BigJKO

SimCity: The City Simulator

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"Here, have some crappy games to make up for our crappy game."

 

Ok, Sim City 4 is good, and BF3 might be your thing (it's not mine, BF2 is better). But otherwise, oh look an ultra cheap mobile game that's been out forever!

 

Oh, EA CEO Riccitiello is "stepping down". I just wonder how much sales have dropped off of both Deadspace 3 and Sim City after week 1. That they have almost certainly dropped off precipitously makes me question the intelligence of both me and all of humanity, especially visa vis spending $60 based on previews; to which should be known by now as "Oh, I'm dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest (scam) to be dishonest, honestly." Not that they were ever anything besides PR, but that they've gotten so good in the past few years that they can make even the most awful of games such as Assassin's Creed 3 and Fable 3 look good.

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"Here, have some crappy games to make up for our crappy game."

 

Ok, Sim City 4 is good, and BF3 might be your thing (it's not mine, BF2 is better). But otherwise, oh look an ultra cheap mobile game that's been out forever!

 

Oh, EA CEO Riccitiello is "stepping down". I just wonder how much sales have dropped off of both Deadspace 3 and Sim City after week 1. That they have almost certainly dropped off precipitously makes me question the intelligence of both me and all of humanity, especially visa vis spending $60 based on previews; to which should be known by now as "Oh, I'm dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest (scam) to be dishonest, honestly." Not that they were ever anything besides PR, but that they've gotten so good in the past few years that they can make even the most awful of games such as Assassin's Creed 3 and Fable 3 look good.

 

The key though is the killer pre-order bonuses you get. Not only in lame DLC, but sometimes in cash. Amazon especially, they typically offer $10 credit and on this title they gave me $20 credit. So you're taking a risk getting it early, but also getting it for cheaper than if you waited a couple of weeks (but still not as cheap as if you waited a couple of years.)

 

I guess in this case I got not only $20 off for ordering it earlier, but now I'm getting a free $10 game too.

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Mass Effect 3 as a free game is weird -- I'd almost say it needs the DLC for the story to hold together.  The ME 2 DLC was decent but easier to separate from the rest of the game.

 

From Ashes because it shows us that Protheans are dicks, Leviathan so the overall plot makes at least a little bit of sense, and Citadel just because it is awesome.  I guess 25 bucks for all those isn't that bad if the game itself isn't free but meh.

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I was pretty excited to discover A WHOLE EXTRA MENU HIDDEN BEHIND A BUTTON I FORGOT ALL ABOUT.

 

It allowed me to make money by building Trade Depots.

 

Sweet! I'm no longer constantly struggling for funding!

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Updates on SimCityGate 2013:

 

A brief rundown on exactly what it is that the servers do for regional settings

 

“All the server sends to your client, is some very basic data about each city – how much power they have available, how much spare fire trucks, you know – that sort of stuff. It’s minor, and it’s sent as raw numbers. Your client then just goes ‘oh there’s XXX power spare from city Z.’ It’s that simple.”

 

complaining. Also, deliberately making themselves impossible to contact

 

"Anyone who even remotely contacted Amazon about the game got their accounts cancelled – by EA. EA blames Amazon. EA claims that I (along with possibly thousands other users according to a thread) have been issued a chargeback. Except the thing is – I never asked for a refund, nor was I given one either."

 

 

 

 

I'm kind of glad that I decided to wait on this game, both due to the myriad problems it seems to be having and because nothing could possibly be as entertaining as this unmitigated trainwreck.

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Mass Effect 3 as a free game is weird -- I'd almost say it needs the DLC for the story to hold together.  The ME 2 DLC was decent but easier to separate from the rest of the game.

 

From Ashes because it shows us that Protheans are dicks, Leviathan so the overall plot makes at least a little bit of sense, and Citadel just because it is awesome.  I guess 25 bucks for all those isn't that bad if the game itself isn't free but meh.

