Sim City

nesf

Grumpypants wrote: »

Look at the person who wrote it, zero insight into the industry and the whole article is based on YouTube comments.

It's true that the boycott is being oversold here, yeah some people won't buy EA for a while but BF4 should sell very well just because it's Battlefield, I'd say a surprising number of people don't even realise it's published by the same company that made Sim City!

It is true there is very wide discontent with this game though.

VinLieger

As much as i love the idea of an EA boycott theres one very big problem called Mirrors Edge 2.......

pedatron

Just noticed this came out for Mac. Might actually play it a bit now as it's on my every day laptop now

Dcully

Just thought id pop into check out what i made in the game and im greeted with ea servers down message.
First time since 3 weeks after release i try to play, hilarious!

Laviski

Dcully wrote: »

Just thought id pop into check out what i made in the game and im greeted with ea servers down message.
First time since 3 weeks after release i try to play, hilarious!

i think you guys get a lot of bad luck.
only bought it recent cause for one way too much bad press at the start and 2nd i got it cheap. the only thing that others me is the size of the cites but other than that pretty game so far.

nesf

Laviski wrote: »

i think you guys get a lot of bad luck.
only bought it recent cause for one way too much bad press at the start and 2nd i got it cheap. the only thing that others me is the size of the cites but other than that pretty game so far.

Get a bit deeper into it and the lack of depth in the simulation is somewhat grating. This can be improved on though, so hopefully more patches, rather than DLC, will do the trick.

Eoin247

The expansion sounds very interesting. The currently announced features don't merit the apparent cost of the expansion though. At least not yet.

A Insight into the megatowers: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-megatowers



I don't know how exactly they are going to implement these towers without them being way too overpowered.

Drexel

Eoin247 wrote: »

The expansion sounds very interesting. The currently announced features don't merit the apparent cost of the expansion though. At least not yet.

A Insight into the megatowers: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-cities-of-tomorrow-megatowers



I don't know how exactly they are going to implement these towers without them being way too overpowered.

Fcuk their expansion. The game is shtie. Went for a game today after months of not touching it and I lasted about ten minutes when I realised Il be building practically the same cities I did the last time. Without bigger sizes its pointless

twinsen

jonny666 wrote: »

Fcuk their expansion. The game is shtie. Went for a game today after months of not touching it and I lasted about ten minutes when I realised Il be building practically the same cities I did the last time. Without bigger sizes its pointless

True That

Eoin247

jonny666 wrote: »

Fcuk their expansion. The game is shtie. Went for a game today after months of not touching it and I lasted about ten minutes when I realised Il be building practically the same cities I did the last time. Without bigger sizes its pointless

While i agree that the small map sizes limit the game a fair bit, there's still room for fun and creativity in the game. You just got to get into the idea that instead of focusing on just one city at once, you should be playing around with at least two or three.

Currently i'm playing one of the new tropical regions without the expansion pack. One of my cities is a V shaped Casino city that is slowly educating it's populace and becoming more and more high tech. Because of my specialisation there's a lot of crime in my city, and regular cop and villian fights can be seen and heard throughout the city. I was making a ton of money from gambling but my police force simply couldn't keep up and so i started a new city nearby.

I decided to plan out some of the roads for the new city. I'm building it with a large circular centre interconnected with large arcs. The new raise/lower tool for roads allows me to not have to sacrifice space for good road infrastructure. This new city is rich in resources, so one day it will become a dirty mining city. For now? It's a dirty industrial city that fuels the commerce in my casino city. My first city hall upgrade was a safety department. Now my casino city is much more able to fight the growing rate of crime.

Of course i would love bigger maps, more than any other addition this game may get. This game is still fun without then though.

Drexel

Eoin247 wrote: »

While i agree that the small map sizes limit the game a fair bit, there's still room for fun and creativity in the game. You just got to get into the idea that instead of focusing on just one city at once, you should be playing around with at least two or three.

Currently i'm playing one of the new tropical regions without the expansion pack. One of my cities is a V shaped Casino city that is slowly educating it's populace and becoming more and more high tech. Because of my specialisation there's a lot of crime in my city, and regular cop and villian fights can be seen and heard throughout the city. I was making a ton of money from gambling but my police force simply couldn't keep up and so i started a new city nearby.

I decided to plan out some of the roads for the new city. I'm building it with a large circular centre interconnected with large arcs. The new raise/lower tool for roads allows me to not have to sacrifice space for good road infrastructure. This new city is rich in resources, so one day it will become a dirty mining city. For now? It's a dirty industrial city that fuels the commerce in my casino city. My first city hall upgrade was a safety department. Now my casino city is much more able to fight the growing rate of crime.

Of course i would love bigger maps, more than any other addition this game may get. This game is still fun without then though.

Sorry if my last post was a bit harsh!

How is the resource sharing now? Last time I played properly it was still a right mess. I had different types of cities in a region and it was telling me it was sharing resources but in reality it wasn't. None of the numbers were making any sense and because of that it was hard to do any sort of planning

Eoin247

jonny666 wrote: »

Sorry if my last post was a bit harsh!

How is the resource sharing now? Last time I played properly it was still a right mess. I had different types of cities in a region and it was telling me it was sharing resources but in reality it wasn't. None of the numbers were making any sense and because of that it was hard to do any sort of planning

I think I was always able to sell water and power without any hassle. I remember freight used to be odd in how it worked, but now days it seems to transport well to other cities once you have good transport in and out of your cities to the appropriate destinations. The new raise/lower tools can really help out with transport when you want to go for a non square grid-like city. Global Resource prices are more sensible now too.

