Cities XL 2011 Verdict so far

[ElGuito 0]

Hello all. Indeed it is slower than XL. I am running on the same exact machine and after "Click to Confirm..." this new XL 2011 takes up to 5 seconds, sometimes, before I know it took the click.

As it is labeled XL 2011, you would expect for it to fully take advantage of a multiprocessor, multicore system running in 64bit mode on an operating system that can address many Gigabytes of memory, AND offload the graphics load to the GPU. Does not seem to be the case.

 As for the sales pitch of 200 new buildings and structures, well, I'll probably will never see them.

Ok with me to have donated $20 to the new owners, I should have waited some more months and read reviews or tested it with someone else who upgraded. DOH!

[Cob92 360]

Originally posted by: howsaboutyes

I dont like that education can be good with no schools and the same with health and that people move in without electricity and water! !quote>

The game gives you a sort of "honeymoon period" when your city is still small, where your citizens will be satisfied relatively easily. This gives you a chance to get the city set up, and does reflect that larger cities are generally expected to provide more extensive services than small towns. However, once your city grows beyond a small backwater village, your citizens will demand proper schools and healthcare services and you'll find yourself spending quite a bit to keep them happy.

Also, people don't move in without electricity and water. The utility center that you build at the start of the game provides a small amount of electricity and water to get your city started, but you will need to produce or import utilities en masse later in the game.

[City Planner 121]

I honestly can't see what is so complex about trading or mass transit buses.

For trading the city your playing is on the left, now choose the trade partner on the right. You choose omnicorp then click the arrow on their side to sell them something, or choose the arrow on your city side to buy something. How is this complex? Mass transit Buses: Can you imagine the screaming if the game was allowed to choose it's own routes? Anyway, I don't see any complexity in this either, you place a terminal and then place up to 40 bus stops, eventually landing back at the terminal again. Nothing complex about it.

Honestly I can't imagine how you managed to play for 3 hours and not obtain a population that required you to start placing schools and clinics to keep the bobbleheads happy. I'm an ultra slow builder but in three hours I'm way up into the hundreds of thousands of bobbleheads and need to have placed multiple schools, multiple clinics etc. It just doesn't make sence, and I'm on the verge of calling shenanigans, what with 1 post, and the claim that playing for 3 hours you didn't have to place any schools or clinics, or the only other option seems to be that you may not have fully grasped how the game needs to be played.

You may want to give it another go and see how it plays when playing it according to CXL rules.

It's not for everybody, and there will always be people that can't break free of the SC4 grasp, but it's atleast worth a 2nd try in my opinion.  Anyway, you're entitled to your own opinion, as it's not going to be the game for everybody.

[Romaq 18]

Ok I'm done for now with CXL 2011. I *like* highways, but the interchange options are pretty horrific, and terribly sensitive to terrain. I would be ever so much more happy to be able to hover the interchange over a section of existing stretch of highway until I got a 'happy green'. No can do. I can understand elevation sensitivity *OR* understand having the interchange be large. Having to deal with both limitations with so very few choices on interchanges is beginning to annoy me and it stops the game from being fun. I'm really spoiled by my golden hazy memory of how SC4 plays. I'll have to fire up the old game and kick it around on current hardware. It would be good to see how my happy golden memories stack up against the reality of StartUp Manager + NAM + god-knows-what-else. I can come back to CXL once there are some mods to make highway interchanges a little more sane, and maybe some 'construction zone' / 'roads with 'property line setbacks'... a 'cheaper road capacity' I can use now without having to play games to allow for a much larger avenue later. I can't afford an airport now, but I know I want one later and I want to reserve the space for it. An 'In Construction' pack, including some love on planning for highway interchanges would really improve my attitude. But right now I'm just too damned annoyed for the CXL eye-candy to make enough of a difference.

So... we fire up SC:4 with the 2011 upgrades.

[Ant1-b0dy 0]

Originally posted by: ElGuito

Hello all. Indeed it is slower than XL. I am running on the same exact machine and after "Click to Confirm..." this new XL 2011 takes up to 5 seconds, sometimes, before I know it took the click.