The ME3 multiplayer DLC is all free, and is awesome. It is the weirdest dichotomy where Bioware/EA 100% deserve a ton of criticism about how they've handled the single player DLC for the game (some of the content is basically mandatory to the game as far as the story goes and should be contained in the main game) and just as much or more praise for the multiplayer DLC (completely free, almost doubled the amount of content since first release).

 

My "problem" with the free game is that I own BF3 and expansions, I own ME3 but would have happily accepted the expansions, and DS3 is not interesting to me, to the point where I bought Dead Space 2 on a steam sale for $5 and I don't think I even installed it. It is incredibly surprising to me that they're actually offering a game that was released less than 6 weeks ago. If I just wanted to claim as much monetary value as possible, I could be getting $120 MSRP in games for $40. Chances are I'll grab Need for Speed or SC4, though. That's kind of funny, too.

 

 

It's sad, I was so excited and I put at least 6-8 good hours into various cities in the first 2 days after release. Then it actually got MORE difficult to play, and it has become slowly realized that my nightmare scenario where I had massive traffic problems bankrupting my city wasn't (totally) because of my inept city planning, but because the traffic algorithm was so dumb that taking out bonds to add avenues wouldn't fix it. I'm not sure I'll go back until they release the traffic patch. I am ok with gaming the game to some extent, but to others I just want to Build Stuff.

 

 

If EA really wanted to win my heart, they'd offer me a copy of Heart of the Swarm and the new Dishonored DLC.

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Let's be fair, EA will never win gamers' hearts. They could do everything right and some fucker up the back will go 'I still remember what you did to Westwood'.

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Let's be fair, EA will never win gamers' hearts. They could do everything right and some fucker up the back will go 'I still remember what you did to Westwood'.

That fucker is me. Westwood was probably the first developer where I truly understood what a developer was, and that they had made all the games in a series I liked. Even Maxis, Microprose, et al didn't occupy my consciousness like Westwood did.

 

EARTH AND BEYOND, YOU JERKS.  :oldman:

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Let's be fair, EA will never win gamers' hearts. They could do everything right and some fucker up the back will go 'I still remember what you did to Westwood'.

 

I liked them for a while after they started the smaller games initiative that Deadspace and Mirrors Edge came out of, as well as some of the EA partners stuff. Too bad they couldn't keep with the good vibes. I still don't hate them quite as much as Ubisoft though.

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"Here, have some crappy games to make up for our crappy game."

 

 

Dead Space 3 is brand new though, and a flagship game for EA. Even if it isn't great. As a peace offering it's rather a lot more than you can usually expect.

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can we just talk about simcity

 

Last night I lowered my taxes to lower than they started at. I was tired of bulldozing ten buildings every minute. I lost like 40000 dudes because I lowered my taxes. I guess having a negative hourly profit drives citizens away (this government doesn't know what the fuck is going on!!), even though my trade depots were MORE than making up for the cost.

 

I guess I should feel relieved. I finally found something that I hate that affects me in a really negative way! The small city size is annoying, but it really just means I have to adjust the way I think about my city, rather than being a real detriment to the game. Now, though, I can jump aboard the rage bandwagon and boycott EA for the rest of my life! Haha just kidding I still like the game fuck you.

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Tax rates really feel like they have little or no actual effect on sims, but it's often confusing what folks want. I routinely go months without a single crime successfully comitted, but buildings still go abandoned due to high crime rate. *shrug* 

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Well my dudes are definitely happier by a large margin than prior to my lowering taxes. It's just what. I dunno if I've ever seen a building abandoned due to crime rate, even during those times when I get yelled at for not having enough cops. For me it's high tax rates 90% of the time. The rest, it's either not enough workers or not enough SKILLED workers or they feel sick.

 

Is there a way to clean dirty ground or is it ruined forever?

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think I've got at least a partial feel for the the way the tax rates works for business.

 

Business's pay a a Sim gets paid a flat wage.

