Almost a quarter century after SimCity Will Wright, Maxis is developing a new simulator cities.
Genre: Construction of cities.
Publisher: Electronic Arts.
Developer: Maxis (Darkspore, GS06/11: 60 points).
Date: 2013.
State: 30% of development.
PROS
New graphics engine and road round.
Multiplayer mode.
Buildings updatable.
The various cities.
Send infographics.
The positioning of the camera ...
CONS
... can cost to make panoramas.
The Sims are sometimes shown without a head.
Looks like a trailer for some awesome, next-gen Sim City.
Don't do this to me, Rumbler. Just stop.
Don't do this to me, Rumbler. Just stop.
Your pain is my pain, brother. :'(
Fake.
I've been waiting years for a fully polygonal Sim City, one where you can actually walk around and get a streetside view. I think the 64DD Sim City was something like this IIRC?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoKT25S2yJU
for some reason I get a tilt-shift feeling from it. if that's how the game's presentation is, it would be pretty smart.
I've been waiting years for a fully polygonal Sim City, one where you can actually walk around and get a streetside view. I think the 64DD Sim City was something like this IIRC?
You can sort of do this with Streets of Sim City, although the game is garbage otherwise.
actually it'd be cool if there were other micromanaging aspects, like running a campaign or business or drug trade. or if you could build park trails and the hike on them. or fish. or skydive. or all kinds of other cool shit beyond just zoning a city and handling taxes.
actually it'd be cool if there were other micromanaging aspects, like running a campaign or business or drug trade. or if you could build park trails and the hike on them. or fish. or skydive. or all kinds of other cool shit beyond just zoning a city and handling taxes.
ALLOW SIMS INTEGRATION
actually it'd be cool if there were other micromanaging aspects, like running a campaign or business or drug trade. or if you could build park trails and the hike on them. or fish. or skydive. or all kinds of other cool shit beyond just zoning a city and handling taxes.
ALLOW SIMS INTEGRATION
Already shot down.
http://It will feature a new simulation engine that aims to model the world we live in today. Player decisions will affect cities outside their own as well as individual sims. Their cities will sit in regions shared by those of friends, and be subject to the series’ signature threats - Bradshaw alluded to giant lizards.
actually it'd be cool if there were other micromanaging aspects, like running a campaign or business or drug trade. or if you could build park trails and the hike on them. or fish. or skydive. or all kinds of other cool shit beyond just zoning a city and handling taxes.
ALLOW SIMS INTEGRATION
Already shot down.
WHAT?!
GameStar: Import your own houses in The Sims, would be a stroke of genius for players of SimCity.
Lucy Bradshaw: At present we have not expected, because the game is technically very different. However, customization is: you design a house in The Sims very detailed, and SimCity are improved buildings with new modules, has its own intelligence and gameplay.
4 doesn't work with multi core CPUs. It's really sad, I would play it more if it was stable.
I'M CUMMING!
This shit looks amazing. It's great to see them get some good ideas back after Sim City Societies. Ugh. What a POS that game was.
-Ocean- We’re making SimCity, not some dopey casual game.
The most important thing is the integrity of the simulation underneath it, the stuff that represents the systems that make up a real city. I don’t want to enforce sustainable design principles in the game – I want them to emerge as natural consequences of your interaction with the simulation.
If you don’t deal with your sewage, with traffic congestion, with walkability & transit, with ground and air pollution – your city will reflect that! And there are lots of people who will want to explore the simulation and see what happens when they do. Making some polluted, congested, urban nightmare is a total win condition, as far as I’m concerned.
Making some polluted, congested, urban nightmare is a total win condition, as far as I’m concerned.
I wish this was out earlier :(SimCity Social comes out next month!
Reports said that you need a persistent connection to play this even single player? Is that true? Do you need to install that Origin crap? Fuckin' EA.
I hope that tilt-shift effect is only for the promotional photos. It looks terrible and is absolutely pointless.
you can't.
you can't.
look more like sim town than sim city imo. they said that the largest cities in SC5 will be about mid-level for SC4.
Did anyone else play SimCity 2000 as a kid and spend way too much time shooting down the helicopter?
No subways is terrible.
no subways?! :( where'd you see that?
no subways?! :( where'd you see that?
No subways, no rail systems, water systems are put down automatically apparently.
no subways?! :( where'd you see that?
No subways, no rail systems, water systems are put down automatically apparently.
