Sim City *Limited* Edition

[TezzRexx]

I imagine it'll come, but you'll have to pay for it... perhaps offline, with bigger tiles, and more buildings...

Still no post. Fuck you, pre-ordering.

http://www.greenmangaming.com/

Send your copy back. Order from GMG for cheapness. Enjoy your life.

[Grimmie]

Or I'll just play a different game tonight :D Gotta finish up Mass Effect 3 at last.

[Thompy]

The plot thickens. If they enabled offline mode and did away with the multiple city region play for single player then, aside from bugs, it'd be a very very well received game. Although there are user reports of the game being more fundamentally broken in terms of how the entire simulation works but we'll see.

[Dog Pants]

It was DRM all along? I'm shocked. Shocked!

[Joose]

Yeah, my suspicion-o-meter pinged quite hard yesterday when I was completely disconnected from the internet for about 15 minutes and things continued to be simulated just fine.

Someone in a comment thread somewhere earlier today (I forget where) compared it to StarCraft 2 and asked why no one was making a similar fuss about that game. This is why: Blizzard got this shit right. If you want to play offline you can totally do that, you just lose access to achievements, chat, multiplayer etc. That's what should have been done with SimCity: Require always on for the social side of things; the multiplayer regions, the achievements, the leaderboards and so on. Then have an offline mode that turns all that stuff off but allows you to play in a region by yourself.

[friznit]

Sounds a bit borked

[FatherJack]

That doesn't look good. As if they've cut out promised Sims-like follow-real-people-around features in pursuit of the goal of making the simulation computation more efficient, but not completely considered all the ramifications of doing so, most noticeably with some of those promised features still left in the GUI.

That said, it is Sim City, not the Sims scaled up. It's supposed to be based on statistical averages, as no computer in the world can run The Sims with a six-million population.

Simulations, even broken ones, are fun to experiment with though. Most of my Towns games end up with me creating some completely unworkable situation I can never recover from, but I don't cry about it. You explore the boundaries, and see what breaks stuff, start over in a different way.

One example might be that you have a hundred thousand bins need emptying, yet have forgotten to provide a rubbish-collection service until now. Okay, maybe a team of five bin lorries spread over a week-long collection cycle are enough to deal with that on average - but what about day one? Going from zero to 100k in a single day is never going to be possible, even if you could prioritise and route the garbage trucks. You've broken the bounds of the simulation, so should pretty much expect stupid behaviour - you need to grow slowly and gently increase utility capacity to cope with demand.

The clip in the comments though, does highlight worrying deficiencies in AI pathing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g418BSF6XBQ
Why is everyone using the clogged-up dirt road, when a lovely quick dual-carriageway bypass has been built? Yes, the bypass is longer - but they always are, hence the name.

[Grimmie]

Bottom line: This game is really, really fun.

[Joose]

Bottom line: This game is really, really fun.

^This. I have also noticed the really broken dude simulation, but its something totally patchable and in the meantime there are ways of dealing with it. From a purist point of view its a really stupid and badly designed bit of simulation. In real terms its an occasional and mild irritation. For me anyway, ymmv.

[Dog Pants]

That's good, because if it was shite then nobody would care about the issues around it. It's also not good because I would like to play it. Mind you, at the price it is now I'd still be waiting for it on sale.

[Thompy]

Bah!

I was in town today so I decided to buy it from Game to save me downloading it. Turns out they are selling it for £10 more than on their website

So I found somewhere else and paid slightly more than I wanted but whatever. Turns out the disc can't install the thing. It's only saying there's 1.99 GB on the disc for a start, but I've read all sorts of other problems people are having. I haven't found conclusive evidence that the game isn't on the disc though. But now I'm downloading it anyway

Bah I say!

[Grimmie]

Some of the game is on the disc, but my install directory is 24GB, so I'm guessing most of that is the patch you download after installation.

[Dog Pants]

A day one patch that's 12 times bigger than the install? Nice.

[Thompy]

A day one patch that's 12 times bigger than the install? Nice.

Oh, no. The beta install was apparently about 12 GB. The stuff on the disc must just be initial files. I'm surprised by Grimmie's 24 GB though That'll take me a few nights of downloading.

[Dog Pants]

Ah right, yeah I see that in Grimmie's post now. It's not unusual to have to download half the game these days, they just don't normally call it a patch.

[Thompy]

Well this is odd. It's now finished installing and I can play just fine. The install size is 3.79 GB.

Despite quitting Origin and opting to download the game it must have cached the 2 GB it copied from the disc before hanging. And of course it will of been compressed somewhat as I couldn't even have downloaded 1.79 GB in the time taken.

So where does 24 GB come from? Or even a more reasonable 12 GB?

[Dog Pants]

Save games maybe?

[HereComesPete]

[Thompy]

Any way of being invited to 5punkland? It won't let me search or felcher and I'm eager to unleash my incompetence. My Origin ID appears to be "aThompy".

[Grimmie]

Sent you an origin friend request, you'll want to be adding "cowjoose" too, as Joose is the region owner.