2.0 - Initial Observations

[LGMizzell 15]

To see wht I thought of 2.0, I set up a new sandbox city as the only city in a region. Once I got it where I wanted, I had:

• Fairly sparse layout.
• Approx 13,000 population
• good balance of everything, no unemployment, very few open jobs ... a happy place that's running fine without further tweaks.
• two solar plants for power (a nice 'green' oriented city)
• Good education and tech levels
• Very little industry, and all of it in a tiny corner of the map where the wind carries all pollution immediately of the map and out to sea.
• Boat load of parks and trees.
• Two small police departments, zero crime
• Two clinics - no sick people or injuries

 

1. Overall, traffic seems better than before.

 

2. Garbage trucks are still clumping up. I maxed the trucks at the dump, and they followed each other around like a blue caterpillar for the first half of their run. They slowly split up a bit, but even after that, why do I need 5 trucks on one street that has little trash to pick up when there's NO trucks on other streets. This still needs some adjustments in my opinion.

 

3. School bus behaviour is better now and aren't clumping up as much. I would have expected the garbage trucks to do the same though, huh?

 

I let everything run a bit, and then hit the pollution problem...

 

Problem started immediately after I got the first "air pollution levels are rising" alert.
 

Germs (air pollution) seemed to almost spawn towards the CENTRE of the map, rather than blowing in from a particular direction, though I can see small amounts enter the map with the wind.

 

I watched it for awhile, looking for a cycle of some sort. Didn't see one.

• Worse at specific times of the day/night? Nope
• Tied to rush hour - caused by traffic? Doesn't seem so.
• It's random
• All my industry is DOWNWIND of the problem.

 

Once it started, it just got worse and never abated. Clinics filled up, sickness everywhere, deaths stacked up. Planting trees like a demon isn't doing anything and not stopping it.

My findings correspond with that of others. This is definitely a bug, and once it starts, you can't stop it and the city becomes unplayable, unless you like sick and dead sims.

 

 

Conclusion: 2.0 needs 2.1 to fix some problems still there and perhaps a few new ones introduced.

 

When I have time, I'll try to load some previous cities that had problems and see what happens. Will report in on those as well...

[CosmicSpeed 28]

This is the kind of report I like seeing.

 

My observations are similar to yours, especially regarding traffic.

 

I have a 16-city private region with just 3 cities active and established. It was created before the patch but I am slowly going through and seeing if some of the region functions work.

 

Cities from largest to smallest:

Mustang Run...: RCI% - 30/30/40 - Houses the water treatment, sewage, train station, trash, advanced coal, coal power with 4x mid-coal burners, high tech industry (from Community College), Elementary school and 3x coal trade depots. 2x clinics, 3x police stations, 1xLarge Hospital,1x large fire with hazmat and 2x small fire.

 

Painted Point: RCI% = 40/40/10 Has a University with school of engineering and medicine, high school, library, 1x lg hospital with wellness ctr, 1x precinct with bus, 1x small fire station, 1x clinic, train station, water treatment

 

Wranglers Run: RCI% = 50/50/0 Solar Power, trash, Have a elementary school, train station, library, and the beginnings of a culture/tourist depot, and other things i cant recall at work, 

 

So far, I have been trying to establish Wranglers run in Turtle mode and since 2.0 pollution has been awesome, albeit without industry. My biggest question will be my large town of Mustang Run....it has bounds of industry and coal specialization.

 

I did delete my old coal plants immediately and made room for the advanced coal right after the patch dropped so that might be a discrepancy.

[TuPhat 27]

Since 2.0 patch, I would say that traffic is way worse than before.  The addition of street lights on medium density streets have slowed down my traffic to an absolute crawl.   On a couple cities that I played last night, where I was dealing with minor traffic issues pre 2.0, now I'm having major issues.

 

Pre-patch, I could design my street layouts to maximize fast traffic flow by limiting the amount of traffic lights.   This could be done by downgrading high density streets to medium density just before hitting avenues in order to keep traffic flowing on these major routes.  Now with 2.0 patch, every medium density street will plop a street light which is slowing up my traffic.   Traffic was fairly frustrating enough before 2.0, now it's nearly unbearable. 

