johndoh4

No mods yet, those will likely come later (I've only been playing CS for a few months now). Population is 90,243.

Lol, does this count? Sandusky has a population of about 25,000; I used to see this from the highway over Sandusky Bay on my trips between Toledo and Cleveland when I lived in Ohio. _____ My real choice is Bartlesville, Oklahoma; population 36,000

AMD R9 280, though this game in particular is much more CPU intensive than GPU intensive, being a simulation game after all.

I play it on my Desktop: AMD FX 8320 @ 4.2GHz (Over-clocked) 16GB Ram DDR3 512GB Samsung Pro SSD (Boot) 2TB HDD AMD R9 280 (Over-clocked) 725W PSU

Does a 4K resolution really make much of a difference on a small laptop screen? I guess you can fit a lot more within the window, but wouldn't it be incredibly small? There has to be a point of diminishing returns. Not to bring you down, I guess I was proud of my AMD Athlon XP 2400+ back in the day.

To be honest, I don't think the game is a that much of a leap forward in the visuals department compared to SC4 (with the exception that it is now technically rendered in full 3-D, and the lighting is a little better). Where it does make leaps and bounds is in the functionality department, as road building is much more flexible, you can annex new land (no region view though), and the game is just more fun to play than games like City Life were. As for game mechanics vs visuals, I prefer things to have a rhyme and a reason to exist in the game, rather than something just sitting there looking pretty (although many modders spend a lot of time making some fantastic looking buildings). I also like solving problems related to demand, traffic, taxes, etc; so more options/advancements in those departments are always appreciated for me personally. However, the game still has to be fun, and many casual gamers like the monuments, and ploppable buildings, which is why most of the add-ons from the developer seem to be in that area; because they sell better (if the developer doesn't make a profit, we all suffer). The other problem is that simulation games have always been a nightmare for PC's to run, and they can only go so far in the visuals department before you would need a CAD PC from NASA to be able to handle all the background calculations, and render enormous sweeping cities at the same time without using ugly draw-in. By the way, I've been largely out of the game for a few years and just started playing CS a couple months ago, hopefully my comments are still relevant.

At this point, I don't believe any more that any one thing is going to "kill" SC4, it will most likely just taper off gradually over the years; only time will tell. I started playing this game when I was a 17yr old Junior in High School, and I'm now in my 30's...so I feel I can say that with confidence. No other game has remained so constant in my life for such a sustained amount of time, and none likely ever will again. By the way, I mean to check out "Skylines" soon, it looks rather promising.

Just be glad you never had to run SC4 in Windows ME, the memory leak was horrendous! Nowadays, once in a while it will crash...which is a little annoying; I can't really be sure though if it has anything to do with the mods, Win7 (it obviously wasn't designed for Vista/Win7), or if it's just the game itself? Edit: I forgot to mention that the game will crash in certain situations where you ask it to do something it wasn't designed to do. If I remember right, the game used to crash when I had a toll booth within two tiles of a one-way road underpass where the ramps are on only one side of the interchange (going in one direction only), and then re-built a section of the one-way road which enabled the automatic on-ramp construction/suggestion thingamajig. The game doesn't know what to do in this circumstance because it can't place the ramp because of the toll booth being in the way, so it just crashes to the desktop; and that's why I don't do this anymore! I never tried to see if this would work with any other freeway interchanges, but I suppose it is possible. It also used to have a weird bug when I used to run the game under WineHQ. Some buildings would turn black, and more and more would progressively turn black until nearly the entire map was that way. If you saved the game after that happened, it would show up with the blacked out buildings on the region map! However, if you ran the game in Windows again where the bug didn't exist, and re-save it, the city tile would appear normal again.

