Sim City 5: "players were having such a good time they didn't want to leave"

[benjipwns]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

“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.”

[pilonv1]

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060

So the traffic is fundamentally broken?

[benjipwns]

holy shit 

[The Sceneman]

did this game have like zero QA?

do they not know of functional server testing?

[pilonv1]

[benjipwns]

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/

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:

A 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.
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.

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.
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.

I 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.

The 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.

[benjipwns]

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.

 

[benjipwns]

 

[Great Rumbler]

 

[pilonv1]

11 day wait for a plane

[Diunx]

This is fucking embarrassing.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Looks like this one was developed by interns.

[Sho Nuff]

Oh my Christ were the other Simcity games this fucked up

[pilonv1]

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.

[archie4208]

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.

Yeah, but you could fix that with a mod.  Good luck doing that with SC5.

[AdmiralViscen]

They owe people refunds for this shit

[mjemirzian]

This looked like a disaster from a mile away. Ppl should have known what they were buying.

[Eric P]

Remember SimCity Societies? Neither do I.

Remember Sim Ant? Everyone remembers Sim Ant

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!

sim ant ruled but you could basically zerg rush everything to win

[maxy]

[pilonv1]

was just coming to post them



 

[Eel O'Brian]

this looks like a world-class clusterfuck

EA Presents: SimIronRoses™ 

[Great Rumbler]

I don't see how this could possibly get any worse, other than if EA revealed that they were taking the game F2P and you had to pay real money for each building and road.

[Eel O'Brian]

"Fuck it, we'll fix it later" seems to have been a key decision here

[Joe Molotov]

(Image removed from quote.)

[hampster]

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 bottom

[archnemesis]

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 bottom

http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/atlantisunderwatertycoon/review.html

You also have some underwater building in the latest Anno game.

[ManaByte]

Apparently the "free game" will be from a limited list of two-to-three year old games that are all under $20 and most are Sims expansions.

[Joe Molotov]

So, basically it's a worse deal than the accidental free game giveaway from last year.

[mjemirzian]

Not surprised by any of this. I knew it would be an utter trainwreck as soon as I heard it was forced online.

[archie4208]

(Image removed from quote.)

[hampster]

(Image removed from quote.)

I didn't appreciate how small the cities are until I saw this pic. Wow that's tiny

[Joe Molotov]

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.

Haha, reading all this stuff is funny.

[Eel O'Brian]

i like how all the little faces in the bottom left corner of the screens have this perplexed look on them, like "uh, we don't know what the fuck's going on, either."

[Great Rumbler]

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.

Haha, reading all this stuff is funny.

I am utterly speechless. Who in the world thought this was actually a good idea?

[Cerveza mas fina]

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?
Always online drm?
Cities so small there is room for a million expansions?

[tiesto]

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.

[benjipwns]

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.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-dont-seem-that-smart-after-all/

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.

[Damian79]

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?

That isnt true, you can have a private game and do all the cities yourself.

Always online drm?

Yeah thats shit.  The fact that it is saved server side sucks balls too.  I lost my city twice because servers fucked up.

Cities so small there is room for a million expansions?

Cities are realistic though.  What suburb/city has everything?  The game is made so that you can split specialisation into different suburbs.  That said they need to fix the ai.

[Great Rumbler]

What suburb/city has everything?

The ones in all the other Simcity games?

[recursivelyenumerable]

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.

They made a sim game about my life 

[Damian79]

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.

[Joe Molotov]

Remember, it's not the size of the city that counts, but being able to slot your sim into the first available hole.  :lenowned

[Flannel Boy]

[pilonv1]

I want to play SC4 now

[pilonv1]

p. sure Damian is Australian. We're not filthy Europeans

Anyway Sydney has most of those things anyway.

[Damian79]

p. sure Damian is Australian. We're not filthy Europeans

Anyway Sydney has most of those things anyway.

Yeah i am.  It has no coal drilling or oil drilling as far as i know.  It gets that stuff from the outside.  In sim city it is possible to build a city reasonably well with about 4 of those but you cant really go all out in them.  Which is what the average city is like imo.

[pilonv1]

It had one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmain_Colliery

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]

[Damian79]

It had one

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmain_Colliery

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]

In sim city the "city" is basically a bunch of suburbs.  Well that is what i understand of it.  You can specailise in all of them if you wanted to, but you have to plan out diffrent suburbs separately.  So the map you play is the city.

[Damian79]

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.

[Rufus]

It rather reminds me of the Anno series with its islands, where you have to set up trade routes because not every island can support every kind of crop. It's fun to juggle those inter-dependencies, but it's clear people expected something different from Sim City.

[pilonv1]

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

[Cerveza mas fina]

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.

VIDEO GAMES

[Damian79]

I see.  But they don't actually run all at once, right?  Like if you're working on one, the others are all "frozen"?

They all run at once but at the slowest speed.  Except for the one you are in but you can change that to the lowest speed too.

[maxy]

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 
 

[AdmiralViscen]

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

[Cerveza mas fina]

Where is Damian from?

[Cerveza mas fina]

You mean because we have beautiful thousand year old cities that werent built around the automobile and can never be replicated in this game? Gotcha.

[Rufus]

On that note: What will the France and Germany packs actually add? Just building styles, or anything fundamental?

[Cerveza mas fina]

Moose Jaw

[Damian79]

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

The great works is shared by everyone in those.  There is a map with 7 and one great works site.  Also this game makes no sense.  I had no tourist attaction and i was getting more tourist and commuters than my friend who was going all tourism.  I had 15000 low wealth commuters and 8500 medium wealth commuters, it fucked up my traffice and then my ecponomy beacue fire truscks adn garbage trucks couldnt get anything.  The game is clearly not ready to be released.