Post by Eorl @ 05:22pm 05/03/13 | 455 Comments
While it may seem like we had all the time in the world to really understand how SimCity works and what it will offer to the players, these types of games really shine in the long run. What is on offer to begin with though is nothing short of fantastic and really shows the potential that it has.
Reviewing SimCity is a rough gig. Not because there’s anything wrong with the game, far from it. Rather SimCity is a beast of a game that won’t reach its full potential until it’s been out in the wild for a little while post-release. The mechanisms in place to dynamically default you into cooperatively living with other players is a gem of a direction for the franchise, and half the time you don’t even realise you’re doing it.Check out our SimCity review for the details.
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Posted 05:35pm 05/3/13
Posted 05:40pm 05/3/13
Posted 05:45pm 05/3/13
Also, I thought it was bad form to start sentences with And and But?
Posted 05:48pm 05/3/13
Posted 05:54pm 05/3/13
Even good games have all the fun sucked out of them with this oh-so-precise marketing process. Here's a review for a product you can't have. Its really f*****g awesome! WELL GUESS WHAT! You cant have it! I BET YA WANT IT NOW. B****. Because that's all you are to EA. A little b****. And you love it. Now go buy my DLC.
As a kid I was always looking forward to games maturing, but as an adult, reality bites.
Posted 05:53pm 05/3/13
they're releasing bigger cities as DLC.
Posted 06:04pm 05/3/13
Posted 06:09pm 05/3/13
Anything else? The sole reason I have not pre-ordered this is because I want to see what DLC shenanigans EA are planning with this what could be an awesome game.
I hate the idea of having to buy DLC just to keep playing the game with others...
Posted 06:32pm 05/3/13
Posted 06:41pm 05/3/13
someone was tired when writing this methinks ;p
Posted 06:53pm 05/3/13
I have a preorder. Looking forward to it.
Posted 07:19pm 05/3/13
I will test my patience and wait to see what EA flings at people upon release. As hard as that will be.
Posted 07:50pm 05/3/13
Also bought the extra upgrade DLC for $20 from here. http://store.origin.com/store/eaapac/en_AU/pd/productID.260623100
Edit: Looks like prices have gone up, i think the cheapest place is videoezy online
Posted 08:41pm 05/3/13
Posted 08:59pm 05/3/13
Posted 09:06pm 05/3/13
Posted 09:16pm 05/3/13
I always loved Simcity as a youngster so I'll pick this up once the price drops for sure. No real rush on getting it at release personally.
Posted 09:17pm 05/3/13
Posted 09:20pm 05/3/13
Posted 09:29pm 05/3/13
https://cdkeys.com.au/products/SimCity.html
Posted 09:48pm 05/3/13
Posted 10:27pm 05/3/13
ive had both good and bad experiences with cjs. and check their prices. they arent always cheaper. check your exchange rates (GPB - AUD)
ORIGIN has a digital deluxe version for $99 tha has the game plus the limited edition (heros and Villains addon - IMO a pretty awesome extra :P) and the 3 dlc's (london, France, Germany) whether or not its worth 100 for a digital copy is up to you as a buyer. just my 2 cents :P
Posted 10:51pm 05/3/13
$42 from VE
Posted 11:18pm 05/3/13
Posted 11:27pm 05/3/13
Posted 01:14am 06/3/13
Good to know, I've bought 3 games from them now, FIFA 13, Tomb Raider and Simcity. Received FIFA and Tomb Raider straight away but got both after release. With Simcity have been told keys are arriving on the 6th (europe time) so will see :)
Posted 11:56am 06/3/13
Or are they sending out digital codes before to keep people happy?
Posted 02:48pm 06/3/13
Posted 02:48pm 06/3/13
Posted 04:33pm 06/3/13
Not if you're a journalist. Read newspapers, everyone does it.
I played the beta (the first one anyway) and I loved it. Staying at home this weekend!
Posted 06:15pm 06/3/13
Posted 06:29pm 06/3/13
I also had to go through all this bulls*** with confirming my phone number, which is a real f*** for me because I don't have any phone reception. I hate anything to do with phones.
Posted 07:25pm 06/3/13
Posted 07:27pm 06/3/13
it's tomorrow :(
Posted 07:41pm 06/3/13
Posted 07:55pm 06/3/13
Server busy; Next rejoin attempt in: 4h 39m 36s
lololollolo
Posted 07:58pm 06/3/13
Posted 08:05pm 06/3/13
It doesn't matter to EA what they do with the servers in the future now, they've already got your money.
The answer is though, that they pull the plug on a regular schedule so you better hope they release an offline patch out of charity:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/03/ea-announces-server-shutdown-for-14-games-citing-dwindling-player-numbers/
http://au.gamespot.com/news/ea-shutting-down-online-services-for-12-games-6401956
Posted 08:12pm 06/3/13
Posted 08:12pm 06/3/13
Posted 08:22pm 06/3/13
Posted 09:02pm 06/3/13
Posted 10:34pm 06/3/13
Posted 10:49pm 06/3/13
My Origin says Available March 7, 2013 00:01, I assume that's local time so it's probably 12:01am on the 7th local time everywhere.
Posted 11:20pm 06/3/13
Posted 11:30pm 06/3/13
Posted 03:12am 07/3/13
Posted 06:40am 07/3/13
Posted 09:35am 07/3/13
Also, rofl.. the server issues have led to a battering of amazon reviews http://www.amazon.com/SimCity-Limited-Edition-Pc/product-reviews/B007FTE2VW/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Posted 10:10am 07/3/13
Posted 10:12am 07/3/13
Posted 10:25am 07/3/13
Posted 10:43am 07/3/13
Posted 10:57am 07/3/13
Posted 11:00am 07/3/13
Posted 11:00am 07/3/13
Loaded it up this morning, took bugger all time as it's a small download (~2gb?). The US & Europe servers were either Busy or Full while Oceanic was Available. Clicked on that, bam straight in and started playing.
Initial thoughts are the controls are a bit odd and the location of menu items.. I got a popup saying I could build a coal mine but took forever to work out how to find where I could buy it. Road creation seems a little whack too. I dragged a road up to an intersection and it wouldn't let me build. I had to go through the intersection or make some weird angle road. Also annoying is you can't build over a road (ie: dirt to paved), you have to demolish it first.
That's the first 30 minutes done. I see the potential with multiplayer cities and things and it looks pretty damn cool actually. Can't wait to get on it a bit more over the weekend.
Posted 11:58am 07/3/13
Posted 12:05pm 07/3/13
Posted 12:10pm 07/3/13
Posted 12:24pm 07/3/13
Posted 12:25pm 07/3/13
Also, land value is very strongly linked to features such as gardens, parks, sporting facilities etc. So as long as you're not building it next to a sewerage plant it's pretty easy to get higher income residential, commercial or industrial areas.
That's my two cents :)
Posted 12:46pm 07/3/13
If you're thinking about buying this I would either wait a week or avoid it entirely.
Posted 04:40pm 07/3/13
http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/
Posted 04:55pm 07/3/13
Posted 05:58pm 07/3/13
Posted 07:45pm 07/3/13
Posted 07:49pm 07/3/13
Posted 07:52pm 07/3/13
Posted 07:54pm 07/3/13
Also add me on origin, TicclesAU, for like minded fun time building cities.
Posted 07:55pm 07/3/13
Posted 07:59pm 07/3/13
Posted 08:04pm 07/3/13
It's the exact same product as the one everyone ordered, except it's sourced from a different country, or the story could be bulls***. Bottom line: if you're willing to pay more on top of your current order, you'll get it first. Sheisters!
Posted 08:11pm 07/3/13
Posted 08:24pm 07/3/13
I keep telling people that CJS are shady bastards. They take your money but screw you over on release date with changed terms and conditions.
Never ever pre-order from them. Only buy from them as a last resort if you can't get a game from somewhere else, and only after release date.
Posted 09:13pm 07/3/13
Posted 09:38pm 07/3/13
Posted 09:46pm 07/3/13
Posted 10:22pm 07/3/13
Posted 10:31pm 07/3/13
Steve played this game well in advance of the general release and his review was based on his experience, which was of course flawless.
I'll post more on this tomorrow, but as always the reviews can't please everyone; from what I've seen people that are actually playing the game are really enjoying it.
Posted 10:46pm 07/3/13
troggles - forget the douchebags, game is awesome!
Posted 10:53pm 07/3/13
" dishonest or not having any integrity " is a bit over the top. But a bit of a penalty for the abysmal launch wouldn't hurt, even if it's just a note on the review.
