We have known for a while that in the coming SimCity your city will affect surrounding cities in more ways than ever before, but we have yet to see that in action. This new developer video shed some light into the process.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVUO1cklon0&w=760]
What is interesting to learn – for someone who is not keeping up with the game that well like me – is that you can used the surrounding cities yourself for your own ends. In the example in the video, a neighboring city was created to supply power to a more metropolitan city full of casinos. The distance of the power plants helped negate the negative affects of pollution on the bigger city. Neat. It looks like power lines are a thing of the past, too, which is not a bad thing.
Also, we see that for these neighboring areas you can simply invite a friend to build a city next to yours, and you both can share in resources. In the video, after a meteor strike, a neighbor city’s fire brigade came to help put out fires. Pretty cool.
SimCity releases March 5th of next year.