The problems with mutliplayer Simcity 2013, after the fact.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

There was promise there, it was poorly executed.  Of course Maxis dropped the ball in forcing us to play online even when we wanted single player, but here's my thoughts on the Simcity 2013 multiplayer experience - and I know things aren't getting fixed.  This is just my thoughts.

 

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One problem with multiplayer was people starting up multiple towns to support power/sewage/water to maximize their city.  These people often took choice plots to simply plop a power plant in, thus leaving the bad plots for other players.  It was a turn off, when looking for regions, to go in and see the one person in the region had immediately snagged four connected cities. 

 

It would have been wise for Maxis to put a restriction on cities owned per region for multiplayer cities, or - like picking sandbox mode - being able to create a "one city per player" multiplayer region - just to encourage working together, and working with what you had.

 

We never did get a "list only recently-created cities" option (freshly made cities were more likely to have actively-playing people in them) in the "join game" interface.  Nor did we ever get a filter to find normal, non-sandbox games.  (Sandbox is an empty experience to me.  You already have all the upgrades, what's the reward for ongoing play?)

 

The only filters we were given were for "regions with abandoned cities" (I still have no idea what use they expected us to get from that) and "sandbox mode" (which ended up being most regions anyway)

 

They really needed an undo option - how many city spaces were wasted because a person messed up their first road so they just left?

 

The global market was a neat idea but didn't really work price wise (often it couldn't keep up with demand anyway).  You should have been able to buy resources from players - even if they were "ghost resources".  Your neighbor has a working oil field?  You should have been able to buy oil shipments the same way you buy power - I click buy and every X amount of time a truck arrives "from that city" if I have a trade depot with the space to store the oil.

[Mr. Bones 14]

Ya ya we all know SC 2013 was, is, and forever will be a disappointing game. It could of been so much more then it is.

[simtom1500 0]

I've personally found that the gameplay is much better in the new single player mode, even though you don't qualify for leaderboards and achievments. I made this super region once in single player mode that would be on the leaderboard for happiness, but, unfortunatly, we cannot convert single player cities to multiplayer cities.