BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Oh My:

 

 

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Not quite up to this standard but There is a 75% off Tropico 4 plus & all it's DLC on Steam atm

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@ Tycho I'm not sure if you remember but a few years back there was a bit of a fuss kicked up because FoxNews took a typically cack handed shot at criticising Sim City for being too "Pro- Renewable".

 

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1141465232001/video-games-go-green/

 

The problem is once people decide on something they don't like to be proved wrong. So people will pick and choose which parts of almost any simulation they like and don't like, it's pretty much unavoidable sadly.

 

The only game I know that has even tried to do both sides of the coin was Fate of the World. Although it did take the view that global warming was real how you dealt with it was pretty much totally up for grabs. Different scenarios were used to gave a different baseline set of assumption (eg: one scenario might model peak oil decline, another near limitless fossil fuel reserves) which the player had to try to use to 'save the world'. One early mission makes you attempt to reducing global warming & increasing the wealth of the worlds poorest at the same time which i failed a good few dozen times before I realised that on that scale my fairly liberal ideals weren't working and I had to be a bit more pragmatic.Even if that meant burning more coal, trying weird experimental weather altering science, and having a really well paid security force suppressing the heck out anyone who got annoyed.

 

I think in general a game that forces me to play against my natural assumptions is better than one that just panders to them.

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Do the sims pay for everything through taxes, like education, security, public transportation and healthcare, or do any of these come with a profit/income?

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Do the sims pay for everything through taxes, like education, security, public transportation and healthcare, or do any of these come with a profit/income?

 

Yeah, it's entirely a tax-driven revenue system, which is a huge shame. I'd love to have the ability to nationalize some industry in this game.

 

Which leads to something else that I've never considered before: This game essentially has nationalized healthcare, right? There's no indication that healthcare is tied to employment like it often is in America, so the only other explanation is that Sim's provides universal coverage.

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The problem isn't that the simulation isn't perfect - the problem is that they've limited cities to tiny sizes and removed a lot of stuff that was in Sim City 4 because their focus seems to be on "everything simulated must actually exist in the world," which is super cool if the actual Sims lead actual lives, but when it turns out the Sims don't act like people at all, then the question is, why bother simulating them with such a high degree of fidelity? Why not cut corners and allow us to build an actual metropolis, like Sim City 4 did?

Well, the answer to "why" is subjective, because you could obviously make a good version of either game. But one answer is that this still allows a certain type of fidelity that you don't get with the more abstract method. Even if sims are going to a different job every day, you're still modeling the effect of X number of sims having to find a way to X number of jobs every day in a discrete fashion, through some combination of available foot traffic, car traffic, buses, streetcars, and intercity commuting. Same goes for X number of injured or sick sims having to fill X beds in a hospital, or X number of police patrol cars having to deal with X criminals, or firefighters with fires, or whatever.

It might be your belief that that specific type of fidelity is less satisfying than the benefits you get with larger-scale abstraction, but I don't think it makes it a foregone conclusion that one is not worthwhile on its face.

Also, to your earlier point about what a simulation means politically: I agree that the choices made in a simulation absolutely present a worldview. And on a purely personal level I would have liked to see this game include a lot more focus on a lot of the things you also seem to want it to have. But the part of your post I'm less clear about is your (apparent) contention (and I could be misinterpreting you) that it is inherently dishonest or undesirable for the game to advance any worldview at all. What is the alternative to that? Would it be a simulation that picks which systems are more effective at random? A game is just software--at some point, someone has to write algorithms that work a certain way.

The kind of city that SimCity represents is not the kind of city that I prefer to live in. In every city I've made, I've filled it up with streetcars and buses because it's appealing to me, and I don't much care if it's optimal or not. But you keep bringing up European cities and I don't see why Maxis is under any particular moral responsibility to represent European cities rather than some other kind. I mean, as you point out, there are a few novelty European buildings--but EVERYTHING ELSE in the game is clearly modeled after American cities. I don't buy the argument that by calling it "SimCity" rather than "Sim American City," Maxis has exceeded some arbitrary authority. I mean, "Anno 1404" doesn't represent a single thing going on outside the specific European-style fiefdoms the game chooses to represent, even though in the year 1404 AD there was an entire planet of other stuff going on.

