5punk

I see a large portion of 5punkers have bought this recently, some of you have been playing it most of the Easter weekend, and yet no-one has yet done a mini review!

Shall I assume it's quite good and worth a purchase?

Yes!

Essentially, the developers looked at the latest SimCity, looked at all the complaints people had about it and made a game that fixed all those problems. Thats not to say its fault free: For one thing, I would really like more detailed statistics on what the fuck is going on in some areas (I can see this area is unhappy, but I have no idea why) and there are some interesting bugs (my train network is utterfucked at the moment, thanks to a known bug that causes trains to despawn off the map reaaaally slooowly) but it is overall excellent. Certainly the biggest issues (tiny cities, online requirement, simulation that very intricately models a completely mental idea of how a city works) have been addressed successfully. I spent a good chunk of the last couple hours fixing various traffic problems in my city. The solutions both made sense and actually worked, elevating the game high above SimCity in this if nothing else.

Yes!

Pretty much all of what Joose said. My only complaints are that there isn't the same type of humour in the game, with disasters and suchlike missing, and the UI is quite cluttered at times with popups from the fake Twitter feed and UI help. Both can be turned off, but at times, it's fucking difficult to make out what is wrong as it is and without the popup, you might miss a bit of info which might actually help, amongst all the shite. I kinda miss the online element of Sim City 5 as well. Felt it was a good idea which got caught up amongst all the problems and lies from EA.

And like Joose mentioned about traffic; 1 or 2 reviewers mentioned that it appeared to have a bug with traffic control, but they're absolutely wrong. With enough thought and effort, you can fix any traffic issue. It's not simple though and is pretty much why it's such a good city builder; there are no simple, easy fixes.

The mod support is fantastic and something which will really extend the game's lifespan. There are cosmetic things from the Ghostbusters' fire station and huge sprawling maps of Los Santos from GTA 5 and real destinations, all the way to practical tools that make the game easier to manage, like the advance traffic report system and the advance bulldozer.

Really can't recommend it enough if you like those types of games and for around £11-15 on CD-keys, it's an absolute steal.

This guide is a great help if you are suffering traffic problems btw (and lets be honest, we are all suffering some degree of traffic problems).

Joose wrote:This guide is a great help if you are suffering traffic problems btw (and lets be honest, we are all suffering some degree of traffic problems).

Ooh handy, i was going to make a post touching on how the lane filtering works but that seems to do a much better job than i can.

Easiest way to see it working would probably be to make a 1 way 6 lane road leading up from a residential area and have 1 2 lane road leading off to the right to an industrial zone. you'll notice the arrows on the road all point right but all the cars will felcher into the rightmost lanes and you'll end up with long ques in those lanes and no one will ever felcher into the lanes next to them. If you then have 3 roads going up, left and right then the arrows at the end of the original 6 lane road will have 2 lanes for going left 2 for going straight on and 2 to go right, and in theory you people will distribute more or less evenly between all of them.

Obviously that setup probably isn't actually very practical or efficient but it shows how the lanes will felcher. the main key seems to be not to have all the different routes using the same roads and intersections to get places. Like at the start with your industrial area having separate entrances and exits (assuming you are using the 1 way systems for industrial zones, god help you if you aren't) for delivery trucks than the entrances and exits that the workers use and minimizing how much that traffic crosses over on the way there and back. i generally make my industrial area fairly near to the starting highway so i can have exits and entrances for the trucks that wont ever meet the traffic from workers until they are in the industrial zone although this can cause the highway junction that is out of reach at the start on most maps to get a bit congested its not gonna be a problem until way after you've got the population to unlock a few tiles anyway at which point you can put those entrances directly onto that highway and keep the old ones just for trucks that go to commercial which should minimize a lot of congestion from industrial zones.

Joose wrote:This guide is a great help if you are suffering traffic problems btw (and lets be honest, we are all suffering some degree of traffic problems).

I think it was suggested by the devs, either as an in-game notice, or a Steam update to use side-roads for house. We don't have them a lot here, but they are common in the US and I remember them all over Crete. They're like a crappy little road that runs alongside a big one, used to access the houses, so the fuckers don't keep parking on the big road.

Kind of like this, although I put some shops along the main road, which is optional.

cfb

The road leading north to the junction looks like a cock.

Dog Pants wrote:The road leading north to the junction looks like a cock.

My goodness, how embarrassing, I would never intentionally draw a cock in a game.

wasn't actually intentional

Only in 5punk could you get a post 2 minutes later saying something looks like a cock

Why has nobody mentioned dams? Had I known about the fluid physics I wouldn't have flooded my city

Dog Pants wrote:Why has nobody mentioned dams? Had I known about the fluid physics I wouldn't have flooded my city

Obviously this is why nobody mentioned it.

Fortunately floods don't seem to be too disastrous. Getting dams working is bloody difficult though, and makes for expensive trial and error.

Yeah, Ive taken to quicksaving just before I plop it down. Dams can easily become Damns.

Joose wrote:This guide is a great help if you are suffering traffic problems btw (and lets be honest, we are all suffering some degree of traffic problems).

I am a highway engineer, I suffer no such problems. The commuters do...

And yes, I am back now that I have remembered my password.

If you can get a hold of it, the Traffic Management mod is pretty handy as you can set priorities at junctions and route traffic through lanes on the run up. It avoids things like traffic giving way to vehicles looking to join a round about, or all three lanes of your motorway coming to a standstill as all of the traffic in all of the lanes tries to exit on to the slip road.

Starts to sound rather Railroad Tycoon when you go delving into traffic priorities. Which is a good thing.

Fred revive.

So, 18 months later and they've pretty much now gone full Sim City, as they're adding a Natural Disasters DLC in the near future:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/0 ... expansion/

I've not played this since April 2015 and I know it's had a lot of patches and DLC so was going to come back to it anyway, but this will probably get me hooked.

Ive been playing this again recently. It remains excellent, although my city got rather bummed by the "death wave" phenomenon. In case people are going to give it a go and dont know about this; apparently for some reason everyone who moves in to your city does so at the same age, and people all have the exact same life expectancy. This means that if you zone in huge areas of residential all at once you will, at some point in the future, suddenly have a huge percentage of your population drop dead near simultaneously. As well as the population drop this also puts sudden massive strain on your dead people removal services, which means that you will probably have a bunch of corpses hanging around for ages, which increases disease, which increases corpses. Took quite a bit of effort to unfuck that situation for me. It can be avoided by only zoning residential in smaller areas at a time, but its beyond me why they didnt just randomise new residents ages.