Cities XL 2011 Verdict so far

soltangris · October 27, 2010

Is there a mod to remove or decrease the in game advertisments? They are so annoying and unrealisitc?

You're kidding, right? How is seeing stuff from the real world in the game unrealistic? Or you claim that the hotel Copacabana Palace is a Walmart publicity stunt?

City Planner · October 27, 2010

Originally posted by: MCjohnstown

Well then. I v'e read all these comments and all the ups and downs for CXL2011. Can someone please tell me if it's worth the 20/30$?quote>

That's what people have been trying to say in this thread.

But if you need it to be more blunt, then, Yes, I consider the 2011 version of the game to be worth the $20.00 price of admission.

It's got a lot that is good about it, and will only be made better if Focus updates and fixes the bugs and the modders are given a bit more access to the files to mod them.

The thing that the game suffers the most to me is a lack of buildings. Even with the reported 700 buildings, it doesn't do anything for when a certain social crowd only has 9 to 12 buildings to choose from.

The game to me is pure eye candy, it is what SC4 has evolved into with so many people playing sandbox type of SC4 and that's not a bad thing. To use a mod that inflicts millions of dollars in income, and then to use the expert mode of placement allows us to build the city of our dreams, as long as we do so within the constraints of what is necessary to be built in the game to make things function, i.e. don't go building 6500 offices and nothing else, else it doesn't function properly.

Yes, a good game that could only be better through patches to fix the bugs, and more enhancements, and more access to the files that modders need access to to keep growing the game.

All in all, the 2011 version for previous owners of the game, goes a long way towards completing the game, but it still HAS to have bug fixes to fully complete the game before they move on to any paid expansions or sequels in my opinion.

City Planner · October 27, 2010

Originally posted by: MCjohnstown

Well then. I v'e read all these comments and all the ups and downs for CXL2011. Can someone please tell me if it's worth the 20/30$?quote>

That's what people have been trying to say in this thread.

But if you need it to be more blunt, then, Yes, I consider the 2011 version of the game to be worth the $20.00 price of admission.

It's got a lot that is good about it, and will only be made better if Focus updates and fixes the bugs and the modders are given a bit more access to the files to mod them.

The thing that the game suffers the most to me is a lack of buildings. Even with the reported 700 buildings, it doesn't do anything for when a certain social crowd only has 9 to 12 buildings to choose from.

The game to me is pure eye candy, it is what SC4 has evolved into with so many people playing sandbox type of SC4 and that's not a bad thing. To use a mod that inflicts millions of dollars in income, and then to use the expert mode of placement allows us to build the city of our dreams, as long as we do so within the constraints of what is necessary to be built in the game to make things function, i.e. don't go building 6500 offices and nothing else, else it doesn't function properly.

Yes, a good game that could only be better through patches to fix the bugs, and more enhancements, and more access to the files that modders need access to to keep growing the game.

All in all, the 2011 version for previous owners of the game, goes a long way towards completing the game, but it still HAS to have bug fixes to fully complete the game before they move on to any paid expansions or sequels in my opinion.

rujagorn · October 29, 2010

It's just the beginning of 3D era for city building game and this game is the pioneer.

Simcity Societies is too lame to count. And I'm quite very pleased with this very early stage.

I can imagine when it's fully developed in near future together with countless ploppable from modders,

it will definitely be the best game in its genre. By then everyone will forget, what is SC4?

rujagorn · October 29, 2010

It's just the beginning of 3D era for city building game and this game is the pioneer.

Simcity Societies is too lame to count. And I'm quite very pleased with this very early stage.

I can imagine when it's fully developed in near future together with countless ploppable from modders,

it will definitely be the best game in its genre. By then everyone will forget, what is SC4?

artforce1 · October 29, 2010

I shelled out the $20 for this game and I think its worth it. It keeps my occupied but I really wish we could have some patches or mods that would let us do the following:

1. Make our own highway onramps and off ramps. Having only 2 basic interchange types is annoying to me since I build alot of my cities on highways and not railways.

2. Mkae our highway sings: How many times do I look at the ingame highway signs and think: Those roads arent even close to eachother.

