several bugs
• everything that was in the first two patches

The complete update notes are described in a pdf that’s downloadable from the official site.

Today Electronic Arts Inc. unveiled SimCity™ Societies Destinations, the first city pack in the popular SimCity Societies line-up of games.

As shown earlier at the official site, the focus of the City Pack is on tourism:

The city pack add-on moves the SimCity Societies experience into exciting, new – and sometimes exotic—locales, allowing players to create the perfect vacation spot.

In the words of  Rod Humble, Head of The Sims Studio

SimCity Societies Destinations is the perfect game to let your imagination go on vacation, while at the same time provides deeper, challenges for the player. Whether you want to forge a mini republic or build a spiritual retreat, you’ll have all the tools to make your destination admired by citizens far and wide.

The press release comes with a set of screenshots:

From unspoiled nature parks with campgrounds and hiking trails to tropical beach resorts with water sports and fine dining, from humble county fairs with hay rides and midway games, to sprawling modern theme parks with all the bells and whistles, you’ll build an entire city based on attracting visitors, and keeping them entertained and satisfied.

Create amazing destinations — Turn your romantic city into a tropical beach resort, your authoritarian city into a banana republic, or your meditative city into a spiritual getaway for the rich and famous. Create attractions that are high class or low brow or bizarre.

More than 100 new buildings with new abilities, from 5 star beach resorts to UFO crash sites.

More than 35 new special Sims with new behaviors – traveling business men, religious pilgrims, political devotees, cult members, adventures and more.

New tourism and tourist functionality – Make your city attractive, working to bring more visitors who bring in more cash to our city’s coffers.

Expanded transit functionality, including air and water travel.

New reviews by Zero Punctuation appear every Wednesday on the Escapistmagazine.com

Update: screenshot of the ordering page in question in case it mysteriously disappears:

• A new disaster in the form of an Alien Attack
• An easier way to locate buildings that are on fire, and finding fire stations to start fighting the fire
• New ways to sort buildings in the building options menu
• Fixes for performance issues, especially on Vista machines

A complete list of updates follows below the cut.

Strategic Mode Update Ready For Download

With today’s update, we are adding Strategic Mode, along with other additions, improvements and fixes.
Game Update #2 Notes
Strategic Mode
• Three Strategic Modes of play have been introduced, to complement the original three Creative Modes of play.
• Each of these Strategic Modes (Basic, Hardcore and Nightmare), is progressively more challenging than the preceding one, and all three introduce a variety of challenging push-backs not present in the Creative Modes of play:
o Buildings carry an ongoing maintenance cost. If maintenance requirements are not met, buildings have a chance of taking damage which will put them out of commission for several days or even result in destruction.
o Recycle gains are reduced, making shrewd planning critical
o Work and visit durations are long. As a result, Sims can go to fewer places in a single day.
o It’s more difficult to keep Sims happy
o Unhappy and Rogue Sims are more likely to act out, produce negative special Sims, or transform into negative special Sims
o Rogue Sims are much less placated by the act of shutting down a workplace, and will remain unhappy or even on the verge of becoming rogue again.
• Achievements and monuments must be earned separately for each of the modes of play
• Hardcore and Nightmare Modes must be unlocked by winning a trophy in the preceding Strategic Mode (success in Basic Strategic unlocks Hardcore; success in Hardcore unlocks Nightmare).

General Enhancements
• UI textures can now change with your society. Look for altered UI appearances in Capitalist, Cyberpunk, Industrial, and Orwellian cities. Modders can use this added functionality to make more radical changes.

Modding
• Several XMLs that weren’t additive now are. Particularly, custom textures don’t all have to live in the same file, so multiple mods with custom textures should play together more nicely
• All attributes of a building XML in the mod folder now take priority over the original, so mods can meddle with all aspects of existing buildings
• The camera settings XML has been moved into its own folder so that it can be modded
• New versions of packages with the same names as old packages now overwrite the old package when installed
• Building textures can be modified directly from the building xml, no more need to use the custom profile textures

General Fixes
• The intended a cap on the number of subways and bus stops in a city was not previously operating properly, and has been fixed. There can now be only 50 of each in a given city.
• New base models have been added to some buildings to address some cases where the terrain would appear over the base.
• Fix for Sims temporarily disappearing if they arrived for work early
• The error message you get when your graphics card or drivers don’t meet the minimum requirements is now more helpful

Stability and Performance
• Fix for a rare crash which could happen on removal of a cultural prop
• Streaming textures provide improved performance and lower memory use-age, particularly in large cities
• Many general improvements to Sim AI performance
• Fix for a lock-up (which could sometimes lead to a crash) involving pathfinding and public transit
• Fix for memory overwrites (which could sometimes lead to a crash) involving Sim and building selection, building scripts, and the lighting system
• Saving takes much less additional memory. This should solve the out-of-memory errors during autosaves that some users were experiencing
• Fix for a crash on exit

It appears critique on SCS being too easy has been taken to heart:

We are proud to announce the introduction of three new Strategic Modes of play, Basic, Hardcore and Nightmare, which will stretch your city-building skills to the limit.

