I had no idea they'd done any expansions for this (the complete edition). I assumed it had been discontinued, since it's the game that effectively killed the Sim City brand. I played it a lot when it first came out, it has a really good interface, it's fun to play and it looks great.
The problem that made me (and probably most of its player base) abandon it after a while is that the cities you can create are absolutely tiny. Sim Town/Village would be a more accurate title. It's meant to be played with a group of players managing separate tiny cities on a larger map, and I tried that once but getting a group together was difficult back then - impossible now.
Because building space runs out so quickly, I started creating separate cities of my own to service the main one. I had an industrial one where I'd send all my garbage and generate power, and another one for a luxury holiday island. But the game isn't really designed to function like that, and the links between islands would break down while the other ones were idle. Visiting each island meant saving, quitting, reloading.
Originally it was always online, as EA claimed that the background simulation required cloud processing to work. That was proven to be a lie when the game was cracked. It was purely an anti-piracy measure, and legit copies of the game would frequently quit because of server disconnections while pirate versions functioned fine. I believe some of the hacked versions also removed the tiny size limits for the cities. EA insisted that cities had to be so small because of the complexity of tracking each individual Sim - obviously another lie. By this point I'd given up on it though.
I just tried loading it up to see what has changed, and it doesn't even appear in the EA Desktop app for Windows, which has been around for a couple of years now. It's requires the legacy Origin launcher.
