SimCity 2000 had the Industries window, which showed which industries were in demand nationally, and setting tax rates for them accordingly. These included steel/mining, textiles, petrochemicals, food, construction, automotive, aerospace, finance, media, electronics, and tourism. However, none of them made a big difference in the way industries developed and had mostly an effect on the way industrial demand worked (the way to beat the Flint scenario was basically setting everything to zero except the automotive, which had a discouragingly high tax rate). That was dropped from later titles. But industries define a city's character, whether it be golden age Detroit, Silicon Valley, or any college town you can name.
Another broken aspect of SimCity 2000 was the bond system. It was a trap, because it looks like you can issue nearly a dozen of them, yet even issuing one is a massive problem. As Pat Coston says in the ClubOpolis website (still online today: [http://patcoston.com/co/strat4.aspx]). "TWO BONDS!!! Boy are you DEEP in debt". You issue a bond with a set interest rate (which fluctuates depending on the economy of SimNation), and you pay every year until the bond is paid off entirely. Often times you can get another bond with a lower interest rate to pay back the first one, but the situation was bad enough that if most players got in debt to use a bond, they were financially ruined. SimCity 3000 simplified this with a loan system that had a set interest rate which ultimately had them pay back 150% of the total over a decade. It was still a bad idea to get in debt but it was manageable and easily explained enough not to financially ruin players.
SimCity 2000 was excellent because although fairly primitive, it did a good job by using every tile as a function of the city and then crunched a bunch of numbers for the way the zones and special buildings interacted. It was also the last true "Maxis" SimCity ever created before EA bought them and changed focus. SC4 was probably the last vestiges of that ideal, though constrained in some aspects because it was designed to fall in with the way The Sims was going.
In the KotCity thread, there was talk of a "variable lot system" which in many ways is reminiscient of the "microsims" inside special buildings like arcologies, rewards, schools, and others (basically non-RCI buildings). The numbers that would appear would often be a result of population and funding, with often a random variable or extra calculation thrown in. Querying the fire station has number of firefighters (driven by total population numbers and funding), fire engines (a percentage of firefighters), and the response time (a random number). In SimCity 2000, random numbers in microsims (no effect on simulation) included fire station response time, the wins/losses of the stadium, number of llamas in the zoo, number of pigeons perching on the statue, tons of salt removed from desalinization plants, and basically everything in the Braun Llama Dome.
Another broken aspect of SimCity 2000 was the bond system. It was a trap, because it looks like you can issue nearly a dozen of them, yet even issuing one is a massive problem. As Pat Coston says in the ClubOpolis website (still online today: [http://patcoston.com/co/strat4.aspx]). "TWO BONDS!!! Boy are you DEEP in debt". You issue a bond with a set interest rate (which fluctuates depending on the economy of SimNation), and you pay every year until the bond is paid off entirely. Often times you can get another bond with a lower interest rate to pay back the first one, but the situation was bad enough that if most players got in debt to use a bond, they were financially ruined. SimCity 3000 simplified this with a loan system that had a set interest rate which ultimately had them pay back 150% of the total over a decade. It was still a bad idea to get in debt but it was manageable and easily explained enough not to financially ruin players.
SimCity 2000 was excellent because although fairly primitive, it did a good job by using every tile as a function of the city and then crunched a bunch of numbers for the way the zones and special buildings interacted. It was also the last true "Maxis" SimCity ever created before EA bought them and changed focus. SC4 was probably the last vestiges of that ideal, though constrained in some aspects because it was designed to fall in with the way The Sims was going.
In the KotCity thread, there was talk of a "variable lot system" which in many ways is reminiscient of the "microsims" inside special buildings like arcologies, rewards, schools, and others (basically non-RCI buildings). The numbers that would appear would often be a result of population and funding, with often a random variable or extra calculation thrown in. Querying the fire station has number of firefighters (driven by total population numbers and funding), fire engines (a percentage of firefighters), and the response time (a random number). In SimCity 2000, random numbers in microsims (no effect on simulation) included fire station response time, the wins/losses of the stadium, number of llamas in the zoo, number of pigeons perching on the statue, tons of salt removed from desalinization plants, and basically everything in the Braun Llama Dome.
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