According to the SimCity Team these new Strategic Modes impact gameplay all over the board, making it harder to balance finance and Sims happiness. These Strategic Modes are said to differ greatly from the Creative Modes that the team apparently decided to dub the current difficulty settings. The patch also includes polishing of the UI to match the atmosphere of your cities, optimisations, and (very important!) bug fixes.

Humble says that the strategy on the development of SCS was similar to the one used with The Sims 2:

Hey how can we broaden this? How can we make it less challenging, easier to use, and make it more into a creativity tool?

The reviews SCS received after launch have been a mixed bunch. Humble promises though to stand by his customers and deliver what they want:

Our job now is to deliver to our customers who are giving us feedback (and we’re giving them) free updates to make sure they get what they want. We’re going to stand by them and add that challenge that they’re looking for and add that extra depth.

Humble seems to admit that SCS may have become a bit too easy for some players:

We got the (general) accessibility bit down and now we need to address their concerns, “Hey, I want more push back. I want more challenge.” It’s usually been the opposite: “Hey, your game’s too complicated. Make it easier.”

On the question whether there will be a The Sims 3 Humble says:

Well, who knows? Yeah, of course, there will be. We are looking forward to talking about it in the future, but not now.

A critique for the established SimCity fan base

SimCity Societies is a fun and entertaining game, and can provide hours of computer-gaming enjoyment. Now, stop thinking of it as SimCity and that can continue to be the case. The fact is, Electronic Arts (EA) did not do this game any favors by lending the name of SimCity, one of the most successful electronic games of all time¹, to it. It is the same disservice that was done to the 914²; when Porsche attached its name and prestigious chrome insignias though everyone knew it was really just a very sporty Volkswagen. Like the 914, Societies runs and handles well, does exactly as it’s told, is fun to drive, and is found lacking only when compared to its famous namesake cousins.

In truth, Societies bears little resemblance to the SimCity of creator Will Wright and his Bay-Area Maxis Software³, now an EA subsidiary. The similarities are found mostly in names and symbols: Residents are called Sims, the Simolean (denoted §) is the monetary unit, and the tasks involve building a city. The two games soon part ways, however. Societies is a product of Boston-area-based Tilted Mill Entertainment, maker of other city-building games Children of the Nile and Caesar IV.

The entire approach of Societies is different from that of all previous SimCity games, starting from the foundation and going up from there. As a Societies player, you are not focused upon building a city, but rather building a community. Every building is “plopped” by the player, not zoned and built by the game engine. There are hundreds of buildings available, each with specific effects upon the city and its population far greater than merely providing jobs or population. Only the first few buildings are available initially, but a wide variety become unlocked very quickly, as the city generates values. Instead of residential and commercial buildings Societies has “workplaces”; instead of residential buildings, there are “homes”. The job market is simulated by a supply of “productivity” units, which homes supply and workplaces deplete.

Productivity is only one of six societal values that buildings can supply or consume, however. The others are Authority (as in city government), Creativity, Knowledge, Prosperity, and Spirituality. Selecting buildings to plop involves making decisions about what sort of city one wants to build, which resources one desires to create, and which resources are in abundance and available to cash in for societal values. Not only buildings participate in the “markets” for these values, however; “special sims” are created by the player, or by buildings. Special sims enhance or magnify a building’s effects, essentially functioning as walking buildings. Examples are entertainers, civil servants, criminals, and businesspeople of various types, to name only a few.

Just for fun, Societies has another type of building that SimCity has barely, and only inadequately, ever dealt with at all. These are called “venues”. Venues are where Sims go during their spare time to improve their happiness. They are non-workplace buildings, although venues also consume productivity (i.e., create jobs, in SimCity terms). Examples of venues are: Parks, libraries, shopping malls, art galleries, restaurants, gift shops, museums, and many, many others. Worker sim happiness is continually monitored and reported at each of seven levels of happiness. And so, this is not a dumbed-down city builder. The Managing resources, values, happiness, and Simoleans gives the game an appealing complexity.

