Enjoying your city

[SimBurger 0]

In SimCity4 you had three possible speeds, and a pause.

I realize CitiesXL pauses after some idle time.

However, my big "fantasy" with a game like this is to be able to create a city, and walk around inside it.  With CitiesXL you can do that.  I may be fooling myself but I believe if you can walk the streets, drive down the main drag, etc you can see important things, like how far the drive to work is.  How far the low income housing area is from the nicer areas.  Etc.  You can tell if you need a park somewhere, and based on the topography you can see where a nice housing development should go.

Therefore I tend to spend a lot of time at street level just wandering around my city, getting a feel for it.

The problem is, the game keeps on ticking, and I see all these alerts, and employment decreases in the 5 minutes I am poking around.  I really would prefer to be able to slow down time, or even pause it, so I can stop and think.  Is there any way for me to slow or pause this game so I can take a moment to breathe?

Thanks

[0wn3d 2]

This only exists in single player mode. (you can pause and there are like 5 or 6 different speeds). Its slightly unfair in PO to have different cities running at different times (Favors the person that wants to just throw down a grid city and take no time to admire their work). You really dont need to pause though, you'll notice that if you do absolutely nothing, nothing really happens. As long as there are no open lots nothing will really happen, if you do nothing to your city for like a few minutes then your city will basically be "stable". By stable I mean that it wont change.

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

So long as your economy isn't in complete and utter freefall I think it would be ok. I do the exact same thing. I disagree with the "do nothing, nothing happens" philosophy as I have left this game alone for a few hours to come back to deserted industrial districts and 50,000 less population. But five to ten minute distractions are never going to be a problem in a relatively stable town.

[0wn3d 2]

Originally posted by: Psycho_Teddy

So long as your economy isn't in complete and utter freefall I think it would be ok. I do the exact same thing. I disagree with the "do nothing, nothing happens" philosophy as I have left this game alone for a few hours to come back to deserted industrial districts and 50,000 less population. But five to ten minute distractions are never going to be a problem in a relatively stable town.quote>

Your right, it does depend on your cities current situation.  But I believe that if while your watching your town and doing nothing if its stable for like 5 minutes, it'll be stable "forever".  The exception to this would be having a negative income, in which case you shouldn't be spending time viewing your city, but fixing it

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

Originally posted by: 0wn3d

Originally posted by: Psycho_Teddy

So long as your economy isn't in complete and utter freefall I think it would be ok. I do the exact same thing. I disagree with the "do nothing, nothing happens" philosophy as I have left this game alone for a few hours to come back to deserted industrial districts and 50,000 less population. But five to ten minute distractions are never going to be a problem in a relatively stable town.quote>

Your right, it does depend on your cities current situation.  But I believe that if while your watching your town and doing nothing if its stable for like 5 minutes, it'll be stable "forever".  The exception to this would be having a negative income, in which case you shouldn't be spending time viewing your city, but fixing it

quote>

Well I ran into a situation where I left the game running overnight (to fatten the city's coffers whilst I slept, +17,000 per turn income) and came back to utter chaos, as mentioned above.  Thankfully  "it happened" right before I woke up so i was able to catch it before the city's bank account descended into the seventh circle of hell.

[0wn3d 2]

Originally posted by: Psycho_Teddy Well I ran into a situation where I left the game running overnight (to fatten the city's coffers whilst I slept, +17,000 per turn income) and came back to utter chaos, as mentioned above.  Thankfully  "it happened" right before I woke up so i was able to catch it before the city's bank account descended into the seventh circle of hell.

quote>

Was this SP or PO?  In PO if your afk for like 10 minutes it pauses.

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

Strangely enough this was in PO. I was unaware of this but I promise you that this happened. Maybe this happened right after I went to sleep? XD

[PyroMancer 0]

Originally posted by: 0wn3d

Was this SP or PO?  In PO if your afk for like 10 minutes it pauses.

quote>

WAIT WHAT!?! I thought that PO was persistant. That was kinda the point. So how can you "pause" in it? I mean how do you setup regular trade exchanges if your games are running at different speeds? It's kinda like the SC4 region system which I both liked and disliked.

