Sim City

Mc Love

the scale of the cities are just too small - thats the only thing bad about this game once its running without issue obviously

nesf

Mc Love wrote: »

the scale of the cities are just too small - thats the only thing bad about this game once its running without issue obviously

Eh, no the simulation is still pretty gimped if you care about such things.

Kirby

There needs to be depth to the simulation. It's all just surface veneer. It doesn't go deeper. Individual sims should have problems they want you to solve that go beyond "It's smelly round here". "We want water". Real world problems...that take more effort to fix than simply plopping a new building.

Feuds between neighbours, visible indicators of crime like proper police shootouts, drug dens, cults, etc. You should have to deal with problem sims who just don't want to work. It shouldn't just be categorized into Commercial job or Industrial job.....there should be different fields you have to manage. Lawyer, police, doctor, binman etc.

Instead we have sims who go to a new job every day and drive home to a new house every day. It's so unsophisticated and it's not what they promised. FFS, the cities are so small that emulation and computation like that should be possible.

It just feels too arcadey and simple to enjoy .

Azza

New patch out this week.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/07/simcity-3-0-update-out-this-week-attempts-to-fix-traffic-again/

Kirby wrote:

Instead we have sims who go to a new job every day and drive home to a new house every day. It's so unsophisticated and it's not what they promised.

They didn't promise that. Going back as far as April 2012 the said that the Sims going to the first house or job was how it was going to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU

A twitter conversation with the lead gameplay engineer a week after release said that was always the way it was intended.
https://twitter.com/vertexnormal/status/312307719782690817

If the thousands of Sims in the game had to remember all that additional info I reckon the performance hit on your average PC would be considerable.

Wossack

they could consider offloading the computation of such things to the EA master servers?

oh wait

Mc Love

Servers going offline at 5pm our time - I guess we will never ever get our lost cities back

nesf

Azza wrote: »

New patch out this week.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/07/simcity-3-0-update-out-this-week-attempts-to-fix-traffic-again/



They didn't promise that. Going back as far as April 2012 the said that the Sims going to the first house or job was how it was going to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU

A twitter conversation with the lead gameplay engineer a week after release said that was always the way it was intended.
https://twitter.com/vertexnormal/status/312307719782690817

If the thousands of Sims in the game had to remember all that additional info I reckon the performance hit on your average PC would be considerable.

I don't think many Sim City fans care about whether you can follow Mr. Smith to and from work with accuracy. Though many find the idea of buildings defining the education/wealth/whatever of agents each day a bit of an immersion breaker. The main objection seems to be the fairly dumb implementation of the agent model in the release version, specifically industries or buildings with education requirements accepting anyone on a first come, first serve basis which is silly and all agents beelining for the closest available job instead of what was demo'd which was job places being "advertised" before each work shift started and signals being sent out to find houses with available workers, this way each Sim started the day knowing which building to drive to which would result in more intelligent traffic.

At the moment it looks like they can't fix traffic with the tools available right now so their solution is to stagger opening hours to reduce peak traffic. That is a fix certainly but it is a very clunky one. Part of the fun of Sim City was managing traffic flows, that's not really something you can indulge in at the moment with Sim City because the traffic often makes little sense.

Azza

nesf wrote:

I don't think many Sim City fans care about whether you can follow Mr. Smith to and from work with accuracy.

I was just replying to Kirby stating it wasn't what they promised. From reading other gaming forums and comment sections it seems to be a major complaint. It was like a core expectation a lot of people seemed to have and believed was in the game, I don't know where it exactly it comes from, perhaps they or video game journalists mistook what Maxis/EA said about the system mehcanics and then Maxis/EA not really clarifying. (perhaps intentionally)

I've still held off purchasing this, if feedback is good from patch 3.0 I might consider it.

Mc Love

I hear the servers are back up - time to try out 3.0

nesf

Azza wrote: »

I was just replying to Kirby stating it wasn't what they promised. From reading other gaming forums and comment sections it seems to be a major complaint. It was like a core expectation a lot of people seemed to have and believed was in the game, I don't know where it exactly it comes from, perhaps they or video game journalists mistook what Maxis/EA said about the system mehcanics and then Maxis/EA not really clarifying. (perhaps intentionally)

I've still held off purchasing this, if feedback is good from patch 3.0 I might consider it.