Posted 11:06pm 07/3/13
Steve's experience was based outside of the reality available to gamers. There is literally no way for us to connect to the review servers and access the experience Steve and other reviewers had, so what relevance does the score have to us?
Considering that people are making buying decisions based on your recommendations I would say that it warrants further thought. Further to that, your reviews get included in metacritic and can have a direct impact on developer income. You can call it opinion all you want, but there are very real consequences to the number that goes at the end of the review (sadly way more consequence than any of the actual words)
If you guys can wait before publishing the review, and take the subsequent hit to traffic, then your criticism will be more valid. If it's a matter of getting to press before anyone else, then you've absolutely got to expect people to question your cred.
Posted 11:06pm 07/3/13
I mean games change as patches and updates happen, maybe there should be several reviews
Posted 11:07pm 07/3/13
It's important to note that it's not possible, in a review, to capture every single way a game might fail to deliver the same experience that the reviewer got. The score is a reflection of the game at that particular moment in time. Some games will get better, some will get worse - that's what the comments on the review are for and we'd always advise every user to read them.
I think the game Steve played will be basically the game everyone else is playing in a week or so. Launch week is always a problem for multiplayer games.
I'm personally stunned anyone bought this, a single player game with an online requirement - if I'd reviewed it, it would have been like "0/10, requires always-online for DRM purposes". I don't know what people were expecting.
What will happen after launch week - are all these places who dropped their scores going to raise them again? How do people feel about that?
Posted 11:08pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:09pm 07/3/13
The review should be taken as "this is our experience at the moment in time we played it - YMMV depending on a lot of factors". In this case the big factor people are pissed about is the availability of the service. I see that as a tiny, tiny blip in the lifespan of this game (...assuming they don't turn the servers off after a year :).
Posted 11:11pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:17pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:19pm 07/3/13
I bought a key this morning from CDKeysHere and they've just posted on Facebook that orders will be in tomorrow morning. No biggie for me, few friends are "trying" to play at the moment and it keeps booting or crashing them. Also have a new account now on Origin, add me if you'd like to play: froodleoodle.
Posted 11:20pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:29pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:30pm 07/3/13
Might wait for the 'game of the year' edition on this one.
Posted 11:33pm 07/3/13
How many points is a good launch worth?
There's an article on Joystiq that talks about games as both a product and a service. The product here, SimCity, is sound enough, but the service has been a near complete failure so far. How to review such a thing?
Posted 11:41pm 07/3/13
Posted 11:53pm 07/3/13
Look, Steve's review was on a product that was obviously fenced off from what many are viewing right now. Is the score reasonable? I'd say so considering its based on his view of the game from what he has played. Its a representation of what it was like when he played it, and hopefully what it will be like after the initial surge of players. I prefaced the review by saying that "it may seem like we had all the time in the world to really understand how SimCity works and what it will offer to the players, these types of games really shine in the long run."
Should games be reviewed again after a cooling down period? Yes I'd love to see new experiences put back onto old reviews or at least a "where are we now" styled review. Can we do it? Maybe, its hard because as trog said we are pushed on what we can do, and sometimes only a fraction of what we are given to review is actually reviewed. Should we go back and edit the score/review to reflect current feelings on the game? It'd be nice, and we may do so, but wouldn't we then have to again go back afterwards and re-do the review to reflect new changes?
I think what we can do is keep everyone as up-to-date as possible with any kind of troubles the game is having, like the post that I did yesterday. We also encourage comments as well like trog mentioned, because then you guys can express what you think instead of keeping it close-minded.
Posted 11:59pm 07/3/13
Posted 12:04am 08/3/13
This gives a user rating and gets AGN tapped into the social side of its user base by allowing people to repost/share/etc on their wall.
Posted 12:08am 08/3/13
http://uk.gamespot.com/simcity/platform/pc/
Posted 12:11am 08/3/13
Now I am not quite sure how the industry works in regards to reviewers receiving games early so they can get some time in before a review can be as accurate as possible. I am assuming it is quite common but if a publisher knows their game is a bit buggy or is of below-par quality then I'd imagine they'd be quite reluctant in letting reviewers get a headstart. Also, if a game is an AAA title and the publisher suspects that it is going to be a massively popular hit, they might be reluctant in handing out early copies in fear that it might get leaked and take a bit of the gloss of their world premiere.
Review revisits are a worthy idea I reckon, but is there any commercial interest in reviewers doing them? 'SimCity reviewed!' is a link some people won't be able to click fast enough because it's a controversial game as well as the continuation of an incredibly popular series. People want to see what this new thing is all about. In a months time when the construction dust has settled will people still care? By that time word-of-mouth has probably done the job a re-review intends to do, and anyone who has sat and waited for a bit to see how a game turns out would probably be happy to rely on that I think.
Posted 12:27am 08/3/13
Posted 12:51am 08/3/13
And the always-on DRM could have at least been mentioned. I reckon there should even be an always-on DRM section yes or no with every game reviewed because it's the suckiest thing ever. I'd never buy a game that had it unless I absolutely had to.
Posted 01:25am 08/3/13
Wow, you talk about getting mad and then spend the rest of the paragraph apologising for EA.
EA served up a pile of poo, plain and simple. It might be playable next week, who knows.
You'll still need a constant connection to a server next week to play a single player game though.
Posted 02:09am 08/3/13
I was going to say that you should not review alpha/beta, but then again they are taking cash for it. I guess the rules have to change. WarZ got reviewed while being an alpha, but they charged up front and had a cash shop so it was totally justified.
Posted 02:13am 08/3/13
Posted 06:56am 08/3/13
I don't mind though, instead will go do something else, I'm sure it will be fixed some time.
Posted 08:00am 08/3/13
Got home at 7:00.
It was 8pm before I even had an Origin account created.
Then it had tons of updates.
Then it froze on one update.
Then it gave me "permission denied" when I tried to click the link showing me what updates were available. I figured that was because I wasn't logged in, so I logged in - got yet another different denied error page.
The updates finally finished at 10pm, but then I couldn't connect.
I just went to bed, CBF.
last edited by Raven at 08:00:34 08/Mar/13
Posted 08:51am 08/3/13
I have one more game criticism and that is the city size is tiny! I have 30,000 sims, everything in demand, all the usable area zoned and they are all after low density instead of high.
Posted 08:57am 08/3/13
Posted 08:58am 08/3/13
Posted 09:04am 08/3/13
Posted 09:05am 08/3/13
The idea is that you are supposed to create specialised 'cities' within the region, as a residential-based city could provide workers to supply demand for a more industrial connected city, and a tourism (lol, cairns) oriented location could be their partytown.
The problem is Glassbox, with all the shiny new detail comes performance limits for mortal computers. Its possible they will patch in larger than 2x2 cities in future for higher end rigs, but for now they're catering to the midline.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/22/sim-city-size-restriction-explained/
Posted 09:11am 08/3/13
Posted 09:14am 08/3/13
Yeh not saying its a good compromise, but it is what it is and there's a reason for it.
Posted 09:18am 08/3/13
Anyway I'm still awaiting my key from CDKeysHere though apparently its expected later today. For anyone that does have the game, are the servers holding up now or still terrible?
Posted 09:19am 08/3/13
Posted 09:26am 08/3/13
I managed 6 hours of play time yesterday despite the dramas. One thing I did notice was when the game intro scene is loading, if I hit esc straight away, then I'd get the server disconnected method but I waited 5 seconds and started hitting space and never saw it again.
Posted 09:49am 08/3/13
Edit: though it still says 'not yet released' on the order status ;)
Posted 10:44am 08/3/13
Hopefully this arvo the servers are working and I can get some good play in.
Posted 10:47am 08/3/13
Posted 10:49am 08/3/13
Glad I didn't pull the trigger and get this, as my concerns regarding EA as a publisher have rung true in a spectacular way, now it just needs DLC that should have been in the original game. I'll be a sad panda indeed if they release a DLC that includes larger city sizes..
Posted 11:03am 08/3/13
Vote with your dollars.
edit: doh, can't embed twitter stuff. Who wrote this crappy forum!
last edited by trog at 11:02:57 08/Mar/13
Posted 12:19pm 08/3/13
Posted 12:21pm 08/3/13
Seriously though, assuming they get the servers sorted out and its reliably playable I'm ok with always-on DRM, and the game itself sounds like fun for the price so I'll let me order arrive. I can imagine having paid a premium for it (like seventy bucks for an origin key) and being unable to play it would be rage-inducing though.
Posted 12:22pm 08/3/13
Posted 12:52pm 08/3/13
Posted 01:01pm 08/3/13
Not sure if you can just chargeback to any point in time...
edit: lol, becoming more confident the servers will be ok when my order ships..