No subways is terrible.
maybe it'll be DLC :lol
:-\
Yeah...I just don't know about this game. I'm always hyped for decent city-builders, but for everything that looks cool about this there's at least one thing that looks really lame. And $60 [or $80 for all the launch DLC :lol] is just looking like way too much.
Cities XL is the poor man's Sim City, but it's still worth playing if you can pick it up cheap [and you usually can].
YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
I prefer 3 and was hoping for less of 4's obtuse regions system in 5 while still managing to create and simulate large, dense cities.
Not really feeling it.
And because there's no save games, I can't go back in time to try a different route. There's no freedom to experiment. Because you suffer permadeath.
This time, I just got an advisor pop-up explaining the situation and no steam from the cooling tower.
http://www.twitch.tv/giantbomb/b/373876663
Disc version comes with 2gb install, you need to download the other 10gb
:what
Disc version comes with 2gb install, you need to download the other 10gb
:what
Disc version comes with 2gb install, you need to download the other 10gb
:what
Watching it now. "I'd like this if it just worked" seems to be a common theme.
So did anyone on the bore get this?
there really no way to make bigger cities? thats a real bummer
We need to keep in mind that Sim City is a mainstream game, it’s not a game that is only going to run on high-end gaming PCs, it has to run in your Dad’s PC as well. That is just a performance decision. Given that was the performance constraint we decided to work under, we built a larger region environment and a bunch of the multiplay to work with 2km cities.
We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size, but I can’t make any promises as to when.
(http://i.imgur.com/7zOh1GG.png):lol
That screen shot is incredible
This has been an exciting and challenging week for the team here at Maxis, the culmination years of planning and development. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and enthusiasm from our fans which has made it even more upsetting for us that technical issues have become more prominent in the last 24 hours. We are hitting a number of problems with our server architecture which has seen players encountering bugs and long wait times to enter servers. This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues.
What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days which will alleviate many of the ongoing issues. We are also paying close attention to all the bug reports we are receiving from our fans. We’ve already pushed several updates in the last few days. Our live ops team is working 24/7 to resolve issues and ensure that bug fixes roll into the game as quickly as possible.
While the ongoing issues are troubling, we can also see that players are really enjoying the game. In a single 24 hour period, there were more than 38 million buildings plopped down, nearly 7 and a half million kilometers of roads laid down, 18+ million fires started and (my favorite fact) over 40 million pipes filled up with poop.
This team has put everything into this game and won’t stop until things are smooth. We ask our fans to be patient as our team works diligently to fix the issues. We share your passion for SimCity and thank you for your support and understanding.
What we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days
QuoteWhat we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days
Someone in management didn't expect this thing to sell very well.
QuoteWhat we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days
Someone in management didn't expect this thing to sell very well.
EA already has money from the initial purchase. No need to add more expensive servers, especially considering only a fraction of the user base will still be active several months from now.
Never, ever buy an always-on online DRM game on the first week of release. Didn't you guys learn anything from Diablo 3?
Never, ever buy an always-on online DRM game on the first week of release. Didn't you guys learn anything from Diablo 3?
I bought Diablo 3 a few days after release and had no issues, amazingly. But it looked like just pure Diablo awesomeness instead of SimTown.
The debate of course is shoud Sim City be online centric.
Lets be fair here , d3 had some issues, but it also sold 10 million copies.
Sim City prob did 10% or less of d3 at launch and its still borked, really shameful.
Lets be fair here , d3 had some issues, but it also sold 10 million copies.
Sim City prob did 10% or less of d3 at launch and its still borked, really shameful.
But it's not a question of raw sales numbers. Both Blizzard and EA know that the initial Day 1 surge will quickly die down to a more manageable number. Adding more servers to meet Day 1 demand costs money that they're not willing to spend, not when those servers probably won't be necessary later in the week. And if they are necessary, well, you go set up some more servers.
Patch 1.2
* Fix for crash caused most commonly occurring on servers experiencing lag. This crash would happen most often when claiming a new city when playing in a region.
* Fix for server select dialog not appearing on start-up if the server the player was last on is not available.
* Disabled Cheetah speed. Cheetah speed is now the same as llama speed.
* Crash fix for finding closest points.
* Crash fixes in transport and pedestrian code.
* A fix cities having processing problems associated with helicopters.
http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/
Also
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9341807.pageQuotePatch 1.2
* Fix for crash caused most commonly occurring on servers experiencing lag. This crash would happen most often when claiming a new city when playing in a region.
* Fix for server select dialog not appearing on start-up if the server the player was last on is not available.
