commanderkai

The largest, fully connected region is a 7 city, 1 great works region. Forgot the name, sadly.

Although a bit of a fudge is fine by me, but this huge gap between the numbers is really harsh. Supposedly, I have a city of 100,000 that's half $$, one quarter $ and one quarter $$$, and yet I lack the population to have a dozen high tech factories and a few commercial buildings fully staffed. It'd be nice to increase the workforce/shopper/student/tourist populations created to have better functioning cities.

Reminds me of Harlan County on Justified. The city looks great.

Larger map tiles. I mean, much larger. You can make a suburb/mining town of sorts if you stick to low density roads and only a few avenues along major corridors, which would fit well with cities extracting coal/ore/oil, but it'd look a bit silly seeing a mining down anywhere close to a major city, in my opinion. Unless contiguous tiles means we'll get SC4 sized regions, I'd much rather deal with larger, disconnected cities to simulate a province of sorts. Right now, we have Simcity with tiny map sizes more akin to city neighborhoods/districts, but with major disconnections that would indicate you're in a chunk of a province.

Yeah, the larger casinos don't have anywhere near enough gambling capacity, in my view. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but they were only 50 more slots for low wealth gamblers compared to the basic, starting casino. Their capacity needs to be doubled to be more reasonable, in my view.

The lack of cheetah speed is especially infuriating, but I was able to make a region "invite-only" a few days back, thus allowing me to play a region by myself. Did they remove that option when creating a region more recently?

Does anybody believe this? I mean, do people really think this whole always online system was Maxis' idea, and not forced upon them through EA's policy to make everything an online, F2P game?

I have been using Europe West 1. It still is consistently overloaded up during daylight hours until maybe today, as I open up the launcher. Either way, the fact that cities are locked to specific servers will annoy those who need to do server hopping to try to get online, a pretty poor decision for a city builder. Thankfully Europe West 1 has not been overloaded at night, and I was able to get 4-5 hours between two cities in the same region. As much as I don't want to be hostile, during daylight hours in North America, servers are incredibly overloaded, the fact you were able to get on makes you the exception, not the rule, as the sheer amount of complaints and frustrations indicate on this site, and EA's main forum for Simcity. This game is good, but there are a number of flaws. The limitations of the servers soured the game for a great many people, and damaged the future of this game far more than map sizes. Making limitations to actual gameplay, like cheetah speed, does not make me all that happier with the game. The constraints placed upon consumers at the moment, both out of the game itself (the servers), and within game (map sizes, removal of cheetah speed, and bugs/crashes) limit the game's true potential at the moment. Sure, it's fun, up until you get frustrated because pathfinding is frustrating, or that you want to make the city larger, only to see that you can't build anymore, and then...boom. That's the city you're stuck with. It's incredibly disappointing.

And that's the problem. I want to sprawl out. Limiting sprawl is a bad decision, especially as they introduce curved roads, and with that, flexible RCI shapes to match said curved roads. Allowing larger maps would give people more flexibility to create better looking cities, using some of the introduced features. This current map tile system basically forces players to try to be as efficient with the space as possible, even if this sacrifices aesthetics and their desires for what they want to build. If you want people to choose different maps that do not feature natural obstacles, people are going to ignore the more difficult tilesets to try to get the easier, flat maps. That means cities that can look quite unique due to a terrain feature are ignored because they're too restrictive on space for development. The concept of specialization, in my view, is genius. I love the concept (although, in my view, ore/oil/coal deposits need to last MUCH longer, so you can sustain a city on such resources for a long, long time, but, you'd be placing yourself at risk due to market fluctuation) but space constraints mean people need to build up if they want a relatively successful city. Also, the servers have not cleared up at all. The only time I am able to play Simcity is past midnight, which is highly irritating to me, as I want to play Simcity when I'm awake during daylight hours. They might, or might not get better, but it is certainly frustrating me as a player of this game. The fact they disabled cheetah speed irritates me as well, since it takes longer to save up money for the next major upgrade.

Good review, although I disagree completely with your assessment that the small maps aren't limiting. They are, they are incredibly limiting, especially when you're playing on a map that isn't completely flat, but has a large terrain feature like a river or a cliff. The only city I was successfully able to develop when I was able to get online (the map name is Trader's Bay, and I believe its in one of the medium sized regions) has a huge cliff that takes up a third of the map, and although you can built on top of it, the space it consumes makes the city difficult to really make prosper with 1/5 of the map consumed by this massive thing. Maps must be made bigger. Also, although the game itself has a lot of potential, the fact that the servers are utter garbage right now, thus disallowing me to play during daylight hours EST, even after 4 days of supposed upgrades is a huge warning and should delay, if not stop any potential buyers. You're lucky you were able to play for that amount of time. I'm nowhere near that lucky. Encouraging people to buy this game when people can't even play the game due to terrible servers is bad advice, unless you know they're nightowls.

