Can Home Tycoon Learn From Sim City Social?
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
Home Tycoon was recently voted the best new game in SCEA Home for the year 2012 in the AlphaZone4 competition. It beat out many great games to achieve this title, including Cutthroats and Mercia, two of my favorites. It is a great achievement for Hellfire Games to be able to gain this award in a year filled with new, innovative games in the Home community.
Before Tycoon came into Home, I had never played a city building game, or any type of Sims game really. I’m more of an RPG fan, and until I came into Home, I hadn’t played any kind of social game on the Internet or anywhere else. I have invested a bit of money into this game though. I found that I liked it very much, especially once they gave me the ability to move my buildings around without destroying them. I recently bought the newest expansion pack for TransUtopia in the Rising Revenues edition of Tycoon. I am glad this expansion pack came out, since the free expansion pack, Aggressive Promotions, which appeared over the holidays made me wreck my pollution levels to finish the quest. I like to keep my city clean.
As I started to get into rebuilding my city, I was invited by a friend to try a Facebook-based, city-building game called Sim City Social by Electronic Arts. I should to tell you right up front, I’ve never played any Facebook games before, so I viewed this one with a bit of skepticism. It intrigued me because I like Home Tycoon and thought I might enjoy trying a different kind of Sim City building game as well. However, I am not an active Facebook person — I rarely go there or post anything.
I started the game and was quickly drawn into it. There is an extremely active social element in it, where friends help you every step of the way, through sending you needed materials to helping you build, as well as by becoming a part of the game itself through moving into your city and supplying its workforce in some of the building quests. The game has several quests, from building museums and “attractions” like parks and mini-golf courses, to investigating alien ship crashes and an Atlantis light house in the ocean. It has both whimsical and serious things to do. Some have time limits that force you to act quickly or lose the associated reward, unlike Tycoon, where you have all the time in the world to complete your missions.
The time limits force you to find friends to help you complete the missions or pay for diamonds, the currency of the game. It is here that Electronic Arts makes their real life money. Sim City Social is a freemium game, just like many in Home, which can be played quickly if you invest money in it, or at a more leisurely pace if you don’t mind waiting and taking the chance you might not complete a timed mission. I have been having a lot of fun with this game, and I can see why it won an award for being the best game on Facebook in 2012.
Spend you money here if you wish to.
I think that Home Tycoon is a great game for what it does, but I also think they could learn a lesson or two from the way Sim City Social plays out. First, consider the friends system. When I first bought Tycoon, I had many people come to visit my city to see what I was up to with it. This rewarded me with $200 of in-game money for each “tourist” that showed up to take a look. This is a great idea at first glance, the idea being that if you visit my city I will visit yours, and so on. The problem here is the person visiting has nothing to do once they arrive, except drive around if they have a car. Also they receive nothing from the visit unless you choose to go to their city.
This whole tourist idea worked for about a couple weeks, then people stopped coming to see my city at all. They either got caught up in another game in Home, or stopped coming because they had their own cities to tend to. I have several friends who haven’t been back to their cities for weeks now, let alone gone to other people’s. My tourism has stopped completely, and I have received little or no revenue from it in weeks. On the other hand, I look forward to going to my Sim City game each day, because my neighbors are there and we work together to help each other build our cities by visiting and also by gifting each other.
In Sim City you can gift a friend with a variety of things to help them achieve their goals, such as money and energy to use for tasks (which would correspond to the workers in Tycoon.) And the other thing is that when you visit them once a day, you are given a variety of things to do in their city; these give both you and your host rewards for each completed task. All the rewards are things that boost your ability to grow your city.
I could see something similar happening in Home Tycoon. For example, let’s say you go to a friend’s city, and once there you are given a short mission to perform, such as driving after a bear or chasing down an alien, both things that have already been programmed. Once the task has been completed, the guest would receive a reward of in game money, or perhaps a boost of extra workers for one-time use that day — say ten extras. This would make people want to go and visit each other, as they do in Sim City Social, which fosters cooperation between cities. This is just a suggestion — I am sure the people at Hellfire Games can come up with better ones.
New buildings from Transutopia.
The other thing Home Tycoon can learn from Sim City Social is variety. Frankly, I am getting tired of building tall skyscrapers and doughnut shops. There is a sports stadium, but no movie houses, grocery stores or fast food restaurants. It seems all the expansion packs are about is exactly that — expansion, and nothing more. So far I have had to build things I didn’t want to in order to accomplish the missions for increased population or employment, and that’s about it. Once completed, I have to destroy what I built to play the rest of the quest out. Having to tear down buildings and put others up, and in the process restructure my entire town, makes me shudder. There needs to be an inventory feature that allows me to store buildings, at the loss of population, revenue or employment only, like Sim City Social has. This already exists for buildings purchased with gold coins (which equate to real-world money); but buildings bought for in-game money simply vanish if you destroy them. It should only cost you the workers to rebuild.
Another thing that Sim City Social does is give you diamonds for leveling up in the game. It takes a long time to do it, but if Home Tycoon gave coins out for accomplishments, occasionally it might entice more people to stay active in the game. Sim City Social also gives you an opportunity to build certain structures that add diamonds to your coffers, but they cost quite a bit to buy, and this way Electronic Arts makes their money up front and yet encourages people by giving them the tools to build their cities.
All of these things would make Tycoon a much more social game and would pull the Home community together as they help each other build their cities. It would also encourage people who have become bored with the game some new incentive to redo their cities with more variety, even if it costs them to do so. And for those who can’t afford to buy coins, it would help them to become more active in the building of their cities as they visited each other and added money or workers to their coffers. It might even make them want to spend a little, to participate more fully in the game.
I believe that all of this would help Home Tycoon grow and prosper as the years in Home go by. And I hope it does prosper, because for a Home game it is fun and challenging.
January 17th, 2013 by Burbie52 | 3 comments
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
I like the concept in sim city social that your “Free” play is based on how much energy you have -- energy is refilled by visiting friends ” neighbor cities” , or by waiting for time to refill it , and of course you may purchase more energy, or by building power plants.
The energy limits your play -- smartly, making you come back to the game more often and interact with your friends to complete tasks and chapters.the more neighbors you have the better chances you have to finish each task -- especially those that are timed and offer special rewards.
Two Home games come to mind that are similar in setup, the midway and Digital Leisure casino. As you may over time play for free, but you may play as long as you wish by purchasing Midway tickets /or Casino chips. Its a system that works well and keeps people playing, by offering easy to understand games play and reward based on skill level.
It would be great to see more like games utilize that type of game play, especially when you can involve your friends (or not) to help each other advance.
Great article. I am glad I read this burbie.
Makes me shudder too Burbie. In fact, I think I’m pretty much done with Tycoon now. My reasons? The structure of the missions; as you mentioned earlier they’re all about higher populations and X amount being in your bank acc at one time. In my book, having to restructure my entire creation just to meet the demands of a mission are not what it should be about. That last DLC not only had taken me months to complete ( I’m playing the poor way) but once I was done my city was just an ugly garden of skyscrapers and factories, I’m still trying to fix it!
When I heard that the missions in the new Science pack were exactly the same ( except this time you have even higher goals of money and population to meet) that sealed the deal for me -- no chance I’m buying that! It was frustrating and disheartening enough the first time, I ain’t paying for a second helping!
I’m actually surprised that there’s so very little in the way of social elements in Tycoon, simply based on where the game lives -- a social network. Maybe it’s memory constraints or budget, whatever the reasons, untill some new game-play elements are introduced in the near future, I’ve had my fill with this game.