Sim City: Apocalpyse

Sim City, a popular city building game owned by Electronic Arts, has been a game I've returned to at various points throughout my life when I've needed a reprieve from faster paced gaming. I enjoy the dramatic differences subtle changes to your city's infrastructure can have on future development (whateva, I drop a power plant in the middle of a residential area...it's my city I do what I want!) The Sim franchise has spread out into a variety of settings (Sim Coaster, Sim Prison, and Sim Tycoon among others). Each setting offers unique fare but often relies on the same building techniques and strategies. In effect, settings change but the rules remain the same. I would like to change the setting AND the rules in a derivation of this old classic...Sim City: Apocalypse.

The Setting
We've learned to love the nuke a little too much. Unlike the idyllic world the Sims normally find themselves in, this simulation takes place in a nuclear wasteland. Natural resources are exhausted and the terrain is a mix of treacherous craters and decimated cities. Rank, stagnant water sits in radioactive pools, and the trees have long since fled the face of the plant. Mutated and malformed animals roam the land in a desperate race between evolution and extinction. This is where the Sims will try to cobble together a civilization.

The Rules
In the standard sims, development was a simple matter of employing money to construct specific patterns to maximize desirability (high density commercial...so hot right now.) I'd like to expand upon this by upping the required innovation to achieve substantial development. In a world facing a massive resource crunch, simple notions of tax and spend no longer apply. I envision a system where the city starts off as a single tent, and all development must come as a result of scouring the surrounding wastelands and decaying cities for resources. Population is not determined by whether there is room for more people, it is determined by whether a new person will survive.

Thus, if you want something more sturdy than a tent, you must deploy a sim to haunt the hillsides in search of caves or crumbling buildings. If you need power, you must send the sims off to find a derelict gas station. Development therefore becomes a matter of recycling for the beginning stages of your civilization. At some point your citizens will acquire adequate knowledge and resources to begin moving beyond recycling and into actual production, thereby requiring less hunting and gathering.

The focus will remain on development, true to the Sim City franchise, but innovation will become a central issue. Where you are severely curtailed in terms of resources, selecting the most critical needs and pursuing them will shape your development rather than the more common development tracks followed in traditional cities. Also, the options for development will be restricted by the surrounding landscape in a way never before realized in Sim City. Since early development will rely largely on recycling due to the largely contaminated natural resources, access to sprawling vacated cities will enhance chances of broad development while starting in the middle of an impact crater will make things trickier.

Honestly, the idea of civilization crawling back into a derelict city really appeals to me. I may be alone in this. So alone. If people get bored I suppose we could have EVIL RADIOACTIVE MUTANTS events to spice it up.

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