I bought it in January 2003, shortly after it was released. I guess I won't be voting in the poll then

That's not really true. What you describe is the conundrum of the AAA game market, where hundreds of people work on one game, which means immense costs that need huge sales figures of more than 5 million games (Square Enix seems to be the last company to have run into that trap) to just break even. On the other end is the indie market. Just look at Notch. 4 people working on the game (actually less, but I counted the composer), 10 million copies sold on PC alone (more than 20 million counting ports). Of course, not everyone can be a Notch, but there are enough people living off their niche games. Let's see how the Kickstarter games turn out. There's also some market in between, with less fanciful graphics and less people working on it, which means they need lower sales figures. So, no, the sentence you wrote there describes the dead end the big game companies seem to march into. There's the real fear that, by making a game suit everyone, it will in the end suit no one. I think this is a theory that the Video Game Industry (mainly the big players) have not grasped yet. There are real proven examples of this though, it's not a crackpot concept.

We are just talking about the visual representation of the cities on the individual tiles, though I wish we also had the option to have city tiles next to each other on the region view if we choose to. In any case, I think most of us would understand that these two games are very different, but we also both know that it would not be impossible nor unreasonable to have a Sim City game "Look" and "Feel" more like Cities in Motion purely as an example; at least aesthetically One of the things that really bothers me the most about the new Sim City, is the feeling that you are so very "restricted" in what you are aloud to do within the game. That is not what the series was founded on, and will not bode well for the series in the future (IMO) if it continues; server issue or not.

Yeah, I see what you mean. It's too bad this isn't more of a city sim game, as it looks a lot more derivative of Sim City 4 (which is a good thing). I really like the game engine that is used here to represent the individual city, as it's nice to have the option for a larger city tile size.

There are a lot of other issues (small city plot size, the lack of the ability to connect cities accurately on the region map), but the game is also grossly overpriced. They really should have started at a price point of $39.99, or at worst, the traditional $49.99.

*cigarette falls out of mouth in excitement* ....Jesus man, when are you going to release this already! (I can't wait!!!)

I never understood why Maxis doesn't believe in turn lanes for the default road designs; other than that, things aren't looking too bad so far. I just hope that the gameplay mechanics, and statistics reporting aren't all watered down in an attempt to cater to the casual audience. Not that it is wise too ignore them all together, but it is at least nice to have the extra options mind you. I suspect that this game will go gold relatively soon (probably in January when all the team members come back from vacation), so not too much will likely change from what they have already developed and presented to us at this point (putting aside anything that we aren't aware of yet).

I feel that I should mention that I am cautiously optimistic about the new game. I am intrigued by some of the new features described by the developers, but it is too early to come to any sort of useful conclusion on the game. All we can do is follow the development, offer constructive criticism, hope that maybe some of the developers are reading the forums, and keep our fingers crossed.

I believe it was mentioned in the Reddit article that that was one of the issues they intended to fix. They also mentioned wanting players to be able to understand the underlying logic behind the game instead of it just being a mystery. But I believe the disappearing cars was a technical limitation at the time SC4 was released.

You know the response you will get is "You can't stand in the way of progress". That is the standard response; but I come from the school of thought that people are sometimes fooled into believing that something is progressing when in actuality it is really regressing.

Sounds like a good move on Maxis' (or was it EA's) part. An orchestral soundtrack will do just fine, though I do miss the jazzy sounds from SC3000. I actually use the SC3000 soundtrack with SC4.

I would kinda like to see annexation as a possibility (though I don't really have much hope). Also, I hope that city tiles don't have to be perfect squares like in SC4; but that will probably depend on whether or not the region view is based on a grid system.

Well, limited does mean limited. They are only offering a limited amount of content I suppose...

I don't exactly have the best PC in the world, but it isn't that bad either. I might be upgrading at some point in the next year or so though. I would like to know for sure whether the specs they posted are Recommended, or Minimum requirements. Here are my specs just to humor you all: AMD Phenom X4 9650 Nvidia ATI Radeon 5770 4GB DDR2 Ram 16X DVD+R DL

Actually, I treat each tile as an independant city; that is how I have always viewed the region. Hopefully they will include larger tiles, but it isn't neccesarily a deal breaker. Maybe this sort of thing will be moddable if it isn't included in any of the official releases.

I doubt I will need to pre-order this game, I'll probably be able to buy it the day it's released if I feel that compelled. I definitely hope they come up with a better option for the physical copy though because there is no point in paying $20 more for a digital version and having to make my own back-ups and what not.