 

I'm going to play around some more tonight, hopefully I don't need to redesign my cities because of this patch. 

[CaribbeanSail 33]

I made 3 cities last night after the patch.  I think traffic is improved and busses seem to work far better then before.  I did still see a lot of clumping of service vehicles though, but this patch was only supposed to address fire trucks, not the others, which I assume is slated for a future patch.

 

I didnt get any pollution issues, one city at 100k population and producing oil and 2 refineries no problem, wind carried it as it should.  OP did you perchance have a garbage issue?  That creates air pollution too.

 

I did experience one crash, simcity froze the computer, had to restart.  I didnt get any rollbacks.  I found a few issues where pedestrians and cars would get stuck in loops, that I never saw prior to the patch, I had to delete roads and rebuild them to fix it.

 

Tonight i will make a tourism city, I am curious to see how the patch deals with the tourism issues.

 

So far the patch seems very good to me.  There is still plenty to fix of course, but they never claimed this patch would fix everything and we know that they are still very actively working on the game.

[Spatzimaus 77]

Massive pollution problems.  I'd carefully laid out my city to minimize pollution, and it's all high-tech industry, and yet I've now got areas being abandoned for air pollution, despite nothing changing for my neighbors.  My garbage situation isn't any worse than before.

 

Massive education problems.  I've got a university town: grade school, high school, university.  And yet, I now have high-rise apartments two blocks from the high school being abandoned because the residents say they couldn't reach the school.  If this is because my buses are leaving town to pick up students from nearby cities, then I'd like to revert to the old system, because this stinks.

 

Gambling still doesn't work right.  The gambling HQ won't unlock, the tourists are still horribly out of whack, and the most expensive casino can't make a profit even though I've got a tourist-heavy town in a fully populated region.

 

And then there's traffic.  I'm still getting huge perma-jams in the middle of my city, on high-density roads with plenty of avenues.  Buildings are burning down left and right because my fire trucks can't get to the buildings, far worse than pre-patch.

 

So thanks to this patch, my city has lost about 25% of its population, from 80k down to about 60k.  This in turn creates new problems, like lack of workers for the various buildings, which makes things even worse.  So this game is going back into storage until they fix their fix, because right now it's just not working.

[LGMizzell 15]

I didnt get any pollution issues, one city at 100k population and producing oil and 2 refineries no problem, wind carried it as it should.  OP did you perchance have a garbage issue? 

 

Garbage is fine ... I set up the dump and maxed the trucks before I zoned anything at all. 100% of garbage being collected.

Sewage is all being processed properly as well with no backups anywhere.

Water plant has a filtration pumps. It's clean there too.

 

In theory, this city should have almost zero pollution anywhere except maybe a small part of the sw corner where there's only 3 or 4 factories total - all downwind from everything else. It's got to be a bug. I see no other logical reason for it.

[Xr3iracer 5]

I have played a little bit of my private region with 7 cities! I didn't have a pollution problem, but the introduction of traffic lights on medium density roads has destroyed my cities! Why Maxis Why!! As for other patch problems, I'm staying well away from Casinos until I start reading more positive posts!

[simmarine 7]

Last night I continued with my city which was well established and making plenty of money making  TV's with no natural resources. I had Sims leaving for being out of money so I lowered the taxes to 4% to keep them happy. What happened next was my population exploded to 100k from 70k and my streets totally clogged with heavy traffic. I had a bus system but it only seemed to make it worse. When I stared the city I made room for boulevards so I had a backup plan. After the initial shock I upgraded everything (main avenues) to high density street car avenues which required a great deal of bulldozing and lost 10 k Sims in the process. What I found was after I did this my traffic was totally under control and my peak ridership was 80k a day so nearly everyone. I found the bus system made things worse so I bulldozed everything but the park and rides and I may bulldoze those and see what happens tonight. I don't know how my pollution is but I'm sure its bad but I have a fully upgraded hospital so my death rate is low. I did see the issue of people leaving for education even after I put a high school next to the building but I may have been to late. My industry is on one side of the map downwind so that helps with pollution but with 3 plastic factories, 3 processor factories, 3TV factories and of course 3 smelters I'm making plenty I'm sure. There are some kinks but I like the fact that the street cars work.