Yeah, I'm with mostly everybody else. It'll probably be a select list of a few games that either A) I already own, or B) Probably would never play. Yeah sure, it's kinda nice that they're doing it, except they should do it immediately, not making us wait another 10 days until we can get a free game while we're still flapping around like fish out of water trying to play a game we paid $60+ for and yet, can't, because of their own incompetence and shortsightedness. In all honestly, I'd much rather see them provide a Season Pass for all future DLC releases for Simcity, considering I spent $80 for the Digital Deluxe Edition. It would highlight that they are quite serious to fans of the Simcity franchise, who put faith in EA and Maxis by pre-ordering a game that many had reservations for, especially over the issue of craptastic servers and an always-online model of gaming.

Exactly. I saw a few pictures with such a grid, and I really, really want to use it to better design my city...especially since they don't show how far a zone can extend when you're trying to build roads. Extremely annoying

...That's incredibly stupid, especially considering there's no other real option to deal with garbage other than A) Pile it up, or B) Export it. If there was an environmentally friendly way to deal with garbage in the game. It'd be wholly more reasonable if the lizard monster came if you relied so much on the sewage outlet pipes for disposing of sewage.

I hope that's not what caused it, because, from my limited playing, there was no other way to properly deal with garbage other than the garbage dump. Recycling will remove SOME garbage and have it be recycled, but not all.

I was able to download and install it, but the patch in the Simcity launcher is taking a very, very, very long time.

Eh...good for you?

Yeah, same. I'm a bit disappointed they didn't email me a key.

Although I haven't pre-ordered, and I'll probably wait for a price reduction before purchasing, I'm also excited to get another round in. I might as well see how the new road/zoning function will work as well.

Uh...why did you pick the Amazon listing of Spore with 12 reviews, instead of the listing containing 3,290 reviews? Either way, it'll probably garner positive critic reviews, but it's too soon to see how well Simcity 5 will do in the marketplace. I think it'll do well enough, but I don't think Simcity will do as well enough for EA to not burn the studio to the ground, and for the most part, I think they have a solid concept with their new engine. That being said, I don't think Maxis should ignore the main issues with what many saw in the beta (small map sizes would be my main annoyance, although many do not enjoy always being online), because they are issues that will irritate both the hardcore and the casual gamer. Always online might be difficult to resolve, but certainly the map size will need to change to make a lot of people content with the game.

I honestly like the improvement they're making for the zoning. It looks pretty awesome.

I see a lot of potential, but yeah, the tile sizes are incredibly small. You can fill up that space rather quickly, maybe after two hours in its current state. It just feels so restricting, especially as you can see so much untapped land all around your city. It would be nice to have some of the territory annexed into your city as you expand, but right now it's more like you're playing a very complex SimTown. I do like the add-ons for the various buildings, though. It's certainly makes sense to not need to build service structures all over the place to give your city coverage. I do think they should show the amount of land that the modules might need when you're first building the structure, instead of hoping that you gave it enough space while you add more zoning. Plus, as others mentioned, the zoning leaves a lot to be desired, as you're not 100% sure if what you zoned is adequate for development. No issues with the online aspect. It did mention that I was disconnected from the servers, but I wasn't booted, so that's a nice relief. So, I'll probably hold off on pre-ordering or buying it at release, unless they tell us straight that they will have larger tiles at the start. I really think it'd be a lot of fun, albeit a bit easy. I didn't mind that as much, though.

True, which surprises me that Simcity wasn't milked excessively as well. It isn't as huge as "The Sims" is, but I do believe it must have made EA money. It took a decade between the release of Simcity 4 and the proposed release of Simcity 5. No, Simcity Societies does not count in my book. I'll call that SimTown 2.

For Simcity 2023, I expect holograms. I want my holographic projector to get some use and I'd love to see a truly 3D model. Every sim living in my city must have some AI type programming, so if I start being abusive to them, they'll rise up against me, trying to overthrow my rule. Also, I would expect to be able to have a remote uplink to the game through my cranial implant, so I can oversee the game while I'm at work, making sure they don't screw up too much. In all seriousness, I just hope that Simcity 5 is a great enough game to hold me off for the decade or so that it takes EA to release the next Simcity.

I just want disasters to be realistic. Something that needs to change is that buildings are just completely turned into rubble, no matter what sort of disaster occurred. Now, some disasters will certainly lead to complete rubble (tornadoes, monster attacks), but floods, fire, nuclear accidents, and hurricanes need to actually show some realistic damage. I'd also love seeing some preemptive/proactive responses to disasters. Floods should be mitigated by your fire units sandbagging areas (with your own citizens doing the same for their homes), evacuation routes for those who can be affected by hurricanes, thus saving a lot of life, and monster/alien attacks being thwarted, or at least contained, by police and military units. Even if it's mostly for show, I'd still like seeing your city's residents reacting a lot more than just running around, but actually hiding, getting off the roads, etc. Also, riots need to come back. I wouldn't mind zombie attacks (Which once again, can be contained through police, military, and preemptive action), but riots are a must.

I'm not going to spend money for mods or "region space". I'm buying the game, and I'll be willing to buy expansions or DLC, but if there is a subscription model I'm not giving EA a dime.