This guy nails the review.

http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/2...eview-simcity/

Interesting. As of right now there is no charge on my bank account for SimCity. I was checking because I am thinking of disputing the charge....

Heh, glad I found this thread. I didn't care for SC4, but I was thinking about giving this one a try but no way in hell after what I've read in here.

It didn't find you when I tried to add you.

Add me "KUDrew."

I just started a new region on Europe West 4.

**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** these servers blow. Piracy wins again. Also, if you build a city in one server but it goes down on you and you switch, your city will not switch over.

http://i.imgur.com/K3KFAI3.jpg

LMAO

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instanc...x/35820015.jpg

I just asked for a refund and got refused. I am issuing a stop payment and disputing the transaction. I told the lady at EA they can keep the game on my account or remove it, I don't really care.

http://i.imgur.com/WUVQujm.jpg

just think, ea have included a shit load of new features, stuff like

fires
earthquakes
storms
ufo's
zombies and just added
server issues.

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No wonder EA is one of the most hated companies in the world.

Can't wait until Sim city reaches Darkspore levels, oh wait you can't even play that anymore because it was online only and EA shut the servers down in less than 2 years. YAY for online ****ing DRM.

Game is buggy as ****, even putting aside all the stupid server issues.

Traffic is just redonk. I have 16 buses. Why are they all following each other to every stop? It causes massive traffic jams. I watched a truck leave a warehouse, drive down an avenue, pull a u-turn, drive the other way, u-turn AGAIN, only to keep driving in the same direction to the end of the city, turn around and pull back into the warehouse. W. T. F. It's buggy as ****. Not to mention the moving trucks that don't know wtf they're doing. I have a few entrances into the city from the highway, but they all take the first exit, then drive THROUGH the city, clogging it up. Instead, they should go down to the exit they need, get off and then go across to the building. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Population of workers is never enough. It's bugged to shit and back, too. There's no reason that I should have to fill up 80% of available land space with residential to create more workers when only 10% of my workforce is actually working, anyway. Region play is broken, so you can't get workers from elsewhere. Education levels are right in the middle -- not too high, not too low, and that's exactly where this particular city is at. Middle development. Yet, with a pop of 75,000, I still need more workers. Makes no sense. i HAVE TEN PERCENT EMPLOYMENT. WHAT THE ****, DUDES?

I am also getting air pollution in places upwind of industry as far away as they could possibly be on the map geographically.

You purchased the wrong game, instead of SimCity, you got SimBama.

From how I understand the game works, I'm not sure this is even possible. The crackers would have to make it so the game saves locally, and not to some EA server.

Wait, so I gather after reading the last few posts that you have to be online and EA's servers have to be working in order for you to play this game? Is that true? If so, I am not gonna bother.

That's true.

Jesus Christ this. Buses literally follow each other around. A fire station at on a busy road, unmoving traffic Jam when the truck attempts to leave the station. Traffic is messed up and I have to wonder if it affects sims ability to find jobs, because I have employment issues as well.

I blame the regions problems on the servers. I wasn't even able to sell electricity between cities last night.

sent

Buses, police cars, fire trucks, etc - have no idea how to get where they are going.

My citizens have been protesting for "crime" for my entire game, even though there is very little crime.

I WANT TO BUY POWER FROM ANOTHER CITY IN MY REGION. I CLICKED BUY.

Providing 0/56.1 MW/hour.

WHAT.

Jesus. This games sounds like a nightmare and a disgrace.

So bummed.

Tropico 4 with all DLC is available for $9.99 on steam. For anybody that has played it, is that worth it?

Try Anno 1404, man, you won't be disappointed (warning: it's not easy).

I figured out traffic, for the most part.

Them mother****ers LOVE them some park and ride.

What about that compared to Anno 2070?

IDK, never played 2070. I would imagine they're both very similar games in terms of mechanics?

It's well ****ing worth it.

Just finished buying/installing it.

Thanks SimCity!

I played SimCity for about 2.5 hours today finally and it sucks.

The graphics look awesome. But on Amazon, it's getting TERRIBLE reviews. An average of 1 out of 5, from over 3000 reviews.

yep, like ****ing Diablo 3. Its bullshit that you have to have a internet connection to play some single player campaigns.

PC owns consoles though amirite.

The only thing I want to know is what is the free game? If anyone has heard please let me know.

SimCity for $28 if you trick Origin into thinking you're from India.

http://slickdeals.net/f/5899204-SimC...-edition-45-99

Qft. Tropico 4 is bad ass. It has some city management aspects that are similar to simcity, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, in a good way. It'd be nice to have a great game like simcity, where you are truly governing and engineering a city fom the ground up, but in this day of corporate **** ups like EA squeezing out the competition, it seems very unlikely to come to fruition any time soon.