 

If there is enough demand for what they do a business will keep trying to recruit workers even if the workers keep leaving the business (& Sims will come out of town as long as there are jobs). They are always attempting to expand, & If a business levels up it increases the wage it pays.

A Business become abandoned if it cannot make enough money to sustain it wage bill(while still making a profit).

​So what will often happen is a business will be being doing OK at a low level, but when it expands it can potentially bankrupt itself in short order.

 

The trick I've found is to be a absolute bastard

 

Start with a flat rate across all sectors and as soon as you have a good base, Charge those with the least the most and those with the most the least. It seems to help stop business busting themselves as they expand.

Of course IF enough of your industry & commercial develops to a high enough level it possible to bump up the rates and not loose any, but while your demographic's are in flux it seems to work.

 

Of course i may be getting this utterly wrong & YMMV.

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My thing when playing the earlier SimCity games was doing the one city and playing it until I burned out. With the new cramped city sizes, you really have to get into the mindset of jumping between all your little cities all the time, and I'm struggling with that. As soon as I start something new, I don't really care about the other ones, especially since they're frozen in time.

 

Also, I'm seeing some really weird simulation artefacts. Huge gangs of people going door to door in my sparse garbage/power part of town looking for work, four fire trucks with sirens blazing, driving in circles next to a burning house, just waiting for it to burn down so they can move on. I followed a recycling truck for a while, and it kept going back and forth across this little area, making weird turns and going up and down the same couple of streets. The city looks really cool when I'm zoomed all the way out, but if I get closer, nothing makes sense. It's pretty annoying, because people suddenly start complaining about stuff not getting to them, or garbage piling up, and there's eight garbage trucks going up and down this one street somewhere.

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Here's the depressing truth: it's time to put Sim City in deep freeze and move on to something else for a while. The Ars review had 'time doesn't heal all wounds' in its headline. But I think it does—or at least could help remedy the massive frustration this game has created. 

 

To be clear, I love the new Sim City. I've already sunk more time into it than I did all of Skyrim. (And I played the shit out of that game.) But the more I've played, the more deeply irritated I've become. The launch-week disruptions weren't so bad—I personally still felt 'lucky' to be able to play at all. Queuing to log in and, hell, even losing my first region because I couldn't get back into my original server didn't seem so bad while I was still learning the new systems. 

 

But 60-hours on, it's a different story. I've gotten the 'your city isn't processing properly' bug that essentially freezes your progress in a region numerous times. And some of the so-called non-essential features disabled by the developers are actually essential. I'm thinking, in particular, of Cheetah mode. In short bursts not having this is fine, but on long play-throughs the lack of fast-forward really messes with the flow of the game. (On the twisted positive side, I've had plenty of time to do the laundry and dishes while I let the simulation run...)

 

This was alluded to on the cast last week, but waiting is an underrated virtue in gaming.  Loving the Walking Dead comics, I downloaded Telltale episode 1 on the day it was available on the App Store. I fired it up but didn't really get into it. (This wasn't a technical problem so much as my own failure to actually spend enough time with the game.) Eventually, around the time episode 5 was gearing to come out, I tried again. And totally loved it. In other words I am glad I waited, putting it aside until it was a better game (in that case more complete anyways). The same has happened to me for WoW, Far Cry 3, and numerous other games.  

 

That's why I'll be playing something else for a while...

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If anyone is interested in joining a region, my origin ID is Gopez_UK.

 

I'm currently playing on the Antarctica server in a region called "New Caladan".

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I don't have any Internet at the moment so this isn't an option, but is sim city 4 worth my tenner to try some city building?

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If anyone is interested in joining a region, my origin ID is Gopez_UK.

 

I'm currently playing on the Antarctica server in a region called "New Caladan".

 We have a small thumbs region up & going on North America East 4 atm. If you pop onto the Thumbcity thread on the multiplayer section of forums i'm sure someone can get you a invite to the region if you care to join us

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