If you are trying to force Societies into the SimCity mold, then you will be disappointed. This is simply not that game. Terrain, rivers & lakes, elevation, and flora are unimportant. Infrastructure is also unimportant, except that commute time is unavailable for visiting venues. The only utility is power, and once you have build it, you can forget it until need more. A power plant anywhere does the does the job; no need to connect it to buildings with wires. No sewer, no water, and no garbage to take out. There are no taxes; happy worker productivity automatically deposits simoleans the city treasury. The map is very small but has plenty of room for any city building you’ll do. You’re not creating sprawling metroplexes, suburbs, and country in this game. The locations of buildings relative to other buildings and terrain features are almost completely irrelevant. For example, authoritarian buildings serve the entire city at a whole with no radial effect. The only exceptions are commute time, as mentioned above, and that a very few buildings have a localized pollution NIMBY influence. So, if it helps aid your enjoyment of this game, use a piece of masking tape to hide the word “SimCity on the box cover.

However, this game includes several features SimCity never thought of, or never explored this well. I’m of the strong opinion that, if Maxis returns to developing any true SimCity games, all future editions should include the societal values, happiness, and venues in a similar way as Societies. A customizable workweek (ranging from 3 days to 7, with various workday/weekday mixes) is an important part of the implementation of venues, and is something many of us have been asking for in SimCity for several years. Weekend days give sims and workers free opportunities to visit venues for recreation, entertainment and shopping. Societies also has weather effects and a larger selection of disasters. The Prima Official Game Guide reports that the game and buildings are moddable⁴. Oh, and there is an Undo button!

The bad news is in the game graphics and the city editor window. There are several graphical display options, but even the best graphics quality is puny in comparison with most games in recent years. The camera is free, but not really. The maximum zoom-out level is still very close-in, denying any comprehensive city view. The buildings and terrain are cartoonish. When browsing the city view, the key strokes that are second-nature to any SimCity player are unavailable, or are assigned to other features, and bring up unintended dialog boxes.

Rating this game is not as easy as it may seem. If you are trying to make this your next SimCity game, this game cannot rank above a 3. But, if you can accept this game for what it is, and leave SimCity to the SimCity games, I give it a 7.

Societies will now leave me wanting Tilted Mill and Maxis to collaborate on the next “real” SimCity game, which in my opinion should still be entitled, “SimCity 5″. The core appeal of SimCity, for me anyway, lies in building an enormous, multifaceted, symbiotic region with metropolitan areas; sprawling countrysides; mountains and forests; transit systems and transportation infrastructure; city services; economic interactions among industrial jobs, commercial development, and public finance, promoting public health, safety, and education; proving sanitation, water, sewer, and power. But Tilted Mill brings the pursuit of happiness to the table. Societies’ treatment of the hourly, daily, and weekly schedule of sims and worker-sims, and their need to visit venues to pursue their happiness would fit nicely with the logistical puzzles inherent in building SimCity infrastructure. The societal-values concept of Societies is a natural marriage with the land-value concept of SimCity. Someone needs to introduce these two kids, now that both are members of the same corporate family. The SimCity franchise would benefit from a true symbiosis with this game, rather than merely lending its name to it.

——————————————————————————–

¹ SimCity. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity Retrieved November 17, 2007

² Porsche 914, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche. Retrieved November 17, 2007

³ Maxis. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxis. Retrieved November 17, 2007

⁴ Kramer, Greg. SimCity Societies: PRIMA Official Game Guide. Prima Games divn Random House, 2007

EA notes that the “day one” patch now available on its servers should smooth out any framerate issues

The changelist as given by EA is as follows:

2 exclusive buildings & 2 terrain maps
Improved install experience for custom content downloads
Optimized shadows
Fixed a random crash bug
Improved localized text
Improved pollution UI
Improved effectiveness of Power Purchase special action

You have got to hand it to EA that they do start handling issues immediately here.

With the game having been released (at least by some stores) the forum at the official SimCity Societies page has come alive as well, and the first game mods have been uploaded to the mod exchange.

The first review of the final game has also appeared on Eurogamer (as opposed to a preview of the unfinished game). Thanks to our editor Gil for pointing that one out. Sadly the review isn’t very positive: Eurogamer gives the game a 5 out of 10.

If you have the game, let us know your impressions in the forum!