EA offering free game for botched SimCity Launch...

Electronic Arts' launch of the new SimCity game has been plagued by server issues, resulting in everything from features being taken offline to EA calling off some of its promotional efforts for the game. As compensation, the company will be offering a free downloadable PC game from EA's portfolio. Registered SimCity owners will be emailed on March 18th with instructions on how to obtain their game of choice.

Here's a quick update on the problems we were experiencing with SimCity – and a little something extra for people who bought the game.

The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity. But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast to address.

So what went wrong? The short answer is: a lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta.

OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. In the last 48 hours we increased server capacity by 120 percent. It's working – the number of people who have gotten in and built cities has improved dramatically. The number of disrupted experiences has dropped by roughly 80 percent.

So we're close to fixed, but not quite there. I'm hoping to post another update this weekend to let everyone know that the launch issues are behind us.

The good news is that SimCity is a solid hit in all major markets. The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a great game. But this SimCity is made to be played online, and if you can’t get a stable connection, you’re NOT having a good experience. So we’re not going to rest until we’ve fixed the remaining server issues.

And to get us back in your good graces, we’re going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio. On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an email telling them how to redeem their free game.

I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy. But we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent.

http://www.ggmania.com/?smsid=ea-off...y-issues-34779

Can my free game be SimCity?

It seems to be working at 99% as of now.

SimCity Blackout Is Just One More DRM Disaster

By Chris Kohler
03.08.13
6:30 AM

“Just so you know,” my fiancee said to me, “you’re going to lose me to SimCity.”

This was no idle threat. Throughout our relationship I had already lost her to Skyrim for roughly 150 hours and to Diablo III for something approximating that. I am happy to play a game for a few hours and then move on to the next one. She plays fewer games, but exhausts every last drop of enjoyment out of them in marathon sessions that would make Rand Paul blush. This was my fair warning that she expected SimCity, the first edition of the classic metropolis-building simulator in 10 years, to be one of those releases with her sleeping about three hours a night, more as a formality than anything else.

She’d played the beta, her city falling victim to meteor showers and zombie attacks. She knew how to avoid those mistakes at the big show. She’d conspired with our friends Dan and Stan to link their cities up to form Danville, Stanville and Wedgeville, collectively the Tri-State Area. She was ready to stop dreaming and start building.

As you might imagine, this is not what happened next. Electronic Arts’ long-awaited release of SimCity on Tuesday should have been an occasion for a worldwide collective all-nighter of urban planning, a nonstop bacchanal of factory building, endless intricate min-maxing of grids of pavement. 12 a.m. Eastern Tuesday morning should have been SimCity’s finest hour.

Instead, the whole operation seized up and shit the bed. EA, a technology company with a market capitalization of over $5 billion, could not muster the online servers necessary to handle an influx of players looking to build their cities. This was entirely a problem of EA’s own making, as SimCity was not designed with an offline mode. Even if you don’t want to team up with others and join your cities together, you can’t just build your personal metropolitan layouts in peace: Every player must be constantly connected online, as a draconian step to crack down on piracy of this PC-only game.

Hey, launch hiccups happen, right? Everybody all tries to connect at once, servers get throttled, and you figure out a way to make it work. Trouble is, as of this writing EA hasn’t figured out a thing. SimCity is still totally busted. It’s difficult to log in: Nearly all of the servers are full, and when a player does find one that’s available, attempting to log in usually throws back an error. And you can’t try again until a 20-minute counter finishes ticking down.

Ah, but if the servers are full, that means at least some people are playing the game, right? Yes, but not really. Players are finding that the servers, choking to death on the player load, aren’t saving their game progress. After spending hours playing through the game, many players are confronted with an error screen, forcing them to choose to either roll back their city to a previous save point or trash the whole thing.

In other words, SimCity is currently in the midst of a disaster that makes zombie attacks and nuclear meltdowns seem tame. Electronic Arts’ attempts to fix the problem have not only been unsuccessful, they’ve been making the SimCity blackout even worse, at least from a public relations standpoint: EA said Thursday that it would actually begin removing features from the game in an attempt to get it to run. At first it was non-core features like achievements and high score leaderboards. By the end of the day EA had ripped out the “Cheetah” gameplay mode, which speeds up the passage of time so you can develop your city more quickly.

What’s next? Will EA determine that the skyscrapers are just too tall?