As it is labeled XL 2011, you would expect for it to fully take advantage of a multiprocessor, multicore system running in 64bit mode on an operating system that can address many Gigabytes of memory, AND offload the graphics load to the GPU. Does not seem to be the case.

 As for the sales pitch of 200 new buildings and structures, well, I'll probably will never see them.

Ok with me to have donated $20 to the new owners, I should have waited some more months and read reviews or tested it with someone else who upgraded. DOH!

quote>

The title got bought out by FHI after Monte Cristo went bankrupt on it. XL was incomplete as sold and FHI fixed some major issues with the game but there is all one can do in such a short span in time.

Granted multi-core support would have been indeed nice but that would have required the entire code re-write of the game; 64-bit mode would address way more than 3.2GB of memory, but then again it would only be playabe on 64-bit machines leaving the 32-bit crowd in the cold (unless you coded two versions of the game one for each).

[bluespottedhorse 49]

I've been reading a lot of complaints of non mulitcore use with citiesxl. To clarify, most new games ARE NOT multicore, so don't expect XL2011 to be anytime soon. Although most of the computers out there are multicore it is extremely difficult to code for multicore.

[ElGuito 0]

Thanks Ant1-b0dy (cool nick) and BlueSpot. I take back my expectancy of 64bit support, there are not many programs yet that have it, those which do (for example Firefox) are still for testing, since all the plugins don't work.

And yes, it was my enthusiastic decision to get XL 2011 - finally here! I want it! - without reading the small print on the side of the box for the specifications.

Still OK for those who qualify for upgrade price. Some of my friends who haven't seen SimCities before are fascinated with the idea of building a whole city and managing it. So I've temporarily lost control and access to my machine, and may have made a few sales, as some people, who are not into computer simulations, want this at their home computers!

[City Planner 121]

The one thing that I do with regards to saving space is to draw out the small farm roads and then i use the black asphalt plaza texture that is in one of the mods to fill inside of the area surounded by farm roads. This way I know later on that I was saving an area for something even if I don't remember exactly what that something was. Oh and then I delete the small farm road around the black asphalt so that I don't have any issues with them, and it just leaves the black asphalt texture as a reminder and a space that I don't build on until I'm ready to place that planned item like an airport in that area.

[soltangris 42]

Can't you use the 'construction area' to do this?

[Jesse Swiss 6]

OOH LA LA what a great idea City Planner, Im gonna have to use this! I wouldnt use a construction area ( even though it would make sense) because you could mistake it for a manufacturing or heavy industry zone

[howsaboutyes 0]

ok i tried to play CXL again for a few hours got a city with 47,000 and then got fed up with buisnesses going bankrupt and the trade system, how does it work I move the slider then a while later I get a message saying 'you cant trade something something not enough tokens blah blah blah' which annoyed me and then something went wrong with the bus which made me get angry, then quit the game and built a nice new city in SM4.

Also why do you have to build a town hall first all the time, its so stupid!

my rating 4/10 - maybe buy it if you want to appreciate how good sim city actually is!

[City Planner 121]

The trade system works on a token system.

ALmost everything that you build in your city produces towards tokens. For example when you build water towers, they add into the pool of water tokens. When you have more tokens of any given resource that is tradeable that is higher than the amount that your city uses, then you can trade the excess tokens.

The message I "think" you are getting is likely a message telling you that you either do not have enough extra tokens to sell them, or that you do not have enough cash "income" to buy them. Cash income is different than the total amount of cash that you have in the city.

If you are negative in cash income then the game stops you from trading with your own cities and you can only trade with omnicorp, but as long as you have atleast +1 cash income you can trade with your other cities. If you need cash income then choose one of your other cities that has a surplus of cash income and give it to your poorer city, it will then be positive cash income in your city.

