Sim City

2smiggy

well i have the hang of getting a city up and going anyway , so I would gladly join someones region if anyone cares to add me , origin name is tl1979 , at work now, but hungover and may be online in the next few hours if i can slip away unnoticed !

Blisterman

Are there any good hints guides online for it yet?

the_syco

Not having the ability to restart from a saved game has forced me to adapt the city to survive. I'm having to constantly take out bonds to survive, raise taxes to stay in business, and keep going forward. Although the city isn't as big as SC2000, having to be more involved in it helps counter that.

The roads may be upgradeable, as if you have stuff built on both sides of them, you won't be able to upgrade them I find. Building the coal plant at the start was a big mistake for me, as having a number of cheapo wind farms around the place did a grand job of powering the city, without the need of having to buy coal. Also, as they're pollution and noise free, they can be put in the middle of residential areas.

bizmark

Roads are upgradeable from the roads menu syco right under the line/curve etc buttons is a button that looks like a cog click it and click the roads you wish to upgrade ....Doesnt change road to avenues though

(iv played this a fair bit i will say its a very good game when it works)

Mc Love

It isnt really working today - the time isnt showing and I cant add buildings at times or upgrade things.

errlloyd

Anyone playing in the next little while up for starting a region, add errlloyd

Blisterman

Is there any road layout more efficient than a grid made of avenues spaced so as to allow for maximum density of buildings? Are the curved roads pointless on a flat terrain?

.ak

Blisterman wrote: »

Is there any road layout more efficient than a grid made of avenues spaced so as to allow for maximum density of buildings? Are the curved roads pointless on a flat terrain?

I use curved roads for coastlines too. Otherwise it's wasted space.

errlloyd

Instead of avenues you can try having a road, a strip of park and then another road on the far side. It may be more efficient in terms of increasing land value.

Also no need to make all the road avenues, use a grid of long rectangles and have either ALL the North South roads or All the East west roads as avenues, make the perpendicular roads go alone the short sides of the rectangles, with just one or two of them as avenues for your railcar links.

Anyone else disappointed that transport has gone a bit backward since rush hour?

VinLieger

errlloyd wrote: »

Instead of avenues you can try having a road, a strip of park and then another road on the far side. It may be more efficient in terms of increasing land value.

Also no need to make all the road avenues, use a grid of long rectangles and have either ALL the North South roads or All the East west roads as avenues, make the perpendicular roads go alone the short sides of the rectangles, with just one or two of them as avenues for your railcar links.

Even then you only need make every second road an avenue because i think they only need to have 1 side with an avenue for max density

Drexel

errlloyd wrote: »

Instead of avenues you can try having a road, a strip of park and then another road on the far side. It may be more efficient in terms of increasing land value.

Also no need to make all the road avenues, use a grid of long rectangles and have either ALL the North South roads or All the East west roads as avenues, make the perpendicular roads go alone the short sides of the rectangles, with just one or two of them as avenues for your railcar links.

Anyone else disappointed that transport has gone a bit backward since rush hour?

Me!! Said it a few pages back but no subways and freight rail. Think there is a few features missing over all. Terrain editor is one of them. Loved making a whole country in the region editor in SC4!

errlloyd

VinLieger wrote: »

Even then you only need make every second road an avenue because i think they only need to have 1 side with an avenue for max density

Yeah, but you're going to have double width blocks right? Like blocks big enough for back to back apartment buildings? Or does that no work?

Also, anyone else just sitting on this thread living vicariously through others while they wait for the game to download the blasted files again because it stopped launching and they had to re-install.

NotorietyH

jonny666 wrote: »

Me!! Said it a few pages back but no subways and freight rail. Think there is a few features missing over all. Terrain editor is one of them. Loved making a whole country in the region editor in SC4!

There is freight rail, it's under the Trade specialisation menu, it's the Trade port, as far as I know you can use it for either shipping or rail or both and you can build heavy rail lines.

Mc Love

This game is sooo addictive!!! It does something to you, takes away your hunger!!

Slutmonkey57b

So the general summation I get from reading this thread and others around the net is:

Its design is needlessly broken.
The launch was badly and incompetently planned.
They're trying to use the "it's a service" lie to weasel out of paying refunds.
They're switching off all the "fundamental design features" that supposedly forced the thing online in order to get it working at all, thus proving the lie about the online requirement.
The game can happily process the entire city for extended periods without a connection, and cities you manage within a region are frozen in time when you're not working on them, proving the servers are doing no useful "heavy lifting".
They're charging wildly divergent prices in different markets for the same digital product with no distribution costs and excluding tax differences, and still allowing western gamers to easily bypass these Chinese walls to pay the lower prices, thus proving the scam of the western markets.
Even assuming you can get in, the miniscule size of the "city" means you are effectively building small neighborhoods in a larger meta-city, and new features (curved roads) are wasted because the city size makes them worthless, or an unsound investment.
The game isn't even able to reliably simulate the interactions between neighborhoods across the meta-city.
Detail level simulations (such as bus routes) aren't actually simulated at all and aren't any sort of step up from previous versions.

