I am just saying. If you don't mind the DRM the you would buy it either way because YOU want to play it. The other people will probably wait or play something else.
Sim City is back in 2013!
- Thread starter green.pixel
- Start date
I am just saying. If you don't mind the DRM the you would buy it either way because YOU want to play it. The other people will probably wait or play something else.
I can't save my game, futz with things or blow them up, and then reload.
Experimentation is somewhat enabled through a hacky sandbox mode, but that puts a damper on experimentation because it makes the work of setting up a test case more onerous.
I can't terraform.
The agent-based simulation leads to certain improvements in some areas, but things it implies like how a sim's employment is the nearest factory or commercial area seems like a regression from the more statistical method done in earlier games. Some of the more complex (and buggy) systems like traffic flow will not be the same.
The zone density based on adjacent road size idea doesn't ring true to reality or how some interesting city designs have done it. I'm not a fan of the city sizes, since people in the 1-hour beta said they started to feel the ceiling bearing down on them.
I'm not saying that the game won't find some success, but it's a different play model and philosophy to the games I played the heck out of earlier.
I'm not the sort of player they want to appeal to, and that's their call.
That's why it's not labeled with a number, but is being treated like a reboot. As a successor to original series, I do not give it high marks. As a new start and a chance for it own legacy, it's not a direction I care for. There are compelling elements to it, and it might look better to me some number of DLC/expansion pack/patches/value bundles down the road.
Experimentation is somewhat enabled through a hacky sandbox mode, but that puts a damper on experimentation because it makes the work of setting up a test case more onerous.
I can't terraform.
The agent-based simulation leads to certain improvements in some areas, but things it implies like how a sim's employment is the nearest factory or commercial area seems like a regression from the more statistical method done in earlier games. Some of the more complex (and buggy) systems like traffic flow will not be the same.
The zone density based on adjacent road size idea doesn't ring true to reality or how some interesting city designs have done it. I'm not a fan of the city sizes, since people in the 1-hour beta said they started to feel the ceiling bearing down on them.
I'm not saying that the game won't find some success, but it's a different play model and philosophy to the games I played the heck out of earlier.
I'm not the sort of player they want to appeal to, and that's their call.
That's why it's not labeled with a number, but is being treated like a reboot. As a successor to original series, I do not give it high marks. As a new start and a chance for it own legacy, it's not a direction I care for. There are compelling elements to it, and it might look better to me some number of DLC/expansion pack/patches/value bundles down the road.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Thanks for your impressions 3dilettante, I think I'll be making a pass on this as well (assuming it ever comes to Steam).
Doesn't sound like SimCity anymore. Not terribly happy that they are focusing less on the simulation aspects of running (and planning) a city: zoning, traffic, etc.
Regards,
SB
Doesn't sound like SimCity anymore. Not terribly happy that they are focusing less on the simulation aspects of running (and planning) a city: zoning, traffic, etc.
Regards,
SB
on SimCity 4, i installed some mods many years ago and it able to show the sims works where and going through what roads, are they using many kinds of transportation (walk to bus station, use bus, walk to train, use train, walk to bus, use bus, walk to office).
the same thing available for goods used by industrial zones too.
I do hear you on the size. While it was easy for some players to hit the "horizontal" limits in the beta, there's a couple things to consider. The high-density stuff was not available in any form. There was very little building "upwards" beyond small apartment buildings. So most of what you'd consider the "end game", the big money items, highly advanced specializations, etc, none of that was there.. The time limit imposed by EA for the testing also made people rush through it pretty quickly, to try to get as much done in that one hour as they could, something I've found rather opposite of the way I've been playing SC4 (that I only just picked up the other day).
I'm not defending the size of the cities, though. I think they made too much of a sacrifice to make the game very scalable to, as they say, "Dad's computer". I'm not playing the game on Dad's computer, I'm playing it on my computer. And my computer is a beast. They should have added options that allowed you to scale the cities based on the capabilities of your computer, just like you would scale graphical settings. I'm pretty sure my system could easily handle a city 4-8 times bigger than what's available. That's part of the reason I went ahead and picked up SC4, is for when I get the itch to play with a BIG city.