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

I'm not 100% sure how it worked before, but now roads to avenues of equal density have no lights, but a stop sign, while road intersections hav lights. You might want to revisit the idea of having avenues for directed traffic.

[LGMizzell 15]

Tried a 2nd city just to be sure about the pollution issue. I was able to recreate it again with no issues.

 

Once you get *just* enough industry to get that first "air pollution levels are rising" alert, it basically spawns from off map somewhere with zero relation to anything you've got in your city, and it does not go away, regardless of what you try.

 

Once you've got it, there's nothing you can do but watch the decline. There's no way to keep up with the sickness, deaths, and "too many germs" abandoned buildings.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

I ran into germs as well, but bus service is MARKEDLY better than before.  I actually saw less traffic until more people moved in, and only had to buy three new bus garages.

[NovaBlazer 10]

• Casino city (even after replacing ALL my casinos) has made nearly zero difference
• Garbage collection is worse than ever.. 24 garbage trucks can only manage to collect about 800 cans.
• Recycling is pathetic... 16 trucks get 1,600 units of recycling.
• Police run around in clumps now like the fire trucks used to, the only thing that doesn't is the police helicopter.
• I have 4 train stations in my city - it used to spread tourists out pretty evenly, but now 75% of all incommers to the city go to the first one.
• Traffic is about the same

 

Overall:

On the whole: I can't tell the difference from the previous versions.  Seems like the same old broken stuff is still broken, the only profit to be had is with electronics making, and same ol' blah blah....

*sigh*

[ForensicCRAFT 9]

I had about 15 police cars follow each other they areas of my city. Didn't see that before. It's almost as tho these developers/programmers don't think of the what ifs or check to see what might have been caused from an update. I mean I'm not a veteran pc gamer, but I've never encountered such issues on a console ever.

I love simcity, so my patience is lengthy. I expect quicker fixes in the future. Identify...fix!!

[procarpenter 3]

No Real Change the cities are still broken its been over 4 weeks trying to repair the broken cities, Still cant use them and no way i can find to remove them and rebuild. Same old convoys of service vehicles running around is circles especialy fire trucks the disperse after the fires have burnt out, over all game is still break might  take a serious rest till about version 10.0 then perhaps the modders will have a field day.

[perafilozof 143]

I am reading this and I am amazed how many problems you guys have. 

 

Since 2.0, I have played in 3 different cities and each and every one got better not worse. BUT all three are at medium density mostly with one having around 30% high density.

 

Are you guys only having problems in cities with 90% high density ?

[5uper_Mania 6]

Tourism is a 'B' to figure out. I sorta had it going with low end casinos pre-patch. But my general strategy is to make as much as possible, so I bee line to electronics. I can secure a steady income of a couple million a day with an average of 120k sims, pre patch...and post.

 

I make mistakes with every play through so it's not fair to entirely blame the patch....

[moaku 74]

2.0 is a disapointment to me.

Yes, it improves some things, and traffic is a bit better... and some things such bugged recycling center were fixed...

But that's just a big hotfixes compilation, in no ways it desserves a major version number change. numbering it 2.0 is just another method of fooling us.

 

Here's a few tests i've done:

- Residential only cities are still doable with low taxes + parks + no services, even if a bit harder than before to do, the RCI demand graphic is more accurate (0 demand for res, 100% for ind and com in the residential city I made), but res still grow with no apparent limit when I add some zones. (only city in my region, so C/I were not compensated somewhere else in the region)

- A test city I built before patch had several vehicles (the trucks that comes from the outside to populate your houses once they've been built) stuck in a loop, making infinite u turns between 2 intersections with no apparent reason. Those vehicles still do that now.

- I have another test city in a region with a solar central as superproject, which occasionnally trigger an event "Fire at the central ! 24 hours to stop it." and guess what ? I extinguish the fire 100% of the times the event triggers, but.... I have 0 fire departments.

- City busses, garbage cars and tram still rush to the same stop/spot most of time, even if sometimes in smaller packs than before.

- Pop numbers are still tricky, the detail tab is still not even close to the (fudged) population number.