Again, as a matter of taste, I'm bummed out that Maxis didn't choose to allow for broader and more modern approaches to municipal planning. And even divorced from taste, I think you could make a perfectly good case that in the kind of cities that SimCity chooses to represent, Maxis STILL failed to take into account plenty of legitimate planning, transit, and revenue models. That to me is totally legitimate, and I agree. But if they didn't even attempt to make a game about, say, modern socialist European city planning techniques, well, so be it. I think it's clear to everyone that this game broadly represents American cities, which are pretty much universally hooked into the national interstate system and are built around road networks built for cars. You may not like that that's how American cities have developed, but it's true. Now, if they've misrepresented (or underserved) what is possible with THOSE cities, then I think those weaknesses are fair game for criticism. But when it comes to wishful thinking that they didn't bite off the particular other culture you would have wanted them to focus on in their game, I guess that's just too bad. You might be better served simply looking into any of the other city simulators that aim to represent those cultures.

I mean, that's part of what makes games creative works and not just emotionless systems. That's why it IS interesting to compare American city builders and European ones. I wouldn't criticize a European city simulator for not being an American one. But you might very well criticize either one for giving short shrift to the cities they aim to model.

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Every time I play this I wish I could dig in and start modding it.  The agent based model has so much potential.  I don't want to create new graphics, just tweak the agent programming and see what happens.

 

The most notable weird thing you see now is that sims will all get out of work at the same time and then head towards the nearest residence that has the right qualities.  But with a road system with a lot of connections this often means a huge group of sims all head towards the exact same residence even though only a few can live there.  Then once the first bunch 'moves in' the rest have to go somewhere else.   This is essentially the same problem that is obvious with emergency services where you can see every fire truck responding to the same fire when there are 8 more burning and spreading uncontrolled.

 

I think this is also why traffic is so much more efficient if you really lock the sims down so they can't choose where to go, very few intersections, etc.  This means fewer groups of sims will target the same shop/store/home and then cause gridlock and then have to reroute.

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I understand the line between abstraction and simulation is not a line between good and bad. But I think a lot of SimCity's gameplay problems come from simulated systems interacting with abstracted systems in ways that produce results more counter-intuitive than either on their own.

 

It's kinda weird that simulated people that are discreet entities within the game world do not have discreet jobs or houses, but I can live with that abstraction. But why isn't there some kind of queuing system so that they all don't head to the same two or three jobs or houses, like Flynn says they do? It makes the detailed traffic model nonsensical, because the intermittent abstraction is forcing real-life networks to handle non-real-life demands. For that matter, why bother simulating traffic jams when the simulated cars are given no awareness of said jams? Some things just seem kind of half-baked, as the incredibly efficient one-road city demonstrates.

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I have no problem with abstraction per se, I just don't think this abstraction really works. It produces really unintuitive results. So for example, you would thing that providing multiple routes through the city would relieve congestion; it apparently does not, since the sims will always take the shortest route. If you try and play the game as if it were actually stimulating a real city, you will quickly find yourself frustrated. The single most important thing to know about city building is that sims go from A to B in the most direct route possible, without any concern for congestion, and I don't understand why the game doesn't just tell you that.

This is compounded by how opaque many of the mechanics are. The game should really explain the sim logic up front. As it is, I feel like the game is willing to provide me with a ton of numbers without actually making the basic mechanics clear. And when you couple this to the fact that parts of the game don't reliably work (eg. Intra-region trade), you have a pretty frustrating experience.

In its current state, in my views Sim City fails both as a game and as a simulation. Its still compelling and fun, but it tries my patience. I also really think being able to save/load and experiment is a huge, huge loss.