The playstyle is definitely a lot different, but I think I'll get more overall enjoyment out of the new one. I like being able to zoom down to street level and check things out. SC4, while a "true" SimCity game, is pretty complicated for a new player. The last couple cities I've played have gotten away from me pretty quickly, even when I felt everything was going well. I get the impression from the videos I've seen of the new one that that's less likely to happen, to see your city develop budget problems that spiral out of control before you can blink, and suddenly everything you worked for is pretty much gone. And this is in a small-area city I dubbed "Newbsville".. lol.
yikes i played SC4 again and it's broken :/
now the mod that making it feels like SC2013 i used since years ago is gone...
it should be able to show where the sims go to work, factory use goods from where, worker from where, etc.
anybody have a clue what mod i used? the error did not say the mod name :/
now the mod that making it feels like SC2013 i used since years ago is gone...
it should be able to show where the sims go to work, factory use goods from where, worker from where, etc.
anybody have a clue what mod i used? the error did not say the mod name :/
SimCity does not seem to support pre-load on Origin, as the installation file is surprisingly small (less than 300MB). However, since it obviously can't be that small, it now downloading some "update" after launching, which seems to be rather large.
So if you want to be able to play it right away, you'll probably want to launch it at midnight and you'll be able to play after work.
So if you want to be able to play it right away, you'll probably want to launch it at midnight and you'll be able to play after work.
An overview of some longer-term playthroughs prior to release popped up on ars technica.
I'm not sure which of the two reviewers I'd most be like when facing this game, but Peter Bright seemed to key on some things that I would focus on pretty heavily.
(edit: Oddly enough, they seem to indicate a bunch of UI issues are popping up, so there could be regressions in the data layer display options. Apparently, Bright likes a hefty police presence, which is something a lot of my cities would have and would severely clutter the screen in the crime map.)
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
I'm not sure how much is going to change in the near to medium term, and how many fixes wouldn't come for a fee in the game store.
Perhaps there's another big patch, as there seems to be some big variability in the simulation's finances.
They specifically referenced how a lot of the problems wouldn't show up in a one-hour beta session.
I'm not sure which of the two reviewers I'd most be like when facing this game, but Peter Bright seemed to key on some things that I would focus on pretty heavily.
(edit: Oddly enough, they seem to indicate a bunch of UI issues are popping up, so there could be regressions in the data layer display options. Apparently, Bright likes a hefty police presence, which is something a lot of my cities would have and would severely clutter the screen in the crime map.)
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
I'm not sure how much is going to change in the near to medium term, and how many fixes wouldn't come for a fee in the game store.
Perhaps there's another big patch, as there seems to be some big variability in the simulation's finances.
They specifically referenced how a lot of the problems wouldn't show up in a one-hour beta session.
beta was 1.8 gigs on my pc. Looking at it now.
I haven't bought the game at this time, but I have been following anecdotal accounts of the game launch, and it has given some flavor to the more generic fears I had prior to knowing more about actual experience.
This is not a universal problem, but a sizeable number of people are reporting it. These sorts of problems would have been deal killers for me right off the bat, which is too bad because I do see some things that look nice.
One initeresting theme is that once you make a game always-online, even a game which may not complain about a disconnect for minutes, anything that goes wrong is now your fault. Granted, a lot of it is, but something like a PC driver problem crashing the desktop is now even more your fault in the eyes of the consumer because you've perpetuated the idea that your cloud is doing so much.
The agent-based system has sporadically wrecked city subsystems, because the formerly abstracted or micro-sim systems now operate on moving agents whose traversal logic can spontaneously fail. Power plants may stop getting fuel, schools suddenly stop letting buses into the parking lot, and transport and emergency vehicles may circle endlessly in long convoys, or politely wait in traffic with sirens blaring while the city burns down.