- I still noted some rushes to the same nearest job/house causing useless traffic jams, however, I didn't tested that deeply, can't say if they still change jobs / house each day yet. And those traffic jams seems, at least on first view, less jamming than before.

- Speaking about traffic jams, the traffic lights/stop change on medium density roads caused troubles to some of my test cities. Why not simply giving players the choice for stop/lights? and while we're here, the zone density ? That would make everyone happy about that point... Maybe EA/Maxis simply don't want us to have freedom in the game ? and they want us to enjoy it with all it's limitations ? Maybe they think Simcity is not about City management ? (because decisions such as stop vs lights is typically management). Please, stop dumbing down your games. They don't need to be accessible to the point a retarded monkey could play. It's simcity, it's supposed to be complex.

 

Well, I've done those tests in a ~2 hours session, but was too disapointed to play longer... So, I have not tested all problematic scenarios, but basically, it's obvious to me that the game is almost as broken as it was before this patch. and I insist about the fact this patch should not have been numbered 2.0, just like this game shouldn't have been named Simcity.

 

Sad to see that  one of the original "slogans" for previous simcities was "Build the city of your dreams !" has become "Build the city we want you to dream about" with this reboot.

 

EDIT: Before patch release, they pretended to have addressed issues most frequently reported by players, giving the impression they listen to the community... But when I read the changelog, except for a very few points, I only see trivial changes that no one complained about. When will they stop considering us dumber than we are ?

[jas19illini 2]

So I built an electronics city in a brand new region after the patch. Only city in the region thus far. Things have seemed fine to me. I've had some abandonment of buildings, usually about 2-4 buildings at a time. Other than that things have been good. Around 60k pop my approval rating was 94, now I have 95k pop with approval dipping to 87. I think mainly bc of some traffic causing people to miss work and thus abandoning houses. I do have homeless sims though. Working on fixing that. It fluctuated between 10-70. That's what I'm gonna tackle tonight. I have two fire stations (one truck each), one police station (6 cars), a hospital and a clinic (could close the clinic but I have $40 million so no need), a grade school and a university. School attendance is about 2900 out of 3000 (4.5-5 hats). I had some buildings within a block of the grade school that had kids who weren't getting educated, no idea how, so I bulldozed them and they started to go to school. I already built the space station and plan to build a tourist city next. No pollution issues, despite having two smelting plants, an ore mine, coal mine, processor plant, and two computer plants. I had sims starting to leave my city to go on vacation saying they were real happy, caused some congestion at the highway connection. So I upped their damn taxes to fix that issue. Lol. I should also add that I had no real garbage issues. 4-6 trucks were able to pick up approximately 4000 garbage cans a day when my pop was around 70k. The garbage screen says I'm currently collecting about 4300 out of 5000 cans at 95k pop, but when I open the data map I don't see any remaining garbage around the city, so I think the numbers being reported are bugged.

[LGMizzell 15]

Revisiting the pollution issue once again...

I thought it might be related to having an incinerator at the dump. I can recreate the problem at will without an incinerator. That's not it either.

However, Maxis is aware of the problem and a fix is already in progress.

 

New stuff

I just had a building go abandoned. Reason? "Couldn't get to school". But, it was NEXT DOOR to the school! Uhhh .....

[CosmicSpeed 28]

I am reading this and I am amazed how many problems you guys have. 

 

Since 2.0, I have played in 3 different cities and each and every one got better not worse. BUT all three are at medium density mostly with one having around 30% high density.

 

Are you guys only having problems in cities with 90% high density ?

 

I feel the same way.  By no means am I having any "game breaking" issues that make it unenjoyable...

[Board_Marshal 104]

Revisiting the pollution issue once again...

I thought it might be related to having an incinerator at the dump. I can recreate the problem at will without an incinerator. That's not it either.

However, Maxis is aware of the problem and a fix is already in progress.

 

New stuff

I just had a building go abandoned. Reason? "Couldn't get to school". But, it was NEXT DOOR to the school! Uhhh .....

