Special Buildings=BS Requirements

[Bally]

I don't understand why some of the special buildings require you to harm your city. I understand that some of us have a sick sense of humor and we like seeing our cities fall into calamity.
SOME of us...
Since the special buildings are required for monuments, it's a real pain to meet the requirements for some of them. The courthouse, for example, requires a 50% crime rate. I have shut down every police station and waited forever but my crime rate never peaked above 40%.
And some require a certain number of cemitaries to be full. First off, that's just morbid. Second, it discourages the use of creamatoriams (which are important space savers).
I really hope that the next patch changes these requirements to ones that make sense, like having 10 police buildings for the courthouse, or having 500 daily train riders for the Grand Central Station. I don't want to turn my city into a torture chamber just to be able to build monuments.

[Carlo]

Unlocks apply to all maps - so just do the bad ones on a city you don't care about, and then they'll be available in your 'main' city as well.

[Ragequit Inc.]

Originally posted by Carlo:

Unlocks apply to all maps - so just do the bad ones on a city you don't care about, and then they'll be available in your 'main' city as well.

Is that so? Well, that doesn't really make any sense and is just bad design in my book.

[Ddraig]

Not bad design at all. Makes you experiment with different things and rewards you for trying them. In fact it's a pretty good design.

[simonmd]

Hmmm, i'm kind of on the fence on this one. While I agree with the OP, Ddraig makes a good point as well. Personally, I unlocked a couple of buildings by starting a 'fake city' and just ruining it to get the achievements. I wonder if CO just decided to play an ironic joke by setting these seemingly hypocritical targets?

[Liquid ID]

They are achievement rewards. Not all of them really make a whole lot of sense.

If you have a large enough city to attempt fulfilling the requirements, just save your city as a different file. Go into it, do what dastardly deeds you need to do or make a huge strip of ugly zoning and don't worry about the mess or repercussions. Get requirements, quit game. Load your pristine wonderful city and slap the monument down.

Or just mod the game.

[Dexter]

Steam already have a seprate achievements system and this game already have steam achievements. I don't understand why in-game buildings have requirements that are so similar to achievements.

And it's not like the 50% crime building reward is a wad of cash or a free Police HQ to help out struggling players, it's basically another building that helps raise properly value and also a building leading up to a major monument at the end. So the requirement is kind of out of context and out of place.

I am in agreement with OP the requirements for special buildings is pretty ridiculous, and the easiest one to unlock is usually the space elevator, probably the least useful of all of them just because all the unique buildings leading up to the elevator are actually rewarding players for growing/building their cities.

I think building rewards need to be about your cities hitting certain milestones, not forcing players to turn off schools to get 15k elementary students or to do this or that.

It should be: "hey, you have 20k people using transit, here's a new park to celebrate it". That's how Sim City has always done it and that part of Sim City has always worked to encourage players to keep playing. (ie: it's not why SC2013 was panned by fans) it rewards growth and many of the rewards are sort of milestone achievements most everyone can get.

Yes there will always be an element of micromanagement and pushing the envelope. A bit of a bragging right to say you got the park at 50k pop instead of 75k because you grew your city well, but it's never unreasonable nor does it force you to do stupid things to your city.

Hence I felt the unique buildings/monuments rewards felt much more like the dev's attempt to keep players spinning their wheels with an under 100k city for a while longer because frankly the game doesn't scale very well beyond 100k. All the service buildings aren't modular and you just have to keep doing fractal replications of your city to keep it growing.

[simonmd]

I think thats the best evaluation of it.