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Well, the answer to "why" is subjective, because you could obviously make a good version of either game. But one answer is that this still allows a certain type of fidelity that you don't get with the more abstract method. Even if sims are going to a different job every day, you're still modeling the effect of X number of sims having to find a way to X number of jobs every day in a discrete fashion, through some combination of available foot traffic, car traffic, buses, streetcars, and intercity commuting. Same goes for X number of injured or sick sims having to fill X beds in a hospital, or X number of police patrol cars having to deal with X criminals, or firefighters with fires, or whatever.

It might be your belief that that specific type of fidelity is less satisfying than the benefits you get with larger-scale abstraction, but I don't think it makes it a foregone conclusion that one is not worthwhile on its face.

That all sounds true to me - I would say that it is my belief that this kind of fidelity is less satisfying than the kind of fidelity you get with something like Sim City 4 - namely, that your cities end up looking like actual cities rather than tiny cities. The best of both worlds is having everything done in discrete chunks in a normal sized city, and some day when we all have supercomputers then we can have that, but until then, it's fuzzy to me why I'd like discrete simulations if those just end up giving me super weird, counterintuitive results. The fun I get from city building games isn't micromanaging things on the level of X discrete units - it's either from building a city with character (Sim City 4) or from getting to know each individual person (Tropico). But in Tropico, I can get to know individual people because they all have jobs, and houses, and I can fire them from the job, and so on. Sim City doesn't get that nitty gritty, but it also doesn't let me get Sim City 4 levels of scale, so...

Also, to your earlier point about what a simulation means politically: I agree that the choices made in a simulation absolutely present a worldview. And on a purely personal level I would have liked to see this game include a lot more focus on a lot of the things you also seem to want it to have. But the part of your post I'm less clear about is your (apparent) contention (and I could be misinterpreting you) that it is inherently dishonest or undesirable for the game to advance any worldview at all. What is the alternative to that? Would it be a simulation that picks which systems are more effective at random? A game is just software--at some point, someone has to write algorithms that work a certain way.

No, I definitely didn't mean to imply that it's wrong for a game to present any worldview. Certainly games can have opinions and advance them. But what opinion does Sim City advance? That American-style cities are desirable? No, it advances the opinion that only American-style cities are viable. It's literally impossible to build a European style 20% tax public transportation city. If you try to move things in that direction, your city falls apart. The message here is that if you try to do something sensible with respect to transportation, you will crash and burn. That's a silly message to send because clearly Europe makes it work. Sim City 4 is an example of something that sends the right message: multiple transportation solutions work, as long as you implement them correctly. (It probably still fucks the taxation up but whatever.)

The kind of city that SimCity represents is not the kind of city that I prefer to live in. In every city I've made, I've filled it up with streetcars and buses because it's appealing to me, and I don't much care if it's optimal or not. But you keep bringing up European cities and I don't see why Maxis is under any particular moral responsibility to represent European cities rather than some other kind. I mean, as you point out, there are a few novelty European buildings--but EVERYTHING ELSE in the game is clearly modeled after American cities. I don't buy the argument that by calling it "SimCity" rather than "Sim American City," Maxis has exceeded some arbitrary authority. I mean, "Anno 1404" doesn't represent a single thing going on outside the specific European-style fiefdoms the game chooses to represent, even though in the year 1404 AD there was an entire planet of other stuff going on.

I guess I think the responsibility falls on Maxis because they don't seem to be very clear about how they're just letting you build American cities. The Gamasutra article I linked is a great example. That dude lives in the UK and used Sim City to model his UK city to figure out UK traffic patterns. Neither he nor anyone in the comments at any point said anything like "well, Sim City is a very American-centric game and you can't really use it to draw conclusions about anything other than preternaturally tiny American cities." I think the Anno 1404 comparison isn't really on point - if Anno had had a "Chinese" set of buildings and stuff, I think it would be a totally fair criticism of the game to say that its game mechanics didn't at all support any sensible sort of Chinese history lesson.

