BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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Oh man, this bums me out. I can live with the city size limits (if the game is designed to support that size, I don't see the issue with that) the always-online.. even server issues. But that the region mechanics seem broken is just such a bummer. Really hope they fix that before the Mac launch.

 

Like someone wrote on twitter, this is possibly the only time a non-simultaneous Mac launch might be a good thing.

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So you can't edit the terrain? And there's only ten regions in the game to pick from?

...

I don't think i would be so bothered by that if i wasn't sure it was for them to be able to sell you additional maps down the road. (Probably with expanded city limits, i bet.)

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I've had an experience similar to Chick's, where it seemed like a monetary gift from one city to another disappeared. It did show up eventually.

 

The region stuff has a distinctly asynchronous feel, and unsurprisingly so, since it was designed for multiplayer situations wherein players may not be logging in and playing at the same time. It feels weird when you're playing alone; it's very much like playing a board game or a play-by-email computer game by yourself.

 

Like, when you pull out to region view, you're still in control of a single city, and you make deals with the other cities as if they were someone else's, even though they're yours. It's all odd and feels a bit disjointed. 

 

It's clear that this is largely due to the design of the game, but I suspect some of it is due to the server problems they're having with the launch. I'd wager that my gift of $20,000 from Fartropolis to Poop City would have appeared more swiftly had the servers not been so bogged down last night.

 

I would very much like to try a multiplayer region, as it does seem to be the way the game is intended to be played.

 

(Origin iD: Wikipedia_Brown)

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So I got home at just before 6pm EST last night. Opened up the box that had arrived from Amazon, installed lightning fast no problem, was ready to go by like 6:15.

 

Played until almost 2:30AM. I have work at 8am, I never do this. I am an old person (for video games). It is pretty addicting, even though I have almost ruined my bedroom community city. We were on mumble, just buildin' cities, helping each other out, ruining everything.

 

 

Some people are going to hate this, but I love that this shows how deep the simulation truly is: I know why your gift took so long to get to where it was going. It's because when you give someone money, SimCity creates an armored truck full of money and it has to drive to the city it was gifted to. Your armored car was probably stuck in traffic somewhere.

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Gooddammiiit. I seriously shouldn't spend money on this. But daaamn.

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Looks like Tom Chick is putting off his review for at least a week, pending a patch. The not-a-review he's posted in its place claims that most of the inter-region mechanics are broken on some level, making the game unplayable in its current form: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-not-a-one-star-review-of-simcity/

 

I've come a long way from the high of Polygon's glowing review. This has become the wait-and-see title of 2013 already. Hope that doesn't end up biting EA and Maxis in the ass.

 

Think you've hit the nail on the head there, when I watched the thumbs stream of the beta a few weeks back it got me very interested in the game. However I've seen enough havoc during MMO launch's to think to myself "ok lets see what happens, after all EU launch isn't until Friday", & boy am I glad I waited now.

 

I also think the criticism Polygon have taken over changing their review is although harsh, both entirely of their own making (by deciding to go for such a early review), and entirely predictable (what game with always on DRM hasn't had a troubled launch?).

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So Polygon gave it a 9.5, then changed it to 8 because of early launch issues? Are they gonna raise the score again when the server loads lighten? They should make a timeline graph of their scores.

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Isn't dynamic scores the "thing" with Polygon?

From what I understand from the drama on twitter, dynamic scoring is a editorial policy. However it feels like doing so is asking for trouble, as Jayel says "what if the servers get better?", or for that matter what if the effect of the DRM on EU or Asian region launch is better/worse? Do we get one score for NA & one for EU? (not to mention that metacritic only ever uses the first score a published).

It feels like something done with the best of intentions but could end up leading down a increasingly silly path.

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Think you've hit the nail on the head there, when I watched the thumbs stream of the beta a few weeks back it got me very interested in the game. However I've seen enough havoc during MMO launch's to think to myself "ok lets see what happens, after all EU launch isn't until Friday", & boy am I glad I waited now.

 

I also think the criticism Polygon have taken over changing their review is although harsh, both entirely of their own making (by deciding to go for such a early review), and entirely predictable (what game with always on DRM hasn't had a troubled launch?).

 

From that perspective, Chick is 100% correct that you can't review a game with a heavy online component day one and call it complete. I have been telling everyone I can who's on the fence to just BE PATIENT. However a person who is having lots of fun with the game and did NOT experience "launch issues" (we were playing on EU West rather than a US server, which meant basically nothing because oh no my ~latency~), I do disagree with his claim that there are things fundamentally broken. My experience so far is that sans online-style issues, it's a well built game. It's definitely not perfect. There are bugs. Hopefully a few really weird things are patched soon. But there are also things that I'm just bad at and the simulation doesn't like.

 

For example, making the highway right through town also be a major artery to get to places IN town is horribly dicking me over. Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so fucking bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me.

 

And that's my problem, not the problem of the City Simulator. That's what I get for making the Residential zone in the region "pretty" arches instead of goddamn squares like urban planners of the 1950s intended. Is it frustrating to see all the homeless people and abandoned buildings, but it's also extremely gratifying to be able to see a momentary breakthrough where I get to put in an avenue and streetcars where there was just a 4-lane highway and the ripple where things DO get better.

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Snow day in DC means that I'm able to get on the servers while most people are at work. When I can actually play it, this game is so amazing. My only complaint so far is the inability to really micromanage your cities budget. SimCity 4 let you set the money allocated to your power plant, school, fire station, etc, but as far as I can tell, the only real control over the budget you have is raising/lower taxes or just completely shutting off a service. 

