Ultimate SimCity 3000™

in 2009 an architecture student by the online handle emperor v omnica completed an experiment in simcity 3000 that would forever go down in history as the largest and most interesting urban sprawl ever created in the history of the game dubbed magnusanti a staggering metropolis of over 6 million population far beyond a gamesave file that's a boundary pushing work of art and careful engineering to perfectly optimize the game's parameters revealing what some have considered a horrifying orwellian impression of the dystopian mechanics that undergird simcity and one might extend that to the natural laws that govern the growth and dynamics of real-life cities in urban design the project was carried out with such robust testing and clout that outlets like polygon and even the museum of modern art covered the hellish metropolis in their own videos and articles about the project it's the ultimate design i always tried to create as a youngster when i would play the original sim city on super nintendo and to be quite frank i was envious of the amount of blood sweat and math that were poured into this project i had to find out more the original game files are available for download if you own simcity3000 and want to see it for yourself so before i try to recreate it what is magnusonte let's break it down into its constituent components every city needs transportation in magnusanti there are no roads but rather a grid-like arrangement of rippling underground subway stations radiating out from the city center there are no schools or hospitals but only a never-ending string of the same library funded with literally zero dollars and maximally funded police stations to achieve order control and maximum population density magnusontians are exceptionally stupid people entirely uneducated and no one survives past the age of 55. zoning is baffling but it makes sense i guess every other block repeats the same alternating pattern of commercial residential and industrial zones optimized to ensure there's little pollution and lots of people despite the lack of roads and cars the paid parking industry is still booming and every single commercial square in the city is inhabited by a large 2x2 parking garage situated between 10 other parking garages all of which lead to nowhere no streets but somehow popular demand keeps calling for more of them and business is booming what else is there to say it's basically ray bradbury's fahrenheit 451 the city has 6 billion dollars or simoleons if you're really trying to sound cultured and it took 50 000 years to complete it but one can only imagine that for emperor v omnica it took much longer to puzzle out exactly how to engineer the foundation of this monstrosity so after much doodoo flinging and overly involved analysis i decided to see if i could use the famous design as a model for myself and achieve the same or similar results in less than 50 000 years what would my own personal version of hell look like forget everything you know the year is 1900 and will be starting with call power one of the most advanced forms of energy production known to man i didn't want to cheat myself in the money so i decided to earn cash the old-fashioned way by attracting people and then taxing the heck out of them to keep evolving my city into its final form the main question simcity asks the player is this where are you going to put all of your garbage to which the only appropriate answer is yes of course you need to pollute if you want to start generating money but better somewhere else than over here it was very nice in here it wasn't long before our new city new city was zoned up and generating oodles of dollars every fiscal quarter ten thousand simoleons cash in surprisingly short order it seemed that we had already maxed out our rci meter even after i had surrounded the city with pollution giving it to other people what was the meaning of this so in response to tepid growth i funded a campaign to remove funding from all the local libraries demand for the stupid libraries catalyzed a watershed moment and residential demand soared once again thus through the construction of libraries designed for our dumb population we grew our numbers without raising our expenses in my probing of the seamy underbelly of the formulas for the governing dynamics in simcity this was the first anomaly where i would say that things were seriously out of whack if the government is an agent that desires only more taxpayers no matter how stupid and unhappy they are then this was the first area set in my sights so the years passed 1900 2000 we seized the new millennium poised for growth if i couldn't hit pay dirt immediately i'd have to call upon everything i'd learned as a sim city player to mold the dystopian utopia of my dreams pollution to the sides keep the people in the middle prevent them from escaping commercial zones blend the two in a continuous spectrum of urban hues and so in every city there's actually a tale of two cities the first one that pollutes and taxes rampantly in order to fund the next generation where you can afford cleaner cheaper energy and build on the