Again, as a matter of taste, I'm bummed out that Maxis didn't choose to allow for broader and more modern approaches to municipal planning. And even divorced from taste, I think you could make a perfectly good case that in the kind of cities that SimCity chooses to represent, Maxis STILL failed to take into account plenty of legitimate planning, transit, and revenue models. That to me is totally legitimate, and I agree. But if they didn't even attempt to make a game about, say, modern socialist European city planning techniques, well, so be it. I think it's clear to everyone that this game broadly represents American cities, which are pretty much universally hooked into the national interstate system and are built around road networks built for cars. You may not like that that's how American cities have developed, but it's true. Now, if they've misrepresented (or underserved) what is possible with THOSE cities, then I think those weaknesses are fair game for criticism. But when it comes to wishful thinking that they didn't bite off the particular other culture you would have wanted them to focus on in their game, I guess that's just too bad. You might be better served simply looking into any of the other city simulators that aim to represent those cultures.

I think I have a twofold disagreement. The first is that I don't really see Sim City as being just American, but I'll grant for the sake of the argument that it is. Besides that, I think I would argue that the game is misrepresenting the possibilities for American cities because a car-centric design is hardly necessary in America. Just look at New York, for instance, and more importantly look at cities like Washington DC, Chicago, and so on that incorporate mass transit like trains or subways into their planning. If we were building those cities from the ground up today, I don't think anyone would say that a car-centric design is the only option and certainly not everyone would say it's the best option. But as far as I can tell, the newest Sim City, aside from some bus stuff and some park and ride stuff, assumes that all cities must be car-centric. That's patently wrong, in America and in the rest of the world, especially if you are building a new city, because people have tried and succeeded in making cities that aren't just car-centric.

But the car issue is just a subset of the larger point - I think games that purport to represent reality in a neutral way have a responsibility to model that reality in a way that at least approximates the actual reality. Sim City, I think, very definitely claims to be at least broadly "right" about how stuff works. But it rules things out of the possibility space that are, in the real world, possible. And in doing so, it is complicit with the efforts of others to rule those options out, and when we rule actual options out at the "reality" stage rather than the "choiceworthy" stage, we're doing it wrong. It's incorrect at best and manipulative and deceptive at worst.

I mean, that's part of what makes games creative works and not just emotionless systems. That's why it IS interesting to compare American city builders and European ones. I wouldn't criticize a European city simulator for not being an American one. But you might very well criticize either one for giving short shrift to the cities they aim to model.

But Sim City makes no effort to communicate the fact that its "creative" aspect inheres not just in the obvious creative choices they've made, but in the very reality they're modeling! You have to ask yourself why certain choices make a city thrive in the context of the game and why certain choices make it founder. If those choices make it thrive or founder because they're bad choices in the context of the simulation, I think Sim City wants to claim that, at least vaguely, these are bad choices in life, too. To the extent putting trash next to your residential district or putting polluting industries on the pristine coastline or leaving fire stations out of your city master plan result in issues, I take it Sim City is claiming that this happens not because some designer arbitrarily decided, one day, to make this the case, but because the designer was trying to capture the sort of thing that happens in real life.

So when Sim City makes a failure out of a city built to be walkable or public-transitable or heavily taxed or whatever, or even worse, doesn't even let you try, surely this sends the message not that some designer arbitrarily ruled these viable options out for no reason other than unexplainable capriciousness, but rather than the designer ruled them out because they don't work, or they're not even close to optimal. And that is my complaint. The central conceit of Sim City is that you are building a city. Your options are, to some abstract degree, the options that people have when they make cities. And when your options don't fit the actual options, or lead to outcomes divorced entirely from the actual outcome, it seems to me the game is being disingenuous with respect to its central conceit, not that the game is engaged in a perfectly understandable act of fictionalization.

