SimCity -- some notes and records

Comments and saved games from SimCity, the PC game simulating city growth. I got the city to a very high population (560 000+) -- a "megalopolis"-- so I thought I'd share my experiences. The game is additictive.

You probably want some or all of the narrative I wrote discussing all this. It includes:

I. An overview of the game

II. A distilled version of the rules

III. Mathematical characterization of game

IV. Observations about suggested strategies.

V. Bugs and quirks in the game

VI. A summary of the game in which I hit Megalopolis status

In separate files are saved SimCity games -- I saved every ten years or so into the game. Here's the city in 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, when it first became a megalopolis (500000 people) and when I quit at highest population. (That was about Jan., 2040, at about 560 000 people). Each saved game is a 27248-byte binary file (input for the SimCity program).

There is also a picture of the city at megalopolis status.

After congratulating myself on this achievement I thought to look on the net for other SimCity sites. Clearly the more complex game SimCity2000 has become the addiction of choice, but I did find some other very helpful links. A number of people have created much larger cities than my own, although in my opinion some of their techniques have crossed over into "cheating". You can be the judge. Check out the Overview of SimCity WWW Browsers; a port to Sparc machines by Hopkins used to be at hello.kaleida.com/hopkins/simcity, now an invalid URL.