Cityville is the newest of the "city sims" that are currently popular on Facebook. It is also the latest Zynga game, so there's a lot of force behind its design and marketing.
Like most city sims, Cityville sets you up as the leader of a small town destined for greatness. Many of these games are set in historic periods such as ancient Rome, but Cityville chooses something that looks like small town America, which I like.
At its roots the game play is fairly standard for this type of game. You buy structures and place them on the map. Each structure has a timer associated with it. After the timer is finished you can click on it to collect some money. Spend your money on bigger and better structures; rinse and repeat.
However, Cityville has some very interesting twists and additions to this standard formula. Let's explore the good and bad, shall we.
First, the good. Cityville has an interesting modification of the standard money loop. It does have the standard structures (in this case residences) which simply spit out money at regular intervals, but it also has a more complex money loop for businesses. They are not really generators, they are transformers. The player acquires "goods" from multiple sources and puts them into a business. That business then converts the goods into money with varying degrees of efficiency (and time) depending on the building.
Goods are primarily gained through a simple farming mechanic. There are a limited number of crops with varying grow cycles. It costs money to plant them, then they produce goods, which you run through the business to make more money. Rinse and repeat.
So why not just load up on residences, which don't require the goods step? Two reasons. First, there is a hard cap on residences. Each one provides population for the city, and you have a cap on that based on how many Community buildings you've built, and they aren't easy to build so the cap doesn't go up very quickly. Second, the residences are sure money, but not very fast money. Using the goods/money loop is far more efficient. It's really the primary economy driver, with residences just being a good way to pick up some spare cash.
Good mechanic #2: Quests! Zynga took a page from their Frontierville game and loaded the game with quests. I've been playing a few days now and I've never run out of little goals to shoot for. The quest system is fairly simplistic compared to Frontierville. It really just guides you toward doing what you should be doing anyway or setting minor goals for you. It doesn't have any of the crazy "ask your friends" items, etc. I find it to be a fun little addition that makes me feel like I always know what I should be doing at any time.
Good mechanic #3: Boosters. Zynga clearly did their research and checked out what their competition was doing. This mechanic is lifted straight out of Millionaire City. Decorations in the game are functional and position matters. When you place a flowerbed or stop sign or what-have-you, it has a radius associated with it. All residences and businesses in that radius get a percentage bonus to their output based on the particular decoration. It really encourages you to set up your city in certain ways. City blocks are very important because it allows the maximum number of buildings to surround a set of decorations and all get the stacking and overlapping bonuses. As an aside, though, I think a hardcore look at this mechanic might show you that the rewards for careful placement are not really that great when you stack them against the amount of time it takes to get everything just right, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
Good mechanic #4: Streets. This part is not really about how streets function as a mechanic, but about how they make the game feel. In most of these games, streets are purely decorative. Any powergamer worth the name quickly discards them and packs his buildings in as tightly as possible to get maximum gain from their limited space. That is NOT true for Cityville. All buildings must have at least one side on a street in order to function. Well, the community buildings and storage buildings don't for some reason, but the residences and businesses do. Like the Boosters above, this helps make sure that your city actually looks like a city and not a storage area for old buildings.
Good mechanic #5: Bonus bar. This works just like in Frontierville. Whenever you collect anything in the game, an icon pops out and you can click on it. If you don't, you'll still get the reward after a couple seconds, but if you do a bonus bar starts to fill up. The more things you collect in a period of time, the higher the bonus. It fades out after a few seconds to further encourage you to get as much done in a short time as possible. It makes you feel clever for waiting to do as much as possible in a short time, which is really just a nice bonus for logging in at farther intervals.
Good mechanic #6: Train! There's a train which functions as sort of a trading post. You can choose to either send goods around to some number of your friends asking if they would like to purchase them, or send money around to them to ask if they want to sell any goods. All the amounts are set in stone, and there's a timer involved, but I think it's a fairly clever way to put trading into a game.
Good mechanic #7: Franchises. Basically, players can put down plots in their city which their friends can use to build businesses on. The player who owns the town treats it as a normal business for the most part (transmuting their goods into money,) and the player who places it gets bonuses from it in exchange for having put it down and supplying it with goods once per day. It's one of the more clever social mechanics I've seen.
Good mechanic #8: Collections! This is very similar to Frontierville. Most buildings and crops occasionally spit out "items" which go into collections. These items are organized into sets, and when all the items in a set have been found they can be turned in for a bonus. It just adds another level of interest to everything in the game, although see below for the flip side.
OK, now the bad. #1 Bugs! OK, this isn't a mechanic, but it's the single most frustrating thing about the game at the moment. There have been some fairly serious bugs that have lessened my enjoyment of the game. For one the game forces random refreshes after you've just collected all your buildings and farms, forcing you to do it all again. Then there was one that prevented me from asking people for resources I needed to complete a building. I know the game says "beta" on it, but really, all Facebook games say that and you shouldn't be driving traffic to your game with these kinds of problems.
Bad mechanic #2: Economic holes. There are a lot of minor glitches and flaws in the game economy. For one thing, the balance curve for goods production is off. The general shape is correct with fast crops being more efficient because you have to manage them better, but the long term crops are just terrible in comparison. The longest term crop I plant is 8 hours, and that's usually only because I'll get slightly more while I'm sleeping. The only time I've planted longer crops is for quests. This also creates a problem for collections in that if you want to do the corn collection you need to plant corn, which is a terrible crop. Now, you don't have to do the corn collection for anything, but it's still annoying.
Also, there's no 2 hour crops (at least not yet.) It jumps from 1 hour to 4 hours, which is a considerable difference. It would be a nice middle ground, and see below.
Bad mechanic #3: Energy. In general I don't really mind energy in games. However, in Cityville it ties directly and strongly into the economy. It's the primary reason that the fast goods can be so efficient. You really can't sit there and gather high efficiency crops because each one takes an energy and you will burn it much faster than it regenerates. Since collecting from buildings also takes energy it puts a lot of pressure on balancing collecting goods and collecting money versus energy regeneration.
Bad mechanic #4:Storage. The concept is easy. You have a limit on the amount of goods you can hold at any one time. You can increase the maximum by building special buildings. As a money sink it's not bad, but in practice the entire system is just annoying. Also, the buildings that increase your cap take up valuable real estate.
These three bad mechanics all come together in a perfect storm to make the economic cycle very frustrating at times. If you plant fast crops you run out of energy. So you plant slower crops. While you're waiting for them to mature you run through all of your goods and have empty businesses sitting around. Ah, but you could just grow more of the slow crops! Not really, because you have a storage cap, so it's very difficult to gather a large amount of crops at one time. So you increase the storage cap by spending money and space on storage buildings.
Ideally, there's a balance in there somewhere. There's some amount of storage space that allows you to grow the perfect number of crops with the correct cycle, and the exact right businesses to use up those goods and make sure that your energy is recharged when the next crops mature. Honestly, I kind of like that challenge, and some of the mechanics like the train help correct errors, but I can image that it might get very frustrating for casual players.
Overall, though, I really enjoy Cityville. It's easily the most fun of any of the city sims I've played, including City of Wonder (which I also quite like.) Once again Zynga has taken all the best elements from other games on Facebook and added some clever touches of their own to create a "best in breed" game.
