Conny

As I mentioned in my beta feedback before I dont like the zoning very much. I miss the control a of debth and hight which is essential in modern city planing. I also miss the abilty of creating blocks filled with wall2wall buildings. I'd love to see a more procedural way of filling zones, as seen here: I found out about this by stumbeling over Train Fever today, which uses a similar way in creating a dynamic city (note: this is a pre-alpah version): EDIT: This shows it even better:

I like this approche to lay out rail tracks eventhough it is in an very early stage. This would be nice to have in the new SC: http://vimeo.com/55925431#at=0

So many threads/ threats about the beta... As many of you I’m a fan of SimCity since the very beginning. Actually playing the very first SimCity on a friends Atari computer as a kid made me want to have my own computer in order to play it over and over again. And so I played SimCity 4 alot too. My personal focus was more on aesthetics and immersion than on the actual simulation. So I had tons of buildings and mods. You want a vivid city and not a web of lifeless streets. But of course the whole needs to make sense to be fun. But I stopped playing SC4 a while ago. Reasons were: · The grid and its limitations · Massive lag when you fill a big map (even with a very good PC) · Messed up scale · Unreasonable traffic and simulation issues (commute, water, population, employment, growth, etc.) THE NEW SIMCITY! I have to admit the expectations are damn high, so the chances of a disappointment are huge. Well, after I played the beta several times I can judge it myself. Less hate, more facts – I hope. User interface: This was another Issue with SC4, at least when you used additional buildings. The UI became unbearable. Of course this is not the case with the brand new (unfinished) game. I doubt that it is always logical but you get into it easily and it looks very good. Issues I had were: · No top view when placing building additions (you are forced to iso), which makes it difficult to see were you place something (you might tear down neighboring buildings). · School bus stop are under education and not transport as other bus stops. · Data layers can be annoying sometimes as you have to click them away (or esc them) · Zooming and scrolling needs a little bit of training… · … so does laying out roads (more of that in transport section) · No zooming in the region view. Glassbox Just a general thought. Why simulate every single sim and every single drop of water when the individual doesn’t matter? I want to build a city not a huge friend zone! Region: The region doesn’t look good. It’s a lifeless space with some miles of highway, rail tracks and a ship or a plane occasionally. There are only three colors: green (grass and some rare trees), blue (awful animated water) light brown (rock or sand of all rather vertical surfaces). · As mentioned often before the space between cities (or work sites) kills a lot of immersion. · Entering a city though works fine and smooth, as does leaving it. · You can’t really zoom or scroll in the region but I don’t want to see it anyway. City: As said a billion times before the city is rather a town, and not a big one. Would be nice to have at least different measurements than squares only (e.g. long stretched coast town). And let the user place the city within the region individually. I love that you can see beyond your city limits. A feature I always wanted. Economics/ cash flow: No worries about that. The money comes in much quicker than you can spend it. If you struggle anyway get a loan or three. They pay back automatically over time or manually all at once if you want. This is no challenge at all, but I expect this to change for the final version. It’s just far too easy. Some goes for happiness. Time: There are three speed setting and pause in which you can build. There is night and day but 30 days and nights don’t make a month. But a month is used in some cost examples. So I don’t know how this works. Actually I count time to scale in general and I guess the way SimCity handles time leads to some distortion in the overall gameplay (e.g. traffic: cars per hour on certain stretch of road). Data visualistion: The data layers are a huge plus, they look good and they give detailed information. Well, not to detailed, because absolute numbers are missing often. I have no Idea how much jobs a factory provides or how many people live in a certain house. I get good looking statistics but no actual numbers on many things. And I have no timeline or graphs, e.g. how certain indicators develop over time. Maybe these come with more departments of your city hall. For example I can only see how many students are at my school right now and how may were there the day before. I have no idea how may cars use a street per day, which is essential I modern day plannings. I only see traffic jam if I set my alarm clock for the rush hour in the morning or evening (actually there is a cashier sound when it strikes 6 am and people go to work). Transport: Roads are even more important than before. They determine the density of the zones you place along them. You can have a traditional grid, or free hand curvy roads, or a mixture of both. This is great! Optional are grid lines which are supposed to help you to find the perfect layout in terms of using space. This needs a little bit of training though. Laying out roads is not so smooth in general. More options on this would be nice. Some layout don’t work (not always for an obvious reason), intersections work for 4 roads max (and look pretty basic), some angles don’t work. Road transitions from one type to another are not done yet. You can up- or downgrade within the same road width. You have no further control over roads, even though they are supposed to be so important: · No one way · No turning lanes · No bus lanes · No bike lanes (no bikes at all?!) · No pedestrian zones · No over or under passes Cars behave strange as they don’t cross the opposite lane in order to enter a building. They do u-turns at intersections, or road ends in order to enter the building from the correct side. This leads to weird traffic. Well, this was discussed here often before and maybe that’ll get some love in the future (Rush hour 2013?). As there were no other ways of transport in the beta, I can’t tell anything about them. Buildings/ zones: I can’t say much about the variety as I could not build that much within an hour. But it seems as if it is good enough to fill the small spot. The textures are plain and simple, a little bit too clean for me. The additions to the ploppables are a great feature, though its placing isn’t (yet). The placing in general is not as smooth as expected, as you have to be very careful not to tear down any neighboring buildings. Zoning can be a little sticky but is a primitive job. Just put a stripe of R,C or I next to the road, that’s it. The road type determines the density. That means, no high dens at a small road, and no direct control to keep low dens low at bigger roads. In addition to that: · Neither control over the depth of the zone · nor to which road (if placed at intersections) it should be aligned to. · Lots of space in between buildings which kills any feel of urbanity. Parks: This feature is certainly not finished yet. The look and the way you place them is just terrible. You can place one piece of park and then you can add more of the same type the same way you add more components to other ploppables. But the pieces barely fit together and you end up with a bunch squares which fit in nowhere and look awful. The pieces itself too! Poor ground, huge benches and a bbq lodge of epic proportions . Parks were an easy way to fill up some space in SC4. And they gave your city a nice look. This is not the case here. It looks bad and instead of filling some leftover space you waste more of it with hideous constructions. My suggestion: paint parks! Paint a ground (like in CXL) by marking an individual space, put some paths in (e.g.like you use for windfarm) and place trees, benches and what not. This way you can fill a lot of the space which you will inevitably have left. Disasters: I had a tornado once. Looked nice and teard down a few houses, but not too much damage. If you have a fire brigade it shouldn’t be a problem. Three more disasters should be in the final game. I guess its meteor, aliens and earthquake. I expect the last one to be much more challenging, maybe it has even region wide effect or changes the landscape a bit. But I don’t know that. Over all: The biggest issue I personally have with the new SimCity is that you end up with a bunch of buildings rather than something called a city/town. As a European I would expect a higher density and some streets with wall to wall buildings (not just bigger single buildings). A higher degree of urbanity! But that does not happen, not with a square grid layout and especially not with a freer road layout. I am gald I could get my hands on the beta. But now I know that the waiting for the simulation of my dreams isn’t over yet. But I have hopes, that Maxis (and the community) will improve it. Therefore the online feature is great. And the groundwork is not bad.