You had a conversation about Reciever a few episodes ago on the podcast. You noted how much you liked that it actually made solid the sorts of interactions you have to go through to use a gun - you thought it was gross how many games are about nothing but shooting people but at the same time how those games treat guns completely different from how a gun actually works. As far as I can tell, Sim City is trying to put itself into the Receiver category of games about cities, not the other category (and in fact I can't think of any city games that would go into the "let's just have fun, fuck realism" category of city builders - Age of Empires actually comes pretty close, I think, because I remember having lots of fun building cool looking ancient cities in that without worrying a fig about how it worked in the simulation, because there was no simulation). Sim City is to cities as Reciever is to guns: it goes through a stupendous amount of trouble to model as much as it can to a great degree of fidelity.

But now imagine that Receiver made it impossible to operate a gun in some way. Maybe it won't let you pull the slide back or whatever. One response would be to say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Receiver, I guess you can't pull the slide of a gun back." That sounds odd, doesn't it? Why can't you pull the slide back? There's no in-universe justification, and in fact Receiver doesn't have any in-universe justification of any of its gun porn. It just treats guns like actual guns and assumes that you will understand why it does this: it's modeling actual guns! So its failure to model one sort of gun action would be inexplicable.

Sim City is like that. Why can't I build a walkable/public transportation city? Why can I buy British DLC or whatever even though my attempts to recreate London are going to crumble and fail? Surely you can't say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Sim City, I guess cities can't be walkable." That's just crazy! Sim City goes to no effort to explain that it takes place in a magic land where cities can only work like people in 1950's America (incorrectly) thought they had to work.

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Yeah, it's entirely a tax-driven revenue system, which is a huge shame. I'd love to have the ability to nationalize some industry in this game.

 

Which leads to something else that I've never considered before: This game essentially has nationalized healthcare, right? There's no indication that healthcare is tied to employment like it often is in America, so the only other explanation is that Sim's provides universal coverage.

I wonder what kind of tax it's supposed to be. Income, sales, or property?

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I wonder what kind of tax it's supposed to be. Income, sales, or property?

 

I assume it's a mixture of income/property, and when your city reaches a certain size, you're able to manage taxes along three-tiers of high, medium, and low density zones. One thing I've noticed regarding taxes: Anytime I increase them for the residential zones, the income I receive from the industrial/commercial zones automatically decreases, because residents have less spendable income to use in those zones. Which, of course, makes complete sense, but I was so pleased that the game took actual economic systems (however basic) into account in its design.

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I think of the resources in the game as essentially nationalized industry -- you create mines, then you explicitly turn those into alloys or plastics, then you plop down processor plants or make TV or whatnot, and all of those structures are paid for by taxes.

 

Whereas the general freight shipping isn't nearly as planned, industry just tries to deliver fright to commercial buildings to get money for themselves, which makes them happier.  You can build a trade depot and hook into that system but it exists without it.

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You're right about paying for industry with taxes, but as far as I'm aware, you don't ever make a profit off of those same industries. So, you're paying for them with tax income and maintaining them with tax income, but you're not able to profit off them. If I'm ever able to get the intra-city, intra-region trading working, maybe then I'll see some actual revenue coming from my commercial/industrial sectors, but for right now it seems like I'm dealing with all of the negatives of nationalization with none of the positives.

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You're right about paying for industry with taxes, but as far as I'm aware, you don't ever make a profit off of those same industries. So, you're paying for them with tax income and maintaining them with tax income, but you're not able to profit off them. If I'm ever able to get the intra-city, intra-region trading working, maybe then I'll see some actual revenue coming from my commercial/industrial sectors, but for right now it seems like I'm dealing with all of the negatives of nationalization with none of the positives.

At least with the specialized industry buildings (coal, oil, etc) you can sell the resource to the "global market" through a trade depot and make some money that way. I don't think you can do the same with freight. 