3. Maybe some weather or something for adding waterfalls or lakes would be neat.

artforce1 · October 29, 2010

I shelled out the $20 for this game and I think its worth it. It keeps my occupied but I really wish we could have some patches or mods that would let us do the following:

1. Make our own highway onramps and off ramps. Having only 2 basic interchange types is annoying to me since I build alot of my cities on highways and not railways.

2. Mkae our highway sings: How many times do I look at the ingame highway signs and think: Those roads arent even close to eachother.

3. Maybe some weather or something for adding waterfalls or lakes would be neat.

bluespottedhorse · October 29, 2010

I think you can already make your own highway ramps.

bluespottedhorse · October 29, 2010

I think you can already make your own highway ramps.

zwr100 · October 29, 2010

IMO If you enjoyed CXL 09 in spite of the massive problems and failures, CXl 11 is worth $20. I also think it's very easy to get $20 worth in hours of gameplay out of just about any game versus other things you'd spend $20 on...movies, bowling, drinking... What is worth $20, what is not?

I'm just going to point out the Pros:

The memory leak, or whatever performance issue, seems a little better - my laptop runs '11 better than '09, though huge cities are still impossible for me...

The graphics settings are better, and you can increase or decrease features such as pedestrians, vehicles, and decorations, which improve performance, and can be used to get rid of some eyesores. (directly related to running better)

I don't like mods, so I'm happy to have blueprints, more maps, metro, and the europe, china, and beach packs.

The fact that you can trade with your own cities makes the game a bit more functional.

There's some other stuff too...

Personally, I appreciate the massive effort Monte Cristo put into cxl, since obviously if it were easy and profitable some else would have done it. I think online cities are the future of city builders, and the fact that it's so new, I understand the challanges of development. It could have ended with MC, but since FHI picked it up there is some hope it will move forward. I'd much rather spend $20 on an incomplete game I really like, than on a perfectly polished beautiful game I don't like...

zwr100 · October 29, 2010

IMO If you enjoyed CXL 09 in spite of the massive problems and failures, CXl 11 is worth $20. I also think it's very easy to get $20 worth in hours of gameplay out of just about any game versus other things you'd spend $20 on...movies, bowling, drinking... What is worth $20, what is not?

I'm just going to point out the Pros:

The memory leak, or whatever performance issue, seems a little better - my laptop runs '11 better than '09, though huge cities are still impossible for me...

The graphics settings are better, and you can increase or decrease features such as pedestrians, vehicles, and decorations, which improve performance, and can be used to get rid of some eyesores. (directly related to running better)

I don't like mods, so I'm happy to have blueprints, more maps, metro, and the europe, china, and beach packs.

The fact that you can trade with your own cities makes the game a bit more functional.

There's some other stuff too...

Personally, I appreciate the massive effort Monte Cristo put into cxl, since obviously if it were easy and profitable some else would have done it. I think online cities are the future of city builders, and the fact that it's so new, I understand the challanges of development. It could have ended with MC, but since FHI picked it up there is some hope it will move forward. I'd much rather spend $20 on an incomplete game I really like, than on a perfectly polished beautiful game I don't like...

Romaq · October 29, 2010

Several things to note:

SC4 is *STILL* on the shelf at Wal-Mart for $10, the SC: Box for $20. Though if asked, I'd say SC: Box is good for Keith Zizza's music, but note that SC: S is not the value, just the music with it. I hope SimTrop has some sort of 10th anniversary planned in 2013 (2003 release date). I would also be pleased to note SC4 still on the shelf. This is relevant to CXL 2010 because it is clear that the CXL line *still* lives in the shadow of SC:4

Music... it's good, but there is not so very much of it and I don't believe anything was added to the 2011. There is no means to make a custom track list. The music also cuts out when I switch to other applications on my second monitor while I check out things on the web or answer IM's. So I have my Windows Media Player playing my 'City Builder' list, for which CXL is again dwarfed by SC4 and the SC: S music tracks. I did cut a few tracks from the list as being too annoying, I don't recall which ones.

