Pros and Cons

[drcacklefanny 0]

Howdy all,

Pros:

+ Graphics: Cities XL is probably the best looking city builder on the market

+ Attention to Detail: A corollary to graphics, the attention to detail (ie textures/animation) is phenomenal

Cons:

- Highways: There needs to be a way to rotate junctions - it's unsat I have to build roads to align junctions

- Auto-pause: It annoys me to no end the game auto-pauses in Solo Mode

- Economy: I can deal with the ridiculousness of Omnicorp, but Leisure/City Services/Commerce is too enigmatic, there simply is no real feedback to the player on how they are doing to get their economy going. Also, loans are one shot deals...

I realize this game is not SC4, nay, it's better in many respects...but it's equally worse in others.

What all are your pros and cons?

[John-SJ 13]

Pros?

[gyzzzmo 0]

My pro's is that it looks nice.

My biggest con is that the game just isnt challenging enough with the effect that it gets boring quickly. Especially with all the bugs going on wich make bigger cities just get annoying.

[El_Presidente 0]

+Pros

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+Curved roads. Allows for nice variation in city and farmland design.

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+Non-growable buildings. I've always been a person who builds a city for the way i want it to look, so this is a big plus. I want nothing but houses and small business? Just plop down some low-density lots. I want a CBD of skyscrapers? Plop down some high-density lots.

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-Cons

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-Lack of specifics. A small power station creates 'some electricity' while a medium one creates 'electricity' and all the while i don't know the actual demand of my town and thus don't know which option to go with.

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-Inability to set trade contracts to renew. Means every 5 days you suddenly find yourself wondering why you're losing 500k.

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-No pause button. Sure, it's easy to get your city to a balanced state where it can run by itself, but if you're in the middle of a big expensive construction project when suddenly nature calls or you want a drink, your only option really is to exit to planet mode.

[Stef42 0]

Originally posted by: drcacklefanny

Cons:

- Highways: There needs to be a way to rotate junctions - it's unsat I have to build roads to align junctionsquote>

While holding SHIFT you can rotate the freeway-junctions in 8 different positions

[USA_Pride 49]

I'll add to that list:

Pros:

+ Farms look much more true to life

+ In PO you can go into other people's creations

+ Curved roads

+ The game looks great

Cons:

- Only one lot size

- Price of planet offer

- Current lack of mass transit

- You lose your cities when you stop paying the PO 'rent'

- You lose all the PO addons once you stop paying (that's why I think of the PO as renting the game)

- No talk of mass transit in an expansion pack that you can buy once, play forever

- Does not make use of multiple cores

- Cannot do an in-place widening of curved roads

- Attaching non-MMO features to the MMO subscription

- A little buggy

Overall at this point the cons outweight the pros for me. I'll have to revisit it in maybe 6 months to a year from now. I'm sure they'll have all the little bugs ironed out by then, but what they really need to do is un-gimp the single player. They completely stole the single player of its appeal so they could promise those features as part of a subscription so they can have a steady revenue stream. If it works for MC, more power to them, but I just can't see a lot of people lining up to pay, pay, pay. Should be interesting to see how many users are in the PO after the holiday gift buying season (speculating the number will go up as exiting young people get CXL under the Christmas tree).

[SimBurger 0]

Pros -

1) PO mode is only $6 a month for endless hours of game play in an interactive environment.

2) The graphics are spectacular.

3) The music is not infuriatingly annoying like in SimCity 4 (i dug the tunes but after several hours I went bonkers. doesnt happen with this game for some reason)

4) The variation in maps is impressive, and fun.

5) The enhanced complexity of the game makes it more intelligent and therefore more challenging than anything SimCity4 could offer.

6) The ability to interact with others rather than only having a single player version.

7) The responsiveness of Monte Cristo on these forums, and their obvious desire to continue enhancing this game.

The addition of Elites is a fun concept and adds more challenge.

9) The highways and road systems are a vast improvement over SC4

10) The fact that this game seems to focus more intelligently on real city building issues establishes it as an improvement over SC4 as well.

Cons

1)

2) Leisure is infuriating for me. I dont want to build a ferris wheel that doesn't even spin. I want numerous leisure options. Elites are bored. What should I give multi millionaires to do? Lets take a look. A ferris wheel. Or a sports museum?

3) I want to see Leisure actually get used. They are always showing low impact low effectiveness and cost a lot.

4) Lack of a manual Pause button in PO mode that enables me to browse my own city without anything changing. Make it equivilent to "Exiting to Planet Mode" if you need to. That's all it needs to do. I want to enjoy my city. Walk the streets...

5) Mouse sensitivity options. Desperately need these as its still difficult to move, and i constantly overshoot my movements and wheel click spins.

6) Im sure there's more, but they've been expressed and based on the last patch, I can see Monte Cristo is working on things, so ill just be patient and let them get to it.

SB

Edited for innapropriate comments.  Talk about the issues, not each other.

--Liv

CXL Forums Moderator

[TheJackalope 0]

Pros

1. Curved roads and Bridges.

2. Farms work well

3. Ability to specialize city

4. Trading

5. Nice preloaded maps and more options compared to vanilla SC4

6. Good service system(better than straight radius)

7. chalenging

8. Good graphics

9. free form zoning tool

10. I have the biggest city on Prospero(flexes epeen)

11. Park fill in tool

12. resource system

Cons

1. Maps generated from actual planet terrain would have been nice.

2. Why not use Earth cut up into 10x10 squares? Tech exists for this.

3. park tool frustrating

4. lot sizes need more variation. 