Posted 01:02pm 08/3/13
Posted 01:07pm 08/3/13
tl;dr because of the server issues and the stripping of features to try and stabilize the servers.
Posted 03:51pm 08/3/13
So little work going to be done.
Posted 05:26pm 08/3/13
JUST KIDDING. It's still 9.4 highly recommended!
Posted 06:19pm 08/3/13
Posted 06:36pm 08/3/13
Thats what you get for pre ordering! man so many suckers. Its like buying a car you have never seen, and just hoping its ok because of what you have read on the internet.
Posted 08:06pm 08/3/13
Posted 01:35am 09/3/13
Posted 02:43am 09/3/13
Adjusting the score seems like pointless grandstanding, cos its not going to change on metacritic anyway. If they want to give it a low score because of the DRM then sure, fine, thats a very respectable stance, but why didn't they do that in the first place? The DRM was always there.
Posted 03:54am 09/3/13
Posted 05:59am 09/3/13
Posted 11:08am 09/3/13
This game is awesome! But dont buy it because its s***.
Posted 01:52pm 09/3/13
Whatever khel...
If the score they gave included a component of end user experience (ie. was it fun), then how can they no downgrade it ?
How fun is sitting at screen not playing it ?
I'd say a 0.
So if say 20% of the time you can't get into it... it should take a 20% hit on its score if not more!
Posted 03:08pm 09/3/13
Anyone keen for a qgl region?
Posted 03:15pm 09/3/13
and i'm the same there just isn't enough room in these pissy little areas
add me on origin - paveway-3
Posted 08:12pm 09/3/13
Posted 08:14pm 09/3/13
Posted 09:12pm 09/3/13
Saw someone post on reddit about modelling a design off "future city" wen't onto wiki and it sounded like a plan so I smashed one out with great success..
Posted 09:23pm 09/3/13
also with this QGL region, are we playing properly? i'm not that keen on sandbox with the hax and s***
Posted 09:42pm 09/3/13
Posted 09:46pm 09/3/13
you need to increase land value which then gets development happening and densities increase but f***ed if i know what else i can do the city building areas are so small you don't have too much room for big s*** like football fields everywhere to increase land value
Posted 10:10pm 09/3/13
Posted 10:11pm 09/3/13
Posted 10:21pm 09/3/13
Nah we'll set something up tomorrow
Posted 10:24pm 09/3/13
Posted 10:27pm 09/3/13
Posted 10:48pm 09/3/13
Posted 12:07am 10/3/13
Posted 01:02am 10/3/13
Should they then put the score back up once all the server issues get resolved? I think it's a lot to ask of reviewers to have the review always correct in real time.
It should definitely be made clear that there are serious issues at launch, I just don't know if the score is the way to do that. If I was a reviewer I'd probably just make it very clear that the review/score was a gameplay review/score only and that there it had become apparent that there were other issues at launch that would affect your ability to access that gameplay.
Posted 01:53am 10/3/13
We should do this, a QGL/AG region for all us wannabe mayors. See who wins, left or right side views. I think max size is 16 cities but I may be wrong there.
Posted 07:11am 10/3/13
Posted 10:04am 10/3/13
I'll set up a region.
On Oceanic 2 server (1 was busy this morning)
Region is called "QGL", has 7 city plots and 1 great work, all are connected. Invite only so get on!
I think anyone can invite, just sent one to paveway & ticcles.
Posted 10:31am 10/3/13
Posted 10:40am 10/3/13
Yeah, I was having this problem too.
If anyone wants an extra neighbour my Origin ID is MonkeezCat, add me!
Posted 10:41am 10/3/13
Posted 10:52am 10/3/13
Posted 10:54am 10/3/13
Posted 10:55am 10/3/13
Posted 11:01am 10/3/13
Posted 11:04am 10/3/13
Posted 11:29am 10/3/13
Posted 11:31am 10/3/13
Posted 11:33am 10/3/13
Posted 11:37am 10/3/13
Posted 11:43am 10/3/13
Posted 11:46am 10/3/13
Posted 11:54am 10/3/13
Posted 12:41pm 10/3/13
Posted 12:54pm 10/3/13
It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to invite people to a region :/
Posted 01:01pm 10/3/13
unless i'm not able to invite to someone elses game
Posted 01:11pm 10/3/13
Just tried to buy a key off there Eorl, paid the money but didn't receive a key..Nevermind, got it.
Posted 01:28pm 10/3/13
Posted 02:37pm 10/3/13
Posted 02:48pm 10/3/13
Posted 04:05pm 10/3/13
is there any way to pause transport of oil and stockpile it so you can release the flood gates and sell it all off on the same day?
Posted 04:18pm 10/3/13
Posted 07:18pm 10/3/13
Ahh, I did not think of this. Yes, you could use trade depot's to do this.
Posted 07:19pm 10/3/13
Posted 07:51pm 10/3/13
Posted 07:54pm 10/3/13
so even if you buy now (which I likely will) you can still get a game.
Posted 08:43pm 10/3/13
What a dumb argument.
This is release. Don't review on an alpha or beta, and don't make excuses for unexpected uptake. Don't compare an mmo to wow on release ... cos wow ain't on release. Review on beta is not current.
Be ready for release or get the f*** out. EA is not some tin pot start-up running from some basement.
What other way is there ? No one reads all the blahblahblah. People read what interests them. Perhaps if the first line of the review in large type bold underline and maybe that amazing old flash tag was "This game has issues at the moment don't buy yet" ? ...
Posted 03:03pm 11/3/13
No, that is a dumb argument. I 100% agree that EA should have done better, but this isn't about what EA should have done, it's about what a game review should convey to the reader.
I wouldn't want to think that an amazing game is terrible just because it has a botched release. I'm not a psychotically impatient hardcore gamer that takes time off work to play a game 96 hours straight as soon as it's released, I can happily wait a few weeks for things to get sorted out.
If the game is fun and has good gameplay I want to know that from the review, I can find out about launch server issues from the news.
Posted 09:23pm 10/3/13
Posted 10:13pm 10/3/13
Includes a solution to the water problem.
Posted 10:26pm 10/3/13
Posted 10:37pm 10/3/13
I think your argument has some holes, and doesn't hold water. You should revise your argument. It is unstable. Perhaps edit out the words which don't make sense. I will change my response if you change your argument.
3/10
Posted 10:53pm 10/3/13
So f*****g sick of being told i need residential
Posted 11:41pm 10/3/13
Posted 11:50pm 10/3/13
So I decided to unleash Godzillas and earthquakes on the city then start fresh. It's been pretty hard without water, no one nearby seems to have any to sell either.
Ah well, I'll get the hang of this game someday.
Posted 12:00am 11/3/13
Posted 12:27am 11/3/13
Posted 01:05am 11/3/13
Posted 09:35am 11/3/13
It is even willing to get denser by pushing back into the mountain side.
Posted 08:58am 11/3/13
You can't deny that it's DRM, but a lot of the online features provided are so central to the core game you can understand why they've done it this way. I think the game would be much duller (and harder) if you didn't have neighbours to share resources with.
I haven't had any issues with the servers as yet anyway.
Posted 09:00am 11/3/13
Posted 09:07am 11/3/13
Wow, that's messed up. Still kinda cool though
Posted 09:55am 11/3/13
Posted 10:23am 11/3/13
a) My construction workers couldn't get to their building site. The stupid f****, all 20 of them, just drove around one block constantly. I demolished the buildings they were going to (building sitting on 0%) and the workers disappeared. New buildings appeared and I went from 25k to 40k within a few minutes.
b) I tried to be fancy with my city and make curvy rounds and s*** - except it meant buildings couldn't grow in density.. lots them. Ended up demolishing most of the curvy rounds and went back to good old fashioned grid.
c) The map I've got is pretty dongs with a big cliff face in the middle of it. I started my industry there which means all the air pollution goes straight over the city. Just before I wound up I started knocking out that industrial area and replacing it with residential. My pop then zoomed up again as I had new land to use *and* the air pollution was leaving the main city.
d) No water - I'm surrounded by water ffs and no water. Stupid game. (will use that tip mentioned earlier).
e) I have good income from manufacturing. But no room to spend it on buildings.. so I have to make the decision to specialise on one thing and stick it out. That's probably going to be manufacturing and trading so a bit of demolishing is to be done today to get that back on track. This now relies on region play which isn't working that great at the moment.
But still enjoyable testing out theories and seeing how they unfold.
Posted 10:29am 11/3/13
Posted 10:42am 11/3/13
Are you the kind of guy who would get stranded on a desert island and go "no problem, there's water right there!" and die drinking the seawater?