One side-effect of putting physical rules on these former abstractions is that it may not be so simple to fix. Fire trucks that have no right of way now will need a tweak to the full agent model of the traffic system to allow them to at least make some progress in heavy traffic.
Zero progress or bad pathfinding can render services useless in ways that a few background variables based on a density plot cannot. I'm almost tempted to get the game so I can test out ideas for workarounds for the feckless fire truck pathfinding, such as a secondary road network on the back of a dense highrise area I don't want to burn down due emergency vehicles forming a conga line down the street.
The transportation system is dumbed down from what it could have been, or probably will be some day with a DLC pack. One example is that cities can be interconnected by predetermined highway connections that must immediately unload into lower-capactiy city streets, and the pathfinding frequently sucks--which leads to serious gridlock.
There may also be balance issues with the game, in terms of what specialization choices currently yield the most money for a given investment in money and precious city footprint.
Under server load, the design choices of this game also lead to some interesting observations on reality.
Simultaneous multiplayer doesn't really exist. Changes to neighbor cities such as enhancements or deals can glitch or take tens of minutes to update. I don't think I could muster a full stable of friends for a large region for multiplayer, much less for long stretches.
If the server situation remains less than ideal, I would find significant fractions of that together time are literaly not happening as far as the game is concerned. This, coupled with other problems with synching and ruined saves that become more likely the more concurrent activity is going on, means the game has multiplied the number of people whose time it can waste.
*Quick PSA, do NOT hit Quit Now when leaving the game unless you don't want your progress saved. Some players didn't realize that this cut off the server sync.
What's interesting is that under load, significant desync problems show that you aren't even playing in linear time with yourself. It's hard to pin down where the glitches are coming from, but there are acconts of players hopping cities in their own regions, and seeing delays/glitches. At other times, they are met with loading errors that ask them to either abandon or roll back their city. Some of the interesting accounts had users that lost progress, redid their work, and then were hit with a loading error that rolled them back to the progress they had previously lost.
The loss of progress is galling to me, especially since the player has so much less agency in managing their data or saving their progress. Regular games with problems with save corruption can sometimes be helped by having multiple save files or allowing a user to back up their folders. This just isn't an option, now.
The interconnectedness of the game is hampered because the glitches and some apparent restrictions to restarting cities too quickly made a number of initial group forays run afoul of abandoned or desynced cities nobody could get rid of or restart.
Allegedly, there were also problems with group players not being able to take over for a friend that had quit a busted city because they bought different DLC versions, and they couldn't inherit DLC the other player bought and could not purge the city the other player still ostensibly controlled.
While modding does not happen because it probably requires more work for tools and handling of complications such as fragmenting the player base, it appears to be acceptable to do the same if players pay for the privilege.
Failures due to other player screwups, trolling, or server foul-ups are currently taking significant amounts of time to resolve since game progress and rollback is entirely at the discretion of the server. At least for the early games, the solution is sometimes just trashing the region and trying again.
Games are also local to a specific server, so while you yourself may change to a less burdened server, your cities will not.
I would imagine the desync issues will be brought under control at some point. I'm not sure if that will also correct some of the strange agent-based simulation failures as well. It's possible because reloading or quitting and logging back in seemed to fix things.
There are also cases where you can fight your way through all the queues and all the disconnects, get to a city, and then the UI doesn't respond. The server hooks are in some funky places, apparently.
This is not a universal problem, but a sizeable number of people are reporting it. These sorts of problems would have been deal killers for me right off the bat, which is too bad because I do see some things that look nice.
One initeresting theme is that once you make a game always-online, even a game which may not complain about a disconnect for minutes, anything that goes wrong is now your fault. Granted, a lot of it is, but something like a PC driver problem crashing the desktop is now even more your fault in the eyes of the consumer because you've perpetuated the idea that your cloud is doing so much.
