Save Cap Limit: Max Number of Regions/Cities are LIMITED

[Hellken 1,658]

marcomsousa 69 points 12 hours ago
Since this is online, will there be a limit in the number of regions/cities that I can play?

[–]MaxisKip 87 points 11 hours ago
Yes, we had to put a cap here. We learned a lot on Spore about this. You'll have plenty of save slots, which will allow you to create and manage many regions and cities. We haven't locked the number yet, but what I can say is that they are bound to regions. So if you created a 16 city region, you could play all 16 cities and that would be one save slot.

 

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/14umm1/we_are_the_simcity_dev_team_from_maxis_amaa/c7gki41

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For $ 60+, it's extremely embarrassing that they decided to put a save cap limit on the game. You pay for a limited amount of regions and cities and that's it. Once you run out of save slots, you will need to delete your regions and cities to make space... ...Or you can pay EA to make another account.

It's official: Sim City (2013) is the first Sim City game which ends.

Whose idea was this?

[grugor 60]

you will have have 10 slots and with 16 cities per region, that gives you 160 cities if you wish. complain when you have that done.

[Hellken 1,658]

you will have have 10 slots and with 16 cities per region, that gives you 160 cities if you wish. complain when you have that done.

Hello grugor,

That does not justify the price, which is around $60. In other words, this game will eventually "end" and is not expected to have the same lifespan of its predecessors. I expect the average person to finish it in within 6 months - 4 years. (You might finish it far faster if you are on multi - player.)

I don't recall anyone from Maxis saying that the slots are exactly 10 either. Do you have a source?

[SilverCyric 130]

He's correct, there are 10 slots, in fact there are already people getting "clans", I guess you could say, that are setting up their multiplay regions, slot 1 is a 16 city region that is free for all, anything goes, slot 2 is a 16 city region of just industrial, another commercial, it's already shaping up with much variety...

[lew1984 231]

When EA eventually close down the servers for this game you wont have any save slots!

[pyanodon 218]

lew1984 is right... no local saves = the cities arent yours. also, it´s block you from load previous savings.

Ok....let´s say we have 10 slots with 16 cities.... with a city with that size, how many hours do you think you will take to fill one slot? i bet 1-2 hours.

[grugor 60]

Hello Hellken

dont get me wrong. i know the cap isnt ideal, but i think you are comparing this game to SC4 where people spent years making their ideal city. It clearly for better or worse isnt SC5.

I think there will be loads of DLCs arriving after release that will keep you coming back to your existing cities changing them to include the new content.

The point of EA closing the servers at some point isnt really an issue as they dont close them until there is less than 1% of peak playing. At that point you would be very unlucky to be part of that 1%.

How much time it will take to build one city to a stage that it feels complete and running smoothly is really not known at this stage, so calculating the gametime you will get from 10 save slots is also unknown.

Btw . i think it was oceans twitter that mentioned the 10 slots

[baertooth 330]

From what I understand regions can have a maximum of 16 cities, not that every region will have 16 cities.

EDIT:

https://twitter.com/...864358144659456

Here is that relevant maximum 10 slots tweet from Ocean.

Looking for the relevant variable cities per region info. Having a hard time finding it but I remember reading there were going to be as few as two cities per region, depending on the region. I'm guessing some regions are smaller than others.

How does this work out?

Do you get to select 10 regions but you might be able to select up to 160 cities or as little as 20 cities depending on region choice,

or everyone gets the same set of 10 regions,

or you're forced to pick (x)number of high city count regions and (x)number or medium city count region and (x)number or low city count regions is hard to say.

And this is assuming there are no multiplayer participants.

[Cyclone Boom 16,829]

This is no surprise really, saved data caps are common practice in most online based games. Since each server has a limited storage capacity, an infinite amount of data cannot be stored. I'm sure if the cities were stored locally, then any form of cap limit wouldn't be required.

Of course, we'd rather not have restrictions like this. In my personal experience playing SC4, I've never had more than 10 custom regions installed at a time. However, in the long term, I've had many more – these are the ones you'd be forced to permanently delete. For players who like to have a range of different regions, such as city journal creators, a region limit may be quite an obstacle.

A solution would be to allow regions to be exported to the user's own local storage. This would be beneficial for both archival and backup purposes. In the game, there could be a kind of data manager, allowing you to view your regions uploaded to the servers. Here you could export and import them to and from your HDD, as well as being able to delete uploaded ones from your quota.

If EA is concerned with region file sharing (a potential method of cheating), a unique identifier code could be saved to each file, linking to your Origin Account. This would be done in a similar way to locked copy permissions for PS3 saved games. As a result, only the file creator would be able to use it for their own multiplayer purposes (affecting the economy and global leaderboards).

Relating to data storage, I think this would satisfy everyone concerned. The saved data cap limit could remain in the game. Also an in-game data manager would allow users to efficiently manage and have control over their files.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

That is equivalent to between 6 and 7 Cities XL tiles. That means, I put my personal value of SimCity 2013 to be less than Cities XL 2011, which was worth $40 new so that is my spending limit before shipping and tax.

--Ocram