Sim City is back in 2013!

[3dilettante]

1. Curve roads. This is arguably the most important improvement over SimCity 4. If all you want is to build the "most profitable city" or "most efficient city" you probably don't care about this, but for others this is a very important feature.

I would think that perhaps more room for the city or a graceful way of adjusting density against the level of curvature might make them more broadly used.

3. Agent based simulation. I know this is controversial, but I think, if implemented well, agent based simulation is much better than statistical model. For example, in SimCity 4, the coverage of a police station is basically by its range, but that's absurd as in real world it's more like to be based on a combination of population and range (also other factors such as basic crime rate). This is hard to simulate with statistical model. For example, in real world, if your streets are jammed with cars, it can be difficult for police to arrive at a crime scene, and reduce the efficiency of your police force. It can be very difficult to simulate such behavior with a statistical model.

While this is true for many functions, at the same time it is harder for non-agent statistical models to outright fail, and they can be fixed without as many knock-on effects throughout the simulation.
I suppose the problem with SimCity is that the implementation has some visible flaws.

1. The global market. The price of some "basic materials" is supposed to be fluctuating based on supply and demand. I haven't observed such fluctuation yet, but if implemented well, this could be a very interesting feature.

This doesn't seem to all the way there, yet. Some of the balance issues may stem from this. I'd imagine a metal or alloys city would be much more rewarding if not having them retarded construction in other cities, since it would follow that skyscrapers and the like need that metal. However, the game seems like it really favors the high-tech and high-education path which is area efficient and gets a lot of mitigation measures, and doesn't value the necessity of the other kinds.

3. Inter-region simulation problem. In theory, it's possible to provide certain services to other cities in the same region, but for what I've seen, it can't really replace "the real thing." It seems that the designers of the game do not want you to create some "garbage city" which specialize in collecting everyone else's garbage, and that's disappointing.

Actually, I think that's something they did say you should do. A big portion of that process, and the export/import market is also handled by agent-based units moving in and out of cities, and is subject again to the twitchiness of the agent system.


I'm saddened that the worthwhile elements of the game and other topics of debate have been so overshadowed by the always-online component. There are other philosophical/gameplay debates about the game's decisions, such as making so much of the economic system mayor-controlled. How many city mayors run a command economy over their metal and processor exports?

 

[Blazkowicz]

This is idiotic, now people who read about this may be afraid of Origin deleting their games, effectively stoling their money. Making your consumers afraid of you is questionable. I can say this freely because I have no EA or Origin account lol.

And the name itself.. Origin was a game developer that EA destroyed and forced to cover themselves in shame (Ultima IX, and even Ultima VIII to an extent it seems)

 

[3dilettante]

I know the EULA for Origin has stripped a bunch of things from the customer, but I really wonder if there's a line being crossed with the threat of cutting off functionality of other products by banning the Origin account in order to intimidate customers from persuing financial renumeration in a singular commercial dispute.

It also appears that they've turned off Cheetah speed for the game.
That is going to be very hard to miss. The lack of a way to race through boring stretches would be a massive demerit to this game if it were released that way.

 

[Davros]

Well valve did a "agree to our new policy or we will take all your games from you"

 

[3dilettante]

That may be so, but I'm curious to the legalities of retaliating against customers engaged in a (edit: separate) financial dispute.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I wouldn't be surprised if some enterprising lawyer saw that Chat transcript and proceeded to fire off an e-mail to the person offering to start up a class action lawsuit.

Regards,
SB

 

[3dilettante]

The EULAs and TOS for most games and services have forbidden this in the US. However, the termination of use rights to different products because of an otherwise separate dispute is something I'm curious about.
There may be separate laws about this, and it may run into the rules surrounding the financial institutions involved in the transactions.

 

[pcchen]

I would think that perhaps more room for the city or a graceful way of adjusting density against the level of curvature might make them more broadly used.

Yes, the city size is indeed too small.

While this is true for many functions, at the same time it is harder for non-agent statistical models to outright fail, and they can be fixed without as many knock-on effects throughout the simulation.
I suppose the problem with SimCity is that the implementation has some visible flaws.

I think this is going to be what make (or break) the game. There are obviously some optimization problems (e.g. garbage trucks leaves a "spot" of trash, or fire engines going around instead of directly going to the fire).

This doesn't seem to all the way there, yet. Some of the balance issues may stem from this. I'd imagine a metal or alloys city would be much more rewarding if not having them retarded construction in other cities, since it would follow that skyscrapers and the like need that metal. However, the game seems like it really favors the high-tech and high-education path which is area efficient and gets a lot of mitigation measures, and doesn't value the necessity of the other kinds.

Yes, and there are some very weird decisions. For example, the first to kickstart your "electronic industry" is to build a "processor factory." Then you can somehow upgrade to making TV... I think it's quite the reverse in the real world
Right now the only serious demand for raw materials are for the "great projects," which require quite a lot of these raw materials.

There are other philosophical/gameplay debates about the game's decisions, such as making so much of the economic system mayor-controlled. How many city mayors run a command economy over their metal and processor exports?

SimCity is always a little bit more "socialist" than "capitalist." However, this version is probably the most "socialism" of all. You need to carefully manage the ratio between residential, industrial, and commercial area (and w.r.t. separate wealth levels) in order to avoid the common "can't find more employees" and "no customers" problem. One of my city's industrial area have this problem to the point of ridiculous, where factories were built, then abandoned due to "can't find any employee," and I have to demolish them. Then they get rebuilt, and the cycle repeats again. This is quite stupid. An obvious solution (and I believe, in other version of SimCity) is to NOT build these factories if there's no enough people to work in these factories.

 

[3dilettante]

How often do you need to manually demolish abandoned buildings? Can't the zone revert down to lesser buildings?