VinLieger

Nuff said http://kotaku.com/5989115/simcity-the-kotaku-review/1487243638/@Fahey

cherryghost

Game is getting mod support soon, but apparently very strict rules will be in place for it. Hoping something good can come of it!

nesf

cherryghost wrote: »

Game is getting mod support soon, but apparently very strict rules will be in place for it. Hoping something good can come of it!

I imagine we'll see nothing like the excellent mod support that we got with Sim City 4. Which is a pity because I imagine modders could fix most of the crap in this game but it would mean less potential DLC.

VinLieger

cherryghost wrote: »

Game is getting mod support soon, but apparently very strict rules will be in place for it. Hoping something good can come of it!

From what ive read basically mod support in EA speak = reskinning models

Shiminay

They've been onto a pretty big money spinner with Sims 3 "Mod support" so I'd imagine it'll be similar. I'm not really a Sims 3 player, but it's a vastly successful franchise for them and they seem to be squeezing a lot of $$$ out of it's regular players who wouldn't exactly be what we here in our ivory towers would classify as "gamers" (ranking them only slightly above Farmville and Candy Crush players in our elitist hierarchy )

Shiminay

Breaking News:

Offline mode coming in an update.

Does anyone still care? I don't understand why people lose their **** over "always online" - I'm always online anyway and if you don't live somewhere where that isn't an option, either shoot your local FF TD for giving the NBS thing to Three (dear gods, I'd have burned the Dáil down if I was forced into that) or move (this is what I did).

cherryghost

I want larger cities and admit they lied about cloud computing.

Jonny7

Offline is coming..

Sales won't raise a tick, will be top of piratebay after a few hours

"yeah well I'm just trying the game out, anyway screw EA for lying to us"

gaynorvader

Jonny7 wrote: »

Offline is coming..

Sales won't raise a tick, will be top of piratebay after a few hours

"yeah well I'm just trying the game out, anyway screw EA for lying to us"

Screw EA in general.

TheChrisD

I'm looking for any glimmer of hope that this recent announcement will mean a Steam release of the offline single-player version of the game...

And even then, I'd still wait for a 75% off sale.

nesf

Shiminay wrote: »

Breaking News:

Offline mode coming in an update.

Does anyone still care? I don't understand why people lose their **** over "always online" - I'm always online anyway and if you don't live somewhere where that isn't an option, either shoot your local FF TD for giving the NBS thing to Three (dear gods, I'd have burned the Dáil down if I was forced into that) or move (this is what I did).

Online only being forced when you want to just play single player needs to die. Mainly because Single player is something you might want to do when you don't have a net connection handy. :P

Edit: Actually this annoys me more because Origin has a better and more stable Offline-Mode than Steam!

grizzly

TheChrisD wrote: »

I'm looking for any glimmer of hope that this recent announcement will mean a Steam release of the offline single-player version of the game...

And even then, I'd still wait for a 75% off sale.

I'd wait for 90% off.

Shiminay

It won't appear on Steam, why on earth would they want to just give their competitors money? It's not like you're being charged for Origin... Although, this *is* EA...

Eoin247

TheChrisD wrote: »

I'm looking for any glimmer of hope that this recent announcement will mean a Steam release of the offline single-player version of the game...

And even then, I'd still wait for a 75% off sale.

You're gonna have an offline mode now, is a game being on steam really a dealbreaker for you? Do you only play steam games?

cherryghost

BAM

"City sizes have been a constant point of conversation among our players since we released the game," said Maxis general manager, Patrick Buechner.

"We recognise that many players have expressed the desire to build up one big city rather than manage the interrelationship of multiple smaller cities," Buechner continued.

"We’ve put months of investigation into making larger city sizes, reworking the terrain maps, changing the routing algorithms of our agent-based system and altering the way that GlassBox processes the data in a larger space," explained Buechner.

"After months of testing, I confirm that we will not be providing bigger city sizes. The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities."

We’ve tried a number of different approaches to bring performance into an acceptable range, but we just couldn’t achieve it within the confines of the engine. We’ve chosen to cease work on bigger city sizes and put that effort into continuing to evolve the core game and explore an offline mode."

I still don't understand this. Beefy PCs can handle the cities as it is no problem, so why not? And the people with slower pcs can just play the game as it is. Christ on a bike

gaynorvader

cherryghost wrote: »

BAM



I still don't understand this. Beefy PCs can handle the cities as it is no problem, so why not? And the people with slower pcs can just play the game as it is. Christ on a bike

I don't think it's a matter of computing power so much. Their algorithms determining where traffic goes is just awful and won't scale. Basically they wrote an awful piece of code, and now can't adapt it without starting again from scratch. That's my understanding from that quote anyway.

TheChrisD

Shiminay wrote: »

It won't appear on Steam, why on earth would they want to just give their competitors money? It's not like you're being charged for Origin... Although, this *is* EA...

By the same logic, EA wouldn't have the entire Sims 3 catalogue on Steam. Yet, they do and it often gets heavily discounted as well.

Eoin247 wrote: »

You're gonna have an offline mode now, is a game being on steam really a dealbreaker for you? Do you only play steam games?

Yes, and yes.

Shiminay

TheChrisD wrote: »

By the same logic, EA wouldn't have the entire Sims 3 catalogue on Steam. Yet, they do and it often gets heavily discounted as well.

Yes, most likely based on a contract that was put in place long before Origin existed EA pulled many titles from Steam when they launched Origin, not all - probably for contractual and common sense reasons.