Game overview and suggestions

[ACEH 0]

Hi everybody,

I've been playing the game from the beta and i have some thoughts that I want to share with you and of course the developers from Monte Cristo.

My overall evaluation for Cities XL is that the game is great, especially in visual aspect, but there are several thing making me crazy:

1. First of all - the public and leisure services. Well, come on MC, the things aren't working this way in real life! In the game you can cover a 500 000 city with one school and one hospital. You should GREATLY reduce the range of public and leisure services and their price of course. It's just unrealistic. Agree with me that for example 100 000 people need at least 10 basketball courts and several hospitals. 

2. The micromanagement - one hospital now costs 5000 per month no matter it serves 5 or 50 000 people. We should have the option to reduce its budget according to how many people it serves. Even more - if for some reason we decide that we don't need hospital any more, we must demolish it. Why we can't just reduce its budget? It's ridiculous. PLEASE change this absurd in upcoming patch, I'm sure you can do this!   

3. The price of the resources that Omnicorp sells is crazy - I've heard from Mathew that this should be fix in the next patch. Give us, the Solo mode players chance to build prosperous cities.

4. The height of the bridges - hey, did you ever see a real bridge, MC. They don't look like those in the game. The bridges from the game are incredibly high.

5. Include some roundabouts - they will include some variety in the road networks and can reduce traffic on intersections.

6. There are different building styles in the game - European, American and so on - thats great but can we have the option to choose what style exactly to be build - some cities look very unrealistic with all of the styles mixed together.

7. Parks and pollution - in certain stage of the game the advisors says "Pollution is killing everything" no matter that my industries are very far from the resident zones and I have near 100 parks in the city. You should increase the parks ability to reduce pollution. One little note - now a parks with different sizes creates same area of effect around them - that's unrealistic too.

8. Create some kind of on and off-ramps for connecting smaller roads to expressway - now we need to make an intersections  with the Expressway which makes no sense - the expressway should be express. In this row of thoughts - why should the smallest roads have traffic lights at intersections. That is cosmetic but very annoying.

9. The upcoming mass transit - buses - why should they cost so much - the people are paying to use them. In most of the cities the municipality makes profit of them and we should pay to have buses. Why? Just reduce the price.

10. A very useful feature from the beta is missing - the lines which shows the traffic when you click on specific road - where did they gone?

Because this post became very long, I stop here and I hope some of the developers to answer some of the questions. I'm sure many of you guys playing the game agree with me. So MC, please answer!

[zero7 68]

Originally posted by: ACEH

6. There are different building styles in the game - European, American and so on - thats great but can we have the option to choose what style exactly to be build - some cities look very unrealistic with all of the styles mixed together.

quote>

That's only true if you use the automatic options.  Go to the main in game menu (XL) then the spanner (menu) then select 'Toggle Individual Buildings / zoning'.  You can then choose buildings individually.

Ploptastic!!   

[ACEH 0]

Yes, zero7, I know that. My point was that we should have an option to choose which building styles should be developing in our city, just as it is in SimCity 4 - there are thicks for every building style.

[zero7 68]

Fair enough - sorry for misjudging what you wanted to achieve.

The main problem I can see with wanting what is in effect a CXL interpretation of SC4's tilesets is that if you use a limited set of tilesets you soon go beyond the defined limits - in sc4 as soon as people wanted to be country or region specific the defined tilesets no longer worked (especially all the HK buildings in the Euro tileset because there was nowhere else for them to go).  However you categorise your buildings you'll also always find buildings that fit the definition, but not the visual language.

The biggest problem, though, is that not everyone will want tilesets selecting on the same criteria.  You may want country specific buildings, I may want to limit the selection by architectural style and someone else by time period.

When the discussions were running during CXL's development I suggested that what was needed was a user controlled filtering system based on metadata stored with the building.  

So take the 'individual building' toggle as an example and add something similar called 'toggle user building sets'.  From what I understand, hidden within the .pak files all the building metadata is in XML format, so it would be simple to add elements for region, country, year and style (though the last one will cause arguments!)  a filter could be defined using this data and applied to the zone-based tools to give complete user control over the type of building that appears in a zone - unfortunately developing the interface to make the selections and recoding the zoning to make it work with selection criteria is unlikely to ever happen as it wan't considered in the design and probably can't be charged for as a bolt-on feature.