It's almost always better to trade with your other cities than it is with Omnicorp since Omnicorp charges so much and gives so little in trading, something like they pay you 35tokens (which is about 3500.00 cash income) for each token, but charge you about 90 cash tokens to sell you any single resource, as you can see that's one big difference. So it's best to specialize some of your cities so that you can simply syphon off those items you need for free if you can't afford to pay for them as you can do exactly that in trading with your own cities, you can just take as much as the other city has to offer and don't have to give anything in return if you don't want to.

I can't imagine what went wrong with your bus, other than you need 50,000 inhabitants to be able to even place the bus but you only had 47,000 which makes me think you have been using a mod of some sort to allow you to place the buses before the 50,000 bobbleheads are in your city.

Beyond that however, I can't imagine what would go wrong with the bus system as it's never produced any problems for me and your messages are too vague to read anything into them.  Maybe if you give us the real wording to any problems that you experience somebody can help you, then again maybe not.

Why do you have to always build a city hall first?

I don't know, it's the way the game is setup to be.  Sure it would be nice to place it later on at some certain population level, however it doesn't bother me to place it first as it's just one little building.

My personal feeling is that if I were to compare this unmodded to Simcity 4 vanilla, I feel that CXL2011 is a more enjoyable game.   I remember recently reloading SC4 vanilla and hated it.  It isn't until I reloaded all my mods into SC4 that it became enjoyable again for me.  But to each their own.

[Cob92 360]

Originally posted by: howsaboutyes

ok i tried to play CXL again for a few hours got a city with 47,000 and then got fed up with buisnesses going bankrupt and the trade system, how does it work I move the slider then a while later I get a message saying 'you cant trade something something not enough tokens blah blah blah' which annoyed me and then something went wrong with the bus which made me get angry, then quit the game and built a nice new city in SM4.

Also why do you have to build a town hall first all the time, its so stupid!

my rating 4/10 - maybe buy it if you want to appreciate how good sim city actually is!quote>

You might want to try the tutorials; I think they have one in there that explains trade. If not, here's basically how it works:

Resources are measured in units called tokens. The amount of resources per token is not known except that one cash token is equal to $100 revenue per cycle. Every building in CXL requires certain resources to perform optimally, and in cases of severe shortages, bankruptcies and abandonment will result. To obtain resources that you can't produce in the city that you are currently playing, you can either set up other cities to produce the resources you need or you can just trade with OmniCorp.

The resource system is as to CXL gameplay as RCI demand is to SC4 gameplay.

As for the town hall thing, I think that's little more than a holdover from City Life (which, regardless of what MC tells you, CXL clearly evolved from). At least you don't have to build a giant 10 story government edifice like you had to do in CL; I actually like the look of the village hall.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

You can delete city hall once you have your town started but I think that gives everything the "Not Connected to City Hall" message. I actually liked the look of the Executive (Suit/RadChic) City Hall edifice from City Life and I wish that the (upgradable) city hall and community centers were available as other buildings in the City Hall sort (and that both City Halls would have the same effect).

This explains tokens: http://citiesxl.wikia.com/wiki/Tokens

[hunkske 53]

I've been playing CXL now for a while, and I still stand by my earlier comments in this thread. It is quite an enjoyable game, if you "stop" comparing it to SC4.

We all know by now it is not SC4 and will probably never be.. Its setup is different, and let us not forget , SC4 vanilla edition wasn't wow either.. It's only with Rush Hour and more importantly, all the lotting and modding of the players, that SC4 came to be what it is now.

As it stands now with CXL, after playing for a while, I find everything gets quite repetitive, and I find it very hard to give my cities a 'unique' look or feeling. At the moment there is simply too little variation in buildings, for every class of residences, commercial buildings, etc. There is too little of parks, too little of 'environment' options, too little variety in leisure buildings (which I still find should not be up to us to provide/place, but that's not going to change, since its in the game setup), etc.

So I hope there'll be a lot of modding/lotting for the game, which will make it much more enjoyable, and which will allow us to really give that uniqueness about our cities like we can now do with SC4.

