Is this game too easy? over 1,000,000 population on solo.

[kevinman23 0]

I just started playing the game, I just start plopping High density buildings and soon I have like a mini city with 200,000... I just trade farms, water, offices for money. Is that it? I think i could get a million population easy with just repeating the process?

[Rakeesh 0]

If your goal is just to hit population numbers, yeah. But there is more to city builder/simulators. Building a visually appealing city, for example. Building the best specialised city. Building the most mega structures. That sort of thing.

[kevinman23 0]

Fair call Rakeesh.

I have not played online yet; does gameplay change when online? is there a sence of competition i.e. in trade?

[thijser 0]

Also you can't just repeat that same proces for 2 reasons 1st you need to sell heavy industry which isn't going to work and 2nd the pollution will start killing your population

[Rakeesh 0]

There is some competition. There's undercutting and such, but there is a bottom and top cap(which is omnicorp) which prevents too much price gouging. There are some people who buy cheap for resale and there's often a shortage of some materials every few days (ever since megastructures hit, lots of people need LOTS of extra materials). There's also no sense of guarantee. That person who bought your stuff can cancel the contract at any time before it's set to expire, or may lose the credit tokens they need to pay and it'll cancel on it's own.

There's also going to be planets released in the future with different rulesets to play with. No word on them yet.

And each planet has their own leaderboards for each resource, population, cashflow, etc. So there is a sense of competition to do well. Especially if you specialise.

[Sainty 0]

I agree with Rakeesh, the online trading isnt really a business model that you can use or count upon, and there isnt any competition really. We are talking about a handfull players that puts up trades. For my planet, as we speak, there are 3 players selling electricity, 3 players are selling food, and 2 players are selling waste... and so on. And the planet has 5500 cities (!).

The social part of the game doesnt really work, most of the people sell either to them selves or sell of offices and high tech to omni so they are able to max out their cities.

And if you sell anything to anybody, you have to count in the possibility that the player will cancel the deal as soon as his city is fixed or the blueprint ready so there is not really a point in trying to specialize for the market reasons.

My personal feeling is that there is no competition in other areas either, I mean - building a grid city to get 25 mil population can be done even if you are one legged hamster. All you need to do is to build 2-3 cities that can support you with food and dirty industry and then you sell everything else to omni. A brain isnt needed for such game play.

Right now Im paying 5

[xannepan 514]

I agree with Sainty. Unfortunately, the trading concept just doesn't work. Appart from the technical problems it is conceptually flawed and failed to create an economy in the PO. Just a few of the conceptual issues:

 

1) I'm on planet caliban; as Sainty experiences there are just too few players active and offering resources I really need and Omnicorp is just to expensive to afford.

2) To keep a city flourishing I currently am dependent on 80-100 contracts, between my own cities, with omnicorp or with other players.... There is no way you can maintain an overview on 80-100 contracts between cities.

3) If one of the contracts fails (because of dependency on another player who can cancel at anytime) my cities economy often goes into the red figures. This triggers a cascade as a result of which many other contracts also fail.

4) With my busy job I can only play once every week or once every two weeks, maybe for just a few hours. During the first half hour I find myself re-establishing cancelled deals (cancelled when I was offline!!) that I need to keep my cities alive...

5) Overproduction of oil, water, food etc is all wasted unless you trade. Even though the game contains silos, watersotrage etc these only increase production. It would be so much better if a city could really created storages of resources and if we could trade fixed amounts of what we have in store with eachother, instead of the 5-yr contract dependency. (Guess this only works with resources like oil, wate, food, water... would be a bit silly for services like offices, workers etc)

[Sincx 0]

After reading this topic might it be a idea to have a sort of topic/item on these forums where people can trade tokens ?

Cause the chat isn't ideal due to different playing hours of people.

If I would wanna sell 15 farms and I would need 15 indurstry I could make a nice deal with someone but this will be easier on the forums then on the chat due to the above mentioned problem.

offcourse you can just rely on your own Cities to trade with but...

Would be nifty to have the forums for that.

[thijser 0]

I think we need a few people with better AI cities i think that if you make a right scripts you might be able to get really rich (I wonder who is going to do this hint hint ) that way we might have a bit less flawned system

[sbtop 0]

Unfortunately there is no way to get "Really rich" as the game caps your bank at £1 billion and that's pretty easy to get. There is no real incentive to trade with other players after a certain point as many are so unreliable that I'd rather get less monet selling to the npc.

[zwr100 2]

Originally posted by: Sainty

The social part of the game doesnt really work, most of the people sell either to them selves or sell of offices and high tech to omni so they are able to max out their cities.

And if you sell anything to anybody, you have to count in the possibility that the player will cancel the deal as soon as his city is fixed or the blueprint ready so there is not really a point in trying to specialize for the market reasons.

My personal feeling is that there is no competition in other areas either, I mean - building a grid city to get 25 mil population can be done even if you are one legged hamster. All you need to do is to build 2-3 cities that can support you with food and dirty industry and then you sell everything else to omni. A brain isnt needed for such game play.quote>

I think the ability to make multiple cities on one planet is part of the problem.  You can make two mildly profitable cities, but when you play one you can have the other buy a resource for a ton of cash giving yourself a falsely bloated income. Resources are never really scarce since you can just  make another city that produces whatever resource you need.  I look forward to planets with tougher rules.