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 Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so fucking bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me.

 

Hmm, sounds like they could've prevented some of this downward spiral by making emergency vehicles not abide by traffic rules and not sacrifice too much of gameplay. After all, why not. they hardly follow traffic rules in real life anyway.

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Snow day in DC means that I'm able to get on the servers while most people are at work. When I can actually play it, this game is so amazing. My only complaint so far is the inability to really micromanage your cities budget. SimCity 4 let you set the money allocated to your power plant, school, fire station, etc, but as far as I can tell, the only real control over the budget you have is raising/lower taxes or just completely shutting off a service. 

One thing that can help is that you can shut off add-on facilities. Like, you can temporarily decommission a single ambulance garage.

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Hmm, sounds like they could've prevented some of this downward spiral by making emergency vehicles not abide by traffic rules and not sacrifice too much of gameplay. After all, why not. they hardly follow traffic rules in real life anyway.

 

So if you have the fancy police and fire stations, you can buy fire marshal cars, faster response dispatches, and helicopters. So you can have police/fire helicopters. They will chase criminals, catch them before crimes have been committed, the fire marshals will actively PREVENT fires, etc. You actually CAN get around the traffic rules, I'm just stuck in a horrible spiral where I can't get the money to do it.

 

And just to be clear, I know how to fix it. And when I say know how to fix it, I mean I have a plan that may or may not fix it but seems feasible - more than one train station. I can run the train station infrastructure to both sides of my city and split it. I just wish I'd thought about this 90 minutes prior when I had a chance in hell of fixing the debt.

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We should have a Thumbs region. I'm currently playing on European servers both because that's where I live and because they're less active (and therefore more stable) than the North American servers. That said, you can change which server you login to at the launcher at any time with no penalties that I know of. My username is Gwardinen on Origin, though I've no idea how to link to it or anything. Add me if you have the game and want to start setting up a region, or have a good region going already that I could join.

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From that perspective, Chick is 100% correct that you can't review a game with a heavy online component day one and call it complete. I have been telling everyone I can who's on the fence to just BE PATIENT. However a person who is having lots of fun with the game and did NOT experience "launch issues" (we were playing on EU West rather than a US server, which meant basically nothing because oh no my ~latency~), I do disagree with his claim that there are things fundamentally broken. My experience so far is that sans online-style issues, it's a well built game. It's definitely not perfect. There are bugs. Hopefully a few really weird things are patched soon. But there are also things that I'm just bad at and the simulation doesn't like.

For example, making the highway right through town also be a major artery to get to places IN town is horribly dicking me over. Traffic is terrible and it's causing people to miss work, which is causing them to be homeless, which is causing buildings to be abandoned, which is causing crime, which is causing me to spend more money on police infrastructure (but I can't spend it on the really fancy police station because I can't afford it, so I'm band-aiding it over with the cheaper ones which end up costing more overall), but there are homeless people so I'm losing out anyway because I'm not getting enough tax revenue, but the traffic is still so fucking bad that my police cars and fire trucks are in horrible traffic jams and can't stop the crimes (example crime: arson). Traffic so bad that the common cry of "why aren't people pulling over? Why aren't the emergency response services using the unused lanes?!" have no merit to me because all the lanes are jammed for HOURS. And guess what? When the skyscraper on the avenue is the one that's catching fire, then the fire trucks are the ones causing the traffic jams. Hooray for me.

And that's my problem, not the problem of the City Simulator. That's what I get for making the Residential zone in the region "pretty" arches instead of goddamn squares like urban planners of the 1950s intended. Is it frustrating to see all the homeless people and abandoned buildings, but it's also extremely gratifying to be able to see a momentary breakthrough where I get to put in an avenue and streetcars where there was just a 4-lane highway and the ripple where things DO get better.

Hahahahaha. It's shit like this that totally sells me on this game. It all sounds so, well, real.

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My friends and I had no end of problems getting together on East Server 1 last night. It wasn't even pulling up the tutorial or letting me grab a plot anywhere. However, when we all got frustrated I ended up on West 2 on my own and was able to play successfully for a couple of hours at that point. Hopefully tonight things will be a little more tame and we get a team region rolling.

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We should have a Thumbs region. I'm currently playing on European servers both because that's where I live and because they're less active (and therefore more stable) than the North American servers. That said, you can change which server you login to at the launcher at any time with no penalties that I know of. My username is Gwardinen on Origin, though I've no idea how to link to it or anything. Add me if you have the game and want to start setting up a region, or have a good region going already that I could join.

Wait EU servers are up? Had thought launch date wasn't till friday

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Wait EU servers are up? Had thought launch date wasn't till friday

 

 

EU copies don't technically go live until Friday, but the European servers are already up. All servers are functionally identical, it's just when you login to them you can only join regions hosted on that server. It's merely a question of playing where you think you'll get the best ping/where your friends are.

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EU copies don't technically go live until Friday, but the European servers are already up. All servers are functionally identical, it's just when you login to them you can only join regions hosted on that server. It's merely a question of playing where you think you'll get the best ping/where your friends are.

 But if you start playing on a particular server, any cities you build will remain there, correct? I started playing on NE 2, got kicked off when they were doing their updates, and haven't been able to get back on. I eventually made it on to one of the European servers, but it had no record of my previous game.

 

Also, now when I try and load the game, there aren't any servers listed as available to play on.

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