Sim City *Limited* Edition

[friznit]

A dirty trick if you're really struggling for cash: separate your housing zone from your commercial completely. Then build an unconnected avenue between them with a bus station on each end (don't connect the avenues to any roads). Then add a toll both at each end of the avenue. The sims are forced to take the bus (giving you money) and the buses are forced to pay a toll twice times each way (giving you more money). Because toll booths and bus stations are pretty crap in vanilla, they're the one thing I mod early on. I like Praiodan's Modern Subway Station because it doubles as a bus station and is a neat 4x4 plop.

[Dog Pants]

I've not got far enough to have much higher density stuff yet, but I can see transport being my downfall when it does. One of my cities lies abandoned with a huge, looping, disconnected abortion of a raised railway cutting through it. I stupidly assumed that being raised I would be able to build it over the top of things.

[Taraniis]

Elevated rail sucks balls, if you can, always go underground or use buses

[Dog Pants]

Yeah, I've been making 'pods' of residential with a grid of bus stops funneling into a single arterial road, where I plan to put subway stations once I have the cash and population. I have abandoned cities all over the area which are each testiment to a lesson learned.

[Taraniis]

It isn't best practice to use one road for everything, your transport network needs to be backed up with redundancies and alternatives or you end up with the M25 - which was going to be called the M16 and would have been one of 4 other arterial routes that didn't get built

[Dog Pants]

Sorry, badly worded. In the current map (the only one which isn't as yet bankrupt) the pods lead into a single road for a group of them, which in turn lead to a trunk avenue. I've just added a second trunk as my city expands. I'm sure I'll still encounter problems, but it seems to be working at the moment.

[Taraniis]

When it gets big enough put some four lane avenues down and then some one way roads next to them keeping the flow of traffic. It costs a bit but it keeps these main routes free flowing without having to upgrade to freeway sections, also an inner city box is pretty handy if constructed in the same vein. The other benefit is that you can keep your bus routes off of the main avenues so they aren't getting clogged up.

If you can make the subways or train stations miss middle sections of the city that serve no purpose, that way if a citizen is on one side of the map but needs to get to the industrial sites or CBD on the other side they use the train rather than drive through the middle and block up the centre.

[Dog Pants]

If anyone still fancies giving this (the new one, not SC4) a punt you can apparently get it here via some convoluted process for £18.49.

[Joose]

Well, I heard some of the things I was concerned about had been resolved/were going to be resolved and apparently that was enough to dissolve my will like a tissue in a thunderstorm, so I have bought it. Maybe I can feel less bad about having crumbled if I think of it as performing a service for 5punks interested parties, like im a scout or something. To that end, a report from the front line:

I see no evidence of brokenness at all.

I logged in with zero drama or waiting, and have played for several hours this afternoon with no evidence of lag, no disconnections, nada. Whilst I agree that they probably shouldn't have made this an on-line game (and I'm seeing bum all evidence to support their suggestion that offline is impossible, but I'll get to that) all the launch issues seem to be fixed already. The server selection screen shows a fair few full servers, yes, but there are several choices of servers with capacity free. As we should probably have expected by now, the people calling SimCity an unplayable mess that is unfit for purpose and all those other lovely bits of hyperbole that have been thrown about are exaggerating massively. They didn't have enough servers at launch. Now they do. Chill the fuck out.

Now on to the stuff that I thought might turn out to be actual problems.

The advisors. Ignore them. They shout about minor issues like it is the end of the world (maybe they are from the internet LOLOLOL), but all of the stats and charts and funky graphical overlays you could ever need are right there next to them and do a far superior job of telling you what you should be doing next. The advisor may be all "ITS LIKE THE GOBI FUCKING DESERT IN HERE! OH GOD! OH GOOOOOD!", but a quick click of the water building options shows you where your water is coming from, where it is going and the two buildings in the corner that are running a little dry.

The small cities. Well...this one is a little more complicated. Its true, the plots are sodding small compared to the old SimCity areas. And yes, there will be times where you wish the maps were just that little bit bigger. But I'm not sure that making the maps bigger would actually improve the game. As it is, you have to think a bit, you have to plan ahead, its a bit of a challenge to jigsaw things into place if you want to expand. If the areas were bigger you would just spaff out more roads and expand expand expand. It would be easier. That's not necessarily a good thing. Of course, its only an issue at all if you want to max out the area, which you don't have to. You could make a nicely running balanced city without squeezing every possible square meter of real estate from it if you so wished. People think of the city population as some sort of high score system (probably not helped by leaderboards) but it doesn't have to be. And surely getting the most out of the area *should* be difficult, no? Having now played it, complaining that its hard to fit what you want into a small space sounds a bit like complaining that end level content in an MMO requires people who know how to play their roles, or complaining that the later levels of an FPS are more challenging than the early levels. Of course they are.

Its not all good mind. I did encounter a couple of things that annoyed me. One was a perpetual riot at my town hall. They were complaining that the housing tax was too high. I lower the housing tax. They still complain. I eliminate the housing tax entirely. Still rioting. I know that one end of my city is currently swimming in poo due to my horrible mismanagement of my waste disposal, but I still don't think it warrants paying people to live in my city. A relatively minor bug, but its still annoying. Fuck off home you protesting bastards.