I'm not sure I agree with the statements about the ease of selling offices or hightech to omnicorp.  Sure you can get to 500k or a mil, but you start to run out of passanger services, then need ports which cause pollution and kill your elites / ht / offices.  If you aren't selling your excess tokens there is no demand and profitability drops.  Meanwhile you need to import all the dirty stuff.

Sure, a million is easy, but 25 million is a challange even with shameless self support. 

[Sainty 0]

@zwr100, at the end you can have 100+/- tokens and you wont get red, so you dont have to sell or buy as much. And if you really want to max out your pop, you stop producing offices and build homes and export citizens to omni.

Offices dont use ports as passanger service, its done by roads, highway connections and airports. Together you can have space to export 1-2 thousand passanger tokens.

I really doubt that you will run out of passanger service, you will sooner run out of space for new residents I belive.

You might be right, it maybe is a challenge, but its not challenging enough, at least not for me.

I really hope they will open a new planet soon with hardcore rules so we can really cooporate and challenge each other in different areas.

[zonik77 0]

I decided to make just one city for the reason that explains zwr100, just because the difficulty rise up. I always have problems with this or that, I have lack of products and I should look for a good deal to make my city grow, sometimes waiting 1 or 2 days looking at the market for food, or waste, and sometimes asking friends about good deals to develop my city or blueprints.

I agree with Sainty that a planet with hardcore rules is extremly necessary to people that is looking for a real challenge.

[morriswalters 16]

Trading is  conceptually flawed.    If you remove Omnicorps the system would collapse.  If you only have one city to a planet people will eventually quit playing because the trading system is not responsive enough.  The problem is time.  The clock never stops.  But trading does.  You play on your schedule and I play on mine.  But the game drives ever onward.  Omnicorps ideal role is one as wholesale house, but their prices are fixed and unrelated to supply and demand.  Nothing has value except as flow.  So the lag between buying and selling is lost opportunity.  This drives everybody to Omnicorps.  Because low money is better than no money and your expenses happen in  realtime.   And since everything is paid for in flow, you are driven to build to create more flow.  No saving for any new toys.  One million or 25 million makes no difference.  When you get to any point that you can get stable at, the game is over except for maintenance trading, which is tiresome and routine.

[SimBurger 0]

I agree. It never occurred to me to make my own litlte "cheat" cities and trade to myself.

Those of you who think its super easy to dominate this game - try playing like I do - make one city and deal with the market.

Scrounge and beg and stress out like me

-SB-

[pipvac 0]

Originally posted by: morriswalters

Trading is  conceptually flawed.    If you remove Omnicorps the system would collapse.  If you only have one city to a planet people will eventually quit playing because the trading system is not responsive enough.  The problem is time.  The clock never stops.  But trading does.  You play on your schedule and I play on mine.  But the game drives ever onward.  Omnicorps ideal role is one as wholesale house, but their prices are fixed and unrelated to supply and demand.  Nothing has value except as flow.  So the lag between buying and selling is lost opportunity.  This drives everybody to Omnicorps.  Because low money is better than no money and your expenses happen in  realtime.   And since everything is paid for in flow, you are driven to build to create more flow.  No saving for any new toys.  One million or 25 million makes no difference.  When you get to any point that you can get stable at, the game is over except for maintenance trading, which is tiresome and routine.

quote>

This.

I wanted to write my own summary, but this really hits the nail squarely on the head.

Your bank balance actually means very little. It doesn't matter that you have 1bn in the bank, if your cashflow is down to a low level than you are stuffed, without demolishing cost generating items out of your city for any period of time. This is rather odd to me. You can't trade in tokens (buy or SELL (!!!???)) if you have zero or negative cashflow. You may have the biggest bank balance on the planet, and could sustain the contract with zero cashflow years beyond the five day period, this will always be ignored.

The trading system is hopelessly flawed. Its an interesting novelty, and on a small scale can help you specialise your city. As soon as you progress beyond a certain point in your city's development, the flaws become cracks, making reliance on 'real' trade rather than chaining our five cities, impractical.

[xannepan 514]

Today after 5 days of not playing I had time for just 30-60 minutes to play a bit. Unfortunately I found out most of my contracts have been cancelled in the mean time. It will take me 15 minutes at least to re-establish new contracts in order to be able to start playing again. In the beginning I could accept this... but now it drives me crazy... this is just too boring...

I'm sorry MC... I have to give up.... Unless PO content packs are also released as expansion packs for single player mode (I'd be willing to pay a good deal for these) or the trading concept is significantly improved I'm affraid this is just not a game for me...I really hope these issues will be solved because in principle this game has so much potential...

[Sainty 0]

@xannepan, you can trade via the web, you know that, right? I usually stay online on the web the whole time during work, watching the market from time to time. And my own tokens. That keeps the city ready for game play. But your problem is still a problem if you are afk during those days. Sucks. I agree.

[Cob92 360]

Originally posted by: kevinman23

I just started playing the game, I just start plopping High density buildings and soon I have like a mini city with 200,000... I just trade farms, water, offices for money. Is that it? I think i could get a million population easy with just repeating the process?quote>

In CXL terms, a million people is not that big. There were beta cities that had 10 and 20 million inhabitants and the entire map carpeted in skyscrapers from end to end.

[JakeMD 107]

(thread read)

--Liv