* Disabled Cheetah speed. Cheetah speed is now the same as llama speed.
* Crash fix for finding closest points.
* Crash fixes in transport and pedestrian code.
* A fix cities having processing problems associated with helicopters.
:what
http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2013/03/review-simcity/
Also
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9341807.pageQuotePatch 1.2
* Fix for crash caused most commonly occurring on servers experiencing lag. This crash would happen most often when claiming a new city when playing in a region.
* Fix for server select dialog not appearing on start-up if the server the player was last on is not available.
* Disabled Cheetah speed. Cheetah speed is now the same as llama speed.
* Crash fix for finding closest points.
* Crash fixes in transport and pedestrian code.
* A fix cities having processing problems associated with helicopters.
:what
Sounds like it was pinging their server too much.
I'm a noob to this series and haven't followed 5 at all, really all I liked was 3000. But they did the region thing from 4 again and made the individual areas smaller? Why?
I played so much Sim City 2000 when I was a kid. Hundreds if not thousands of hours.
Here's an even better comparison:
(http://i.imgur.com/DiiT9gu.jpg)
See that little red square? That's roughly the size of a Sim City 5 city.
Polygon just lowered their score to 4 :rofl
But they did the region thing from 4 again and made the individual areas smaller?
They did, and here's the thing: in Simcity 4, the individual player controlled every aspect of the region. So, you could build a factory town that was connected to your peaceful suburb and have those two cities feed off of each other. Now? You have to hope that other people in your region are cooperative.
They did, and here's the thing: in Simcity 4, the individual player controlled every aspect of the region. So, you could build a factory town that was connected to your peaceful suburb and have those two cities feed off of each other. Now? You have to hope that other people in your region are cooperative.
To be fair I think you can create a private region and just run all the cities yourself although at that point it begs the question of why the game is online (We all know its piracy of course). Same as with Diablo 3.
Don't know why everyone is shocked. Everything mentioned in this page are things we have known about for almost near a year. The game has smelled fuck up since post-E3. But I guess most of the people in this thread now didn't follow this games marketing.
ALl this talk about how crappy the new SimCity makes me crave some other good city builder. What would be the best to play? Is SimCity 4 the best or something else, I've read some mixed opininions on it and it appears to have stability issues for some people..
EA, you are worse than Herpes. At least my infrastructure worked.
Remember SimCity Societies? Neither do I.
Publisher Electronic Arts has suspended some of its online marketing campaigns for SimCity in the wake of ongoing server issues, asking its affiliates to "please stop actively promoting the game" until further notice.
In an email sent this morning to affiliate partners, EA Origin says it has "deactivated all SimCity text links and creative and we ask you to please remove any copy promoting SimCity from your website for the time-being." The email, obtained by Polygon, is directed at affiliates of EA Origin's LinkShare program.
"To be clear we are continuing to payout commissions on all SimCity sales that are referred, however we are requesting that you please stop actively promoting the game," the email reads. "We will notify you as soon as the SimCity marketing campaigns have been resumed and our promotional links are once again live in the Linkshare interface. We apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause, and we thank you for your cooperation."
SimCity launched earlier this week and has struggled to meet player demand. Developer Maxis has deactivated certain gameplay features and says it will continue to roll out fixes to address "server instability" and player frustration."
Polygon has contacted Electronic Arts seeking comment and will update with any information the company provides.
"What we saw was that players were having such a good time they didn't want to leave the game, which kept our servers packed and made it difficult for new players to join," explained senior producer Kip Katsarelis on EA's forums.:lol
All they had to do was put out a prettier Sim City with a few more features! How do you fuck this up so badly?
Remember SimCity Societies? Neither do I.
Remember Sim Ant? Everyone remembers Sim Ant :heart
QuoteWhat we are doing is deploying more servers over the coming two days
Someone in management didn't expect this thing to sell very well.
EA already has money from the initial purchase. No need to add more expensive servers, especially considering only a fraction of the user base will still be active several months from now.
Seems typical for online game launches. Providing enough servers for launch capacity is a waste of money when the online pop. will plummet in the coming weeks or months.
Good Lord, this is one of the biggest gaming disasters I've ever seen. :lol
MaxisToast 27 points 2 hours agooh god
So, we originally had some grand designs for this map. It used to be the 'budget map' and was supposed to show not only expense, but income.
Long (and slightly confidential) story short: doing the income part was crazy hard and we cut it.