[infected_silence 1]

i think this game needs a tool to convert sc4 lots from the exchange in cities xl content ...hehe just kidding

but i think that most players that already enjoying all this years the variety and and customization that the online sim city community have offered are doomed get bored too easy (including myself) if they play the games out of the box (including sim city 4)...

in my opinion the work that the guys at Focus have to do is almost known by anyone to city building games this years...

take the benefits of sim city 4, like ingame mechanism - deepness - real managing simulation - PLUGINS folder - map modification and tools (roads - transportation) and bring them to 2011.with 3d capabilities but also good building perspective (find the new grid system guys )

we all want to take a 3d ride to our cities..this cooooooooooooooooooool but also we need better building tools not easier or less...but BETTER..

to all guys working at Focus...in my opinion you dont have to shy or feel guilty if you use same mechanisms (but improved ) as sim city 4...take the best parts out of this magnificent city building game, the best mechanisms and make them better or apply them to 3d functionality.

and for me this is not copying - this evolving...its called evolution....Halo is a GREAT FPS...Doom 2 was also great and much older...but that doesnt make Halo a copy of doom...its evolution.

we dont have to let the ideas that sim city brought to city building games to die just to make something completely different...we have to evolve them....

hope the next years to be a BOOM for the city building games that we so much love...!!

[fisherman 0]

I've put about 15 hours into CXL2011 having passed on the first release, and I like it quite a lot.

Head-to-head comparison: CXL2011 vs SC4RH vanilla with no mods?  I'd take CXL2011 hands-down.

CXL is buggy?  Get over it.  SC4 is buggy too.  I've had it randomly quit plenty of times over the years, the application doesn't run as well on newer machines, and it could have been a whole lot more friendly to content developers.

You can't figure things out in CXL?  Okay...

1) Go through the tutorials.  The scrpiting is horrible, but they won't take much more than an hour.

2) Look at the options menu.  You can switch to "advanced mode" so that, for example, if you want to build an Expressway as your main road instead of the quickly-obsolete Small Avenue, or if you want to start with high-density zones right off the bat, you can.

3)  https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=370&threadid=112063&enterthread=y

4)  https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=370&threadid=110884&enterthread=y

I think what makes SC4 so awesome is the accumulation of community content.  My SC4 plugins folder currently stands at 1.2GB.  That's quite a lot of custom content.  And for me, it's what really makes the game worth playing.  The fact that CXL is fun even without that says a lot.

Definitely worth it, for my money.  

Originally posted by: Geodesic7

 It's early days yet so there is still plenty of scope for improvement and I see a lot of potential in the game.  I wish they had spent a bit more time getting some of the minor problems fixed before release.

Here's a few examples:

Roundabouts and roads don't align properly

Alignment issues with intersections and so-called fast lanes

I think these next two speak for themselves

On the "English roads" these yellow boxes and look right appear everywhere there is a junction

The yellow boxes even show up on the corners and bends

This street light just looks terrible

And these street lights are just wrong

Street furniture - I'd like to get rid of all this - if you know how please share

quote>

Seriously?  And you don't mind all the glitches in SC4?  These are not one bit worse.

[Cob92 360]

[seriously?  And you don't mind all the glitches in SC4?  These are not one bit worse.quote>

Plus, CXL has a traffic simulator that actually works properly. Traffic patterns in CXL are much closer to real life than SC4 (where Sims would pile into back streets and trails leaving your giant freeway system unused), and people don't complain when their job is less than a mile away.

What CXL needs is for Focus to release the tools that modders need to get real custom buildings into the game. Custom content is the one thing that SC4 has that CXL surely and truly lacks.

[Jesse Swiss 6]

Yes Cobhris96 you're correct, one of the downfalls of SC4 I thought was the traffic simulator, but I do wish that your highways and expressways would have a little more traffic depending on City Size, overall Highways/ Freeways in SC4 were useless but in CXL 2011 it is a great addition

[Romaq 18]

Well, looking at things like http://www.citiesxs.net/forum/index.php/topic,1795.0.html reminds me of *why* I want to go back to SC4, though I have not actually done that just yet. I've been spending time carefully looking at mods and documenting them to include in CXL2011. A fishing pier and a fishing factory with the karel53-mods. Not so much what they are, as the fact it was done. The one-way expressway, mods to make business hotels and other such consumers, and so on. Yeah, it's the creative mods and such that make this interesting. http://www.simpeg.com stuff is just... what the hell? Things that make my cities unique, signatures the way the Space Needle makes any city Seattle, Washington. Water plopables in SC4 to create lakes and waterfalls where none were possible.