So I guess we'll be stuck with random or individual plop - the latter will, of course, become as awkward and overloaded as the SC4 park menu as the number of buildings increases.

[ACEH 0]

Yes, I agree with you.

[Mastaflex 0]

Good post, you covered a lot of the problems I have with the game and I just want to expand on these thoughts; here is my two cents.

Originally posted by: ACEH

1. First of all - the public and leisure services. Well, come on MC, the things aren't working this way in real life! In the game you can cover a 500 000 city with one school and one hospital. You should GREATLY reduce the range of public and leisure services and their price of course. It's just unrealistic. Agree with me that for example 100 000 people need at least 10 basketball courts and several hospitals. quote>

Very true and I think they are trying to fix this.

2. The micromanagement - one hospital now costs 5000 per month no matter it serves 5 or 50 000 people. We should have the option to reduce its budget according to how many people it serves. Even more - if for some reason we decide that we don't need hospital any more, we must demolish it. Why we can't just reduce its budget? It's ridiculous. PLEASE change this absurd in upcoming patch, I'm sure you can do this!  quote>

This is soooo crucial for a city building game, they need to forget micromanagement for a minute and realise that these kind of services are made have their funding increased or decreased on the fly, it's how a city operates its various regions. Fixed prices make it bland and lame, I am trying to be nice about it but I feel MC specifically made it like this to not copy SC4.

3. The price of the resources that Omnicorp sells is crazy - I've heard from Mathew that this should be fix in the next patch. Give us, the Solo mode players chance to build prosperous cities.quote>

I have no problem with this at all, I can build succesful cities in solo but if they want to lower it then that is fine with me.

4. The height of the bridges - hey, did you ever see a real bridge, MC. They don't look like those in the game. The bridges from the game are incredibly high.quote>

Very true also, maybe needs a look at.

5. Include some roundabouts - they will include some variety in the road networks and can reduce traffic on intersections.quote>

Also a very realistic suggestion and would be nice to see.

6. There are different building styles in the game - European, American and so on - thats great but can we have the option to choose what style exactly to be build - some cities look very unrealistic with all of the styles mixed together.quote>

I am comfortable with the way cities look right now but being able to chose which style dominates is a very good suggestion.

7. Parks and pollution - in certain stage of the game the advisors says "Pollution is killing everything" no matter that my industries are very far from the resident zones and I have near 100 parks in the city. You should increase the parks ability to reduce pollution. One little note - now a parks with different sizes creates same area of effect around them - that's unrealistic too.quote>

I am a bit on the fence on this one. While it's annoying to see this message constantly even when all I build is light industry and manufacturing, I believe they made it this way to add variety in cities so that they don't always have everything single thing.

8. Create some kind of on and off-ramps for connecting smaller roads to expressway - now we need to make an intersections  with the Expressway which makes no sense - the expressway should be express. In this row of thoughts - why should the smallest roads have traffic lights at intersections. That is cosmetic but very annoying.quote>

Roads can use some work, there are several bugs with highways and expressways where it will say the connection is not possible when it actually is... Also the more options they can give to roads the better.

9. The upcoming mass transit - buses - why should they cost so much - the people are paying to use them. In most of the cities the municipality makes profit of them and we should pay to have buses. Why? Just reduce the price.quote>

Buses should be available at a low cost that is a given.

10. A very useful feature from the beta is missing - the lines which shows the traffic when you click on specific road - where did they gone?quote>

No comment.

Because this post became very long, I stop here and I hope some of the developers to answer some of the questions. I'm sure many of you guys playing the game agree with me. So MC, please answer!quote>

I hope MC does listen, I like the game when I should love it and it's not because I am picky or have too many expectations it's just the common sense stuff that either needs to be looked at and in some cases fixed asap.

 

[ACEH 0]

 I'm very happy someone agree with me, thanks Mastaflex. Does anybody played the beta - didn't you remember this feature:

10. A very useful feature from the beta is missing - the lines which shows the traffic when you click on specific road - where did they gone?

I'll post a screenshot:

This feature was so useful for planning new roads, I'm so surprised why didn't they included it in the final version.