The map was still super useful when balancing the budget, but since it didn't give the full picture we weren't comfortable featuring it in the main data layer palette. So now it lives only within the context of a bankrupted city.
QuoteMaxisToast 27 points 2 hours agooh god
So, we originally had some grand designs for this map. It used to be the 'budget map' and was supposed to show not only expense, but income.
Long (and slightly confidential) story short: doing the income part was crazy hard and we cut it.
The map was still super useful when balancing the budget, but since it didn't give the full picture we weren't comfortable featuring it in the main data layer palette. So now it lives only within the context of a bankrupted city.
“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”
“It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.”
So this is the second thing that has been puzzling the hell out of me today. Did EA lie about how much population a city could support in this game in order to reassure the potential player-base that small tile sizes would be okay?
Check out this thread from the Sim City forums. In particular this post:QuoteA Low Income - Low Density House has 6 adults, 4 are workers and 2 are shoppers. If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 6. Makes sense.So what the hell? This basically confirms a lot of suspicions of mine and others that we aren't actually seeing that many sims in our cities and it also explains why only 1/10 of the population is working. We don't actually have as many people in our cities as we think! EA has stated numerous times that their internal testers were able to get cities of 500k and even 1 million sims, but in reality they may have been blowing smoke up our asses! What the fuck, if I'm having traffic problems at ~100k sims (which is actually more on the order of 10k sims) imagine what would happen if I had 10 times more sims on the streets.
A Low Income - Med Density House has 60 adults, 40 are workers, 20 are shoppers If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 60. Makes sense.
A Low Income - High Density House is where things go all whacky... By the pattern above you would assume that a high density home would be 600 adults where 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers, and this is true. If you look at the data layers (at the right times) you will see that there are indeed 600 residents and 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers....
BUT...
If you destroy this High Density house, your population goes down by 5200!!!!! (As well as increasing by 5200 when it gets rebuilt)
So either the worker/shopper count is bugged for high population buildings, OR they are purposefully "padding" the bottom center population numbers to make the city look bigger than it actually is.
Am I deluding myself or is it a real possibility that this gamebreaking design decision cannot be remedied?
What's particularly frustrating is that the addition of phantom population is not linear. See these posts from the linked thread (which match my own experiences):
1.QuoteI don't mind if they have to put in phantom pop because they can't sim every individual, I just wish they did it consistently say 4 phantom for every real pop. Instead the phantom pop grows exponentially so you see your pop go from 100k to 200k and think you have doubled but in actuality you have gone from something like 20k to 25k. The higher your pop the less sense the game seems to make because you are seemingly supporting more and more massive populations with ever decreasing percentage of real sims.2.QuoteThe magic figure is 500 or when there is no medium density buildings. When the total population is below 500, the total population = the number of workers plus shoppers. After 500, they beefed up the total population in certain percentage. For larger cities, the ratio is 1:10.This is why your tax revenue doesn't double when the population of your city doubles. Your population counter might claim that your city has doubled in residents, but the number of AI agents actually being simulated has only increased by a small percentage of that (which gets smaller and smaller the larger your city gets).
If you're going to artificially inflate numbers to make your game seem more impressive, at least do so in a way that doesn't significantly impact gameplay.
Yet, the total amount of required workers increases with the "phantom" population and not the actual population, causing a worker shortage. This is my biggest gripe with the game. 6 blocks of industrial, 2 block of commercial, dozens and dozens of blocks of residential, and I have a 10k worker shorter. WTF?
This problem is the most serious in the game; even if you have all low-wealth sims and 80% residential, once you get to 50,000 population or so you have chronic worker shortages that can't be alleviated by increasing density. Utterly game-breaking and yet Maxis hasn't said anything about it.
Because of the way the traffic system works, the most efficient city layout is based around a single snaking road from one end of town the the other.(http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/6597/spark20130127193819.png)
Oh my Christ were the other Simcity games this fucked up
Oh my Christ were the other Simcity games this fucked up
Not to this extent. SC4 had a bug where everyone always took the most direct route to a place, but nothing major like this.
Remember SimCity Societies? Neither do I.
Remember Sim Ant? Everyone remembers Sim Ant :heart
If EA wants to make an always online game it should be a massively multiplayer sim ant game. Each server can be a backyard (spiders unlocks are $5 each!)
My ant hill is surrounded by rocks. I dare you to come to my hill!