 

[Jedi2016]

How often do you need to manually demolish abandoned buildings? Can't the zone revert down to lesser buildings?

You don't have to do it very often, really.. the trick is to keep them from being abandoned.. hehe. They won't revert down, they'll just go away.

I do wish they would pop-up the "abandoned" icon regardless of what view you're in, though. As it is, I have to check the "Bulldoze" view every few minutes to make sure nothing new's popped up. My fire coverage isn't the best because of traffic.

I haven't really had that many issues getting into the game. It was a little twitchy yesterday with that update they pushed out, but I was able to get right in tonight. I'm on NA East 2.

I am starting to feel the pinch of city size, though. You run out of room pretty damn quick, and it sucks having to bulldoze buildings to make room for something else.

 

[Jwm]

I still have not been able to play longer than 30-mins. I did once get back in only to be forced to play the tutorial, and subsequently was kicked off due to my inability to connect to the servers.

Oh well, I will try again in two years probably only to find they disconnected the servers, due to lack of a player base.

Due to my experience of really only playing the tutorial 1.25 times, yeah, I am sad about all this...

Sent from my RM-820_nam_att_100 using Board Express

 

[Sonic]

Yeah I'm not going to buy this. This is a serious problem EA needs to fix. I really dislike the concept of having to always be online in order to play a game. If there's an earthquake and my power goes out how am I able to play this game from my laptop? It's absolutely ridiculous and asinine of EA to purposefully single me, and others who share my views, out from purchasing their game. I really hope this game ends up getting hacked somehow so I can enjoy it at some point in the future. If there's all these issues now then that truly means EA was either too cheap in the development of this game and decided to release it in a crappy state. This company has given the finger to its customers so many time in the past one would think they'd learn from their mistakes. Now I could care less if someone hacks into their system and finds a way to make it freely available to play without ever paying EA a dime. Though with my last sentence I think this would be more proper in the DRM thread in politics ethic technology sub forum or whatever it is.

 

[Babel-17]

yikes

http://games.slashdot.org/story/13/...of-poor-reviews-amazon-yanks-simcity-download

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I guess this is one instance I can thank EA from the bottom of my heart for not releasing a game on Steam. Otherwise I likely would have pre-ordered it a month or so ago, and been pulling my hair out about it right now.

From everything I've read about the game, this is not the SimCity I remember, loved playing, and was hoping for.

The always online doesn't bother me. The state of the game, limited city sizes, lack of underground transit (which makes the cities even smaller feeling), lack of micro for power, sewer, water, etc., too much control for a Mayor over industry, and on and on. Bleh. While it does look like there are some nice ideas, it just doesn't seem to work right.

One reviewer was correct. This should not have been called Sim City. This is more like Sim Village or Sim Town.

Regards,
SB

 

[3dilettante]

I would love to see a post-mortem on the troubles being experienced on the server side, as unlikely as it may be for that level of introspection and disclosure of proprietary information.

Some of the rollback errors point to the existence of queues and subsystems that must have been coded for multiple attempts, but they are also not well-ordered with respect to one another.
An analysis of the points of failure and an honest assessment of the load would be enlightening. EA's PR on the unexpected demand is not entirely useful, even when they gave "hard" numbers on the aggregate amount of road and building count.

What worries me is that people have experienced problems and data loss so consistently, when there should have been more cyclical behaviors, particularly prior to the launch in other regions.
While heavy load may have been the big driver, it seems like the server and storage code and infrastructure has some serious flaws. It's still not clear just how much these servers are doing.

Users have very little ability to work around it, so the design choice to host the data server-side placed a much higher premium on system quality, which was not in evidence. A wide swath of the progress-loss bugs are fundamentally difficult to accomplish on a local machine. The warning signs should have come during those press betas. They had tens of users and had occasional sync and connection problems, when any sort of error in an unladen and controlled environment would be a red flag for the real world.


I just saw someone saying that the game censored their city name. Which happened with Diablo 3 as well.
I wonder if EA will bulldoze phallic cities.

 

[Grall]

I was so intrigued by this game, and then I heard about the always-online aspect and I became very wary, and now it seems all those fears were justified. Complaints about things like the small size of cities ("towns", "villages"... ) seem to have grown directly out of running the game on remote servers; artificially limiting city size obviously places less demand on server infrastructure.

On top of that, we have EA greed impacting the game and the player's enjoyment of it from multiple directions; both by enforcing what is essentially an always-online DRM scheme (to combat piracy), and by imposing a strict limit on the size of the simulation, thus limiting EA's expenditures resulting from their own choice of DRM scheme.

All together a thorougly deplorable state of affairs, and EA's claims that this is the result of "unexpected demand" can be discounted pretty much entirely; EA must have had a very good idea indeed how big demand was going to be judging from things like pre-orders and other sources, if they truly did NOT know then they must be entirely incompetent over there; EA's one of the biggest software publishers on the planet for chrissakes. It's unforgivable if they should not know themselves how popular one of their own big-franchise titles is going to be, especially when the server infrastructure that the game relies on is crucial for the performance of the game and the enjoyment of their paying customers...!

 

[Arwin]

Size limits may just be cpu performance due to the agent model?

 

[Grall]

Has anyone reported any CPU performance issues with the game though? I think I've seen pretty much everything except that particular complaint mentioned so far. Indeed, what is the CPU load when playing this incarnation of simcity on a modern multicore processor...?

 

[orangpelupa]

https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408

Dan Moskowitz
‏@moskow23
@mattcrwi The main sim + game loop is on a single thread, so extra cores don't help. We do make use of extra CPU for audio/rendering

so it seems it wont use multiple core for the simulation.

 

[Malo]