I understand why CXL went the 'globe/ node' model for their cities, but I find I still very much miss SC4 regions. The CXL maps are all grouped together by the same type, and there is no notion of 'distance cost' between two cities I would pick. So I create the city of Landing to get started, and I make another city built around growing just food, another city that needs water. The cities span the globe, and there is no sense of 'neighborhood advantage' as you have with SC4 regions. Looking at the globe, I find a bunch of very similar or identical maps clustered in an area. The map I need to add is somewhere very distant on the globe, but there is no notion of relative cost distance adds between any two cities, so 'where' I pick to have a city on the globe simply does not matter beyond my choice of maps. That's a design choice, and I don't think there is a 'fix' for that. Besides, if you had to figure a 'distance cost' between cities when dealing with tokens, it would make the game horribly complex and a pain to cope with.

One relatively simple suggestion, however, would be what was in the code in the *planet* version: if you select a given type of terrain or resource (or difficulty level?) then the regions that had maps of that sort would hilight on the globe. I would want to show you in my CJ, were I to make one, why a given region was strategically important, resources in and around that region on the planet, and so on. Since the globe doesn't show me anything beyond random dots, the whole globe metaphor becomes rather useless and it could have been done just using a list of available maps. DO have the globe with city dots in there, but have it tell me something meaningful that I can't see from just a list!

So I load the city, and all I have is all that's in the city. It's good to have the 'full use' of the map, but one of the design choices I would have pushed for is the notion of a 'skirt'. In SC4, your city *can* be surrounded by other terrain in the region, and you get to see everything in region mode. With CXL, you build up to the edge, and everything is there that you can build upon. On an SC4 city, you build your road and your port 'here' but not 'there' because of what you know is adjacent. With CXL, there is no 'adjacent' and no consequence to where you decide to build your connections. One design change I would have made is to have 'skirts' to cities. Those would be areas beyond which you can build that could at least 'hint' at things beyond. Caesar IV would have ruins just beyond where you can build. It would have a road connection point that your C:IV 'citizens' came in from. I think that would have been a far better model for CXL to have adopted.

I picture maps with road connections already to the edge of your new city, and some cities with highways already built across them. SC4 has 'scenarios', where you have to *fix* a problem, or you have a certain amount of time before a problem that you have to fix appears. The real life city of Bellingham had a real life 'highway' scenario. The new US-5 had to go 'through' the city, and we either had a route we could have go right through our downtown area (where Industry Zones were by the bay) or it could go through the less expensive 'cornfield' area around the city. We had a definite area where we knew the highway would start in our area, and a firm idea of the point this new highway would reach. US-5 ended up going the cheaper route through our cornfields, and that caused our residential, industrial and commercial 'zones' to end up in the former cornfields while downtown Bellingham lost much of that former business. NOTHING like this is an issue with CXL 2011, CXL does not have scenario challenges tied to the maps. But it *could* have. I could see a timed challenge where you had an existing 'expressway' route through an existing city, and you had to decide the route for a new highway through your area. If you didn't have a highway in place by a given time, the traffic through your expressway *WILL* die off and your city will die along with it. Deal with this scenario if you dare!

Nope... CXL doesn't have scenario developments like that. The challenges appear to be in the form of resource location and terrain, along with how to develop your city. And all that 'development' goes right out the window if you unlock everything to begin with. I'm very happy that CXL 2011 does allow me to unlock everything up front. That has been a huge boon towards learning how to size things. How big is an expressway? How big is a highway? Can I actually fit this interchange in this area? By the way, CXL 2011 does not have needful planning tools. I'm using dirt roads to map out space for things. Several changes I would have in lieu of outright cheating that would save much pain in city planning:

