A new player's impressions...

[Smeedyer 0]

Hey all,

 

Newbie here.

 

You may be wholly uninterested in how I've found my first 25-35 hours in this game - if so, there's a back button for your convenience located somewhere in your browser.

 

For those impatient types that are mildly interested but don't want to read much - there's a TL:DR at the end.

 

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I purchased this game on Saturday night (19th Oct) after watching an enjoyable Let's Play. I had vague memories of hearing about the server issues back on release, but otherwise knew nothing about the game except from the Let's Play.

 

Running Windows 7 on a 2-3 year old machine, with a middle range graphics card.

 

Background of my Sim career. Many many tens of hours spent on SimCity NES version. Probably twice as many then spent on SC2000, and somewhere inbetween on SC3000. I was then swallowed by University, and then online gaming so I missed SC4 entirely somehow (which I'm rectifying by purchasing recently too).

 

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First installation crashed after unpacking the download. I had to download it a second time but then it installed fine. It was about 10:30 pm when I got into game for the first time and it was 6am when I finally managed to make myself turn it off and get some sleep.

 

It's fair to say, despite the false start during installation, I thoroughly enjoyed that first night!

 

Ditto on the next day

 

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This week I've been reading up. Watched some advanced tip videos, and of course been submerged in the general complaints and moans (mainly on map size).

 

I'm just about at the stage where I'm starting to notice some of the bugs and oddities, but nothing too game breaking for me yet. Most annoying thing so far is the tiny bit of road coming from the train station / ferry port which isn't even a bug, just a bad development choice.

 

Gifting so far has worked every time between my cities, but I do have the bug where 2 out of my 4 cities can't see the progression on the Great Work which is a bit irritating. My first city has the strange thing with recycling where there's apparently 50'000 cans to be picked up, and yet there's no green bars left in the data fill. Not sure what's going on there. 

 

Biggest population in one city so far is just over 200k, with another at 170. Traffic is definitely becoming an issue, but I am fairly certain that's my old Sim-game traffic design.  Last night I watched some traffic calming videos and they are already making improvements. Notably I had 4 way crossroads everywhere! Tut tut.

 

Maintaining a positive income (discounting exports) has proven tricky, but from something I saw yesterday, I think that's because I've been rather generous with my taxes (10%) and can get away with 12-13% to make things a little easier.

 

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All in all I'm finding this game to be a pleasant blend of learning and fun. 30 hours in, it's already down to the equivalent of £1.33 per hour of entertainment. Comparing to a cinema ticket at £8 for 2-3 hours, or drinks in a pub - it's a very good deal. 

 

I expect this will easily pass the 100 hour mark (£0.40 per hour!) and once there I will be unlikely to feel too much anguish over another £30 for the expansion. Not sure about the DLC though - will have to ponder that one.

 

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So far, not experienced a server outage, which has been nice.

 

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Perhaps - 200-500 hours in or so - I might turn into the bitter spouter of bile. But really, after 200 hours what does the game really owe me?  

 

Sure, people may have racked up thousands of hours in SC4 for a fraction of the price but (as I said) I bought that recently, and it crashed after about an hour of play, and I lost that progress, irritating me (I'm sure there's an autosave I could turn on, but I hadn't found it) and I've not played it since.

 

SC (2013) crashed similarly for me (only once so far has it crashed) and I lost nothing. It was in the cloud, and all was good!

 

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TL:DR Joining the game after the 7th patch I've had a perfectly enjoyable gameplay experience with the right combination of learning, relearning old tricks, and fun. 

 

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There is a good game here! 

 

Ignore the naysayers - watch some (recent) videos - and decide for yourself! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Noobi-Wan 22]

Glad to hear you are enjoying the game!

[kinneyj09 4]

I agree very fun enjoyable game despite the negativity

[CorpusDei 69]

Map size is my main issue with it (well, I don't really like the slightly cartoony graphical style either but that's personal taste rather than anything else) but SC2013 does make some improvements over SC4; the city specialisations and trade most notably - and the road placement system (though that was basically lifted straight from CXL) and road-side bus stops... several little things.

 

However, for just about everything else, a modded version of SC4 does it better (my plugins folder is probably about 2 GB now O_o) - build a custom region, plant your own flora and fauna, start with an agricultural community with streams and waterfalls. Run in a Highway (RHW), sink it, put restraining walls alongside and line with trees, have road intesections and rail bridges over it - spend hours trying to build the "perfect" interchange.

 

So yeah, vanilla SC2013 might (apart from the city size) *might* be a better game than SC4 in most ways... once you've modded SC4 to within an inch of its life, SC2013 just feels ... unfinished.

 

 

Aside: if SC4 crashes it's probably because it doesn't like multi-core CPUs, try creating a shortcut to the game with "-CPUCount:1" added to the end of the target path (or as a launch option if you bought it on Steam).

 

If in doubt when playing, Ctrl + S to quick save ... often. HTH.

[Smeedyer 0]

 once you've modded SC4 to within an inch of its life, SC2013 just feels ... unfinished.

 

Haha - a rather unfair comparison. It will be interesting to see SC2013 after 10 years of modding too.

 

But we're not in a world where these games are mutually exclusive. I will get around to playing SC4 again and yes, probably modding. I will at the very least look to get that NAM thing people talk about that seems to fix some important later-game bugs.

 

Thanks for the multi-core advice - will try that out too, it is indeed via Steam! (And haha, Ctrl+S - will remember!)

[Griffon 19]

I've bought all the DLC and I'd say the most useful is the theme park if you do a lot of tourism cities.  Theme parks bring in a lot of people and if you get it fully upgraded it can give you over $100,000 a day.  Yes it does take up a lot of room (about 1/4 the map size) but it's still very useful in a tourism city.

 

Another DLC I liked is the Heroes and Villains, although I don't use it very much anymore.  It was fun at first to see MaxisMan and Dr. Vu fighting but it takes a lot of time and attention to get either one upgraded and Dr. Vu generates too much crime for any city (but Dr. Vu only gets upgraded if the criminals are successful at what ever crime they do and you usually get a lot of people complaining about crime in your cities).

 

I personally always thought SC5 is better than SC4 (maybe it's because I didn't use many mods in SC4) and SC5 isn't as bad as everyone says...anymore.  I'll admit when it first came out the game was terrible.  The Great Works problem is the most noticeable bug that might be considered "game breaking" as of right now (for me at least).  I don't usually build them anyways but I hate that I can't build them if I want to because of it and I think EA/Maxis is working on it too.  I've seen countless posts and forum topics on their help site about the Great Works problem.  I don't really want to play until it's fixed or until the expansion comes out (which ever happens first and I've already bought the expansion too).

 

As far as mods go in SC5 (I said this in another topic) the chain plopper and the service road mods are the best to have.

 

Btw, Origin says I've spent 600 hours playing SC5 already (but that also includes downloading the patches).

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

It is decent.  There's a lot of (not necessarily unwarranted) jadedness from the awful launch and the multiple patches we've had to contend with, but the promise really is there.

 

Severs have been stable for a few months now.  You'll get the odd person who will chime in on that statement in saying the were bumped recently or had a bad patch, but that's no different from any online game's server rates.

[SockoJr53 51]

You were actually better off coming in around this time than back in March. The game gets better with each successive patch. Currently I'm not playing, there are a few things "breaking" my cities and they are un-playable. The next update 8.0 looks like it will solve some of them though, so I am optimistic.