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-MWwY9JoiyMo/UT024vQhMWI/AAAAAAAACO4/JxBJ3i_FqYQ/s900/watertown3.png)
Now that I think about it there really should be an underwater city builder, or a Sim Tower in the ocean where you can build levels underwater down to the ocean bottomhttp://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/atlantisunderwatertycoon/review.html
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-MWwY9JoiyMo/UT024vQhMWI/AAAAAAAACO4/JxBJ3i_FqYQ/s900/watertown3.png)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2RfNZsnuj4
(http://i.imgur.com/evqYGbkh.jpg)
The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.
The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs."
"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops...
Since no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house.
Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire. The only thing you get for having multiple fire-trucks is that they put the fires out slightly quicker.
QuoteThe reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.QuoteThe problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs."Quote"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops...QuoteSince no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house.QuoteFire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire. The only thing you get for having multiple fire-trucks is that they put the fires out slightly quicker.
Haha, reading all this stuff is funny.
Likely they are visiting your parks. A sim will go to a park (or public library) if they cannot go shopping due to lack of shops or lack of money. Since parks are free, going 'park shopping' doesn't drain the household's income, yet provides the same increase of happiness.
Is there any place to read a short summary of every single thing wrong with this game? I only know of the "always online" and "small cities based around automobile transportation" flaws.http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a75te/how_it_came_to_this/
The list of offenses is egregious and growing:
-Draconian DRM which monitors you at all times, requiring you to be online to report in at regular intervals.
-Horrendously unreliable servers wholly incapable of supporting the number of players.
These two issues alone are damning. You must play under the strict EA terms and only when they allow you. You thought you purchased this game and own it, but soon realize you’ve only been granted tentative permission to borrow it, and only when it’s convenient. Little did most suspect that these issues would only be the tip of the iceberg. Then came the game itself:
-A supposedly required set of server-side calculations to allow for a simulation engine so complex and powerful that your puny computer alone wouldn’t be able to handle it – revealed to be a hollow lie concocted to justify not allowing any offline play.
-Cities that reach populations of hundreds of thousands of individual Sims – revealed to be another lie – the supposed hundreds of thousands of Sims being nothing but a number displayed on the screen desperately hoping you won’t notice your actual population is but a tenth of what it displays.
-Sim AI as dumb as shit. Quite literally, the sewage agents are no different in their one-track behaviors than the Sims themselves. There are no doctors, no engineers or scientists; no teachers or real police or firemen. There are only generic nomad agents which assume the first job they stumble into that day, and sleep in the closest available house that night. Not a thing about them resembles a real life. They are all as mindless and generic as the water, electricity and sewage that all travel the same streets.
-Finally, even the game’s cities themselves cannot function with these sewage-brained Sims and they inevitably collapse in a sea of asinine gridlock as the entire police force prioritizes individual criminals in sequence, as do the firefighters with fires and the workers with jobs. And so your city will crumble as uncontrolled inferno erupts in factories while 16 fire trucks dutifully douse a smoking kitchen on the other side of town.
Perhaps some may have found it in themselves to forgive the onerous DRM policies and unreliable server issues, but the final nail in the coffin is the stream of blatant lies which were marketed. We were told this revolutionary SimCity would at last achieve the coveted dream of simulating an entire city of individuals, and that from these individuals the social dynamics of modern life would fantastically emerge before our eyes. Instead we get a population counter that shamelessly inflates the modeled population by up to a factor of ten. Worse yet, the minority of existing Sims aren’t the dynamic individuals we were promised, but a shambling horde of mindless, indistinguishable zombies entirely incapable of any situational decision making.
They were too busy coming up with ways to monetize this game and include features that would prevent piracy to look at things like game mechanics.
Forced multiplayer component? :mouf
Always online drm? :mouf
Cities so small there is room for a million expansions? :mouf
What suburb/city has everything?
There are only generic nomad agents which assume the first job they stumble into that day, and sleep in the closest available house that night.
Tokyo has everything. Heck I could name a dozen cities in Japan that have everything. More importantly, the older games had everything, SPINMASTER MCWORKSATMAXIS.
p. sure Damian is Australian. We're not filthy Europeans :yuck
Anyway Sydney has most of those things anyway.
Balmain Colliery was a coal mine located in Birchgrove in the inner-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It produced coal from 1897 until 1931 and natural gas until 1945.[1] It remains the deepest coal mine ever to have been sunk in Australia.[2]
It had one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmain_CollieryQuoteBalmain Colliery was a coal mine located in Birchgrove in the inner-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It produced coal from 1897 until 1931 and natural gas until 1945.[1] It remains the deepest coal mine ever to have been sunk in Australia.[2]
Even three (it's three per map right) "cities" the size of the ones in SC5 are pitifully small next to SC4.