In response to Wired’s request for comment, an EA spokesperson referred us to a blog post by SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis, who wrote that Electronic Arts would be adding new servers until the player base could be fully accommodated, and that it would prioritize stabilizing this situation before it turned the game’s features back on. She did not give a timeframe for the resolution.

There won’t be any long-term repercussions, my now long-suffering fiancee said as we drove to work Thursday morning, as the blackout stretched into its third day. There had certainly been short-term ones: On Metacritic, the game currently has over 1800 user reviews that average out to a 1.7 out of 10. And Amazon removed both the downloadable and physical versions of the game from its store, with a note that reads, in part, “at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed.”

But once this is all solved, she said, it’ll be like nothing happened. She has a point. This is hardly the first DRM-related controversy that’s come up as a new game was released. Remember the great wailing and rending of garments over the launch of Half-Life 2 in 2004? That game simply required you to pop on Valve’s server for a split-second to do a one-time confirmation that you had a genuine game, and then you could get to playing. But gamers, used to instant gratification, were up in arms when this process resulted in some slight delays. “Message boards on Half-Life 2 fan sites were buzzing with talk about the delays and the frustration people felt about being kept from playing,” the BBC News reported at the time. It reported that fake programs promising to unlock your copy of Half-Life but that actually contained a virus were spreading around to impatient players.

And now? The once-reviled Steam service, required to play Half-Life and looked upon as useless bloatware in 2004, is now a beloved addition to any gamer’s desktop. Half-Life 2 was celebrated as the game of the year.

To take a more recent (and more closely analogous) example, there was Blizzard’s launch of Diablo III last spring. The situation was almost exactly the same: Fans, already upset that Blizzard required them to be connected online to play the role-playing game, got their games home and encountered what would become known as Error 37, a full-to-bursting server that rejected their advances. What happened then? Within a few days, Blizzard solved the problems and all frustrations were quickly forgotten. Diablo III went on to sell 12 million copies in 2012, the biggest PC game of the year by a country mile.

The lesson there was: If you screw up and don’t properly plan for the launch of your service, so what? If the game’s good enough, players will stop complaining the second they get in.

Of course, Diablo didn’t also have the issue of erasing players’ progress. Another recent game that did was Ubisoft’s PC version of Assassin’s Creed II, released in 2010. If your internet connection dropped during play for some reason, you’d immediately lose all your progress since the last save point.

What happened there? In fact, the bad PR and outcry from fans over an anti-piracy scheme that seemed to hurt legitimate players far more than it did pirates caused Ubisoft to reconsider. By the next year, it had dropped the always-online schemes, and Assassin’s Creed III only required a single activation.

So maybe there’s a chance that this debacle, whenever it ends, will conclude with Electronic Arts allowing players to enjoy the game without having to connect online. Or maybe EA is willing to suffer through weeks of terrible optics if it means achieving the long-term goal of converting traditionally single-player genres into online experiences. And SimCity is pretty good. The Metacritic user scores might be low, but the reviews from writers who played it before the public got in and overloaded everything were universally positive. So it all might blow over, in the end, with nothing changed.

Either way, I’ll know when the worst is truly over: It’ll be when I look around and realize I haven’t seen my fiancee in days. Then everything will be fine.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/03/simcity-outage/

Was thinking of checking this out...

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I'm glad the Cities franchise exists, and I've played them all in order to satisfy a city-build craving, but they aren't very fun. I get sick of them quick. There's no spirit to them. There's nothing like Sims that you are interested in. It's not fun to plop down a fire station. It's just zones and buildings and a whole lot of them.

I'll probably take a bit of a break from Sim City, just crashed for about the 9th time today.

I'm tempted to pick this up simply for the free game. If I have until March 18th then I'm trying to wait to see what the free game ends up being. I need to know how the game is outside of the server issues.

It's buried in the thread but the game is very good, fun to play aside from two issues.

1. City Size: They said they will address but right now you really run out of space after about 3 hours. You can keep packing people in but it almost forces you into a new spot in the region.

2. Dumb AI: Glassbox has given us amazing things, you can follow your Sims around in their daily life but god forbid a firetruck or a police vehicle gets through traffic to get somewhere they need to be. Also shuttle buses have a nasty habit of backing up behind each other even when there are multiple lanes.

Also AFAIK the free game thing will only be for those who got it prior to the patch that came out a couple days ago.

If you run out of space after 3 hours, you're going to have one seriously ****ed up city. There's no way you can adequately plan out a workable city that will scale in that time frame.

Yes, the AI needs a lot of work, particularly traffic.

I've been trying a city on my own, without anyone else in the region to see if I can get a handle on the traffic and employment.

