SimCity Social: Facebook-style Simulation

Balancing depth with mass market appeal.

In SimCity Social, you’ll still build residential, commercial and industrial structures, put out fires in your cities, control crime by setting police stations, set up road networks and deal with pollution, all while trying to grow your population. You won’t, however, customize tax rates, manage power grids or sewage systems. It’s an attempt to balance the depth of the traditional SimCity experience with more mass market-friendly mechanics and social elements.

A core element of SimCity Social is competition related to the number of virtual people living in your city. Your friends on Facebook are displayed across the bottom of the in-game screen, and aside from their picture, the prominent feature is their city’s population number. If they’re way ahead, and you’re afflicted by an especially aggressive type of jealousy, you can travel to their town and exacerbate hazardous situations.

You can hop into a city while a friend isn’t logged into Facebook, and by doing so, you might find one of their residential structures in on fire. A good friend might alert their fire department. As a not-so-good friend, you can dump gas on the fire and flatten the structure. You could invite the local homeless population into their apartments, hide the keys to fire engines and help criminals escape. Whether you choose to do something malicious or not, you’re still rewarded, so not only the good guys win.

The points you receive for interacting with the cities of your friends can be put towards special structures. If you’re nice, the selection of special structures will be bright and colorful. If you decide to mess up your friends’ towns, you’ll be able to build towering spiky spires and giant robot factories, so the look of your own city could eventually reflect the way you decide to behave.

Interacting with your friends also rewards you with free Energy. Energy, as is the case in many Facebook games, is required to perform in-game actions. Pretty much the only thing you can do in without Energy is set up roads, which at least means you can set a grid around areas where you eventually plan to set up more houses or businesses until your Energy gradually recharges or you pay real money to purchase more. And in case you’ve been a jerk, before bailing out of a friend’s city, you can leave a gift; animal-shaped clouds, hot air balloons full of confetti and a number of other items the friend will see when he or she logs back in.

Assuming you have enough Energy and in-game currency, you can set up new businesses and industrial centers. These aren’t auto-upgrading zones, they’re just one-time purchase, pre-made buildings that you place around the game world. Their placement will affect population, so taking care to place commercial centers near residential areas and having proper fire and police department coverage of your city could be important to create a safe and effective metropolis. Or you could just build a giant robot factory and let everything else burn down.

If buildings do catch on fire and crumble, they aren’t destroyed entirely. They’ll come back after a while, so there’s no need to repurchase them. Though businesses won’t auto-upgrade, but they can be manually augmented by spending resources to boost their effectiveness. So if you have a sports stadium in the center of a dense residential area, it’s a good idea to upgrade it to broaden its effects on your city, which in turn will upgrade the structure’s appearance into something fancier.

Residential zones in SimCity Social function more traditionally, where you demarcate territory as residential and then watch as NPCs move in and the ever-morphing buildings that sprout from the ground show how well that particular tile is doing. After you’ve got a kernel of thriving metropolis, you can expand beyond the initial borders to the edges of what appears to be a large map. The undeveloped territory will sometimes contain bonus elements. You may find a plot of land where, for reasons buried somewhere in the tubes of the Internet, giraffes wander around, which can be turned into a tourist site if you develop around it.

With a number of elaborately detailed buildings and special animations within many structures, your eye will often dart from one thing to the next while staring at the SimCity Social screen. Things like a kid booting a soccer ball in the stadium, monster trucks roaring around an arena and cars loaded with moving boxes pulling up to empty residential zones vie for your attention, often punctuated by the explosion of virtual currency icons when something significant occurs. There’s also the mayor’s house, basically a visual representation of your city’s level of advancement, which you’ll continually be upgrading and customizing as you play.

Maxis and Playfish appear to have built SimCity Social from a stack of good ideas. Though it may not have the depth of the SimCity scheduled to launch in February 2013 for Windows, and assuming the Energy system isn’t overly restrictive, it could still be an enjoyable interactive experience for someone usually too timid to try more complex simulations. Expect SimCity Social to launch within the next few weeks on Facebook, and plenty of content updates to follow in the months afterward.