SC4RH is still on on the shelves. I have to blame this website and others like it, though by 'blame', I really mean my appreciation for the hard work. CXL needs to have enough of the game engine opened up to allow the CXL version of the NAM.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The revolving restaurant looks vaguely like the Space Needle. I have not made a Seattle redo because it is missing other important landmarks (Smith Tower and Washington Mutual Tower/1201 1st Avenue, Columbia Center has some lookalikes though).

ETA: Oh yah, there is also currently no custom Seattle map.

[Romaq 18]

Yeah, it would be cool to redo Seattle except for the horrid freakin' highway interchanges and their inability to cope with elevation changes. But I always look for Smith Tower, as I am a 'Smith'. I pointed that out to my wife, and she was like, "Yes? And?" Well, it's an early skyscraper, and it's Smith Tower? "Uhm.... And?"

Sometimes these things just kinda get lost on wives. But it would be cool if we can get the necessary file format data to create our own models instead of reskinning existing buildings.

[RisKFactoR 6]

Hey, been a while since I last posted to Simtropolis, but I have a question real quick.

Forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere, or is not the appropriate thread to ask this in (short on time!) I was wondering if you need CXL 09 in order to play CXL 11 with fully functional features taht come with the game? I heard it mentioned that 11 was an "expansion." I hope it's not the case, for I was completely turned off from purchaseing CXL 09 due to the restrictions of single player mode, and refuse to spend any money on that piece of garbage.

However, since CXL has changed hands, and the current developer has unlocked all the features for single player mode, I would gladly open my wallet even if it cost more than $20. So long as you don't need CXL 09.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

It is a standalone expansion. You do not need Cites XL original to play Cities XL 2011 but you get a 50% discount.

[EAGCE 2]

The traffic simulator alone makes cities XL better than SC4.  The traffic issue was the thing that drove me away from SC4.

And I love blueprints.

I'd just like to see more transit options. Light Rail would be awesome.  Working roundabouts would be nice. 

Even though the traffic simulator is better, I'd really like to see more citizens using mass transit.

[Jesse Swiss 6]

I would like more traffic Maybe like one of those Traffic Trees in SC4, Oh that would be great

[RisKFactoR 6]

Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle

It is a standalone expansion. You do not need Cites XL original to play Cities XL 2011 but you get a 50% discount.quote>

Hey, cool! Sounds like Imma havet to open my wallet for the game then. Kudos to Focus Interactive for making a new city sim game come closer to living up to its potential!

[_MostlyHarmless 17]

I like it. It takes time to get used to but it's fun. I'm still disappointed in lack of rail options, but the transit routes are a great addition. The game is a resource hog unfortunately. As soon as you get more than 5,000 people you system will lag big time!

[Screwballl 196]

Originally posted by: northsider1983

I like it. It takes time to get used to but it's fun. I'm still disappointed in lack of rail options, but the transit routes are a great addition. The game is a resource hog unfortunately. As soon as you get more than 5,000 people you system will lag big time!quote>

Its not so much a resource hog as it has a memory leak. As it builds all the different connections, sastisfactions and so on, it keeps eating up more memory. Go back to the region then back into the city every 1-3 hours to reset it.

[MayorMarty 1]

I'm very surprised by this game, I thought it would be awful but I'm really liking it. I've only played 2011 though, not the old version.

My honest opinion:

If they allow modding to the extent that it is available in SC4 I can see it living on for a long time and even becoming the new SC4.

If they don't, give it 6 months and it will be gone.

Simple as that really.

On a sidenote, you can't develop waterfronts like in SC4, if this is added, by the devs or by modders I can see it sticking around, but at the moment you can't do anything like what you can with Pegs kits for example, but neither could SC4 in its infancy.