I laid down a medium avenue in the shape of a D. It extends along the city's borders on one half of the map, with the vertical part running straight down the middle. Inside, I've got zero cross streets, just 4 north/south roads running from top to bottom. The only way to switch streets is to hit an outside avenue and run down it. Someone posted this as a solution to traffic problems on the EA forums, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. So far, I've got 25k pop and I'm getting by with a single fire engine from the crappy cheap firehouse with no other upgrades. I'm impressed so far, but will have to see how it goes when things get bigger.

As for employment, I've still got a TON of unfilled jobs, but they are mainly in the middle and upper class, so I should be able to plant some new areas of high and medium wealth, as I still have 1/4 of the map open (the other 1/4 is taken up by utilities, garbage dump, sewage, water and solar plant).

I only have 12 industrial buildings, and they're at the top, with the wind blowing away from the residential zones. I put 12 little blocks of residential zoning to 4 blocks of commercial zoning in most cases, and when I ran out of space to keep that pattern, I just built residential. It's working well enough to keep me from having a ton of unfilled jobs. Unemployment is a non-issue.

I've been going super super slow, upgrading the infrastructure well in advance of upgrading the streets. I still have a lot of dirt roads in my city, although a little over half are up to medium roads for the population density increase. I have no doubt I'll hit 30k soon, and then I'll reassess where I'm at. Might let it run for a few hours at that to get a bunch of cash before I upgrade to high density roads.

I still have no buses or streetcars and no traffic problems as of yet.

Just out of curiosity can you designate streets as 'one way'?

Both of my cities filled out the map at that point. Then I just started upping road densities and demolishing stuff to fit in higher education, parks, and my various supporting coal/oil/ore buildings. The only thing I have left in the city is to become self sufficient in producing plastics and alloys to get my processor factory up and running. Unfortunately size limitations may make me go build another heavy industry city and focus on that instead of industry and education.

Nope, no subways or highways in this one either.

That's okay for now, but when you hit a higher population, you're going to get death by traffic. The ai sucks so bad it will kill your city.

You can't even make interesting cities with cool layouts because the pathing is so bad. I'm sure you're self sustaining for now, but it can't last. Cities will literally grow themselves to death and there isn't anything to be done about it.

And it needs all of those things. They spent all this time on making cool curved road features but the programming is so bad that grids are the only way to go.

I have a ton of buses and streetcars and the traffic still sucks. Having a great deal of mass transit still doesn't help. I think I have so many buses they are the ones causing the congestion on maximum size streets.

Nuke them from space....

****.

************.

**** YOU MAXIS.

:sigh:

My plan was working perfectly. No traffic problems. Everyone got to work on time. I was making tons of money. Things were going awesomely. I had the infrastructure I needed to expand at my own pace.

And then... Godzilla.

RIGHT THROUGH THE MAP. One side to the other.

Got all my high wealth buildings/parks. Then through my upgraded fire station and hospital. Then through the trade depot and recycling center. Then through the university and school of science.

I took out 150 sims worth of bonds to try to repair the damage. I lost my cashflow with the buildings, so I used that money to replace what I could.

I have one trick up my sleeve that I'm trying right now. I doubt it will work, but that is to upgrade all of the streets to high density immediately. That will give me a lot more cashflow if I can keep the same level of services, and maybe I can recover financially enough to keep the infrastructure upgraded as the services are being used up (like keeping up with power, water, sewage and garbage trucks). That's my main focus.

But, seriously. ****.

Godzilla.

Like, really Godzilla?

Yeah. They have random natural disasters in the game. Can't turn them off unless you're playing in cheat mode.

UGH. **** THIS ****ING GAME.

Last city collapsed. Couldn't recover from the disaster.

Started new city. Just get my ore operations up and running, bought 3 trucks, had 4 full mining arms on the thing . . .

****ING GODZILLA AGAIN. THAT MUTANT MOTHER****ER. Just rampaged right through, destroyed it all. ****ING AGAIN. This city had only been up like an hour, too.

**** YOU.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha*breath*hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahaha*breath*hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha


I'm glad this game cost $60, if it was cheaper I might have purchased it and been in the same place as Silock.

I did see that and forgot about it, I think I'll just not play until this game is fixed. All that planning for naught.

LMAO.... Godzirra!!!

That kind of random unstoppable destruction shit would piss me off enough to completely abandon the game....

Nothing quite like being pigeon holed into playing a certain way. **** YOU EA! Where is my free game so I can play it more than Sim shitty?

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LMAO

Anno 2070 on sale at steam. it's a lot of fun, and multiplayer too.

