Drawing Board III: Services Coverage

This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com

Continuing on with some feature ideas, today I want to talk about how coverage is determined for city services like police, fire, and hospitals. But first, the usual disclaimer:

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

This series of posts are not to be read as "official" ideas for the Metropolis Project, they are simply my personal thoughts about what some cool game features might be. The final feature set for the game will be decided by the community and the development team contracted to build the game, and may not include any of these things. More details about the purpose of the Drawing Board articles can be found here.

The Sim City 4 (left) and Cities XL models for service coverage.

One of Sim City 4's most poorly modeled aspects was the coverage area for services. While there was a good simulation as far as how many residents were serviced by the area and what budget that required, the area itself was a totally unrealistic circle. In Cities XL, they took a large step towards fixing this, with the coverage area determined by distance along the transportation network rather than a straight radius. Unfortunately, while improving on this aspect they also dropped the more granular budget management and crime (or fire, or health) simulation aspect in favor of a simple satisfaction bonus. Metropolis will need to take the best of both games and improve on them even further.

A small city like the one above could cover its entire area with only one precint, even if the coverage was not particularly strong...

A growing city could then add a second station and divide into two precints for better coverage.

Leaving aside the actual crime, safety and health simulations (which, besides service coverage, should also be influenced by other factors) let's look at the way coverage areas are determined, taking police as an example. For inspiration, consider how a real life police force is organized: The city is usually divided into precints, with a single police office being responsible for each precint. The game would reflect this same system. If the city had only one police office, that office would cover the entire city, but the quality of coverage for any given location would vary, based on a number of factors: number of citizens in the coverage area, size of the police station, distance from the station (as determined by network, of course), etc. Thus for a small town, a single station might be sufficient: even though it would cover a wide area, the low population density would balance the quality of coverage somewhat. Once another precint was added, the city would be divided into two coverage areas. These areas could be determined automatically, but would still be adjustable for players who want to micromanage.

Furthermore, there should be mechanisms for upgrading and supplementing services as the city grows larger. For this there would be several options open to the player. The first would naturally be to increase the number of staff; This would be capped at a certain number by the building's size. Another would be to increase the number of vehicles available (lessening the impact of distance on coverage quality); This could be limited both by the number of staff (no point in more cars than officers!) and the parking space at the building. When those caps started to be hit, the player could upgrade the building itself, in two ways: the first would be through "modules," improvements to the existing building that would give a bonus to service quality (for example, a forensics lab, a dispatcher service, an extra parking lot, etc.) Each building size would have certain modules available. The second would be to upgrade to a larger building. There would be two ways to do so, either tear down the existing building and construct a new one, if the lot size permitted (this would cause a disruption in service quality, though, while the police operate from a temporary location) or build on a different spot, with the precint being transferred on completion (which would mean finding a new location and buying the lot).

Various options for greater efficiency would be available to the player, which could themselves be upgraded with added building modules. In this example, the station in the second image has added a new parking lot and gained extra capacity.

Beyond this, there could be city-wide upgrades to the service through the addition of special departments: One police office could be designated as police headquarters, and certain upgrades there would have an impact on police performance city-wide: a SWAT team, for example, or a computer crimes division, or an undercover unit.

With this system the player could maintain the same precint structure while still increasing the quality of service. An analagous system could be applied to fire, hospitals, and schools. While this level of detail might not be for everyone, and might not be practical for an initial release, with a flexible game architecture there would be a basis for this kind of simulation.