The agent-based system has sporadically wrecked city subsystems, because the formerly abstracted or micro-sim systems now operate on moving agents whose traversal logic can spontaneously fail. Power plants may stop getting fuel, schools suddenly stop letting buses into the parking lot, and transport and emergency vehicles may circle endlessly in long convoys, or politely wait in traffic with sirens blaring while the city burns down.
One side-effect of putting physical rules on these former abstractions is that it may not be so simple to fix. Fire trucks that have no right of way now will need a tweak to the full agent model of the traffic system to allow them to at least make some progress in heavy traffic.
Zero progress or bad pathfinding can render services useless in ways that a few background variables based on a density plot cannot. I'm almost tempted to get the game so I can test out ideas for workarounds for the feckless fire truck pathfinding, such as a secondary road network on the back of a dense highrise area I don't want to burn down due emergency vehicles forming a conga line down the street.
The transportation system is dumbed down from what it could have been, or probably will be some day with a DLC pack. One example is that cities can be interconnected by predetermined highway connections that must immediately unload into lower-capactiy city streets, and the pathfinding frequently sucks--which leads to serious gridlock.
There may also be balance issues with the game, in terms of what specialization choices currently yield the most money for a given investment in money and precious city footprint.
Under server load, the design choices of this game also lead to some interesting observations on reality.
Simultaneous multiplayer doesn't really exist. Changes to neighbor cities such as enhancements or deals can glitch or take tens of minutes to update. I don't think I could muster a full stable of friends for a large region for multiplayer, much less for long stretches.
If the server situation remains less than ideal, I would find significant fractions of that together time are literaly not happening as far as the game is concerned. This, coupled with other problems with synching and ruined saves that become more likely the more concurrent activity is going on, means the game has multiplied the number of people whose time it can waste.
*Quick PSA, do NOT hit Quit Now when leaving the game unless you don't want your progress saved. Some players didn't realize that this cut off the server sync.
What's interesting is that under load, significant desync problems show that you aren't even playing in linear time with yourself. It's hard to pin down where the glitches are coming from, but there are acconts of players hopping cities in their own regions, and seeing delays/glitches. At other times, they are met with loading errors that ask them to either abandon or roll back their city. Some of the interesting accounts had users that lost progress, redid their work, and then were hit with a loading error that rolled them back to the progress they had previously lost.
The loss of progress is galling to me, especially since the player has so much less agency in managing their data or saving their progress. Regular games with problems with save corruption can sometimes be helped by having multiple save files or allowing a user to back up their folders. This just isn't an option, now.
The interconnectedness of the game is hampered because the glitches and some apparent restrictions to restarting cities too quickly made a number of initial group forays run afoul of abandoned or desynced cities nobody could get rid of or restart.
Allegedly, there were also problems with group players not being able to take over for a friend that had quit a busted city because they bought different DLC versions, and they couldn't inherit DLC the other player bought and could not purge the city the other player still ostensibly controlled.
While modding does not happen because it probably requires more work for tools and handling of complications such as fragmenting the player base, it appears to be acceptable to do the same if players pay for the privilege.
Failures due to other player screwups, trolling, or server foul-ups are currently taking significant amounts of time to resolve since game progress and rollback is entirely at the discretion of the server. At least for the early games, the solution is sometimes just trashing the region and trying again.
Games are also local to a specific server, so while you yourself may change to a less burdened server, your cities will not.
I would imagine the desync issues will be brought under control at some point. I'm not sure if that will also correct some of the strange agent-based simulation failures as well. It's possible because reloading or quitting and logging back in seemed to fix things.
There are also cases where you can fight your way through all the queues and all the disconnects, get to a city, and then the UI doesn't respond. The server hooks are in some funky places, apparently.
Last edited by a moderator:
I played the game for two days, and this is my first impression:
Good:
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.
2. Performance is good. Although the whole game is now in 3D, I don't really have any performance problem with my Core i7-2600 and GeForce 670, with all settings maximized and 1920x1200 resolution.
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.
Interesting:
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.