Instead of 'unlocking' a building, allow an option to place a construction zone the exact size and shape of an intended construction. Your interchanges, for instance. Would that I could have dropped a 'construction field' outline for those big-azz interchanges where I knew they had to go so I did not *HAVE* to cheat, build one, build around it, then delete the damned thing as I couldn't afford it yet. Same with other buildings I know I'll want or need (Airports/ Harbors), but I can't afford them yet. And yes, I've been building my city blocks in groups of 12 of the smaller buildings with a grassy road between them so I can convert the block of 12 to a block of 6 of the high density size later. That's an obnoxious pain in my arse. If you are going to do that, why make an 'alley' mode to the low & medium density blocks that let me drop 12 at a time with an alley that I can easily make into a 6 building high density structure? Make the alley a dirt road, and fill in behind with just grass & trees. I dunno, but don't make block upgrades such a pain in the arse!
This 'construction zone' thing ought to allow for you to place roads without destroying the 'zone'. Ok, so I want to leave room to put an exchange tomorrow, but today I still need a damned road that lets me travel. So let me build a crossroads in that zone while preserving the room I need for that interchange I know I'll need later. Don't *force* me to unlock, cheat to get money, then destroy the work of placing things I can't afford at this stage because *YOU* didn't provide sufficient tools that I would not have to cheat to create the city in the vision I want!
Highways are an EPIC FAIL. At least with normal roads, I have control over straight-line, 8 compass directions and curves. I can control crossings to suit. I can *make* roundabouts, if I have to. I use dirt roads to 'cut' bits off of roads I'm working on. CXL 2010 does NOT provide tools for highways. Perhaps I missed it, and to my shame I need to go through the entire tutorial to be sure I didn't just miss it, But I can't make my highway straight, as far as I can tell, without using dirt road guides to ensure how straight it is. Damn you, CXL! And I can't 'cut' highway chunks out as I can at least do with roads. Nope, I have to delete the whole damned thing end-point to end-point. Bite me, CXL 2010! Your highways are th3 l00z. No cookie for you! Again, I'm forced to 'cheat' because of a limited oversight in tools to develop high-expense infrastructure.
Roundabouts and interchanges. I have no tools to make my own to suit me, and the ones provided are damned clumsy. The 'road' interchange has roundabouts on each end. That kinda makes sense, really. I can deal with that. But then a) I can't connect it with just any road, it has to be a large avenue, and 2) I can't connect to those roundabouts with anything other than straight in... I can't come at the roundabout from an angle. Damnit! So we have something perfectly useful wasted along with that huge heaping gob of space. I would suggest a change in the 'block structure' of such things. Even if you can't get away from fixed 4-sided regular polygons (squares, rectangles), you should code to allow fixed road types that can go 'into' your fixed polygons. I see a highway interchange that is incomplete, in that a one way road offramp 'spur' pulls off the highway and ends at nothing. It is up to the person building the road to connect the one-way offramp with an ordinary road partially enters the fixed interchange block, and that one-way road can then go 'anywhere' legal to other one-way roads. If you create four such 'spurs' for each orientation and on/ off direction, you have only one more puzzle piece to sweat over which is...
Bridges. Epic Fail. As with highways, I can not force point-to-point straight or 8-compass direction bridges. I am forced to use curved bridges & tunnels. EPIC FAIL, no cookie for you, CXL! I can't build the bridge 'even' on both sides. I have to do this clumsy thing that makes one side of a bridge distinct and awkward-looking from the other side. I generally make multiple passes at it to get my bridge over a highway just the way I want. That gets expensive, and again I'm forced to cheat just because I don't want my highway bridge to look like crap. There may be better ways to do it than I am trying, but it is not obvious from what I already know on how to build roads. If I drag a bridge line from one side of a highway to another, why not simply offer me 'confirm' and do an optimized bridge in ghost form until I click the menu? Same me some pain! Why must you force me to cheat simply with the effort and expense to not have a bridge over a highway look like crap? EPIC FAIL, CXL!
Roundabouts... EPIC FAIL, CXL 2011! I'm glad to see them in, but again... trying to build using them is horribly expensive (e.g. forces me to cheat because of reiterations). This is where the notion of imbedding required or optional road-type end-points within a polygon would make a huge difference. Or... what the hell, just allow me a 'circle' button on the straight/ compass/ curve menu. I draw a road to an endpoint, then confirm. I then click a 'circle' button on the same road-type, then I click the button again. As I 'drag' the road, it becomes the opposite side of a circle from the prior endpoint, and the circle is as tight as is 'sane' for that road. Perhaps the endpoint is an expressway, so then I change to 'large avenue' and go from there. I can then make a tight avenue circle, click to get my endpoint, and I now have a perfect circle avenue exactly how I want. I make the circle a 'one way', and I can then draw other roads up to that circle pretty as I please. Current CXL 2011 implementations give me a forced road-type with a fixed size, and trying to *PLACE* one at a specific point on the map is No Fun . So... thanks for the roundabouts, but it's more like, "Thanks for nothin', man!"

