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In, you’ll still build residential, commercial and industrial structures, put out fires in your cities, control crime by setting police stations, set up road networks and deal with pollution, all while trying to grow your population. You won’t, however, customize tax rates, manage power grids or sewage systems. It’s an attempt to balance the depth of the traditional SimCity experience with more mass market-friendly mechanics and social elements.A core element of SimCity Social is competition related to the number of virtual people living in your city. Your friends on Facebook are displayed across the bottom of the in-game screen, and aside from their picture, the prominent feature is their city’s population number. If they’re way ahead, and you’re afflicted by an especially aggressive type of jealousy, you can travel to their town and exacerbate hazardous situations. You can hop into a city while a friend isn’t logged into Facebook, and by doing so, you might find one of their residential structures in on fire.

A good friend might alert their fire department. Words with friends help. As a not-so-good friend, you can dump gas on the fire and flatten the structure. You could invite the local homeless population into their apartments, hide the keys to fire engines and help criminals escape. Whether you choose to do something malicious or not, you’re still rewarded, so not only the good guys win.

The points you receive for interacting with the cities of your friends can be put towards special structures. If you’re nice, the selection of special structures will be bright and colorful. If you decide to mess up your friends’ towns, you’ll be able to build towering spiky spires and giant robot factories, so the look of your own city could eventually reflect the way you decide to behave. Interacting with your friends also rewards you with free Energy. Energy, as is the case in many Facebook games, is required to perform in-game actions. Pretty much the only thing you can do in without Energy is set up roads, which at least means you can set a grid around areas where you eventually plan to set up more houses or businesses until your Energy gradually recharges or you pay real money to purchase more. And in case you’ve been a jerk, before bailing out of a friend’s city, you can leave a gift; animal-shaped clouds, hot air balloons full of confetti and a number of other items the friend will see when he or she logs back in.

Assuming you have enough Energy and in-game currency, you can set up new businesses and industrial centers. These aren’t auto-upgrading zones, they’re just one-time purchase, pre-made buildings that you place around the game world. Their placement will affect population, so taking care to place commercial centers near residential areas and having proper fire and police department coverage of your city could be important to create a safe and effective metropolis. Or you could just build a giant robot factory and let everything else burn down. If buildings do catch on fire and crumble, they aren’t destroyed entirely. They’ll come back after a while, so there’s no need to repurchase them.

Though businesses won’t auto-upgrade, but they can be manually augmented by spending resources to boost their effectiveness. So if you have a sports stadium in the center of a dense residential area, it’s a good idea to upgrade it to broaden its effects on your city, which in turn will upgrade the structure’s appearance into something fancier. Residential zones in SimCity Social function more traditionally, where you demarcate territory as residential and then watch as NPCs move in and the ever-morphing buildings that sprout from the ground show how well that particular tile is doing. After you’ve got a kernel of thriving metropolis, you can expand beyond the initial borders to the edges of what appears to be a large map. The undeveloped territory will sometimes contain bonus elements. You may find a plot of land where, for reasons buried somewhere in the tubes of the Internet, giraffes wander around, which can be turned into a tourist site if you develop around it. With a number of elaborately detailed buildings and special animations within many structures, your eye will often dart from one thing to the next while staring at the SimCity Social screen.

Things like a kid booting a soccer ball in the stadium, monster trucks roaring around an arena and cars loaded with moving boxes pulling up to empty residential zones vie for your attention, often punctuated by the explosion of virtual currency icons when something significant occurs. There’s also the mayor’s house, basically a visual representation of your city’s level of advancement, which you’ll continually be upgrading and customizing as you play. Maxis and Playfish appear to have built SimCity Social from a stack of good ideas. Though it may not have the depth of the SimCity scheduled to launch in February 2013 for Windows, and assuming the Energy system isn’t overly restrictive, it could still be an enjoyable interactive experience for someone usually too timid to try more complex simulations. Expect SimCity Social to launch within the next few weeks on Facebook, and plenty of content updates to follow in the months afterward.

Electronic Arts is finally unveiling a long-rumored Facebook game, SimCity Social. And with it begins a great experiment: Will fans who enjoy this free-to-play online game also dish out $60 when the full-fledged SimCity remake arrives for the PC in 2013?

The game is the first major Facebook title that EA has launched since it debuted The Sims Social last August. And it is EA’s big counterattack against Zynga’s CityVille, which has been the largest game on Facebook for more than a year. EA announced SimCity social at its press event at industry trade show Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, Calif.

Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president of EA’s Maxis label, said in an interview with GamesBeat that EA will clearly separate the two experiences between a lighter, more social Facebook experience and a deeper, full throttle simulation with the PC version. She noted that when The Sims Social came out, it actually increased interest in the overall Sims franchise across multiple platforms. The same could happen here.

“We think the core appeal of the SimCity brand will be a big draw,” Bradshaw said. “It is an interpretation of SimCity for Facebook. It is a quick and fun experience while the full SimCity on the PC will be deeper.”

Bradshaw said the game is a collaboration of EA’s Maxis studios in Redwood Shores, Calif., Emeryville, Calif., and the Playfish studio in Beijing, China. They have created a city-building simulation for the masses. Cities will come to life and “push back at the player,” said Jami Laes, vice president of global studios for Playfish, in an interview.

“Facebook gamers have been waiting a long time for the original and best city-building game to come to the platform,” said Laes. “This isn’t your typical drag and drop city-building game. Players don’t just build a city – they choose the kind of city they want and watch its soul come to life as it grows and reacts to their decisions. With SimCity Social, we’ve taken the best in social gaming design and married it with unprecedented depth to create an all-new, deeply social experience.”

Facebook has more than 900 million users, and about half of them play games. Many of those players are casual fans, and as Sean Ryan, head of game developer relations at Facebook, and Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, have said in the past, they aren’t likely to pick up a game and pay $60 for it.

SimCity Social has no set linear paths. Cities evolve as a consequence of the choices that players make. The point of that is to allow for more creative freedom, Laes said. As the mayor, the player has to deal with issues like crime, fires, and pollution, and he will also make decisions that will help the city take its unique shape.

“We want you to find surprises on every street corner,” Laes said. “We want it to have a wow factor.

The developers have tried to give the game great graphics for a Facebook title. The long journey home ending song. Its look and feel resemble the original SimCity from 1989, says Bradshaw; although, the visuals more so evoke SimCity 3000. At any given time, from the highest view, you might be able to see 150 buildings at once. When you zoom in, you might see 10 to 30 buildings. Social interactions go beyond just visiting your friends’ cities. You can do mean things to your friends or be nice. You can cooperate with them or compete. The new SimCity will be able to add different kinds of events that affect the city over time.

EA has had a large team working on the game for a while. It’s not clear how it will do against the entrenched CityVille, which has 34.7 million monthly active users and is the No. 2 game on Facebook, behind Zynga Poker.

“For EA, there is a huge advantage in brands that have appeal in multiple audiences,” Bradshaw said. “What we can do is broaden our reach by doing different experiences. We apply our brands to Playfish, bringing our history and reinterpreting the games for the new markets. EA is thinking broadly about our strategy and being in every segment where the growth is. And we bring our triple-A quality.”