SimCity

[Buck]

The new SimCity game comes out tomorrow.

Anyone getting it? The videos I've seen have looked incredible.

[cookster50]

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.

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by Silock

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

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.

[Fish]

.... Godzirra!!!

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

[Imon Yourside]

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?

[Imon Yourside]

[Imon Yourside]

[kaplin42]

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

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

[Silock]

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

Hello, I’m Stone Librande, the Lead Designer of SimCity, and I wanted to take a moment to address some of the questions that I’ve been hearing about our game. Now that we’re getting close to resolving our server issues, we’re putting a lot of attention on improving the simulation based on the community’s feedback.

SimCity is built on GlassBox, which is an agent-based simulation engine. At the surface level, GlassBox is designed around the premise that “Agents” are created to carry data to various “Sinks” around the city. In SimCity, you can think of the “Agents” as Sims and vehicles. The “Sinks” are the buildings that receive money, happiness and other resources from these Agents. During development we tested many cities in a variety of scenarios, but there are almost limitless permutations. Now that the game is in your hands we are seeing the emergence of many cities that test our systems in unique ways. It’s great to watch this happen because at its core SimCity is a game about experimentation and exploration. (Of course, it’s not so great when these experiments reveal bugs.)

We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.

We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.

We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.

SimCity is a simulation but it is also a game. We wanted to make managing the mundane day-to-day functionality of a city a fun experience. We wanted players to be invested in the lives of their individual Sims, which is why you can click on one and see a name and small story about what is happening to him or her at that moment.

On that note I wanted to take a moment to address a question that’s been coming up: the persistence of our Sims. The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds. But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.

I want to end on some good news. We are slowly re-enabling some of the non-essential features that we had turned off during the week of launch. Regional Achievements are live on a select number of servers and we’ve re-enabled Leaderboards on the Test server. We need your help testing the Leaderboards so I encourage you to go to the Test server so that we can expedite the timeframe in which this feature is brought back to the rest of our servers.

We’ll continue to provide you with updates on the game as we make these changes. We appreciate all of the feedback that you’ve been giving us and I want to assure you that we’re listening. It’s fascinating for us to see all of the different ways that players are testing our systems and we’re excited about making SimCity better with your help.

[AussieChiefsFan]

Originally Posted by KILLER_CLOWN

[AussieChiefsFan]

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

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by AussieChiefsFan

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.

[Silock]

Originally Posted by KILLER_CLOWN

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

False.

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by Silock

False.

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

[QuikSsurfer]

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.

As EA forum member LeLedg and others have accidentally discovered in a thread about customers trying to make legitimate SimCity complaints, EA is preventing the customer assistance hotline number from even appearing in the forums. When you type out the number 866-543-5435 , it is replaced by an asterisk, a common message board function typically used to block course language. Just to be safe, the forum-goers typed other permutations of the number in addition to completely different phone numbers -- it's only EA's number that's censored.

This is perfect

[Gravedigger]

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.