So with a little bit of package editing within SimCity, and a little playing about in the code, it's possible to enable debug mode. I linked the activation to the "Help Center" button in the main menu for ease. Most debug features are disabled without having an actual developer's build (they have terraforming tools etc. available in the full developer build!), but a few things do still work - including editing the main highways.
Not only that - but you can edit the highways ANYWHERE - even outside of your city boundary... and even if you quit the game and log back in later, it's all saved safely on the server.
This shows that highway editing will be easily possible, AND that editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries should be very viable too.
Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won't get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected "forever"). Population count now shows REAL figure, not the "artificially inflated" figure. My large cities have a population of about 15k now, not 100k :P
Tokyo has everything. Heck I could name a dozen cities in Japan that have everything. More importantly, the older games had everything, SPINMASTER MCWORKSATMAXIS.
So Tokyo has a trade HQ which is like a Stock Exchange, Electronics HQ, Processor Factory, Drilling for Coal, Oil and Ore, All the Tourism Landmarks Like the Eiffel Tower, Gambling Casinos, Plastics Factory, An Alloy Factory, A Computers Factory, A TV Factory and A Trade Port within the city? News to me, I actually didnt know.
I see. But they don't actually run all at once, right? Like if you're working on one, the others are all "frozen"?
Other things I have modded out with a quick change: Unlimited time to remain disconnected (won't get booted at 20 minutes, can now be disconnected "forever")mandatory online connection :piss2
Even three (it's three per map right) "cities" the size of the ones in SC5 are pitifully small next to SC4.
Thats is the smallest map you can play on. You can have a max of 16 suburbs.
Even three (it's three per map right) "cities" the size of the ones in SC5 are pitifully small next to SC4.
Thats is the smallest map you can play on. You can have a max of 16 suburbs.
Pretty sure they function as 4 grips of 4 with no interaction between groups.
Also I live in New York lol
diggery-doos
diggery-doos
That's not even spelled correctly oscar :wag
I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity, but I’d like to offer some straight answers on the topic: Always-Connected and why SimCity is not an offline experience.http://www.ea.com/news/simcity-update-straight-answers-from-lucy
Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past. It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.
We put a ton of effort into making our simulation and graphics engines more detailed than ever and to give players lively and responsive cities. We also made innovative use of servers to move aspects of the simulation into the cloud to support region play and social features. Here’s just a few:
We keep the simulation state of the region up to date for all players. Even when playing solo, this keeps the interactions between cities up to date in a shared view of the world.
Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.
Our Great Works rely on contributions from multiple cities in a region. Connected services keep each player’s contributions updated and the progression on Great Works moving ahead.
All of our social world features - world challenges, world events, world leaderboards and world achievements - use our servers to update the status of all cities.
Our servers handle gifts between players.
We’ve created a dynamic supply and demand model for trading by keeping a Global Market updated with changing demands on key resources.
We update each city’s visual representation as well. If you visit another player’s city, you’ll see the most up to date visual status.
We even check to make sure that all the cities saved are legit, so that the region play, leaderboards, challenges and achievements rewards and status have integrity.
Cloud-based saves and easy access from any computer are another advantage of our connected features. You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere.
Almost all of our players play with connected cities. But some chose to play alone – running the cities themselves. But whether they play solo or multiplayer, they are drawn to the connected city experience. And Always-Connected provides a platform for future social features that will play out over regions and servers.
The game we launched is only the beginning for us – it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO.
So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. We did not focus on the “single city in isolation” that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.
So I’ll finish with another HUGE thanks to everyone who stuck with us through this launch. Hundreds of thousands are building and sharing cities online now. And what you’re creating just blows us away. SimCity is a special game, with a very special community of players, and we’re proud to be a part of it.
Social gaming can go eat a giant bag of smelly butts.
I hate to disturb you when you’re playing SimCity
Look, it's worked for a few people, why do you have to be so negative and assume it can't scale up infinitely until we have the entire global population as our customers?
That isnt synced to the servers though i wonder if it would.
Modders have also discovered that it's possible to mess with files client-side to affect server-side activity.
That isnt synced to the servers though i wonder if it would.
Well, it does say this:QuoteModders have also discovered that it's possible to mess with files client-side to affect server-side activity.