Biggest problem I keep having in game is I have too many rich, educated sims, and not enough cavemen :( Industry keeps b****ing because they can't find any workers as a result. This is a pain.
Posted 11:10am 11/3/13
Res - http://i.imgur.com/EdVQfl7.jpg
Com - http://i.imgur.com/CulXwFQ.jpg
Posted 11:29am 11/3/13
Don't worry Pave, I'm the same in my region. Friend makes about 10 million a day and yet I'm still struggling with 4,000 residents and only just building avenues. Though he went full mining and rushed it really quickly so he could afford to build another city on the side so maybe that has something to do with it.
Posted 12:14pm 11/3/13
Posted 12:36pm 11/3/13
placing two of the $2400 Plazas, Nature or Formal parks together will bring almost all land up to high value. Then make sure all the surrounding roads are high density where you want the skyscrapers.
that's a pretty reliable method for me to get skyscrapers - add education, health etc to make them better.
Posted 12:39pm 11/3/13
Posted 12:58pm 11/3/13
Posted 01:19pm 11/3/13
Posted 01:33pm 11/3/13
i always try and run a ring road of basic avenue at the start of the game so later than can be upgraded to cover most of my city for street cars
Posted 01:41pm 11/3/13
Posted 01:44pm 11/3/13
Posted 01:49pm 11/3/13
Posted 02:12pm 11/3/13
Pave - parks increase land value which increases the type of resident (medium/wealthy). They have a smaller effect on happiness as people go there when they can't afford to shop. Other things that help with happiness is low taxes, low crime, good health coverage, etc. Also lowering residential taxes to 8-9% helped me out at the start.
Probably the main thing though is time, put it on cheetah mode and just wait :)
Posted 02:26pm 11/3/13
This could be an AI issue because I've noticed some cars will just completely ignore a road and thus cause issues with factories not getting enough people.
If I was to try for a medium to high rich population, I'd still need low income earners wouldn't I for factories to supply the shops which give jobs to medium income earners right?
Also Tic, Cheetah mode doesn't actually work, its only Turtle and Llama speed at the moment which is annoying and hopefully they turn it back on.
I'm actually having a bit of trouble with my first city, though to be expected considering I didn't know how the heck to build roads and space (I've got a giant strip between two roads that no one will build in despite being zoned). My population is at roughly 10,000 but most of them are turning into medium income earners and as such my industry is going to poop. Maybe I should open up a trade depot and import for factories so they can supply the huge amount of shops I'm making now for medium income earners to work at.
Posted 02:23pm 11/3/13
Posted 02:25pm 11/3/13
F*****g Labor Party all up ITT
Posted 02:27pm 11/3/13
Hah pretty much. My second city (which was just made for poop and water supply) is nearly bankrupt but everyone is happy. Clearly a Labor thing.
Posted 02:34pm 11/3/13
Yes, I found that too. I was about the same but bringing in a ton of money via metal and alloy sales. Then it all went to s*** when my residents were too wealthy and too educated.
Posted 02:36pm 11/3/13
Posted 02:37pm 11/3/13
I'm converting it into processors which sell for $67k a crate - have 3 factories pumping it out. At the moment all the materials are made in the town (coal & ore mine with smelting) so it's not too bad. Once it dries up though, I'm f***ed.
Posted 02:44pm 11/3/13
The industry is actually getting smaller, replacing a lot of it with residential. The air pollution is bad but it's unavoidable with the mines so I'm kind of capped with trying to attract wealthy people because of it. Over time I'll slowly move the industry away from where it is now into another part which doesn't have wind blowing across the residential area.
Posted 02:56pm 11/3/13
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Posted 05:35pm 11/3/13
Posted 05:38pm 11/3/13
Posted 05:47pm 11/3/13
Posted 06:17pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:07pm 11/3/13
Which is everyone playing on?
Posted 07:10pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:10pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:18pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:32pm 11/3/13
There she goes! Also had another Earthquake .. :( At least it's helping demolish buildings so I can redo my road grid.
Posted 07:31pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:31pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:34pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:42pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:51pm 11/3/13
Posted 07:56pm 11/3/13
Posted 08:38pm 11/3/13
Since the Indian Origin thing doesn't work now, I guess I'll just wait it out.
Posted 08:47pm 11/3/13
There are some area
Posted 09:04pm 11/3/13
I've created three cities so far, however this is currently my "main" city.
Posted 10:00pm 11/3/13
I guess it makes no difference to gameplay but europe, america and asia feels dirty :/
Posted 10:30pm 11/3/13
Posted 10:32pm 11/3/13
Posted 10:36pm 11/3/13
Posted 10:39pm 11/3/13
I'm mad about curves!
Lets you easily plan into 100K plus cities with low traffic though
Posted 11:45pm 11/3/13
Posted 11:59pm 11/3/13
Posted 12:39am 12/3/13
:(
Edit: Actually f*** it hard. I've got about 2mil of goods sitting in the trade depot waiting to sell but they aren't moving so subsequently I've gone broke..
Posted 08:53am 12/3/13
I thought that at first as well, but if you get a nice super flat surface you can fit in quite a lot. This new SimCity seems to be more reliant on neighbouring cities, in that you'll design each city to be specific to your needs. Making a mining town and need more low income bodies? Develop a city where that's all they do. Need more goods then your city is producing? Make another city and have it fund your development.
Posted 09:21am 12/3/13
Posted 09:36am 12/3/13
The first city was what can only be described as an abomination.
The second city, I toyed with curved and circular roads and learned about how the road system affects things like hospital/fire/police and education cover. I had a couple of circles within circles that only had one connection, that is a bad idea, traffic wise it was fine. However it decimated the facilities cover.
Oh and whilst I thought about it I figured it wouldn't matter so much, I built the majority of my commercial and about 1/2 my residential downwind from the industrial zone. Turns out (I think) this makes people b**** about germs everywhere. The air pollution was pretty poor for half my city.
WetWired, I've found to get my head around planning I use dirt roads to begin with as I like to lay a fair bit of road down to map out the area. Add my parks and other land value stuff then zone up.
So my next city is going to have an Ally down the guts, that will eventually work into a curve connected by branching high density streets, similar to a spine. Industrial will be upwind and at one end of the ally..
Fun game, pitty I can't play in Oceana at the moment, it's always full :/
Posted 09:43am 12/3/13
I have an avenue running from the highway down into the guts of my town and this is *jammed* the entire length. After zooming around a bit I found one truck trying to do a u-turn at the highway entrance causing a jam there and a fire truck/bus combo jamming it at the bottom.
Speaking of fire, police, buses etc - they are useless. They get stuck in traffic jams, cause traffic jams, stop in the middle of the road and don't move, etc. I've had to demolish roads and buildings to clean up the mess.
Yeah this was my mistake, now all they do is complain about the germs.
I don't know if it's the servers being funky but I switch to any other server, login, go back to Oceania 2 and 50% of the time I can login without a queue. So I just keep doing that a few times until I can get in.
Posted 09:49am 12/3/13
F*** :-(.
Posted 09:50am 12/3/13
Posted 09:58am 12/3/13
Wetwired, I'll join an Antarctican QGL map, it would be awesome if their servers are localised and the server is actually in Antarctica.
Posted 10:02am 12/3/13
Also is there an undo? I'm constantly plopping down stuff in the wrong spots
Posted 10:31am 12/3/13
Wetwired give us the name of the region when you do and I'll join it tonight. Make it private otherwise it can fill with randoms really quickly. QGL Asia filled up super quick, d'oh!
Posted 10:45am 12/3/13
No undo button sadly which gets really annoying. There is kind of one on roads, if you hit R when the road function is selected you can upgrade them but its free to downgrade.
My new city is leaps and bounds ahead of my old one thanks to knowing what to do now. Having one looping avenue around and then off-shooting it with high density streets works wonders, because everyone has to go through the avenue to get to shops and jobs so they will always pass by. Its also great placing a education centre along the avenue because everyone is now educated. Only problem now is air pollution but should be able to fix that with cleaner solutions.
I want to build a new city based on a part of my living area, would be cool to grab a map of Taringa and see how it works.
Posted 11:21am 12/3/13
Yeah so on my way to work I drive through 3 school zones, thanks mate
lol I dunno, I got a refund for this bulls*** and I'm playing Tropico 4 instead
Regards,
El Presidente
Posted 11:22am 12/3/13
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCityStrategy/comments/19si6i/city_layouts_to_combat_traffic/c8qww5u
Posted 11:59am 12/3/13
Posted 12:01pm 12/3/13
Keen to play with others :S
Posted 12:21pm 12/3/13
Posted 12:42pm 12/3/13
Add CharlesGrogan
Posted 01:15pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:22pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:28pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:33pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:48pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:49pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:53pm 12/3/13
Posted 01:54pm 12/3/13
Posted 02:00pm 12/3/13
I did, it should still be there though? Maybe it was the one in my other city that I destroyed.
