Why city building needs to evolve

Jan 23, 2010 15:21 GMT  ·  By

One of the series that shaped me as a gamer was the Caesar games created by Impressions and published by the now defunct Sierra. I first played Caesar II sometime in 1997, right around the time I was developing a nice little obsession with Roman history, and I felt incredible power at controlling an entire province in Ancient Rome and developing it as I saw fit. I was even more involved with Caesar III and with Pharaoh, although they ditched the provincial level.

Building those huge pyramids, which often came in complexes and with a Sphinx or another obelisk thrown in just to make it a bit harder, was a challenge both in term of real management, creating a smooth running city that could support itself while also diverting sufficient resources to the building process itself, and in terms of personal time management.

After these high points, the city building genre seems to have devolved. I played Sims City 3 and 4 and found them underwhelming. I played Caesar IV and found it lacking anything new.

The two titles, Zeus and Poseidon, based on Ancient Greece, felt more small scale and a bit artificial because of the links to the Gods and missions. I enjoyed the early Settlers titles and found some hours of fun with the Anno series. I played Tropico 3 most recently and liked it, but it lacks the scale of early Caesar and Pharaoh. And now it seems that city building is set to be an extreme niche genre like flight sims or railroad simulations.

So, this is why I am happy to find out that of all organizations, the United States Army is keeping the art of the city management game alive by using something called UrbanSim to actually train its soldiers into the finer minutia of counter insurgency tactics.

Matthew Bosack, who is the project manager working on the title at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, said that “The cocktail-party explanation: I say I make SimCity Baghdad. You’re basically the mayor. But instead of tornados, earthquakes, and Godzilla running around your city, it’s insurgents.”

This is clearly a city sim and appears to be one that innovates while also maintaining some of the basic aspects of the genre. The sole problem is that only the Army gets to play with it at the moment. It might be nice for some developer to pick up on the idea, make a commercial product and release it.