Originally shared on The SimCity.com blog

SimCity Telephone City Part One

What happens when one city has multiple Mayors? That’s the question we answered by having six members of the Maxis team play the same city over a course of a day. The rules were simple: one developer picked a city and played for exactly 30 minutes. Once the time was up, another team member picked up where the last Mayor left off. And this continued until all six Maxis Mayors had a chance to play. Thus, the SimCity Telephone City is born.

Below you’ll find the first part of our telephone city broken up by the different Maxis developers.

Mayor 1: Software Engineer Scott Clarke:

I was lucky enough start off our Telephone City. I thought of the many ways I could troll everyone else by creating traps and/or obviously bad situations for them to deal with. First things first, though – I need to find a good spot to start up a city. Since this will be single city, I want to be sure it has enough resources to sustain itself. I find a nice spot which has a good amount of just about every resource I could possibly need. As an added plus, there are also rail and water connections!

Next, once I am in the city, I want to look at all the resource maps and figure out where I want to place things. I notice that there is a strip of high value land which is perfect for residential and commercial development. It just happens to be situated between an oil deposit and an ore deposit. I have found my trap!

First, I build up a nice little town right on top of that high value area, and then build up a mine and some industry upwind of it. I also decided that traffic needed to be an issue, so I made sure there were a few choke points where all traffic had to pass each day. As a cherry on top, I place the elementary school right over the oil field. If someone wants oil, there will be bigger consequences.

Before I wrap up and hand off the city, I make sure all the basic services are supplied, trades are flowing, and everything looks happy and seems to be running smoothly. I can’t wait to see how everyone else deals with the traps I laid out.

 

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