That's one thing that confuses me, there doesn't seem to be any way to transport goods between my two cities, it's like they're too far away. Having an airport with a freight hanger in each didn't let me do it either. I wanted to ship 90% of my money to my new city to give it a head start bu there was no way of doing this.
Posted 02:10pm 12/3/13
It's kind of stupid.
On top of that there is still huge lag between transporting stuff between cities... so if you send it off, expect it to take a while to get there.
Posted 02:17pm 12/3/13
It's gone now, I rebuild my fire station and the helicopter option was no longer available.
Posted 02:17pm 12/3/13
I haven't played on Antarctica so I may not show up yet.
Posted 02:18pm 12/3/13
Yes, that makes sense. I could send it to one city all the way across the river though. So maybe if you could be bothered you could slowly pass it on until it gets to the city you want, that's pretty annoying though.
Posted 02:29pm 12/3/13
Claimed my area near Grog's, will be interesting to see how it goes though I won't be caring about water shortage that's for sure.
Posted 02:57pm 12/3/13
So I have massive traffic to the other two cities which I don't have a rail link to - s**** me off as my roads are congested.
Posted 03:01pm 12/3/13
Posted 06:39pm 12/3/13
Posted 11:30pm 12/3/13
add me Bushy_Squirrel
Posted 07:57am 13/3/13
man you've been pumping some hours into this game
Posted 08:30am 13/3/13
Posted 09:06am 13/3/13
I think a lot of my problems could be solved if I could make some of the roads one way only.
Posted 09:22am 13/3/13
Posted 10:36am 13/3/13
haha not really i left it on for like 3 hours one time while i went for sleep lol came back with a bit of money :)
Posted 10:39am 13/3/13
Posted 11:01am 13/3/13
I did find the best idea is right from the start, make your highway link an Ally (lowest grade ally) that runs down the guts of your city (more like town lol).
Then make sure that there are no intersections close to the entrance of the highway and no streetcar crossings and whatnot.
So far, I've found the train link is useful only if you are pulling in workers or shoppers. They also only pull it from places that have rail links I think.
Buses make a huge difference to traffic, pop down a bus depot, fill it up with buses and put bus stops all around the city, particularly residential (not high wealth tho).
Have a look at the traffic in detail where it is jammed and see if there are any repeating offenders.
I'm not sure what to do about those people doing U-turns all the time, retards. 1 way roads would rock.
Posted 11:10am 13/3/13
The simulation is actually really hard to understand coming from the past games.
Posted 11:13am 13/3/13
1. When founding your city, before building it look at your region and see what your immediate neighbors need and what they have. My latest city saves soooo much money by importing power and water and sending sewage off to them. It is about 17K population bringing in $8,000/day + coal mining operations on top of that.
2. Someone in your region needs to build a university. It is needed to get tech levels of industry up plus unlocks a bunch of stuff. I poped one in my industrial city (Toll Industries) and all my industry is now high tech plus it is bringing in heaps of students from the region (yay trains). So its educating the whole region. Not sure of what the flow on effects of that will be.
3. When starting your city, don't be afraid to take out bonds. Those ally's really need some serious cash.
4. Your resident wealth has a big impact on your city and the region. Be sure to match your requirements, ie little need for high wealth residences in low tech industry.
Posted 11:16am 13/3/13
Posted 11:23am 13/3/13
Either way doesn't that really amount to the same thing?
My firetrucks got stuck for hours in a bottleneck near the entrance to the city while across the other side houses were burning down. I think simulates peak hour too, most of the day my traffic is ok but come 8am if there's a fire, s***'s going to get burnt down.
Posted 11:32am 13/3/13
Posted 11:36am 13/3/13
Also, sometimes it takes a few in game sim hours/days to clear the traffic after you alter the road system.
Sometimes it is just you looked at the traffic when you had a big influx of moving trucks or construction trucks (density upgrades and stuff).
Posted 11:38am 13/3/13
Posted 11:41am 13/3/13
I'm unsatisfied with that explanation.
Posted 11:44am 13/3/13
The sizes are small, and they are annoying. You can quite easily cap out a "city" in at least 3 hours of playtime or less if you rush the design/screw it up but I reckon a bigger size would just cause more issues right now due to the traffic AI being so terrible. Hopefully when they fix it we can start to see things function properly and then get larger sizes. For now though, there is a big emphasis on multiplayer and using multiple cities to function as one. Its something new that I quite enjoy and was foreign to begin with but I'm slowly picking up what needs to be done.
From my understanding after reading Reddit's SimCity section, the traffic and civ AI is simply agent based, and that each agent will be created outside a house and go to the closest unfilled job position and then be "deleted". It will then create a new agent outside the business which will look for either the closest empty house or shop and go there. Repeat the process in loop and that seems to be what is currently going on.
This is what is causing massive traffic congestion because agents are simply finding the shortest path to the closest job/house/shop and just congregating in one giant puddle. There is actually no distinction between any of the AI, they all act like even the water/electricity and poop. If you watch the electricity or water grid, you'll notice sometimes it will just continuously loop around until it fills a spot. This is what happens with civ AI and vehicles, they just loop until they fill a spot. Apparently this is fixable with the programming language that they use by adding a weighting system, though that would increase the amount of data being sent so it is unknown what fix will be made.
Posted 11:45am 13/3/13
Posted 11:49am 13/3/13
Also, has there been any reference to a rebigulator which is a concept so ridiculous it makes me want to laugh out loud and chortle?
Posted 11:52am 13/3/13
Posted 11:55am 13/3/13
If you want I could try ditching my industrial and stick to residential and commercial? Maybe I'll specialise in tourism or gambling. The only thing is it's hard to know exactly how much you need, is there a way of finding this out? How many workers your neigbours need exactly?
When I first started out it was telling me I had unfilled mid wealth jobs, so I created more mid wealth residential areas, then those people complained about a lack of shopping, then I created more shops, then I needed more mid wealth jobs. This process seemed to repeat itself until I just gave up on pleasing them all.
Posted 11:56am 13/3/13
Posted 12:11pm 13/3/13
No, people here are talking like the poor AI is causing the traffic problems, when I think the looping cars are just an illustration of local traffic density. I have no basis for thinking this.
edit - After reading that article Eorl posted it would seem that this isn't the case.
Posted 12:12pm 13/3/13
That's a somewhat apt metaphor for life, really.
Posted 12:25pm 13/3/13
To check the more detailed demands of employment and stuff use the regional view and click on the buttons at the bottom (like workers) and then on the right hand side, click the various buttons for low/medium/high wealth and look at the bars that appear over the cities. That will tell you who wants what and so forth.
Posted 01:03pm 13/3/13
A question you guys might be able to help me with - I have a very high density city, everything is skyscrapers now and I keep finding myself in a situation NEEDING other cities, I've had to create a second city to cope with garbage, sewage and electricity, but then that brings it's own set of problems... trying to manage duel cities somewhat takes the fun out of it for me. Am I doing it wrong or is this how it is intended to be played?
Posted 01:07pm 13/3/13
don't know about that, playing in balls deep i didn't start getting any education or tech leveling until i got my own facilities and the other cities in the region all would have had a uni before i did
Posted 01:12pm 13/3/13
Also for people with traffic management issues here is th probable reason why:
What this means is that you can cause a big pile-up of dense traffic because it is doubleing up with a lot of traffic that went one way then came back to add to the traffic coming out.
The answer is to design your city knowing how traffic agents flow. Instead of how you think they should flow.
Posted 01:29pm 13/3/13
This is the problem that I was talking about before though, in that the agent AI is so simplistic that they are just filling "empty" spots. In SimCity 2004 each agent had its own job and house and would commute between the two (three for shopping) until they moved out/died/got fired. In this new SimCity this isn't the case because they simply "fill" what they can get, causing mass congestion and unfilled jobs/meltdowns because any sim can fill any spot.
Hopefully if (and when) this AI is fixed it will cause a more unique flow, in that Sims will know where exactly to go and you won't have low income earners/non-educated Sims filling up random jobs that they are unqualified for. If they worked like SImCity 2004 the example that you have Toll with one road would not have as bad congestion, cause the people dedicated to the bottom housing would go there after work, while the top housing would go there.
Also people are figuring out that there is a very high shadow population after 500 combined citizens (workers and shoppers), with large cities supposedly gaining 10 shadow citizens for every real citizen.