Ok, so that's more than several points on the city planning issue with regard to roads and future structures. Some of these problems are resolved in SC4, especially given the NAM and mods along the way. But the 'I know I must plan ahead for X' problem without adequate tools to do such planning are a cause of frustration. Ok, so if I'm negligent in planning ahead, and if that causes me pain, I understand. But when I *KNOW* I'm going to build a highway 'there somewhere', I *KNOW* I'm going to want an airport in a certain location, I *KNOW* I need interchanges, and the tools to let me make those necessary upgrades are somewhere between piss-poor and non-existent, I get frustrated and angry. I want to throw something and hit someone, preferably a dev involved in CXL 2011. If I'm going to cheat, I want to cheat because it's fun. I do not want to cheat because the tools suck so badly I find I'm forced into it.

Other aspects of the game seem ok. Buses & trains appear, and I only got far enough to play with buses, and only a little. I keep getting my undies caught in a bundle on the 'city planning' stage, and that has so far prevented me from really looking at busses & trains. Other people can give their take, but if I wasn't so annoyed as hell trying to set up transportation I would love to look more closely at the bus & train side.

Upgrading low density to medium density plots should be better. When the option of medium density structures come up, I would love to be able to select an area to upgrade... drag & click, get a cost to see if I can afford it, do the upgrade. I can't *find* the damned buildings easily to upgrade, even if I should wish to do so. Even worse is the upgrade of low & medium density to higher density. You *DID* plan on having grassy road 'alleys' between those 2x3 blocks, didn't you? You didn't? It sure sucks to be you! I don't even mind that so much, given the rest of the game. So long as I allow for the grassy road gap, the fact I can identify lower density structures by size to upgrade them, it is *LESS* of an issue than upgrading low density to medium. And that, to me, is rather sad. Lordy how I miss SC4 zoning!

SC4 terraforming vs. CitiesXL 2011... CXL has 'flatten' tools, 3 sizes, that's it. Bite me, CXL! I understand that part of this is because of the shadow map. Even if you took the time to totally and completely flatten the CXL map, you will still observe 'terrain shadows' that are burned onto the map. Between the shadow map and the color map on top of the terrain mesh, you 'perceive' a great deal more detail than what is really there in the elevation mesh, so from the developer point of view, it makes sense to have minimal tools for editing the course terrain mesh when the enduser has no means to 'update' the terrain mesh or re-burn the pretty terrain maps. Allowing the enduser to directly interact with those maps would greatly inflate the size of the stored map on game saves, as well as completely p0wn the CPU while it does the calculations of the shadow map... I'm not clear if the color map could be redone at all without a licensed version of http://www.world-machine.com/index.php. Likely not. So "Leaving Things at That" allows for really beautiful scenes in which to build your city.

Bite me, CXL! You are in the shadow of SC4. You may not like having to be the game in that shadow, but you are. It would have been better to allow terrain mods at least as well as SC4 does, even if it did not appear as pretty, than to not allow such mods. So I have this nice, pretty land in which to build, but making bridges (the pain expressed above) had me create divots in the landscape, for which I now have divots. Your terrain tools should include circles for 'revert'. You didn't want it to be 'too easy' for me to trash your pretty landscape, but simply by building I have done so. *NOW* that I have trashed it by mistake on the fault of your ham-fisted way of doing interchanges and zone upgrades, I can't put it *BACK* the way it was. The only means I have to hope to put the landscape where it 'kinda sorta' was is using roads, if it even works at all for a given situation. Again, "thanks for nothing" in your effort to preserve the pretty purity of your land over my control what I intend to do with the land. A 'revert in this circle' would have gone a long way, but it's too bad you didn't even make the effort.

