Game Difficulty Level

[SimBurger 0]

I'm just tossing this out there.

Do you think its possible a lot of people are going to find this game .... way ..... too.... difficult?

It's fairly straight forward for a short while.  Assuming you do the tutorial.

But the minute that first alert comes up suggesting you need to begin "Trading", all bets are off. 

I had absolutely no friggen clue what I was supposed to do, despite a decently high IQ and simple useability.  I mean it was so beyond confusing that, four times now, I have closed the game down simply because I didn't know what I was supposed to do, no matter how hard I tried to figure it out.  I also did not have the time required to sit down and train myself on what trading is, how it works, and what's entailed.  I came on the forums and saw pages of posts teaching people how to trade.  Those are very helpful - thanks to you guys. 

But man ....

As a fairly intelligent person who is also 35 years old, and the owner of a small corporation, when I am faced with a window on my screen that makes absolutely zero sense, has absolutely no help options, and none of the buttons seem to work as I expect, I simply close it down.  Because I know its going to be a pain in the *ss.  And I am a guy who was obsessed with SimCity 4.  I loved it.  I loved the challenge, the thinking, the balancing budget.  The unknowns....  

I can't even imagine the average joe 15 to 23 year old user.   The person who isn't that into the game, but just wants to play it purely for entertainment purposes. 

The intense focus and importance of trading immediately brought me to a screeching halt every single time, and I haven't even bothered to start playing the game again in a week.  I want to, but I know I need to invest the mental power and I am just too busy right now.  I don't get the sensation of challenge / reward with this game that I got with sim city.  I know I am in the minority because I hear a lot of you saying you do.

Kudos to you guys who have figured it out, struggled with it, tackled, it and succeeded.  When I arrived on the trading page for the first time - the "Nb" and "C" columns stared me in the face with no explanation.  I was told I needed to sell something, but the entire "Buyers" screen was empty.  Nobody to sell to.  There were 30 people also trying to sell something.  So I sat there, lost.  Let alone - how much do I sell something for?  Whats the guideline?  What the heck am I even selling - office services?  Does that mean I load a bunch of admin assistants into a "Freight" truck and cart them over to the city next door?  It just left me lost.  Something about the trade only lasting five days?  Why?   Is it a day?  an hour?  a week ? when the time circle at the top goes around once?  Who knows?  Not me. 

So I closed the game again. 

I just don't see the average user even being able to play this game past 15 minutes.  Literally.  I think people are going to hit that trading screen after the first 20 minutes, not have a clue what to do (especially those who dont know about this forum), watch all their businesses go flat, and say screw it. 

Thoughts?

SimBurger

[Androv 6]

Well the world chat is very similar to 'Barrens Chat'.... but instead of "Where's Mankrik's wife" it's "How do I trade for xxxx"

[Coney 0]

Why don't you just go ahead and do ALL the tutorials? There is one on trading that quite effectively explains it all to you

[bluetooth 0]

I can't say I had any problem with this. It's explained in the tutorial and in the manual. I don't even think that selling or buying office service is that hard to understand. I bet your own business has to consult a law firm, an accountant or use mail order service now and then. If you can't find it in your home town you have to find it in another town.

[hanskamp 1]

I don't find it a hard game to play. It is challenging because the success of the category of buildings depends on the other buildings. There is something in Settlers and Caesar that I find back in this game. You need Fual for Industry. You need Industry for Manufacturing. You need that for High Tech. And you need that on its turn for Offices. It is a chain of needs and offers. That is what actually attracts me in the game.

My challenge was to build a city where there is no industry and no polution. Is that hard? No, not if you excessively trade with others or with Omnicorp. I took this challenge, because I got fed up with pollution which I couldn't master. It makes the people unhappy and offices, hotels etc. less profitable.

My background: I am a 43 years old man with autism and with high intelligence, able to master things quickly. Cities XL is a challenge to master and I like it.

[JakeMD 107]

Some people have said that taking things slow and getting your feet on the ground is one of the best strategies to start out with.