labors of the fathers for me this meant an outer city of rhodes my first city while i made inroads toward my own personal magnusanti starting with the subway tunnels that led to the urban center of my second city containing a primary transit hub that would be the heart of our new metropolis like a cancerous parasite that ultimately takes on the likeness of its host the new city reached outward and engulfed the outer lying lowlands in an assertion of its dominance bleeding the old city of taxes and population until the former was merely a shadow of its lofty towers rise magnusati rise out of the ashes of your former shell and become everything you're supposed to be after major development i created a tapestry of zoning nearly identical to the original still i was nowhere near 6 million population even with half the city zoned we remain stuck at a paltry 100 000 pop with half the storefronts opened then immediately abandoned we had to buff up those numbers or else die in the cradle so after decades of collecting a few hundred dollars a year despite our mistakes we managed to carve out subway connections to attract migrants from nearby towns and build up a strip of three by three dense industrial zones opening the flood gates to a watershed moment where our population doubled to 200k and then the dam burst after the explosion of the power plants we ousted the cadres of established families that had been hoarding up all the land i'm not kidding you after massive blackouts in an exodus what followed was the great migration into new magnusonte a baby boom by blowing up our power plants we flexed on nearby towns that we were not afraid of pain leading kindred spirits their way into our borders to be fruitful and multiply memorizing this zoning pattern took forever but it became my mantra in tirelessly planning the city as de facto immortal emperor mayor forever through the next three centuries we passed a half million and beyond but with almost the entire cities owned we remain stuck at only six or seven hundred thousand what was holding us back from our full potential there's no i in team but there is an eye in city i had forgotten what was the most important that my people didn't actually matter the city was actually losing money every year in my efforts to lay that foundation i came close to quitting here to be fair i had actually come very close to recreating the physical zones identical to the original magnusanti but there was still more work to do we raised taxes and passed a million population then i did what any other self-respecting simcity player would do i left my computer running and i went to the grocery store while my tax bureau leeched the population for unfathomable hordes of wealth for the next hundred years when i returned like magic we were rich and all it had required was a century of complete neglect i don't know emperor rv omnica but i do know this that man should be invited into mensa for 600 years we watched the population grow removing one obstacle at a time that prevented our people from reproducing and filling up that hopeful metropolis i did everything i could an interlacing citywide law enforcement themed venn diagram composed of the radii of each of my police headquarters completely dismantling crime hundreds of post-apocalyptic libraries filled with books that no one would ever read but somehow kept a constant stream of migrants incoming maxed out the transit funding and even a subway and rail connection on literally every tile of the map multiple neighbor agreements to fully utilize every square inch of real estate sanitizing the water building parks in the center i had done literally every possible thing to make my city just as good and yet i was a sim city failure but the underlying capital t truth is this the greatest joy i get is probing that black box of underlying formulas that govern the growth and dynamics of a city it's not about the result but the story that got me there that was when the fires began and the free thinkers returned to magnusanti to set that prison of metropolis ablaze and an infernal welcome for the next generation something moving something with errors something that it's a joy to puzzle and ponder over for hours and hours a major thanks to clayton ashley of polygon and emperor v omnica and the moma for inspiring this i'll leave those links down below so you can go check them out and thanks to my patrons well thanks for watching as always i'm ambiguous amphibian until next time

Channel: ambiguousamphibian

Views: 1,322,150

Keywords: simcity, best city, the best simcity, magnasanti, simcity 3000, simcity 3000 magnasanti, simcity 4, simcity design, sim city, the sims, sims, simulation, ambiguousamphibian, ambiguous amphibian, ambiguousamphibian sims, ambiguousamphibian simcity, simcity part 1, simcity ep 1, simcity game, simcity gameplay, simcity 3000 game, simcity 3000 gameplay, let's play simcity 3000, let's play simcity, simcity let's play, simcity pc

Id: Y5iYcTKjvTQ

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/zzjeffrey]

One of my favorite creators on YouTube. Never played SC3000 but learnt a lot from this video!