 

  It may be related to 2.0 but you may consider something else.  I had several buildings along a curved road (two separate instances) that complained "couldn't get to school" or "we demand schools or we move out" despite having plenty of buses and desks and some of the buildings were within walking distance of the high school.  What I noticed in the education screen was that either the building never generated kids to be students (building was white like a commercial building) or the kids were generated but never left the building to go to a bus stop.  What I had to do was place a small side road (as short as possible) which left enough room for the buildings to rebuild (after bulldoze) but in a slightly different orientation to the road.  Once the buildings finished they all worked properly.  Of course if you have tightly packed buildings without any wiggle room this may not work but even just a little shift may be enough.

  I was thinking perhaps somehow the access to the building wasn't reading the road properly which was causing the failure.  I tried only bulldozing the buildings several times hoping it would "reset" but the problem remained when the building finished.  Forcing the building to ever so slightly reorientate to the road seemed to do the trick.  This was all pre-2.0.  If the problem is a function of changes made with 2.0 then I've no help to offer.

[Haljackey 17,267]

As a beta tester, its unbelievable that the dev beta was more stable than the game I paid for. And they've had a month and a half to fix it!

[tnemelkfoo 4]

 police cars clumping has always been happening to my cities before the patch!

[eburress 267]

As a beta tester, its unbelievable that the dev beta was more stable than the game I paid for. And they've had a month and a half to fix it!

 

It's unbelievable to me that Maxis decided to release a game that was so thoroughly flawed.  Sometimes it's ok to miss a launch date if your game just isn't ready for prime time.

[NCGAIO 562]

Reading about the new bugs included with the 2.0 patch....
 
SimCity patch 2.0 introduces new round of annoying (but hilarious) bugs
 
Remembered having seen a solution that can mitigate the recent problems with the sewage and still solve the burning buildings without stopping.
 
http://v.cdn.cad-comic.com/comics/cad-20130128-90856.png

I do not think it would be difficult to implement on grounds of extraordinary competence demonstrated by the devs until now !
 

[LGMizzell 15]

In addition to the other stuff I've previously discussed ...

 

1. Recreated the pollution issue in a residential only city

2. Ran into a render bug I've not seen before a couple of times where I could see a grid extending into infinity off the edge of the map

3. I won't call this one a problem yet, but I've set up train and bus stations in the residential city, plus train and bus stations in a neighbouring almost industry only city. So far, almost nobody in the residential city is commuting over to the industrial city to fill jobs. I've spent limited time letting this one run just yet, so it may not have had proper time to work out the region interactions just yet. We'll see after letting it run a bit more...

[Denny_S_Ika 0]

As for the other problems I haven't seen any, maybe because I just created a new map, but the first thing I noticed is that when I leave the game alone, running in cheetah speed, sandbox mode, and a few money cheats.    

For the first 5 minutes it's fine, (A big hospital, Police Station with crime prevention and detective wing, Fire station with Hazmat truck and regular fire engine) but after I leaveit for the additional 10-15 minutes all hell broke loose, fire and deaths are everywhere and or some reason don't go away at all. After 30 minute of destructive gameplay I abandon my region.. some bug perhaps? I don't really know.

[Denny_S_Ika 0]

In addition to the other stuff I've previously discussed ...

 

1. Recreated the pollution issue in a residential only city

2. Ran into a render bug I've not seen before a couple of times where I could see a grid extending into infinity off the edge of the map

3. I won't call this one a problem yet, but I've set up train and bus stations in the residential city, plus train and bus stations in a neighbouring almost industry only city. So far, almost nobody in the residential city is commuting over to the industrial city to fill jobs. I've spent limited time letting this one run just yet, so it may not have had proper time to work out the region interactions just yet. We'll see after letting it run a bit more...

Have you plopped down a town hall in connected regions? The first time I play this game after update, I tried to create connected regions, and the people won't commute unless we have the neighboring mayor visit us first. I don't know whether it's intentional, cause for me it's not very logical.

[morriswalters 16]

I am not seeing the problems with pollution that others are but currently my cities are all commercial and residential.  One is a 50 year old city on the test server and the other I started today on North American West(?).  No problems there so far.  The one on the test server had industry before I wiped it out.  And now I have zero pollution.    Sims are dying like flies though.  No traffic issues, but it is only at 90k give or take. But I'm only using 1/4 of the map.

[fpdlskf 5]

Patch 2.0 fixed some problems while causing several others.