[SimBurger 0]

I did the tutorial. Unless i missed something it didn't explain anything on how much to charge, what to do when nobody is buying and you have to sell something, what the "C" and the "Nb" are, etc.

I haven't seen the manual. Maybe that's my problem.

I guess my point was, most games, you can keep playing without needing to take a course in economics. Im willing to do the work and learn, but I wonder if the average user is just going to say screw it.

-SB-

[hanskamp 1]

Maybe there will be good books about this game in the near future, who knows. Maybe you could buy that book. Although I start to know how to play it, I want to have a good book too... I haven't look in the hard drive's directory in which the game is installed, for a PDF file with a manual in it.

Believe me, I have started various cities. In the beginning my cities went bankrupt before they reach 100,000 citizens. Later on I got in troube at 200,000. Now I have a city without Industry and Manufacturing but heavy trading, close to 300,000 cities without any threat of bankruptcy.

[PyroMancer 0]

Originally posted by: SimBurger

What the heck am I even selling - office services?  Does that mean I load a bunch of admin assistants into a "Freight" truck and cart them over to the city next door? quote>

OMG! I'm getting sick of hearing that one from people. Every hear of OUTSOURCING!! When you call up the tech support and you get some Indian guy over in India that is becuase one company(aka city) is buying their "OFFICE SERVICES" from a company/city in India!

And no it doesn't take an imaginative thinking to come up with that. It's COMMON SENSE! Although I'm reminded of this motivational picture on that subject.

[EAGCE 2]

I'd really wish they'd make the services clearer on how much they affect things.  Like, a high school compared to a private school.  How much difference does it make?  Do we need both?  Can I just load up on one?  Is one more cost effective?  It's impossible to know without experimenting.  And even then it may not be totally clear. 

And why do they have low satisfaction with leisure when they have a building right across the street from them?

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

A little while ago we had a thread saying the game was too easy...    

[PyroMancer 0]

Originally posted by: abcvs

A little while ago we had a thread saying the game was too easy...    quote>

Yea and as I recall most of them people were SC4 fanboys who played CXL for all over like 10-20 mins with really small easy to manage cities and then quit cause it wasn't SC5. Followed by them coming to the forums to whine about it. I don't think I recall a single one of those guys who said it was to easy bragging they had made a city over 1M.

SC4 is also extremely easy. Plot down a bunch of roads and put zones connecting them. The next thing you know you got a city with a bunch of buildings bringing in a ton of cash. That's what I do by coving the map in SC4 before i even add water pipes to go high wealth citizens, so that I got a ton of cash as a buffer. The hard part is getting a highly populated city with high wealth people and keeping it running.

[PyroMancer 0]

Originally posted by: EAGCE

And why do they have low satisfaction with leisure when they have a building right across the street from them?

quote>

Because they are just like people in RL. They have become extremely jaded by having the leisure place so close and it no longer gives them an satisfaction to go there.

[intristin 0]

I don't believe the trade system is too hard, it's just that it's too buggy and slow at the moment. My PO free trial has ended and I decided not to pay for it until these issues are fixed. The trade system needs a lot of work and I really hope they fix it. I will keep checking back because other than this and a few other issues, the game is fun and has lots of potential. It's just not worth the money in it's current state.

[John-SJ 13]

I'd be curious to know from those who have the game, is there a PDF manual?  It seems to me there needs to be since the game can be purchased from download sites such as Direct2Drive.

I ask because I have not ruled out buying this game altogether, but if I do it will definitely be via download.  Lack, or inclusion, of a manual for a game this complex will definitely be part of my decision making process.

So, is there a PDF manual?

[Stef42 0]

There are some tips and 'rules' witch you could use, witch are available at the Support section on Citiesxl.com

I think you need a lot of patience to make a great city, because it takes so much time.

[JakeMD 107]

To all who are looking for the "official" game manual, here is the link.

[John-SJ 13]

Thank you!