5. bad mouse sensitivity

6. big city token trading pita

[cheuk18me94 0]

Prons:

Good Graphic

Even go smooth with poor graphic card(HD3200)

Curve road

Trading

Free Zoning

Easy to start

Cons

No way for mass transit for solo mode(I defunitely sure noone like it, and even hate it)

Can't make the cities detailed.

Too few kind of buildings

No custom plugins and custom map.

more variation of lot size

Bad mouth sensitivity

Always restricted by resources, for example, I can't build a farm because I have no agriculture result

Too high upkeep cost

Bad Tarnsform Tool. I think it is hard for me to flatten the hill or have reclamation on the river,lake and sea.

Same type of bridge have one type of the corresponding type.

[Soviet779 1]

Originally posted by: John-SJ

Pros?quote>

Heh exactly lol.

[citiesxlfan42 27]

With all of this being said, I'm going to go with City Life and SC4(this one first. DUH!)

Pros:

Curved roads

Non-Growable Buildings(like someone higher up said.)

Graphics. Very nice!

The whole tokens thing is nice, too; considering that I have issues with neighbor connections.

Cons:

No multiple core stuff

PO makes me get POed(heh heh)

Cost of PO

Mass Transit Issues

I've seen the whole checklist for the patches, but MC has already broken umpteen promises too many and I'm not beleive that one, either. Sheesh.

[gabry85 2]

Pros

- 3D graphics (always welcomed)

- Street view (much appreciated)

- Realistic terrains

- Somewhat addictive

- Explores a new CB gaming dimension (PO, even though...)

Cons

- Unfriendly simulation engine (focus on private transportation, poor budget management, difficult placement of highways and buildings) and UI (you often have to guess what to do next)

- Expensive civic, utility, leisure buildings and unbalanced upkeep costs

- Bad rendering at close views (textures are too small and therefore low-res)

- Doesn't exploit its potential (i.e. curvy roads vs big square lots, terrains vs building on slopes)

The Awesome!

- Curvy roads (including tunnels and bridges)

- Refined pathfinding (radius restriction abandoned)

The Horror!

- Single-player mode is deliberately neglected (it's as clear as day)

- Low customization and unnecessary restrictions (limited custom content, no regions, no terraforming, build city hall at start, build city links)

- Almost no sounds (how appropriate for a company that pretended to be listening to people...)

- Shallow, repetitive... yawny... zzzish (if you're insomniac, you may actually take this for a good point...)

- Too buggy for release

[Tysons4 68]

pros... lots of promises

cons... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[jeremy12 0]

Can we leave PO out of this otherwise this will turn into another flame war between people thinking its over priced and people who think it is cheap and reasonable

Now with that said

Pros

+visit other peoples city's

+MC is going to be constantly adding to the game it will not be the same game 1 year from now

+ Graphics

+Graphics

+Graphics 

+ Street level

+ seamless zoom

+ Curved roads

+ no grid

+ tokens for trading makes it simple

+ Farms work well

+ Ability to specialize city

+ Nice preloaded maps

+ Trading (when its working properly)

+Park fill in tool

+Web based trading (manage city from out of game)

+the free form  zoning tool

cons

- lack of diversity of parks

-Leisure needs more buildings, retail should count, should not be city funded, should be zone able, Leisure  in general is bad

- does not handle multi core, so even on high end systems it becomes slow

-Lack of information when traffic is heavy i want to know there are 30 cars a hour going down a road meant to handle 40 cars a hour

- MC needs to give more info about whats being worked on, 1 page that just says Heres what we are working on for next patches that shows bugs being worked and new features

- Trade in Single player can be to hard to master for new players and to young cities

- large avenue bridges need a stone version

- Current lack of mass transit

- custome maps

- You lose your cities when you stop paying the PO 'rent'

Half Cons (would be nice to haves....)

- Only one lot size

-earth as the planet

Someone said "Mouse sensitivity options" for cons, just get a decent mouse like the Logitech MX518 has a + and - button on it to incease and decrease sensitivity on the fly its great for opening one game and tuning it down quick then going into COD4 and cranking it up fast

[SoftcoreGamer 352]

My perspective is,

This game has been launched as a MMO from day one, not because it is a suitable genre for such a venture, nor because it's a passionate dream of its maker, but a company cashflow decision. The deliberately crippled Single Player version will not likely be attended to, at least in the short run.

My point is, when it comes to evaluating an MMO game, we should include the new elements of (1) game company server quality and (2) on-going customer service, as part of the "game experience".

So basically, this is an evaluation of PO.

Pros

• Curved roads (though Sims3 has that too)
• Nice Bridges
• Brilliant free form zoning tool
• Quick response to changes
• Economy model such as Hi-tech symbiosis with Recycling
• Visiting other player's famous cities in 3D without having to install them

Cons

• Overall super VAGUE feedback in the game (simply scream distress but don't offer specificity of solution)
• Inefficient programming leads to extreme choppiness which requires constant game restart
• Passive aggressive sales tactic (if they want us to sponsor them on a monthly basis, just say so upfront)
• No Custom Buildings (unjustified fear of competition with official content packs)
• Players do not get to play their own online cities offline with all PO functionalities intact (forcing people to stay online)
• Players do not get to OWN and KEEP their (online) cities (daylight robbery of intellectual property)
• Player's online cities are owned therefore HELD RANSOM by The MMO Server Owner (Very Omnicorp)

[cheuk18me94 0]

I think about it

Cons: Have Planet Offer

[Livin in Sim 83]