The main thing I remember people drooling over was actual proper traffic not statistical traffic. I can see how people could go from this to each sim having a specific job and home.

Mc Love

looks like the sims keep running out of money in my city so I have loads of abandoned buildings

Mc Love

So they fix one or two things and something else breaks! Update 4.0 it is then! Why did the launch a game that is in effect still in beta??

Shiminay

I'm just after applying the latest patch, will take a look at it during lunch to see how it behaves. I'm not holding my breath.

Mc Love

Breathe Shiminay - its actually working, before I started this morning, it applied another update. The amount of homeless people has reduced somewhat. My two cities are working as they should, but it still comes back to the need for more space. I am constantly trying to re-adjust the city in order to squeeze more residents in.

One of my cities has about 79k but is making over a million an hour due to my exports etc.

VinLieger

Will have to have a go of the new patch next week and see how my original wonder city from release reacts, will be interesting to see as its taken everything in its stride so far

Mc Love

Anyone know how I can get a screenshot of my budget screen? Cant seem to get it to work.

Also my great works site is showing different resources per different city

errlloyd

Mc Love wrote: »

Anyone know how I can get a screenshot of my budget screen? Cant seem to get it to work.

Also my great works site is showing different resources per different city

Yeah my great work site was doing that before. I have a feeling I pumped way too many resources into it.

Thecageyone

Mc Love wrote: »

Anyone know how I can get a screenshot of my budget screen? Cant seem to get it to work.

Also my great works site is showing different resources per different city

Click the PrtSc key on the screen you want to grab, minimise or close the game, open up a programme like irfanview [which is free] and click ctrl+V to paste the screen grab in. You can then crop, resize or whatever and save the file to your desktop. Then attach it here, or use a site like imgur [also free] to host it and link it here.

VinLieger

Just in case anyones wondering its still horrifically broken.
Setup a very profitable casiono city with everything running smoothly intending to use the profits from that to fund an industril city that would build my great work.
But the trade decided to break and now the simoleon truck is stuck going round the region in circles and all regional trade is thus broken for some reason so my big money churning casino city cant send a cent to anyone.
So then i decide to try setup a trade speciality inside my casino city but cus the global markets(a key part of the game) are still ****ed it wont work plus my trucks take a day to get back into my city cus of the bonkers idea to only have one entrance off the regional motorway.
How the hell did this game get made?

Mc Love

Yeah its criminal isnt it!

Sarn

I see the Amusement Park Pack DLC is on the way. I think they should fix the game first.

Hopefully nobody buys it, it's the only way EA will learn their lesson.

nesf

Sarn wrote: »

I see the Amusement Park Pack DLC is on the way. I think they should fix the game first.

Hopefully nobody buys it, it's the only way EA will learn their lesson.

Hmmm, those buildings look quite big, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of room for them in the standard city plots available at the moment.

Sephiroth_dude

Where would you even fit it in your city lol? the map is too small.

humanji

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Where would you even fit it in your city lol? the map is too small.

It would be part of a tourist city in a region.

the_syco

Gonna check how Sim City is. Haven't played it since maybe two weeks after it came out. Currently "rolling back" the city, as it won't play otherwise.

/edit; 30 minutes later (still rolling back), I got bored, and just quit it. May just create a new city next time.

Mc Love

I'm surprised they are releasing add-ons when the game is still broken! Where would you put it in a city...they are too small!

Mc Love

Looks like another update was deployed on the 15th - will fire it up and see what its like.

The city size remains the biggest problem for me

Yakult

Mc Love wrote: »

Looks like another update was deployed on the 15th - will fire it up and see what its like.

The city size remains the biggest problem for me

Tbh, my experience lately has been good. Much improved game with the updates but like you I'm still a bit annoyed about the map size, but you can still have a bustling city with space left over if you plan right.

Mc Love

I guess that didnt go so well - traffic is still a big issue given that some cities have only one entrance/exit, which messes up the global markets.

Also the great works site is different for every city I go to!

Azza

Apparently this has been fully cracked now, allowing for indefinite offline play, saving, apparently it makes the population count accurate and allows for bigger maps as well.