I love the beauty of CitiesXL 2011. I love standing at points in the map and looking at open spaces, views in the distance, my city below. I love clicking on cars and 'driving along' with them. I must say that I miss the surprise of seeing what the Sims would build within a given zone. CXL 2011 has much beauty, but little surprise and a ton of "I'm so annoyed I'm close to violence" with it.

While I'm thinking of it... maps. I can put up a map for agriculture, but then when I try to lay down any road besides the tiny dirt road, the map goes away. Damnit! I would have said that the map is 'toggle', that if I want to build my roads and things with that map up, the resource map can *STAY* up until I toggle it *OFF*. I suppose that allowing the small dirt road to build with the agri map on is a bug, but *I* say it's a bug the map goes off with any *OTHER* road. More annoyance with CXL 2011.

Maps... to be more specific, I wish to save the 'overhead' resource maps. I believe ctrl+f11 will save the map for me, but in other versions of CXL, I could not use that to save resource map data. I hope the CXL mod team will work out details of teasing that data out of the .pak files. It isn't cheating for me to know where resources *ARE*, because you show it to me on the map when I want, even at the start of my city. It is an agony that I can't easily have that data where I can load it in on an image editor complete with the color map and plan how to lay out my city. More frustration with CitiesXL 2011.

Placement tools, lack thereof. CitiesXL does not use a 'grid' the way that SC4 does, and that is good. Unfortunately, everything WITHIN CitiesXL is even more 'grid based' than SC4 with rectangles in place of small square 'zones', and how the cursor 'snaps' to even grid points on the 'gridless' map. But I have no means to see the 'snap grid' and use it to my advantage. I would strongly suggest a toggle switch that will put a 'snap circle' around the cursor. When I move the cursor around, I would see minor and major lines of where the cursor would snap to, provided nothing else attempts to draw the cursor away such as a building or road end-point. Major lines are needed also, say every 4 or 5 minor lines. That will let me plan on lines some distance apart. Currently, I have to draw dirt roads to have distant parts of a plan link up. Damnit, CitiesXL!

Anyway, all of the above is what is on my mind at the moment. I'd like to keep going with CitiesXL, but cumulative frustration with the 'planning/ building' stage of the game has me very inclined to shelf CXL 2010 for a while, and if anything resume SC4 given today's mods. I may just complete the CXL 2011 tutorials to see what features would help the annoyance factor if I knew they existed. But I find the experience with CXL 2011 full of promise and eye-candy, but somewhere between disappointment in the shadow of SC4, and Epic Fail on issues where small changes could have a huge impact on the experience.

--Romaq

Romaq · October 29, 2010

Several things to note:

SC4 is *STILL* on the shelf at Wal-Mart for $10, the SC: Box for $20. Though if asked, I'd say SC: Box is good for Keith Zizza's music, but note that SC: S is not the value, just the music with it. I hope SimTrop has some sort of 10th anniversary planned in 2013 (2003 release date). I would also be pleased to note SC4 still on the shelf. This is relevant to CXL 2010 because it is clear that the CXL line *still* lives in the shadow of SC:4

Music... it's good, but there is not so very much of it and I don't believe anything was added to the 2011. There is no means to make a custom track list. The music also cuts out when I switch to other applications on my second monitor while I check out things on the web or answer IM's. So I have my Windows Media Player playing my 'City Builder' list, for which CXL is again dwarfed by SC4 and the SC: S music tracks. I did cut a few tracks from the list as being too annoying, I don't recall which ones.

I understand why CXL went the 'globe/ node' model for their cities, but I find I still very much miss SC4 regions. The CXL maps are all grouped together by the same type, and there is no notion of 'distance cost' between two cities I would pick. So I create the city of Landing to get started, and I make another city built around growing just food, another city that needs water. The cities span the globe, and there is no sense of 'neighborhood advantage' as you have with SC4 regions. Looking at the globe, I find a bunch of very similar or identical maps clustered in an area. The map I need to add is somewhere very distant on the globe, but there is no notion of relative cost distance adds between any two cities, so 'where' I pick to have a city on the globe simply does not matter beyond my choice of maps. That's a design choice, and I don't think there is a 'fix' for that. Besides, if you had to figure a 'distance cost' between cities when dealing with tokens, it would make the game horribly complex and a pain to cope with.