EA forum member LeLedg and others have accidentally discovered in a thread about customers trying to make a legitimate SimCity complaints, EA is preventing the customer assistance hotline number from even appearing in the forums. When you type out the number 866-543-5435, it is replaced by an asterisk, a common message board function typically used to block course language. Just to be safe, the forum-goers typed other permutations of the number in addition to completely different phone numbers -- it's only EA's number that's censored
kNetDownForceQuitAfterMinutes : 20
:lol :lol :lol
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition
presumably the audience for sim city extends outside the typical gamor. ignoring that five of the lot require a decent PC, and only one of those isn't about murdering people (rated M), you're left with a slim selection of old and cheap games. you'd think EA would have a more eclectic range of games.
that said, it's a good selection if you're into those games. Dead Space 3 came out last month, I think.
Here are some shots from Cities XL 2012 [which is on sale on Steam]:
Despite all of its launch complications, EA Maxis' series reboot SimCity has managed to sell over one million copies since launching two weeks ago. EA reports this is the biggest launch for the franchise, the majority of players – 54%, EA says – choosing to download SimCity. In fact, EA says 44% of total SimCity sales went directly through the publisher's digital distribution platform, Origin.
Satan quits EA...again:
http://kotaku.com/5991181/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-steps-down
Satan quits EA...again:
http://kotaku.com/5991181/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-steps-down
He had a good plan coming back into the company! We got a bunch of good games and new IPs.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1bb604/i_present_to_you_megabumtopia_one_1801800/
tl;dr
1.8million pop city, residental only. No Power, no water, no jobs, no fires, no crime, no sick people, no taxes...
Need an extra incentive to go green in SimCity? Maybe you need a little boost in the form of the new Nissan LEAF® Charging Station that is available today. This free in-game item is the perfect way to kick start your desire to create a city that will make you (and your Sims) happy. In the case of your Sims, In the case of your Sims, the Charging Station provides happiness to the Sims that use it and a onetime wave of happiness to the nearby businesses. Need another bonus? It produces no sewage or garbage. That’s right! Green indeed.
To redeem the Charging Station, just visit this Origin page (http://tinyurl.com/cculs88) and then restart your game in order for it to appear. You will need to use the same Origin ID that you use to play SimCity.
3. Is there additional gameplay added?
Plopping down the Nissan LEAF® Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles. The Charging Station produces no garbage or sewage as well making it pollution free.
:bow Moose Jaw :bow2
So just raise taxes to some ridiculous amount and then plop a few Charging Stations down to make everyone happy? Obama's America. :usacry
A lot of times, what we are finding is there’s a new way to think about SimCity and how it works, and especially with the fans that have been with the franchise for a long time. They have a way in their mind that SimCity works and it sometimes goes against the grain of how this SimCity works.
One thing we are finding out is it’s just misinformation a lot of the time. What are perceived bugs are really just, well that’s the way the system is designed, and what we are trying to do is better communicate the design intentions through developer blogs, release gameplay
So you’re not actually looking at solutions to increase the zone size, but what you are looking at are ways to make things more efficient within the space that is currently provided, is that right?
Yes.
One of the limitations of going with an agent-based simulation is we wanted to make sure that a fire engine for example obeys traffic and wasn’t running through cars and things like that. We wanted to have that integrity to everything.
With the limited space on the roads, for example, they can’t go through traffic right now because there are cars in the way and putting in special rules for the traffic lights to obey and recognise this is actually a big undertaking but it’s something we’re looking at. It was just out of scope for launch.
SIMCITY CITIES OF TOMORROW EXPANSION PACK COMING NOVEMBER 12
Speculative Technologies, New Specializations, and Massive MegaTowers Take Gamers' Cities to the Future
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – September 19, 2013 – Bring the cities of today into the world of tomorrow. Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that the SimCity™ Cities of Tomorrow* expansion pack is currently in development for Mac and PC and will be arriving November 12. Built upon the foundation of the ultimate city building simulation that has more than 2 million players worldwide, SimCity Cities of Tomorrow gives players the ability to transform their cities as they take them on a journey 50 years into the future. Using new technologies and experimental urban planning techniques, mayors will shape the destinies of their cities, thriving in a utopia of clean technologies, or a dystopia of hyper-commercialism.