I disliked how easy it was to abuse by having a long term contract with another city yet when you went back to that otehr city all that money you had spent as an expense in the other city was simply lost. Or you could exploit it by selling stuff constantly for a profit even though the other city couldn't really afford it and didn't need it.

[0wn3d 2]

Originally posted by: PyroMancer WAIT WHAT!?! I thought that PO was persistant. That was kinda the point. So how can you "pause" in it? I mean how do you setup regular trade exchanges if your games are running at different speeds? It's kinda like the SC4 region system which I both liked and disliked.

I disliked how easy it was to abuse by having a long term contract with another city yet when you went back to that otehr city all that money you had spent as an expense in the other city was simply lost. Or you could exploit it by selling stuff constantly for a profit even though the other city couldn't really afford it and didn't need it. quote>

The actual simulation of the game is not persistent, its just that the city created is persistent.  When you are logged off you are not making any money and your population and everything else is staying the same.  Trades simply last for 5 days (real days), and basically add or subtract to your total of a resource or money.

[SimBurger 0]

Good points. I never thought of the fact that your city must keep going so that other cities can keep going. But im still a little confused - if you can close down for a week and log out and do nothing, why can't you pause it in Planet Offer mode too? Seems to be almost exactly the same thing, no? Pause can initiate a "Save" and that's that. Right?

Where I did have a problem with poking around my city for 15 minutes was when it was new. People are trying to move in, and there aren't enough zones, etc. I kept getting popups saying basically "Hurry! Hurry! Need more residential zones! Oh crap! Running out of new job space! Employment is starting to take a dip!"

And that was all in the 10 minutes I was at street level looking at my city. It was stressful after awhile. I couldn't enjoy what I was doing. I like to be methodical, and think things through. It was bothering me.

SimBurger

[0wn3d 2]

Are you saying you find those messages intrusive? They are like really small, not that close to the center of the screen, and in small font. I mostly ignore them. You can find most of the data you need to find in the population thingy. I've definitely found though that most of the time you can simply ignore the messages and let things go on. I have noticed that its easier to ignore the messages when you have unemployment, as opposed to available jobs. When you have available jobs eventually businesses close down and you lose tax money. Having like <10% unemployment seems to not be too much of an issue in terms of tax revenue and satisfaction. If you want to look around in street view, I suggest making sure you have no available jobs.

[TheJackalope 0]

The danger in leaving it on for hours is that if lots of contracts get cancelled you can go into free fall when the businesses that use those resources get inefficient and then cascade through all the other industries. This probably most likely to happen in smaller cities where you are dependent on a few trades since the game measures availability by percentage of need filled. If you need 4 and a contract for 1 gets cancelled its a 25% drop. If you need 100 and 1 is cancelled you get a 1% drop. It's why some of the large cities can run fine with a 20 token shortfall.

[Kredit 0]

Trades are the key here, indeed... a completely self-sufficient city which is running stable (ie, positive balance, no great shortage/excess of anything, low unemployment and high house filling rate) should in theory be able to run endlessly without major changes. So yes, you could leave a city like that for hours and come back to a larger bank account. However, imagine the same city, but with a shortage of 2 out of 4 needed fuel, which is fulfilled by a contract. If that contract ends, all companies that depend on fuel will do less well. Then, all companies depending on those companies start to do less well... Now, people are losing their jobs. And, you are losing income. All in all, left alone, a city could, theoretically, be completely "ruined" in such a situation. Which is why it pauses Though I'm not sure this always works, I've seen the pause message on-screen a few times while the city still seemed active...

[Spritzen 0]

I'd like them to give you the option to have afk pause be turned on and off. I can see it's uses but I've had a few occasions that I'm watching TV and just wanted to let it build up my reserves in the mean time so I can look into make some more serious alterations. Having to move my mouse every so often to stop the pause really annoys me.