One relatively simple suggestion, however, would be what was in the code in the *planet* version: if you select a given type of terrain or resource (or difficulty level?) then the regions that had maps of that sort would hilight on the globe. I would want to show you in my CJ, were I to make one, why a given region was strategically important, resources in and around that region on the planet, and so on. Since the globe doesn't show me anything beyond random dots, the whole globe metaphor becomes rather useless and it could have been done just using a list of available maps. DO have the globe with city dots in there, but have it tell me something meaningful that I can't see from just a list!

So I load the city, and all I have is all that's in the city. It's good to have the 'full use' of the map, but one of the design choices I would have pushed for is the notion of a 'skirt'. In SC4, your city *can* be surrounded by other terrain in the region, and you get to see everything in region mode. With CXL, you build up to the edge, and everything is there that you can build upon. On an SC4 city, you build your road and your port 'here' but not 'there' because of what you know is adjacent. With CXL, there is no 'adjacent' and no consequence to where you decide to build your connections. One design change I would have made is to have 'skirts' to cities. Those would be areas beyond which you can build that could at least 'hint' at things beyond. Caesar IV would have ruins just beyond where you can build. It would have a road connection point that your C:IV 'citizens' came in from. I think that would have been a far better model for CXL to have adopted.

I picture maps with road connections already to the edge of your new city, and some cities with highways already built across them. SC4 has 'scenarios', where you have to *fix* a problem, or you have a certain amount of time before a problem that you have to fix appears. The real life city of Bellingham had a real life 'highway' scenario. The new US-5 had to go 'through' the city, and we either had a route we could have go right through our downtown area (where Industry Zones were by the bay) or it could go through the less expensive 'cornfield' area around the city. We had a definite area where we knew the highway would start in our area, and a firm idea of the point this new highway would reach. US-5 ended up going the cheaper route through our cornfields, and that caused our residential, industrial and commercial 'zones' to end up in the former cornfields while downtown Bellingham lost much of that former business. NOTHING like this is an issue with CXL 2011, CXL does not have scenario challenges tied to the maps. But it *could* have. I could see a timed challenge where you had an existing 'expressway' route through an existing city, and you had to decide the route for a new highway through your area. If you didn't have a highway in place by a given time, the traffic through your expressway *WILL* die off and your city will die along with it. Deal with this scenario if you dare!

Nope... CXL doesn't have scenario developments like that. The challenges appear to be in the form of resource location and terrain, along with how to develop your city. And all that 'development' goes right out the window if you unlock everything to begin with. I'm very happy that CXL 2011 does allow me to unlock everything up front. That has been a huge boon towards learning how to size things. How big is an expressway? How big is a highway? Can I actually fit this interchange in this area? By the way, CXL 2011 does not have needful planning tools. I'm using dirt roads to map out space for things. Several changes I would have in lieu of outright cheating that would save much pain in city planning:

Instead of 'unlocking' a building, allow an option to place a construction zone the exact size and shape of an intended construction. Your interchanges, for instance. Would that I could have dropped a 'construction field' outline for those big-azz interchanges where I knew they had to go so I did not *HAVE* to cheat, build one, build around it, then delete the damned thing as I couldn't afford it yet. Same with other buildings I know I'll want or need (Airports/ Harbors), but I can't afford them yet. And yes, I've been building my city blocks in groups of 12 of the smaller buildings with a grassy road between them so I can convert the block of 12 to a block of 6 of the high density size later. That's an obnoxious pain in my arse. If you are going to do that, why make an 'alley' mode to the low & medium density blocks that let me drop 12 at a time with an alley that I can easily make into a 6 building high density structure? Make the alley a dirt road, and fill in behind with just grass & trees. I dunno, but don't make block upgrades such a pain in the arse!
This 'construction zone' thing ought to allow for you to place roads without destroying the 'zone'. Ok, so I want to leave room to put an exchange tomorrow, but today I still need a damned road that lets me travel. So let me build a crossroads in that zone while preserving the room I need for that interchange I know I'll need later. Don't *force* me to unlock, cheat to get money, then destroy the work of placing things I can't afford at this stage because *YOU* didn't provide sufficient tools that I would not have to cheat to create the city in the vision I want!
Highways are an EPIC FAIL. At least with normal roads, I have control over straight-line, 8 compass directions and curves. I can control crossings to suit. I can *make* roundabouts, if I have to. I use dirt roads to 'cut' bits off of roads I'm working on. CXL 2010 does NOT provide tools for highways. Perhaps I missed it, and to my shame I need to go through the entire tutorial to be sure I didn't just miss it, But I can't make my highway straight, as far as I can tell, without using dirt road guides to ensure how straight it is. Damn you, CXL! And I can't 'cut' highway chunks out as I can at least do with roads. Nope, I have to delete the whole damned thing end-point to end-point. Bite me, CXL 2010! Your highways are th3 l00z. No cookie for you! Again, I'm forced to 'cheat' because of a limited oversight in tools to develop high-expense infrastructure.
Roundabouts and interchanges. I have no tools to make my own to suit me, and the ones provided are damned clumsy. The 'road' interchange has roundabouts on each end. That kinda makes sense, really. I can deal with that. But then a) I can't connect it with just any road, it has to be a large avenue, and 2) I can't connect to those roundabouts with anything other than straight in... I can't come at the roundabout from an angle. Damnit! So we have something perfectly useful wasted along with that huge heaping gob of space. I would suggest a change in the 'block structure' of such things. Even if you can't get away from fixed 4-sided regular polygons (squares, rectangles), you should code to allow fixed road types that can go 'into' your fixed polygons. I see a highway interchange that is incomplete, in that a one way road offramp 'spur' pulls off the highway and ends at nothing. It is up to the person building the road to connect the one-way offramp with an ordinary road partially enters the fixed interchange block, and that one-way road can then go 'anywhere' legal to other one-way roads. If you create four such 'spurs' for each orientation and on/ off direction, you have only one more puzzle piece to sweat over which is...
Bridges. Epic Fail. As with highways, I can not force point-to-point straight or 8-compass direction bridges. I am forced to use curved bridges & tunnels. EPIC FAIL, no cookie for you, CXL! I can't build the bridge 'even' on both sides. I have to do this clumsy thing that makes one side of a bridge distinct and awkward-looking from the other side. I generally make multiple passes at it to get my bridge over a highway just the way I want. That gets expensive, and again I'm forced to cheat just because I don't want my highway bridge to look like crap. There may be better ways to do it than I am trying, but it is not obvious from what I already know on how to build roads. If I drag a bridge line from one side of a highway to another, why not simply offer me 'confirm' and do an optimized bridge in ghost form until I click the menu? Same me some pain! Why must you force me to cheat simply with the effort and expense to not have a bridge over a highway look like crap? EPIC FAIL, CXL!
Roundabouts... EPIC FAIL, CXL 2011! I'm glad to see them in, but again... trying to build using them is horribly expensive (e.g. forces me to cheat because of reiterations). This is where the notion of imbedding required or optional road-type end-points within a polygon would make a huge difference. Or... what the hell, just allow me a 'circle' button on the straight/ compass/ curve menu. I draw a road to an endpoint, then confirm. I then click a 'circle' button on the same road-type, then I click the button again. As I 'drag' the road, it becomes the opposite side of a circle from the prior endpoint, and the circle is as tight as is 'sane' for that road. Perhaps the endpoint is an expressway, so then I change to 'large avenue' and go from there. I can then make a tight avenue circle, click to get my endpoint, and I now have a perfect circle avenue exactly how I want. I make the circle a 'one way', and I can then draw other roads up to that circle pretty as I please. Current CXL 2011 implementations give me a forced road-type with a fixed size, and trying to *PLACE* one at a specific point on the map is No Fun . So... thanks for the roundabouts, but it's more like, "Thanks for nothin', man!"