[bluetooth 0]

You can also find more detailed informaton on the Cities XL support pages. www.citiesxl.com/content/view/797/134/

[koolkalang 2]

You know, they said the same thing about simcity 4.

[ForceInfinity 0]

I remember people asking about how to control the Avatar mode, and the best place to look is in the support pages for the Avatar. Seems there's a fair amount of information that's in the support pages that I wished were in the manual

[jeremy12 0]

I put my girl firend down in front of this game last night, never played a sim type game except for The Sims, within a hour and a half she had a 90k population with a +35k income, so no i don't think its hard you just have to not play it like its sim city

Originally posted by: Androv

Well the world chat is very similar to 'Barrens Chat'.... but instead of "Where's Mankrik's wife" it's "How do I trade for xxxx"quote>

HAHA i thought the same thing after a hour my first day playing this

 

[DazzaDazza 29]

well I have to agree with SimBurger, the game is over complicated in parts that it dose not need to be and you never really no what is going on or why thing are going wrong, every thing is so reactive. the game would be easier to understand if it was based on real life not made up stuff.

[jeremy12 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

well I have to agree with SimBurger, the game is over complicated in parts that it dose not need to be and you never really no what is going on or why thing are going wrong, every thing is so reactive. the game would be easier to understand if it was based on real life not made up stuff.quote>

whats made up in this game?

[Psycho_Teddy 25]

Here's the deal. Video games are hard. Ultimate Ghosts 'n' Goblins anyone? Chess? WoW? SimCity 4? Counter Strike? Team Fortress 2? Megaman IX? Any of these ringing a bell?

They're designed to pose a challenge to the player. That's the idea. If want something easy, buy Sim Town.

Difficulty is not a design flaw.

[Androv 6]

I don't know about what's not made up - maybe the fact the city pays for the entertainment facilities? The sports ones are a bit odd but the cultural ones made sense to me (the city runs the museums and so forth).

SC4 had the radius of fail around every structure - such as the primary school that people would only drive 500 m to reach, that was ..... one of the things that stopped me playing SC4 I far prefer Cities XL, with the colour coding of each service so you can see how far it reaches, and it being altered on traffic conditions and so forth.

[DazzaDazza 29]

Lets see what is made up

Zoning by wealth

people trading

leisure,

The way hotels work in the game

The way water, fuel and so on work in the game

a fire, polices, that don't acutely do anything

an education system that doses not do anything but make people happy

The way your people stay poor though there hole life and never evolve.

I could go on and on

[Kredit 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

Lets see what is made up

Zoning by wealth

people trading

leisure,

The way hotels work in the game

The way water, fuel and so on work in the game

a fire, polices, that don't acutely do anything

an education system that doses not do anything but make people happy

The way your people stay poor though there hole life and never evolve.

I could go on and on

quote>

I agree that some things are not completely realistic, but the way zoning works seems fine to me... it's not so much that the same people stay "unqualified", but if they become "qualified", they move to a "qualified" area, because they can afford to.

And there's no "people trading", but if your city has more people than jobs, they need to find a job in another city, and vice versa.

Services are weird in the sense that you don't need all of them, at least not at the start. A small starting village doesn't need anything, but once the city starts growing the need for services increases. If you check the satisfaction for each service, you can see which households use the service and which are not "covered" enough. It seems to be quite an intricate system, though unfortunately not one I completely understand yet... It's not so much that education "only" makes people happy, all the services and the level they are provided on influence people's satisfaction, so if there's no fire dept, but there are schools, people will be unhappy about fire prevention but happy about education, on average they'll be "half-happy". Because everything is measured in "satisfaction", this provides an easy way to compare all kinds of statistics.

Leisure is starting to make more and more sense to me. If you check commerce buildings, you'll see bars and suchs. Leisure is simply city-funded culture and sports. You don't really need to build any, but they can make your citizens a bit happier...

Businesshotels seem quite logical to me. It's a bit weird that you can only build holiday hotels in designated areas, but I guess that's more a gameplay decision (i.e. Holidays as a resource) than a logical one.