The second thing is something I'm not sure how they could have done better, but its still irritating: when you place zones you just highlight the roadside you want the zone to emanate out from. The trouble is there is no indicator of how far back from that road the larger buildings will need until those larger buildings start being built. It makes placing a parallel road a pain in the bum, as I'm never sure I've placed it far enough away without being so far away that I've wasted space in between. I think its something I'll learn over time, but some sort of indicator would have been nice. Maybe a little box showing the maximum distance from the road a zone can possibly stretch out to? I don't know.

Last thing: the server requirements being because the sim is too complex for our poor PCs to handle: Bullshit. The claim as I understand it is that each individual person in the city is simulated, and they travel between the different cities in the region, and modelling all that moving around is, like, really hard guys, for reals. No it isn't. I have played Supreme Commander in a heug map with a bunch of AI opponents: thousands of units were milling around firing millions of projectiles at each other; each bit of movement had to be calculated in real time, the health of individual units had to be tracked, trajectories of laser death had to be calculated and healths adjusted appropriately whilst complex systems of resource management, automated build queues managed themselves, nukes exploded, water was modelled...*that* is a complicated simulation, and *that* played fine on a computer I used many, many years and upgrades ago. So no, im pretty certain that my computer could handle it just fine. I get that some peoples computers are not as good as mine, but you know what works well for making a game work with both modern and older computers? Options. Let me choose if my computer is man enough.

Like I say, the fact that the always on requirement is bullshit is significantly reduced in severity for me by the fact that they have fixed the server issue, im not going to be playing it on a train and my internets are pretty reliable. If you wanted to play it on a commute, well...I guess it sucks to be you. For me, its no longer a big issue, just a stupid and needless one.

Overall, its a bloody good city builder, and im enjoying it more than any other city builder I have played for some time. Probably since SC2k in fact.

[Dog Pants]

Good words Joose, and you make some interesting points. Regarding the server issues, I'll only mention that they doubled the amount of servers this weekend (although I don't know if that affects Europe). I think you have a good point about the size of the plots, that part of the skill is in the art of keeping it within a scale. However, I like huge sprawling cities with millions of citizens. For me games like this are like a clock I've built, watching it tick away in a perfectly balanced display of machinery. The bigger and more complicated the clock, the more satisfying it is. I don't think that would be a game-breaker for me though. The bugs will be patched out in time I'm sure, and I think every review I've read has said ignore the advisers. After what you've said I would probably have bought this if a) you could play it offline and b) it was priced like a normal PC game.

[Taraniis]

However, I like huge sprawling cities with millions of citizens.

Yes because all those abandoned monstrosities you keep talking about are, like, awesome... I know how you feel though, I was saying to Friz earlier that I managed to model London and the Boroughs on SC4 (ladies) and that looked spot on from the region view. However once you went down to the city view it was just the same, there wasn't much thought that needed to be put into it and you get to a certain point where you are just sitting back and watching rather than doing anything.

Its not all good mind. I did encounter a couple of things that annoyed me. One was a perpetual riot at my town hall. They were complaining that the housing tax was too high. I lower the housing tax. They still complain. I eliminate the housing tax entirely. Still rioting. I know that one end of my city is currently swimming in poo due to my horrible mismanagement of my waste disposal, but I still don't think it warrants paying people to live in my city. A relatively minor bug, but its still annoying. Fuck off home you protesting bastards.

That isn't far off.

in my RL job. Someone threatened to take me to the High Court for breach of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 because we extended a layby near his house and HGV's were parking in it which he declared a complete invasion of his privacy. I have been threatened with The Hague (yes, that one, for war criminals) because I refused to introduce a speed limit where a parish council wanted it, someone else has threatened to sue me personally for £75,000 because we repaired a major trunk road at night and the noise of the machines working 1 mile away kept them awake for 3 nights. We've had demonstrations outside the council offices after announcing on-street parking charges, despite making the car parking charges lower and dropping resident permits from £600 to £25 a year. The best had to be when someone tried to sue me for negligence because there weren't any street lights where they had a nearly fatal car crash into a drainage ditch, despite hitting the fucking lamp post on the bend, next to the drainage ditch, on the way into said ditch.

On balance I would say that these reactions to taxes and poor sewage are pretty realistic.

[TezzRexx]

I buckled and bought it on Friday. Haven't looked back, it's a very good game and a challenging one at that. Will be even better with a 5punky region :}

Also, I've lost many hours of my life to it. AGAIN.

I have had the odd connection error, but it consists of trying once or twice then I'm in. next to no hanging around.

[Joose]

Will be even better with a 5punky region :}

On that note, I have created a 5punky region, imaginatively titled 5punkland. I've set it to private to randoms don't join, which means you need to prod me for an invite. I have started us off with a pollution spewing industrial town, but on the plus side I have emergency services I can export to you lot.

[TezzRexx]

Excellenté, will do. I'll go create all the houses ever to fill the jobs

[Thompy]

I'm itching to buy it but... £45?

[TezzRexx]

The Limited Edition is £36 here:

http://www.greenmangaming.com/

I used it and it was fine

[Wiggy]

Anyone know how I can join the 5punky region? Can't find it anywhere

[Joose]

Ah yes, you need to be on Europe West 5

[Grimmie]

Still no post. Fuck you, pre-ordering.

[Dog Pants]

Earlier one of the EA people Tweeted that patching out the always online requirement wasn't out of the question, just not any time soon.

And now that they're not going to. Presumably the we're-in-the-shit-o-meter has started to come back off the endstop since they put new servers in and they're starting to relax back into their evil thrones again.