So.... ummmm.... I'll just be over here with my old versions....

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/

Dude has it right re: apologists. Steam is a good service precisely because consumers gave valve so much **** about it at launch. Anyone letting a game company off the hook for "launch day issues" is a fool.

VinLieger

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

So the general summation I get from reading this thread and others around the net is:

Its design is needlessly broken.
The launch was badly and incompetently planned.
They're trying to use the "it's a service" lie to weasel out of paying refunds.
They're switching off all the "fundamental design features" that supposedly forced the thing online in order to get it working at all, thus proving the lie about the online requirement.
The game can happily process the entire city for extended periods without a connection, and cities you manage within a region are frozen in time when you're not working on them, proving the servers are doing no useful "heavy lifting".
They're charging wildly divergent prices in different markets for the same digital product with no distribution costs and excluding tax differences, and still allowing western gamers to easily bypass these Chinese walls to pay the lower prices, thus proving the scam of the western markets.
Even assuming you can get in, the miniscule size of the "city" means you are effectively building small neighborhoods in a larger meta-city, and new features (curved roads) are wasted because the city size makes them worthless, or an unsound investment.
The game isn't even able to reliably simulate the interactions between neighborhoods across the meta-city.
Detail level simulations (such as bus routes) aren't actually simulated at all and aren't any sort of step up from previous versions.

So.... ummmm.... I'll just be over here with my old versions....

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/

Dude has it right re: apologists. Steam is a good service precisely because consumers gave valve so much **** about it at launch. Anyone letting a game company off the hook for "launch day issues" is a fool.

Beggining to agree with this sentiment, i still think the idea was good but its implementation is fundamentally flawed, the fact i can never play the city i want to and keep having to start new ones on a different server is my main issue currently, they need to stop adding new frontend servers and get to work on increasing capacity of the current ones, wont be buying a new EA product for a long time

nesf

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/11/simcity-is-inherently-broken-lets-not-let-this-go/

Dude has it right re: apologists. Steam is a good service precisely because consumers gave valve so much **** about it at launch. Anyone letting a game company off the hook for "launch day issues" is a fool.

RPS comment sections are always good for a laugh but 9 pages of it....

No such thing as bad publicity eh? It's an interesting live experiment.

Maximilian

It's a very good article by John Walker. You only have to play the game for a short while to realise that however you slice it, the "always online" element is DRM and only that. Every single online feature could easily have been implemented without needing continuous internet connectivity. It's absolutely so obvious there is no disputing it.

So what really annoys me is that EA and Maxis blatantly and very deliberately lied to all and sundry.

nesf

Maximilian wrote: »

It's a very good article by John Walker. You only have to play the game for a short while to realise that however you slice it, the "always online" element is DRM and only that. Every single online feature could easily have been implemented without needing continuous internet connectivity. It's absolutely so obvious there is no disputing it.

So what really annoys me is that EA and Maxis blatantly and very deliberately lied to all and sundry.

You couldn't really do the multiplayer regions without effectively continuous internet connectivity. That could very easily have been a tagged on multiplayer element to a single player offline game as John Walker pointed out. Going completely offline would cost us some features but nothing required to play single player in your own region though as far as I can tell.


A point was made on Reddit though that kind of struck home for me, if you were going to do Always Online DRM, would you design it this way? It just seems a really dumb way to implement it.

Azza

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

So the general summation I get from reading this thread and others around the net is:

Its design is needlessly broken.
The launch was badly and incompetently planned.
They're trying to use the "it's a service" lie to weasel out of paying refunds.
They're switching off all the "fundamental design features" that supposedly forced the thing online in order to get it working at all, thus proving the lie about the online requirement.
The game can happily process the entire city for extended periods without a connection, and cities you manage within a region are frozen in time when you're not working on them, proving the servers are doing no useful "heavy lifting".
They're charging wildly divergent prices in different markets for the same digital product with no distribution costs and excluding tax differences, and still allowing western gamers to easily bypass these Chinese walls to pay the lower prices, thus proving the scam of the western markets.
Even assuming you can get in, the miniscule size of the "city" means you are effectively building small neighborhoods in a larger meta-city, and new features (curved roads) are wasted because the city size makes them worthless, or an unsound investment.
The game isn't even able to reliably simulate the interactions between neighborhoods across the meta-city.
Detail level simulations (such as bus routes) aren't actually simulated at all and aren't any sort of step up from previous versions.

So.... ummmm.... I'll just be over here with my old versions....

Your first 3 points are sound.
I can't comment on the next two as I don't have the game.
Different prices in different regions is typical for pretty much every game. I don't know why you would single them out over this.
As for you point on city size. The general consensus is that it is too small but overall feedback from the game when its working is that its a good game, the majority of people here (and also most reviews) seem to think its a good game.

the_syco

Logged in today, loads more buildings abandoned. Started to get rid of them, but then this happens;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jKuSNbZiMQ

Fricking dinosaur!