Water, fuel, waste, etc., all seems perfectly logical to me...

Anyway, to reply to the OP: I don't think so... This is my first city builder in 10 years. I only did the first step of the tutorial and then started my first city. Yes, I had to figure a number of things out and I have made a few mistakes, but overal the basics aren't all that complicated. The trade window was bugged a bit a the start, which made it practically unuseable, but it's much better now, and I can hardly imagine anyone who's familiar with computers having trouble figuring out how it works...

[DazzaDazza 29]

Government don't zone buy wealth they zone buy density, the desirability of the land tells you what wealth the zone is. If I zone unqualified workers near the beach, sorely the rich people would eventually drive up the price of the land because every one wants to live on the beach. So it would then become a rich suburb. In CXL this dose not happen, it just stays the same,

in real life and in "most" places around the world the government do not make business contracts with other cities that involve forcing people to go work somewhere. Unless you are in the Amy or something but that is completely different. In real life if you can't find work in the city you live in, you move, you don't fly half way around the word each day to go to work.

governments rally don't have much control over where hotels and how many hotels are in there cities, of courses to start up a hotel business you gave to go though planning, but ultimately if it is in a bad spot or there are too many in the city, it is not the governments problem, it the person who own the business

How can you buy water from a city that is not even in the content as you, how dose it get there,

How can fuel make sense, what are they making and for what, there aren’t any petrol station in CXL so they cart be making that.   where are thy getting the raw product from and what is it, what fuel doses a factory need anyway apart form electricity, what is fuel, petrol, gas, .

And in CXL there is not enough retail, I had a large city in the Beta yet all my shops where going broke, how is this possible?. Why, your Sims don’t seems to spend there money on anything, Your Sims complain there is not enough retail,  then when you place it near the homes it goes broke, and there still  complain about it, WHF, ether they wont it or not.  

[Kredit 0]

Originally posted by: mrdazza_460

Government don't zone buy wealth they zone buy density, the desirability of the land tells you what wealth the zone is. If I zone unqualified workers near the beach, sorely the rich people would eventually drive up the price of the land because every one wants to live on the beach. So it would then become a rich suburb. In CXL this dose not happen, it just stays the same,

in real life and in "most" places around the world the government do not make business contracts with other cities that involve forcing people to go work somewhere. Unless you are in the Amy or something but that is completely different. In real life if you can't find work in the city you live in, you move, you don't fly half way around the word each day to go to work.

governments rally don't have much control over where hotels and how many hotels are in there cities, of courses to start up a hotel business you gave to go though planning, but ultimately if it is in a bad spot or there are too many in the city, it is not the governments problem, it the person who own the business

How can you buy water from a city that is not even in the content as you, how dose it get there,

How can fuel make sense, what are they making and for what, there aren’t any petrol station in CXL so they cart be making that.   where are thy getting the raw product from and what is it, what fuel doses a factory need anyway apart form electricity, what is fuel, petrol, gas, .[/u

And in CXL there is not enough retail, I had a large city in the Beta yet all my shops where going broke, how is this possible?. Why, your Sims don’t seems to spend there money on anything, Your Sims complain there is not enough retail,  then when you place it near the homes it goes broke, and there still  complain about it, WHF, ether they wont it or not.  

quote>

Thing is, you're not "the government", you're not even  "the mayor" (even if it's what you're called in-game), you're a lot of things rolled in to one. Mayor, developer, trade unionist, architect, etc. etc.

This is not supposed to be SimMayor or SimGovernment It's about "building" a city in a way that's both challenging and enjoyable. Not about defining the tasks a mayor should or should not do. Bottom line: Gameplay ALWAYS trumps realism. Always.

Most of the rest of your gripes seem to be details and finetuning. Yes, the amount of retail needed is a bit low, I agree. They'll probably tweek that at some point. However, why that specific shop went broke? Dunno... polution? traffic? wrong kind of shop (discount store in Elite area)? That's what makes CXL interesting. It's not just "I need 10 of those for 5 of those and then I can build 2 of those again".