Throughput

what you lost won't bring the boom back.Dying cities have been revived with more careful stimulus, such as a whole new industrial district set down beside the neighborhood that was starving for work. Jay Forrester's Urban Dynamics argued jobs revive a declining city where housing programs fail. Here you can test theories before the next downbeat.Boom and correction is economics, doing the job other city builders give to a bank balance. The bar for the next Euphoric mode climbs along a logarithmic curve, so the pressure that shaped your first twenty residents is still shaping your seven-thousandth.Meanwhile, Aura blooms across the map. Busy, mixed traffic on surface streets makes a neighborhood lively. Industry and traffic necrotize the ground around them. Parks can help keep Degeneration at bay, but a park with negative Aura will only make the problem worse. It’s Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities manifested.Playtesters named the practice "aura farming." One of them never chased Throughput at all and grew a small, stable, glowing town. Another raced to Euphoric, then got buried in negative Aura on the way down: "I built Detroit."The city grows new organs to serve new needs: avenues when a street first runs hot, subways when commutes get long, highways the first time you reach Euphoric.Schools lead to offices, offices ship software, and software wants an internet.Eventually the game offers you a data center. It produces vast amounts of software and needs very few humans. (Playtester, verbatim: "DATA CENTER??")You've spent hours wiring yourself into this organism. The data center is the moment it stops needing bodies, and what you do about that is the story the late game leaves with you.The controls melt into intuition. Z undoes anything. Hold shift and roads lay themselves in a grid.Saturated, vector-bright, deliberately abstract. An original soundtrack spanning a spectrum of electronic music.Headphones on. Lock in.