So, I think I'll just bulldoze everything bar the power plants and school later, and start afresh somehow.

.ak

You know, I wouldn't mind the whole server situation if they coded a better que system. Waited 20 min, go in, then 'Unable to connect to server yadayada' and then you have to log back out, and que again. It should just autoque if it drops you.

Slutmonkey57b

nesf wrote: »

You couldn't really do the multiplayer regions without effectively continuous internet connectivity. That could very easily have been a tagged on multiplayer element to a single player offline game as John Walker pointed out. Going completely offline would cost us some features but nothing required to play single player in your own region though as far as I can tell.


A point was made on Reddit though that kind of struck home for me, if you were going to do Always Online DRM, would you design it this way? It just seems a really dumb way to implement it.

You could come 80-90% close to the multiplayer experience without a persistent connection, this isn't the first multi-user collaboration idea. It's no significant step up from turn-based email gaming either, given the inert nature of the cities not being actively managed. If the inter-neighborhood links were deeper or more active, it might be more difficult but I don't see much going on, relatively speaking.

youreadthat

I really really hope they fix the region play soon. Not being able to power one city with the surplus power from the other even though the capacity is there is getting tedious.

Slutmonkey57b

Azza wrote: »

Your first 3 points are sound.
I can't comment on the next two as I don't have the game.
Different prices in different regions is typical for pretty much every game. I don't know why you would single them out over this.
As for you point on city size. The general consensus is that it is too small but overall feedback from the game when its working is that its a good game, the majority of people here (and also most reviews) seem to think its a good game.

You're right about regional pricing. I called them out on it because in this case it's both very transparent and it undermines another pillar of why you should pay top whack to greedy publishers because of all the suffering. If they can afford to sell it for 20 quid in India there's no reason to charge 50 or 60 here other than "we can get away with it".

Maximilian

nesf wrote: »

You couldn't really do the multiplayer regions without effectively continuous internet connectivity. That could very easily have been a tagged on multiplayer element to a single player offline game as John Walker pointed out. Going completely offline would cost us some features but nothing required to play single player in your own region though as far as I can tell.


A point was made on Reddit though that kind of struck home for me, if you were going to do Always Online DRM, would you design it this way? It just seems a really dumb way to implement it.

I was expecting something akin to an MMO, whereby you just couldn't do it any other way other than always online. That is so obviously not the case here it makes me angry.

On the reddit point - didn't Ubisoft try something like this with their always online - like with Silent Hunter 4 - it left some game content on a server, so you could only play online. The joke was it still got cracked, in the end.

nesf

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

You could come 80-90% close to the multiplayer experience without a persistent connection, this isn't the first multi-user collaboration idea. It's no significant step up from turn-based email gaming either, given the inert nature of the cities not being actively managed. If the inter-neighborhood links were deeper or more active, it might be more difficult but I don't see much going on, relatively speaking.

The Global Market being simulated across all the regions is interesting and would be extremely hard to pull off without regular data being sent to the server. I'm not convinced it actually adds much though.

The collaboration idea, well the biggest issue is say I've a coal city and you've a bunch of coal factories and I'm supplying you coal (bad example but just accept it for the moment). This can only happen when we're both online playing our cities! If I'm offline, you get zero coal from me even though in theory I should always be pumping it out, but because of limited resources they can't just pump out coal out of my city without going in and modelling it to some extent and working out how fast I'm running out of it. Basically the only way to make it work is for me when I finish a session to gift you the coal so when you log in you have some bit of a supply from me. For single player regions this is even more annoying as you keep having to switch back to your coal production city and leaving it run for a good while to build up the coal you need for your other city.

It really is a mess. The only things we can reasonably trade are utilities and services, not resources which kind of defeats the point of a mining specialised city unless you're happy doing a lot of micromanaging.

nesf

Maximilian wrote: »

On the reddit point - didn't Ubisoft try something like this with their always online - like with Silent Hunter 4 - it left some game content on a server, so you could only play online. The joke was it still got cracked, in the end.

Yeah they did it on Heroes of Might and Magic and a bunch of other titles. It took three months to crack if I remember correctly. Ubisoft pretty much gave up on that after that.

ahnowbrowncow

the_syco wrote: »

Logged in today, loads more buildings abandoned. Started to get rid of them, but then this happens;

Fricking dinosaur!

So, I think I'll just bulldoze everything bar the power plants and school later, and start afresh somehow.

People see this huge ass fire breathing dino thing coming straight for them but they act as cool as cucumbers and let him cross the road???

Maximilian

I've lost about 40 mins or so this evening due to server crap. Got kicked out of the game and given an option to rollback (30 mins or so) or abandon my city altogether.

Absolute bullsh!t.