Sim City *Limited* Edition

[Thompy]

Oops. So it seems abandoning a city means it won't reset if someone else takes over. I was having a look at different areas in 5punkland to see what they were like as the preview image is pretty poor, and now it's listed as abandoned with a few simoleons missing. I was going to start over in the next city I made as I got all anal about some road placements, but didn't want to leave an empty city with hardly any money. Seems like there should be a reset button.

[TezzRexx]

Oops. So it seems abandoning a city means it won't reset if someone else takes over.

I noticed that (in other zones), think it's a bug that'll probably get patched.

[Grimmie]

I believe it's intentional. In public games if someone doesn't log in for a while you can re-claim the land and turn their poopy city's fortunes around.

[deject]

lol @ EA & Maxis

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03 ... ns-silent/

I mean come on guys.

[Mr. Johnson]

That's pretty special.

[Dog Pants]

I think they haven't responded because they're still doing this:

[Joose]

I'm not sure that's the conclusive proof that it claims to be, to be honest. He shows that you can build roads/rail outside the city limits, but nothing else. Roads/Rail are only a small subset of all the things that are going on in a city. And besides, they have said themselves that the city sized can be made bigger, and probably will be at some point (either patch or DLC. Probably DLC though).

Saying he shows you can play offline indefinitely is a bit misleading too. You can, but whilst doing that you cant save, or load, or use any of the regional features. Saving and loading could easily be fixed by just pointing to save files to the computer rather than the cloud, but the regional features might be more tricky. Just playing devils advocate, but the regional stuff could be the "complex simulation" that they were talking about that had to be done server side. I still call bullshit that it would *have* to be done server side, but that horse has bolted. If they have built the game with all the regional stuff being handled server side it is not likely to be a trivial task to re-engineer the game to do it all client side instead, and anyone who claims that it definitely would be is talking out of their arse. I'm not saying that it definitely wouldn't be either, just that it is possible that they have written it in such a way that rewriting it would be an epic task.

The other argument of course is that you could just remove the regional stuff entirely *and* make the cities bigger and everything would be fine. I would argue that a bigger city that tries to cover all the bases would make the way the simulation works completely fall to bits. Maybe if they had built the game with that in mind from the start it would be able to cope, but getting the game as it is, turning off the region features and then massively upping the city sizes is almost certainly not possible.Not without rewriting the game from scratch.

TL;DR: Interesting video, but doesn't really change anything. They maybe shouldn't have made the game like they have, but they did, and I remain unconvinced that it would be simple to fix those things.

[Thompy]

This is quite addictive, although I'm finding it a bit easy, maybe. I have memories of my SimCity 2000 cities crashing and burning shortly after starting every time, abandoned buildings, massive loses etc. Maybe it was because I was 13 and didn't get it. But it seems very easy to keep profits rolling in and gradually upgrade everything. Now my city is far from a bastion of perfection, and it's completely uninspired, so I don't know if reaching perfection is will be difficult or not. And er...

...I need to go plop some more now though.

[Taraniis]

I'm in, just sent my request to cowjoose. Let me playzors!!

[Joose]

Invite sented!

[Joose]

Damn you Tezz! Damn you and your commuters! The main road outside my city was all kinds of fucked, with no-one able to get in due to the road being a carpark. Through creative road restructuring I have managed to clear the traffic backlog. But now no one can get out, because the road to Tezzland resembles that Dr Who episode with the eternal traffic jam. Almost every car on there is Tezzish.

A couple of things I have learnt from my road restructuring: intersections are super bad. You want as few of them as possible. This is because the traffic light system is slow as arse. As a result, a long wiggly road weaving through buildings is significantly more efficient than a New York style road grid, as even though the cars have further to go they will get there in a fraction of the time due to not having to stop every ten yards. The one caveat to this is fire trucks: they block the whole road, so although you want to minimise intersections, one long road with no intersections at all would create a citywide gridlock the first time someone has a sneaky cig in bed.

Another interesting thing I noticed: Traffic leaving your city appears to have priority over traffic coming in. I only have one road entrance to my city, and before the restructuring it had a T junction right as it came in. The traffic lights seemed to let dozens of people out for every two or three cars coming in.

[Grimmie]

As a result, a long wiggly road weaving through buildings is significantly more efficient than a New York style road grid

Having recently been on a NY road grid, I can confirm they're slow as arse. They do get around it slightly by having the horizontal (across Manhattan) road alternate between one-way-east, and one-way-west though.

I've also discovered that the road/rail networks do limit who you can trade with. I can't send or receive anything to Vagina Park (thanks for that one, Tezz) because it's up on the plateau without a connection to us on the valley. I gather there are other region maps that are completely connected across all 16 cities, but the one we went for isn't. Unfortunately that also means I can't make a residential town to fuel my tourism coffers, so I fear I may have hit a brick wall in Grimhampton.

[Joose]

Yeah, im starting to hit similar issues myself. We could try moving to a new region if people want? The old region wouldnt go anywhere if people want to continue poking at their existing cities. Personally I've learnt a lot of things about how to design my city that are extremely difficult to work in retroactively, so a fresh start might be a good plan.

[Dog Pants]

I like that your cities are interacting like that. It doesn't really come across in the reviews I've read, but that's the sort of network feature I'd expect to see in a multiplayer Sim City.

[Thompy]

Yeah, im starting to hit similar issues myself. We could try moving to a new region if people want? The old region wouldnt go anywhere if people want to continue poking at their existing cities. Personally I've learnt a lot of things about how to design my city that are extremely difficult to work in retroactively, so a fresh start might be a good plan.

Fine by me! I like to constantly restart. I feel that if I got one city too good it'd lose replay value because I know I've already cracked it.

[buzzmong]

Ooops, I bet EA management are really in a tizz considering big general news sites like the BBC have picked up that the game has been hacked to work in offline mode despite the claims that it was online only.

[TezzRexx]

Damn you Tezz! Damn you and your commuters! The main road outside my city was all kinds of fucked, with no-one able to get in due to the road being a carpark. Through creative road restructuring I have managed to clear the traffic backlog. But now no one can get out, because the road to Tezzland resembles that Dr Who episode with the eternal traffic jam. Almost every car on there is Tezzish.

A couple of things I have learnt from my road restructuring: intersections are super bad. You want as few of them as possible. This is because the traffic light system is slow as arse. As a result, a long wiggly road weaving through buildings is significantly more efficient than a New York style road grid, as even though the cars have further to go they will get there in a fraction of the time due to not having to stop every ten yards. The one caveat to this is fire trucks: they block the whole road, so although you want to minimise intersections, one long road with no intersections at all would create a citywide gridlock the first time someone has a sneaky cig in bed.

Another interesting thing I noticed: Traffic leaving your city appears to have priority over traffic coming in. I only have one road entrance to my city, and before the restructuring it had a T junction right as it came in. The traffic lights seemed to let dozens of people out for every two or three cars coming in.

sorrrrrrry! If it's any consolation, my rapid expansion has left me completely unable to plop any more things or expand any further

[FatherJack]

sorrrrrrry! If it's any consolation, my rapid expansion has left me completely unable to .. expand any further

Except into Jooston Vasey

[Dog Pants]

Here's the list of free games EA are offering as an apology for selling you SimCity:

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
MOHW (Standard Edition)
NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

Some decent enough games in there (BF3, ME3), and some excellent but cheap ones like PvZ and Bejewelled. Sim City 4 being offered is a beautiful irony that I'm certain they're aware of.

[Grimmie]

So.. BF3 (does anyone play this any more? is it a good buy?) or SC4?