Posted 01:45pm 13/3/13
There were no agents in Simcity 4, everything was just based on stats. There were no citizens or workers living in your city and driving the simulation. Just traffic density, population and demographics stats.
It's also what I'm getting at here. Don't assume that the animation of the agents is accurately representing the simulation.
Posted 01:46pm 13/3/13
For instance Industry and Freight doesn't really do anything to commercial.
Sure commercial will accept the freight, however it doesn't need it.
Trade Depot's and other freight storage buildings simply accept freight, then that freight decays over time. This simply makes the industry happy and builds up.
It is entirely possible to build a city with only Commercial and Residential, with no industry in the region at all (and no other cities) and the commercial stores restock daily as if they received freight.
My guess is that commercial is supposed to need freight, however due to the massively overpopulated servers maxis patched in band-aid fix.
It explains a problem I've run into. My best city, Toll Industries, is almost 3/4's industry, and it is caining along nicely. The idea was the freight I made would ship off to other cities that have a freight shortfall. It sort of did that, however I noticed something odd. I didn't build much commercial at all, just a little tiny bit scattered around to keep people happy that shops are nearby (certainly only low density).
However my demand for freight has been increasing and matching my production of it. Yet I have nothing to use freight.
EXCEPT: I've also been building trade depot's to store the freight, thinking it would leave from there to the regional cities. Instead it seems the Trade depot's create an artificial demand for freight and just feed it into tiny blackholes so it disappears over time. Thus all the freight my city creates, get used up by the trade depot's and none is left for neighbours.
Since the intercity stuff seems to not be updating at a regular pace my guess is this was patched in to allow cities to run well. I do hope this is the case and will be 'fixed' soon.
I'm going to destroy 2 of my trade depot's that are accepting freight and close down my airport and see if my freight starts shipping to other cities or my entire industrial complex dies...
Posted 01:49pm 13/3/13
Posted 01:55pm 13/3/13
Trade Depots sell freight on the global market, wouldn't that explain where your good are going? You should be seeing regular payments in your budget. I wonder if this was switched off at some stage.....
Hog - Relatively stable, but still hasn't had essential features like Cheetah mode patched back in. It also still feels broken to me, but I can't quite put my finger on why, hence the discussions here trying to understand how it works.
Posted 01:51pm 13/3/13
Time will tell if it was a band-aid fix or just a fundamentally flawed game design...
Posted 01:52pm 13/3/13
Posted 01:55pm 13/3/13
There are options to build coal/ore/stuff addons to your trade depot and then you have the option to use those resources locally or put them to the global market, however there is no option for basic freight.
As I said, I'll get rid of those trade depots later tonight and see what happens. It could be that poor documentation is to blame.
Perhaps locally sourced freight has commercial building pay more in tax revenue, whereas if it gets it from the magical global market the extra cost is taken out before you get tax revenue?
Posted 01:56pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:00pm 13/3/13
I suspect it's doing what you said earlier and just sticking the freight into some black hole. Hopefully it still pays you for it :S
Posted 02:02pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:05pm 13/3/13
Firstly slow down... Its easy to rush in and build out a city really quickly, but you are much much better off building your city slowly.. Start with a small residential area, business and industrial, Have it running smoothly, wait till most of it becomes medium density before building more, this can be harder to do the more you play, but trust me, regardless of your "skill level". Taking it slow is the right way to play.
When you start a new area, instantly switch to the different maps and check what resources you have available, what way the wind is blowing. Plan ahead but don't starting acting on it.
Ignore the stupid pop ups.. learn to check the details page on the populate screen... read whats there and work with that.
Those pop ups are either delayed or crazy. Checking the details often will help you manage your city a lot better.
My list of how things should be built... residential, industrial (small areas, again start off slow,) commercial, power, water, sewage (again you might not need those if your region has some established places you can feed off... save money and use those if you can).
Then medical center, fire station, education, then police (why education before police you may ask.. educated sims are less likely to get into crime, plus it gets your student sims something todo rather then just sitting there doing nothing, plus it increases happiness a lot more then police do).
Once this is up and running i will then start expanding into transport.. Trains and ferries and buss (look at your region, check what other places are doing.. don't put down a train station if no one else has one.. but do if they plan to.. talk to the other players).. doing transport early on will allow you to run train tracks to a suitable area rather then just plonky it on the train line where you can fit it (i bet you have all done that).
Once this is running how its intended, then i expand.
Constantly check power and water and sewage, just click on the button and make sure everything is green, if it hits yellow start upgrading ect.
You will find if you let your city grow slowly and upgrade as it's need everything will become a lot easier to manage.
And yes, if you are playing in a region with other people, check the needs of that region and build based on that... you will f*** up everyone elses time if you just go in willy nilly and start building what ever.
When playing with another region do use there power and water, it starts off pretty cheap if will give you plenty of cash to get your emergency services in place (which will be the first thing that you really need).
If your having traffic problems choose the time of day when to expand and expand slowly... A mass amount of trucks moving citizens in will f*** your day, if you decide to expand at 6am for example, things will just get ugly.
If you need a big cash boost raise taxes to 20% for 2 in game hours, depending on your pop of course, this will give you a big increase in cash without seriously impacting sims mood, this is a much better alternative then bonds.
Stay away from tech unless your sims are educated and you have the hazmat addon to the fire station (your day will not be fun).
You don't need to spend big to get your sims mood up, lower taxes to 8% and they will soon start building UP! parks are good and all, but instead of using them to increase happiness directly, use them to fight crime, or improve areas that are of low land value for pollution reasons ect,
I have no magic tricks for trafic congestion short of build less intersections, don't be affraid to remove roads and change things up, sure its annoying todo but its necessary, you can't effectivley future proof 100% so expect it to happen.
Using these tips i can build a pretty sizable city of 100k sims really easily, its around that mark that i need to change alot of things and i will rely on other people in my region to help with power and water...ect
Oh one other tip, say you want to do over, but you don't want to abondon your city... once again raise taxes but for a lot longer, then delete delete delete... this will give you a huge starting bonus and an empty city... don't use bonds or else you are already starting out with a debt.
Posted 02:16pm 13/3/13
The same goes when building up your city from the start. The amount you pay back your bonds pails compared to the extra tax income you get from all those extra zones you plopped, plus the ability to quickly plop utilities and services.
Posted 02:17pm 13/3/13
- I have about 8.5mil in the bank. A deficit of -70k/hr but my electronics processing pulls in phat staxs, about 1.5mil/month.
- Population is >= 80% happiness and sitting around 105k
- At a a guess my zoning is about 80% residential, 15% commercial and the rest is utilities.
- I started the Arcology great work and last night had sent the first lot of materials to it.
My biggest tip for traffic is to look at it like the game pathing is not broken, instead the agents don't have the capacity, like humans, to think of alternative routes. Instead they just bank up and up and up and cause the traffic jams. The number one things that cause traffic jams are traffic lights.
At the entrance to my city I had a 4-way intersection with a high density avenue and traffic both ways was backed up forever. I demolished that and made a curved (coal mine in the way) high density avenue all the way into the guts of my town. I removed all crossroads and traffic is now free flowing.
So next problem is traffic jams in the city. My city is a grid square with the outside a high density avenue. Crossing across is high density roads. This wasn't working at all, instead the guys would jam up one corner of the map as they were trying to get to the tourist areas and university in that part.
To fix that, I basically removed the last street tile of each crossing high density road - now the avenues have no traffic lights. The agents are now forced to go around the city, on the high density avenue, and they then exit the high density roads near the tourist areas and universities.
My biggest flaw was thinking intersections and high density everything was the answer. You have to mix medium & high roads with the avenues to create good traffic flow. Also destroy half your bus stops and strategically place them along a route you want the bus to take, make sure that they are on high density roads/avenues so when they stop they don't block traffic behind.
This is how I make money! Fat lots of money :) Creating processors from the plastic in the recycling center and alloy from my smelter is an easy way to kick start your profit. Once you have that factory pumping along, you can then go into making computers and TVs which just cause ridiculous amounts of profit. I've now destroyed my smelters and am relying on imported alloy and still make a lot of cash.
Posted 02:20pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:25pm 13/3/13
Pretty much the only way to make huge cash is with trade, Computers and TV are flavor of the month, but fuel is also profitable.
It's very much worth nothing, that if your region lacks resources there is nothing stopping you from using the global market from importing what you need and building from there... one thing you can't really do is import low and export high...
Posted 02:29pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:50pm 13/3/13
on the surface everything seemed to be more or less working on release it is becoming increasingly obvious how outrageously broken some aspects of the game are. beats the f*** out of me what they actually tuned in the beta stage.