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/U..._Weekend_2013/

They're slowly fixing the game. It's infinitely more playable now than it was.

Looks like major improvements to traffic coming very soon. I'm grateful, because I want to resume my circle city.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/ar...mcity-update-8

ROFL

All this talk about SimCity has made me want to go back and play SimCity 4 again. Just gotta find the disk.

I'm not far from this either, much better than this shit.

False.

Other than eye candy, i'm not sure what is better about the new one?

So apparently EA has censored their support number now.... lol un****ingbelieveable.
I've never been given so much joy from a game that I didn't buy.

This is perfect

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Played it for the first time last night, honestly pretty impressive. I only got to a small city level so only an hour or so played but its much cleaner than SimCity 4. The charts and graphs that show the specifics of your city are much more in depth. The menu is more user friendly, and deeper than that of SimCity 4. The Sims actually tell you in little bubbles why they don't like the city, not just your advisors, which are there as well.

You can add a specialization such as Mining, Technology, etc and allowing you to share your resources and buying them from other cities is great for a new city keeping your waste, power, water and sewage etc in line. Also you can take out Bonds, but you have to pay them back, but it allows you a few options in case you get in the red.

I really love what I've seen so far, all your zoning (commercial, residential, and industrial) are free to zone. Also depending on what you put around the zone means if its low, medium or high quality zoning, so its not hard to put businesses, shopping, and people in your city, but to upgrade through building other things I think is a really nice touch. You can only build along streets and streets are a little expensive, as are your basic buildings like Medical Center, Fire House, Police Station, but overall its so easy to start up a city even if you don't go through the tutorial. There are little help icons that pop up in the top right corner that always help out.

I haven't gotten far enough to really get disasters, or crazy crime, or a nuclear power meltdown, but what I have played is an amazing time so far. I had been playing SimCity 4 for the past week or so to get me psyched to play the new one, and I have to say that there are alot more positives than negatives with this new game.

Keep playing and report back.

SimCity Hack Lets Users Destroy Anyone's Online City Thanks To Always-On DRM

Since the top brass at EA were dumb enough to go through with the hated and repined always-on DRM, there were consequences to be had. SimCity has been a disaster in the media circles since launch all because of the DRM, and now things have gone to the next level as a hack has been discovered that lets anyone invade any of the online cities and lay waste to them...permanently.

CVG noted that EA's director of communications, Erik Reynolds, has been transparent about removing all talk about hacks on the official EA forums due to their terms of service, as noted in Reynolds' tweet.

As a quick recap: Modders found out that you can play SimCity in offline mode as a single-player game. In addition to playing the game offline, the modders have also opened up additional things like larger cities, expanded highways and better population management. In other words, they fixed the broken game that EA shoved down your throats.

However, with all this good news also comes some bad news. Modders have also discovered that it's possible to mess with files client-side to affect server-side activity. I think you all know where this is going.

Basically, as the video shows below, you can enter into another person's online town and wreak havoc, however the modder notes that he turned off synching to the server so as not to actually cause permanent harm to his friend's city.

It's still awesome because this hack is only as destructive as it is because of EA's decision to make the game always-on. If the game hadn't had always-on DRM then this hack wouldn't be half as devastating as it is. Having EA delete these kind of topics from their forums is great damage control but don't be surprised if there's another furor when people start raging on the forums when some hacker decides to go through and Godzilla everyone's town. Enjoy.

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http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Sim...DRM-53685.html

Played it for six more hours tonight, still a better game than 4. The only thing that broke the game for me was the Sandbox stuff which allows you to cheat so I stopped playing that because it takes all the fun out of it and makes it a mediocre game. The only issue I had was finding a server that I could build a new city on. Every single game that had people in it on the Europe East server was packed so I had to create a new game. It makes it annoying that you have to start a new region and your trade will take forever to get going. Overall I still like the game, but just like SimCity 4, I'll get tired of building cities sooner or later.

I can't seem to get past around 200,000 residents. Simply run out of space.

http://m.ign.com/articles/2013/03/18...-apology-games

Ill take my free copy of Dead Space 3 tyvm :)

I'll probably go with Sim City 4

Yeah I guess I'm lucky, I played Dead Space 1 and 2 and was going to buy 3 but then I read about the free game debacle for people who bought the game by the 18th, Heart of the Swarm came out, so I waited and hoped and low and behold I get a $60 game for free now. Pretty sweet, if Dead Space 3 weren't on that list... bleh, I don't know what I'd go with because I picked up SimCity 4 on Steam Sale last year so I guess.... Battlefield 3?...

Mass Effect 3!

Boogie ‏@Boogie2988

EA CEO resigns.