StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Vincent Ocasla says that in fashioning the "Magnasanti" metropolis, he has "beaten" SimCity by creating the max stable population of six million. It consists of four grids of identical 12 x 12 grids with everyone's workplace within walking distance. There are no roads, the city runs entirely on subways. There's zero abandoned buildings zero congestion, and zero water pollution. It sounds like paradise, but it hides a dark core with a sinister message for would-be top-down urban planners.

Ocasla told Vice:

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Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don't need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it's like going to the same place....

...The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
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They also don't live past age 50, which Ocasla is fine with because max population, not max longevity, was the goal.

In this over-the-top video, you can watch how Vince made the city, a process of trial and error that took four years to complete and involved burrowing into the code and math of SimCity to figure out how to game the ultimate solution. It comes off as a bit occultish and intimidating, so much so that, according to a comment Vince made on his YouTube channel, the original video was falsely flagged and taken down from YouTube for containing Satanic messages. That's okay, it's nearly Halloween.

The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Trawling through one of the user forums discussing the city, we find the kind of encoded conversation that is at once alien and familiar to real world discussions of architecture and urbanism, only this time I am on the other side of the fence:

I can’t see the industry from here, but by the EQ I take it you went with clean? You realize you could squeeze in 2 more workers per tile with dirty? And you got them to behave with rail-to-subway stations? Good stuff.

Are all your residential and commercial zones low land value, high density? That’s the best for max pop. I assume they’re all historical?

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:

The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Sounds like a Randroid Teabagger wet dream to me. I wouldn't live in Magnasanti. I wonder what it would look like with happiness and longevity optimization?

The Grim Squeaker wrote:So, the future of high density living is Megacity 1? (Well, not even that, Meg1 Habs don't require citizens to leave their buildings for education/food/work in most cases).
Big deal

AniThyng wrote:Looks like the realization of the industrial slab sided Arcology from Simcity 2000 which is basically exactly what this is - worker drones shackled into a gigantic metropolis in a building.

YT300000 wrote:

AniThyng wrote:Looks like the realization of the industrial slab sided Arcology from Simcity 2000 which is basically exactly what this is - worker drones shackled into a gigantic metropolis in a building.

Except that this one won't fly into space at some point in the future.