"Will the world of tomorrow be a utopia powered by clean energy or an industrial society consumed by mass commercialism?" said Patrick Buechner, General Manager, Maxis Emeryville. "With SimCity Cities of Tomorrow, players can build the future as they imagine it. Transport your Sims on MagLev, power your cities with fusion reactors or tidal wave generators, manufacture a legion of drones to serve your Sims and build massive MegaTowers that dwarf modern skyscrapers. We're giving you plausible technologies to take your cities onto a journey 50 years into the future. What will you create?"
SimCity Cities of Tomorrow gives players an entirely new way to dream about their city of the future. New regions, new future technology, new city specializations and new transportation methods will transform the way that cities take shape and evolve. Will they create a utopian society underpinned by clean technology under the auspices of the Academy, or encourage giant corporation OmegaCo to strip-mine natural resources and pollute in the name of feeding consumerism? For the first time in the history of the franchise, cities can be built vertically with enormous multi-zone MegaTowers that extend high into the sky and dwarf the rest of the city. Education and research will help players discover new technologies that make their cities less polluted, less reliant on natural resources, managed day-to-day by service drones and fueled by green energy. As the population increases, Sims will live, work, and play closer together. When players have finished deciding whether they want their Sims to live together in harmony, or as members of an exploited workforce, they can rain chaos upon them by unleashing an all-new disaster exclusive to this expansion pack.
The SimCity base game is available now on Mac and PC and developed by Maxis. SimCity is cross-platform compatible, so all players play together across the same servers. Players can play both versions with the same Origin account, allowing them to seamlessly continue their cities, achievements and leaderboard progress across the Mac and PC. Since its launch in March, SimCity has had seven major game updates that have made upgrades to the core simulation and provided game content and features at no additional charge.
SimCity Cities of Tomorrow will be available for Mac and PC and is not yet rated for the ESRB. Pre-orders will begin soon at www.SimCity.com.
As the population increases, Sims will live, work, and play closer together.Because of the city sizes or because of their inability to travel anywhere in the city?
See, SimCity is a PC game, and if PC games have any great advantage over their console competition, it's the ease with which gamers can mod the originals and make them better, more interesting, and even drive sales of the original product. Unless that game is SimCity, that is. Why? Because apparently EA hates you.http://kotaku.com/simcity-is-ruining-its-mods-too-1437491634QuoteThe good news is that SimCity will soon be allowing user-generated content. The bad news is that EA is looking to place so many restrictions on what you can actually mod that it seems almost pointless. In reaching out to the game's community with its initial plans, EA has already put its foot down on mods that change the way the game plays. Here are the two key points from its "first draft":
-UGC that effects the simulation for multiplay games and features are not allowed.
-Examples of acceptable UGC include swapping art assets, like buildings and vehicles.
In other words, EA took one of the greatest sandbox games of all time and is limiting what you can to with it to what color sand you put in that box.
Let’s get right to it.(http://i.imgur.com/dbr6iK6.png)
SIMCITY OFFLINE IS COMING!
I’ve wanted to say those words for quite some time, so my apologies that I didn’t take the time to say Happy New Year first.
Yes, Offline is coming as a free download with Update 10 to all SimCity players. When we launch it, all of your previously downloaded content will be available to you anytime, anywhere, without the need for an internet connection. We are in the late phases of wrapping up its development and while we want to get it into your hands as soon as possible, our priority is to make sure that it’s as polished as possible before we release it. So, until then… testing, testing and more testing. As one of the final steps, we’re putting Offline into the hands of some of our most hardcore players, the DevTesters. This group of volunteers is going to put Offline through its paces before we release it.
In Update 10, you can still play solo in Regions on your own, or in Multiplayer with people from around the world. What’s new is the Single Player Mode, which allows you to play the game Offline by yourself. And because your saved games in this mode are stored locally, you can save and load to your heart’s content. Our team will be delivering a follow-up blog that will outline the full details in the near future so stay tuned.
So what does this mean for the Online game? All of the benefits of being connected will remain including access to Multiplayer, the Global Market and Leaderboards. And all of your pre-existing saved cities and regions will still be accessible should you log-in to the Online game.
Bringing the game Offline means big things for our wonderful community of Modders. They can now make modifications to the game and its components without compromising the integrity of the Online game. Modding is a big part of our studio’s legacy and we’re excited to see what you guys create. Check out this thread to learn about Oppie85’s Central Train Station, which you can put into your game right now, and if you’re interested in making your own content take a look at the Modding Policy. To get you started, we will be rolling out a series of tutorials from the studio that surfaces how we’ve created some of the content that you’ve seen so far in hopes of inspiring your creativity.
who gives a shit. the actual game is a turd, drm or not.