Drawing Board I: Planning Mode

Now that I've laid out all the basic design principles for the game, I'd like to take a little break and speculate about some specific features that I think would be good advancements over SC4 and would make for a really compelling experience.  Note the use of "speculate" up there: I debated staying away from this subject, for fear of distracting too much attention from the more immediate focus of the project (fundraising).  But, let's face it, talking corporate structure and budgetary allocations all the time is a bit dry, and this stuff is fun to think about.  Besides, I have a whole list of these ideas and hey, it's my blog :)  So, I'll indulge myself a bit here, with an important disclaimer:

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
This series of posts are not to be read as "official" ideas for the Metropolis Project, they are simply my personal thoughts about what some cool game features might be.  The final feature set for the game will be decided by the community and the development team contracted to build the game, and may not include any of these things.

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OK, so to kick it off, here's one that I think would be a) easy to implement b) useful for players and c) more realistic:  Planning Mode.  This is something I always felt was missing from Sim City 4 (and is missing even worse from Cities XL where you can't pause.)  In a way it's a more elaborate version of a common (for other software) and much-requested feature: an undo button.  Here's how it would work:

When you entered Planning mode (a simple button or keyboard toggle), the game would pause; You would be able to lay streets, bridges, zones, buildings, or any of the things you would be able to do normally.  However, no money would be deducted from the treasury, and anything you bulldozed in the process would appear "ghosted" in red rather than be destroyed.  While still in planning mode, you would be able to undo any changes without penalty.  There would also be a running total of the cost for all these improvements displayed somewhere.  Upon building everything to your liking, you could hit an "execute" button which would deduct the total from your treasury and return you to normal mode, where the constructions would begin.

Apart from solving the "oops I didn't mean to demolish that" and the "oops I placed that expensive bridge in the wrong place" problems, this is, when you think about it, more in line with what happens in real life.  A real city government doesn't just lay a street, and then another, and then place some zones, and then maybe a police station;  The entire package, street grid, zoning, utilities, etc., are planned as a whole before a single hole is dug.  Of course, we're so used to the Sim City paradigm that it seems natural to do it the former way; and of course that would remain an option for those who want to just do a quick build of something.

As a side note, another niggling thing that bugged me in SC4 was that you could see the zone colors when the lot was vacant, leaving a bunch of random colored dots in the view of your city.  I would make that an option you could toggle, but the default would be to only see zone colors in planning mode or with the zoning tool.

There are more fun permutations you could make on this idea, for example the ability to save plans for future execution, or execute them in stages, but I think the basic idea is not only a sound one, but an easy to implement upgrade for our new game.