Posted 02:54pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:55pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:55pm 13/3/13
Posted 02:56pm 13/3/13
This doesn't overly bother me, I think a more involved global market would distract players from the city building/management side of things.
I believe trade ports ect are designed as a way to assist in exporting/importing faster.. which makes sense, as from what i saw on the leader boards it was all about these related values.
Posted 03:01pm 13/3/13
From my experience schooling is better off as upgrading as you go, or else attendance will be low.
Students are of varying ages, so you will get some attendance, but it will be maximized if you have a school, high school, then uni/community college.
Also note the community college works the same way as a university, it will educate adult sims, and it's quite cheap, if you are looking at research though to unlock things a univerisity is required (and it will cost you a lot more to run).
Posted 03:53pm 13/3/13
Posted 04:17pm 13/3/13
Check attendance of primary school, place high school, remove primary, check attendance of high school, check education level of city.
Posted 04:23pm 13/3/13
Posted 05:13pm 13/3/13
Posted 07:08pm 13/3/13
Posted 07:28pm 13/3/13
Posted 07:35pm 13/3/13
Right in the middle of residential
Posted 07:40pm 13/3/13
Posted 08:23pm 13/3/13
Posted 08:34pm 13/3/13
Posted 09:20pm 13/3/13
MY University filled to 1000 the first day it was running, there was a huge need for it. Then almost all my industry in the same city is lvl 3 Tech, sending freight to the magical blackholes and making money. I wan't a business like that, the hardest part is making one of those mini-black holes..
Posted 11:42pm 13/3/13
Posted 11:46pm 13/3/13
Really struggling to crack 100k pop even with 0% taxes. I'm guessing a pure residential/commercial city isn't possible :(
Posted 11:51pm 13/3/13
lots of utilities with upgradeable modules come with the basic unit and you add additional upgrades. edit the pump station and then bulldoze the basic pump, replace with a filtered module.
Posted 11:54pm 13/3/13
same goes for things like wind or solar plants, delete the basic starting one and have all upgraded modules.
what I wouldn't give for a ctrl-z feature in this game.. the number of times I've wasted 60k+ f*****g up the placement of something that I have absolutely no choice but to redo... rargh!
Posted 12:54am 14/3/13
The limited space thing is starting to annoy me. It doesn't take long at all to fill it up and when that happens your options become much more limited. I think an ideal size would be twice the length and width, so four times the surface area; it would allow for much more creative city design and planning.
Posted 10:22am 14/3/13
Also has anyone done oil mining? Ive got 3 of them pumping and i cant get the first milestone with the HQ anyone else have? also how many process factories do you need to have to make heaps of money?
Posted 10:26am 14/3/13
Ive had 200k with that many people, make sure you upgrade your mansion etc that how land value goes up
Posted 10:28am 14/3/13
I made enough profit with one processor factory however at the time I was creating my own plastics (recycling) and alloy (smelting). I had a coal and ore refinery for the smelting so didn't have to import.
Now I have 2 processor factories, one TV factory and one computer factory and import all the materials (recycling contributes about 3-4000 when I use something like 30,000 daily). This generates enough income where I don't even worry about plopping down a computer factory, realising it's in the wrong spot and demolishing it .. the money earned is utterly stupid!
Posted 02:45pm 14/3/13
Posted 04:48pm 14/3/13
Ive managed to make a single city, the only one in the region, convert it all to high tech, high wealth, built a bunch of processor/electronics factories and the money is rolling in. Its just plain grids, but there is pretty much no traffic even with 150K pop. High wealth must not generate traffic, I had far worse traffic at 50K pop.
Kinda over this game , I dont see any reason to keep playing. Every city I make ends up the same. It feels like a shallow imitation of Simcity that is much more focused on being a game, and less about simulation.
Posted 04:09pm 14/3/13
Whats probably annoying me most about the game is that it has some serious flaws from bugs to imbalances and the dev's have acknowledge s*** all about them...
Ignoring the launch problems (which personally never affected me).. the game is broken, some of this s*** would of been discovered if there stupid beta wasn't limited by an hour.
Also I hope websites re-think there policy on reviewing a game based on the pre-launch experience, as I bought this game based on reviews and it sold it to me pretty strong (Ausgamers included) and whilst most of my disappointment is directed towards EA and Maxis I do feel slightly cheated by the review sites in which I trust the opinions of.
Posted 04:47pm 14/3/13
It should not be possible to build up a commercial/residence city with no method of receiving freight. Nor should you be able to run industry/residence without having somewhere REAL to send you freight.
I can see what maxis is attempting to do and really hope they get there soon.
I want to see the global supply/demand for all freight to respond to the changes in the server. Including basic freight. It may even be doing that, however without being able to look that information up DURING CITY play it is hard to respond to.
My industry/residence city is going gang-busters, 20K population bringing in $10,000/hr. All my freight goes into Depot's to disappear, presumably to the 'global market' Now in my region there is very large demand for industry across many cities, however I export none of my industry directly to them. I would imagine regions across the server are similar, LOTS of demand for freight. So global demand for freight would be very high.
The global import/export makes it super easy mode to do anything. It almost negates needing neighbor cities. The global supply/demand should be both more expensive to buy from and take longer to send/receive goods. Thus making import/export to neighbor cities far more important. It would also make pure residential or RC/ RI cities only work if the region supported it...
Posted 04:56pm 14/3/13
Yeah, it bothered me that Trog was suggesting we vote with our money, all the while hosting a massive buy recommendation for a broken game.
Posted 04:55pm 14/3/13
Posted 05:00pm 14/3/13
Each dwelling/apartment should require rent/mortgage to be paid. If the Sims don't have any cash they eventually get kicked out. Thus a Sim MUST have a source of income otherwise cities can't go very much.
It already tracks cash flow so why not do that. Perhaps it will be patched in.
However a full Residence city with no supporting cities in the region should NOT be able to grow like that.
Posted 05:08pm 14/3/13
Posted 06:11pm 14/3/13
I really do like the concept they have going, it just needs tweaking.
It really seems the game wasn't completed yet, maybe 85% game logic, art/sound assets at 99%. As far as EA was concerned it was playable and releasable. Hopefully Maxis is working on patching in the rest of the functionality, so more logical interaction between C and I and requirement for R to have money.
I really don't mind how there are no real Sims, it is more about the buildings. As far as the building is concerned as long as someone paid rent on time it is all good.
If residence were required to pay rent/mortgage it would require that industry employ them and industry receive its money (some of which flows to the resident houses) from commercial who in turn receive it from sims, a big circle. Mining would be the beginning of the region cities to generate money to be fed into the ICR cycle.
Throw in the global market to alter where cash goes/come at a macro level and the game would be much more interesting and dynamic..
Posted 06:13pm 14/3/13
Cash should be the main driver for increasing density, along with happiness to modulate it.
At the moment, happiness is the driver for density and in a way happiness generates money. ???? WTF
Posted 08:19pm 14/3/13
Posted 08:57pm 14/3/13
Posted 09:27am 15/3/13
Posted 01:07am 16/3/13
Posted 08:26am 16/3/13
So I demolished all the residential, took out all the parks and things that increase wealth and after 10 minutes the population was a tad under 200k.
My goal for a city was to have a no industrial, high wealth and high population but it seems like you can't achieve the population part of it.
In other news, the Balls Deep arcology is almost finished phase 1!
Posted 05:25pm 17/3/13
Posted 08:53pm 17/3/13
So far I'm enjoying it still, started a new region in that very flat wooded area, building a new Gotham 2.0 and trying out some different road designs in sandbox. Its definitely more effective to plan out where your roads are going to be instead of doing it on a whim, less traffic congestion until they fix it.
Posted 10:11pm 17/3/13
The upgrade comes at 1000 students in a day, the University has 4 class periods per day which can all be up to and a little bit over the University's capacity.
Posted 09:25am 18/3/13
Posted 09:52am 18/3/13
I can understand F2P games having in-game stores were you can by one of buildings or whatever (I personally don't like that and don't play those games), however a fully paid up front game like SimCity should not have these micro-transactions in them with game changing effects, or really cosmetic ones.
Expansions packs, cool. DLC not as cool, but if they have enough content for the $'s, cool. Single building micro transactions, NOT COOL.
Posted 10:48am 18/3/13
Posted 12:35pm 18/3/13
Yeah I am finding this too, I have a city that runs at -70k/hr but is making well over 5mil a day from TVs... I walked away from the city and did some work on the yard, came back a few hours later having made close to 60mil without a problem... entirely self sustainable. Only thing that happened was an earthquake that destroyed my police station.. but it still kept working anyway? weird.