2. Cooperative play. The ability to play with a friend in the same region seems to be interesting, but I haven't tried that yet.
Bad:
1. Server problem. Of course, this is to be expected for a launch, but some problems are not very good. For example, in some case, if you "claim" a new city, or start a new region, the server may take several minutes to complete this operation, but the client let you to continue. This eventually lead to a client crash, and all you done in the new city is gone. Fortunately, if one may say so, it takes only a few minutes for the client to crash, so you don't lose too much.
2. Minor graphics glitches. Sometimes a building may flash like crazy, or a road may be partly covered by sand. Nothing too big, but annoying.
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.
4. No farms. This is quite an omission, and disappointing, especially considering that they are going for a region based system.
The balance problem, I think, may take some time to sort out. Some buildings are extremely profitable, to the point of ridiculous. For example, a recycling center, while itself quite expensive, can bring in a pretty big profit in a large city, just by selling those recycled materials. Recycling business in the real world is, well, not like this.
Good:
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.
2. Performance is good. Although the whole game is now in 3D, I don't really have any performance problem with my Core i7-2600 and GeForce 670, with all settings maximized and 1920x1200 resolution.
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.
Interesting:
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.
2. Cooperative play. The ability to play with a friend in the same region seems to be interesting, but I haven't tried that yet.
Bad:
1. Server problem. Of course, this is to be expected for a launch, but some problems are not very good. For example, in some case, if you "claim" a new city, or start a new region, the server may take several minutes to complete this operation, but the client let you to continue. This eventually lead to a client crash, and all you done in the new city is gone. Fortunately, if one may say so, it takes only a few minutes for the client to crash, so you don't lose too much.
2. Minor graphics glitches. Sometimes a building may flash like crazy, or a road may be partly covered by sand. Nothing too big, but annoying.
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.
4. No farms. This is quite an omission, and disappointing, especially considering that they are going for a region based system.
The balance problem, I think, may take some time to sort out. Some buildings are extremely profitable, to the point of ridiculous. For example, a recycling center, while itself quite expensive, can bring in a pretty big profit in a large city, just by selling those recycled materials. Recycling business in the real world is, well, not like this.
Babel-17
Veteran
http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...of_the_classic_game_is_totally_addictive.html
It has a guy's general impressions. He likes it a lot.
It has a guy's general impressions. He likes it a lot.
Blazkowicz
Legend
I looked at Sim City and similar on wikipedia, I don't remember why at first but I went to look at clones (and the transport tycoon variants too).
I ended up installing a free software game called "lincity-ng", nice! a poor man's Sim City, but weird and maybe flawed (lol at the help system telling me everything except what do the percentages mean). But pass on that, I've discovered a little known gem.
apt-get install micropolis and a few seconds later you end up with a GPL license version of a particular classic game, made back in the "One Laptop Per Child" days and not very publicized otherwise.
The game had no undo when I built a stadium in a useless place by mistake so I decided to mess with it.
I've just learn there's a java version, released february 23rd for those who don't run a linux/unix OS! It's complelety free, except for the original title which is strictly reserved to its holders, so I won't tell what it is and let you guess
I ended up installing a free software game called "lincity-ng", nice! a poor man's Sim City, but weird and maybe flawed (lol at the help system telling me everything except what do the percentages mean). But pass on that, I've discovered a little known gem.
apt-get install micropolis and a few seconds later you end up with a GPL license version of a particular classic game, made back in the "One Laptop Per Child" days
and not very publicized otherwise.
The game had no undo when I built a stadium in a useless place by mistake so I decided to mess with it.
I've just learn there's a java version, released february 23rd for those who don't run a linux/unix OS! It's complelety free, except for the original title which is strictly reserved to its holders, so I won't tell what it is and let you guess
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
No, they haven't:
Not only are they refusing the refunds but they are also threatening to ban the Origin accounts of those who ask for a refund through their bank (meaning that all other EA games connected to Origin will be instantaneously wiped out).
EA sure know how to soil themselves.