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You're right about paying for industry with taxes, but as far as I'm aware, you don't ever make a profit off of those same industries. So, you're paying for them with tax income and maintaining them with tax income, but you're not able to profit off them. If I'm ever able to get the intra-city, intra-region trading working, maybe then I'll see some actual revenue coming from my commercial/industrial sectors, but for right now it seems like I'm dealing with all of the negatives of nationalization with none of the positives.

 

You can:  Basic trade depot -> build something that gets you resource like an oil well -> build the corresponding storage at the depot ->  click 'Manage Global Market' on the trade depot -> set to export for that dollar amount.  Direct income.  You don't need any other cities in the region for that.

 

Recycling plants are really profitable because they can turn trash directly into alloys and plastics which are higher order resources than oil and coil.

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Ah ok. I guess I just haven't gotten far enough to really figure out how to actually make money. Good to know that I don't have to rely only on taxes for the rest of the game.

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An industrial focused city often has a huge deficit, even to the order of tens of thousands an hour, but more than makes up for it with those sales.

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I just did some tests in sandbox mode, and it seems like they've tweaked the traffic a bit for the better.  Which is also effecting where sims 'choose' to live, since they are considering traffic at least a bit now, I'm seeing fewer situations where they all aim for the same house (since if they do they cause traffic and sims behing them decide they live in a different house?) 

 

Wish I had saved my earlier test cities though, it'd be interesting to create perfect little test cases and then compare against the patches.

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Flynn, on 10 Mar 2013 - 19:55, said:

An industrial focused city often has a huge deficit, even to the order of tens of thousands an hour, but more than makes up for it with those sales.

Ouch, really? First city, no industry, no one else in the region, and I was running a massive surplus despite the unemployment. Like the game was on easy mode and all I had to do was sit there.

Oh, and why does the multi lane/streetcar stuff cost so damned much? It says 30 simoleons per... whatever, but you place it down and two second later your spending tens of thousands.

Also, city size needs to be bigger, MUCH bigger. Each "city" feels like a little experiment, not a city, one play session and your city might be done. Four times as big and with proper highways (only way to manage traffic) should be called for. Still, my first experiment was fun, and I'll make another tomorrow.

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The global trading was very confusing at first. I didn't even realize it was there until very late in my first city (which ended up in a nuclear disaster). I have loads of buildings related to trading but I have no idea whether I'm making money or losing it. I'm sure there is screen that tells me exactly that, but I haven't bothered to check it out yet because so far I'm doing good.

 

I'd say that this is a minor complaint compared to the server issues, but I'm really disappointed by the lack of New Year's fireworks in this game. In SimCity 4, I remember watching those tiny sparks from my god-view and feeling somewhat responsible for those tiny people that cared so much about an arbitrary date that meant practically nothing to me as a player. I bet they thought the fireworks filled the entire sky.

 

I like the Antarctica server. I bet it caused nervous laughter at the Maxis office. 

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The way you guys are describing the way sims seemingly live anywhere is weird, but I guess there are limits. Clearly the simulation could be as sophisticated as Maxis likes (and I bet hidden toggles make it so), but there's a big performance trade-off for serious number crunching and simulation.

I guess in a way the somewhat random driving around to find a suitable home kind of emulates the kind of traffic you find in real life when people are taking kids to school, hitting the shops, joyriding, meeting friends, etc. Not sure how much of that the game simulates but I'm sure it's missing some real-world driving that goes on. Adds to the feeling of randomness I guess. ;)

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I could've sworn I'd seen screenshots of fireworks, Nappi. Those don't happen at New Year's?

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What would really help is some kind of history when you click on sims or locations.  So when a sim says, "There's no place to shop!" even though they live next door to a freaking shop, you have some clue.  It might say they tried to go shopping but were caught in traffic for example, something that happens all the time.   Or it did go to a store but it was closed because there were not enough medium wealth employees to staff it.  

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I could've sworn I'd seen screenshots of fireworks, Nappi. Those don't happen at New Year's?

 

There is fireworks when you upgrade your Town Hall or Major's Mansion. It doesn't feel the same, unfortunately.

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