I am now just gifting money to new cities and buggering around with cool designs and building all the great works things- I think that is going to wear off quickly though.
Posted 01:16pm 18/3/13
Is Steve working on a piece about this? He is yet to comment on his review and seems oddly silent when there is so much here that bears discussion.
Posted 01:30pm 18/3/13
Posted 03:19pm 18/3/13
Posted 03:21pm 18/3/13
Not on Antarctica server, but down here in Melbourne today may as well be in Antarctica.
Posted 07:54am 19/3/13
More info about it all here: https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-something-extra
Posted 07:55am 19/3/13
Posted 09:12am 19/3/13
Posted 09:28am 19/3/13
Posted 09:29am 19/3/13
I really hate the in-game friends thing. Origin, will say Blah is playing SimCity but it doesn't say what server. You jump into a SimCity server only to have 0 friends playing.
I find this game no challenge at all, well apart from having well flowing traffic. It is just wayyyyyyyy to easy to make money and pretty much any city combination grows.
My latest city I'm focusing on building Medium and High Wealth workers that commute to other cities that need them, so it is about 80% residential with a corner that is mining Coal and recycling to pay the bills, and then some.
I totally ignore the RCI bars as they are totally broken. For instance my city has zero demand for commercial, yet my commercial is doing just fine and any commercial zone I plop down gets filled almost instantly.
Sims really need to pay Rent, after taxes. That would make a huge difference I think, as you would really have to make sure your sims are earning enough from your city/region otherwise it just wont grow.
The game is just plain too easy.
Posted 10:12am 19/3/13
Posted 10:19am 19/3/13
Posted 10:21am 19/3/13
Posted 10:22am 19/3/13
Posted 10:37am 19/3/13
Yes, getting free DLC would be more ideal. I think the base game is fun but lacks depth; it's quite easy to lose interest quickly. This could be remedied with significant gameplay altering DLC, though I'm not sure I'd pay for any as I think the $70 I paid for this game should be giving me more features to start off with.
I don't know the source of that image of the microtransactions, but the $14.99 for a ship kind of worries me.
Posted 10:50am 19/3/13
EA CEO has stepped down.
To be fair, about 10% of those are me yelling about stuff.
Posted 10:42am 19/3/13
Think of the extra tourists though!
Posted 11:17am 19/3/13
Posted 11:38am 19/3/13
Posted 12:47pm 19/3/13
Posted 03:36pm 19/3/13
ditto, it's driving me up the wall!
Posted 08:19pm 19/3/13
Posted 09:24am 20/3/13
didn't someone come up with an offline mode hack yet?
Posted 12:15pm 20/3/13
Posted 06:43pm 20/3/13
Posted 07:34pm 20/3/13
Anyway, new patch today which i'm about to give a whirl....
Posted 08:04pm 20/3/13
So now there is no challenge. I hope they certainly sort that out.
Not sure which game to get, I'm thinking of Dead Space 3, of NFS:MW. IS NFS any good?
Posted 09:38pm 20/3/13
Khel should give it 12 out of 10.
Posted 09:54pm 20/3/13
Posted 05:37pm 21/3/13
Posted 05:41pm 21/3/13
Posted 09:08pm 21/3/13
Posted 11:50pm 21/3/13
Posted 12:13pm 23/3/13
Posted 02:01pm 23/3/13
Posted 02:21pm 23/3/13
Posted 02:23pm 23/3/13
Posted 09:59am 24/3/13
industrial needs unskilled workers -> the only way to grow your city to get like 200k population is to increase density across the whole area pretty much -> increasing density requires you to increase property value which attracts high wealth skilled workers -> industry goes out of business because there isn't any unskilled low wealth workers left
Posted 10:28am 24/3/13
You can increase low wealth density by decreasing taxes rather then placing parks...
But the game still lacks an incredible amount of balance.
Posted 10:37am 24/3/13
a fire alert pops up that there is a hazmat fire in one of the industrial buildings, so I look over at my hazmat fire truck and sure enough he pops out so i'm like sweet - he drives over the other side of the city to a low income house that is also on fire, stops at the house for less than a second and then drives off back to the fire station and both the house and the industrial building proceed to burning down completely
winning
Posted 11:00am 24/3/13
I thought density is related to happiness. If you increase property value, you increase the wealth of the sims. The problem is that high wealth sims don't build high population buildings. A high density low wealth building will have more population than a high density high wealth building.
I confirmed this as my city was about 80k with all high wealth people. I destroyed all the things that increased land value (parks, etc) and watched all the bogans and derros move in. My population is now about 220k.
Posted 11:11am 24/3/13
Posted 01:16pm 25/3/13
Why are my sims so stupid, and so incredibly lazy?
I don't know about you, but I walked 1km to primary school, and 3km to high school. Every day. For six-seven years of each.
Can you please explain to me why it is that basically none of my sims are willing to walk greater than a distance of about 10 houses before they give up on any hope of education? And why, oh why, must they require busses to get to school - and school busses at that? Is it so inconceivable that a child might take another public transport system to get to or from school?
Similarly, can you explain sims complete disdain for highways? I get that there's this two-lane regular street right there that is more direct, but have you actually ever done that in practice? Taken small roads that constantly cross major roads, rather than using a parallel major road or highway? It would seem this is the preferred choice of sims. Here in Melbourne, a good example of this is the Western Ring Road, which is a 5km longer router (5.5 vs 11km) than taking another main road, but it's still quicker. This seems to be something which never occurs in Sim City.
Further, on what planet does a city of 150,000 require 50-floor high-rise buildings? My local council, at last census, had 154,000 residents. We also have planning restrictions that only allow three story buildings with special conditions - yet skyscrapers seem to be a common occurance, and requirement, for any Sim City to reach such populations.
May I suggest that your Sims are idiots, and that zombies might produce a more functional society?
Sincerely,
A frustrated player.
Posted 01:19pm 25/3/13
Posted 01:19pm 25/3/13
Posted 01:28pm 25/3/13
Yeah, and WTF is with only being able to build expensive or high-volume residential on a multi-lane road? That's just asking for both traffic chaos and accidents.
Posted 01:38pm 25/3/13
I haven't really played post-traffic-patch because I'm scared that the MASSIVE-SUPER-EASY-MODE that is SimCity 2013 will provide absolutely no challenge. As I said earlier, the only challenge in this game was managing your traffic when you got big cities and only because the traffic system was broken.
So now there is practically no challenge.
Posted 02:10pm 25/3/13
Posted 02:36pm 25/3/13
Recycling center > export alloy and plastics, then use them + import material to make tvs once you have the trade HQ upgrades - enjoy infinite money and no challenge at all.
Posted 03:38pm 25/3/13
Posted 04:20pm 25/3/13
Yep - I think it's a bug. My city was making millions every day until 1.7 "fixed" traffic problems.
Posted 09:11pm 25/3/13
Don't zone on your avenues. Zone on the opposite road so the entrances to those buildings aren't on the avenue and traffic entering/exiting won't f*** it all up.
Posted 09:26pm 25/3/13
so where is everyone playing these days? what server?
Posted 10:08pm 25/3/13
Posted 12:09pm 26/3/13
I tracked some of my sims last night and one idiot went around the block 5 times before getting fired. She only had herself to blame.
Posted 12:23pm 26/3/13
normally just over 1 hour, once you have approval raiting of 75% and create Manor for Mayor its just keeps jumping up and up
Posted 12:26pm 26/3/13
haha
Posted 12:13pm 28/3/13
I was surprisingly wrong.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7053-SimCity
Yeah, he went way beyond that benchmark.
Posted 12:42pm 28/3/13
If a game is good or a development studio succeeds at trying new or interesting things it'll receive moderate praise while at the same time pointing out some of the bad bits. If a game is s*** or the devs/publisher try to get away with serving a turd on a silver platter he'll go off at it (and rightly so).
Posted 01:28pm 28/3/13
i want to play with other people as i can't be f***ed building multiple cities just to be able to survive and i start public games but no one ever joins i suspect because the game finder is completely munted and i can't ever find any regions that aren't full on it
Posted 02:11pm 28/3/13
I shall call him... Ausgamia.
Posted 02:14pm 28/3/13
Posted 02:21pm 28/3/13
Posted 02:24pm 28/3/13
Posted 02:43pm 28/3/13
Posted 02:55pm 28/3/13
Posted 03:24pm 28/3/13
Posted 03:44pm 28/3/13
If you all want to PM me a username, I'll send you details/invites when I get home.
Posted 03:55pm 28/3/13
Posted 06:02pm 28/3/13
Posted 08:05pm 28/3/13
Posted 09:10pm 28/3/13
Posted 01:10pm 29/3/13