lasergoat

Pocket Gamer: 8/10 http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Mobile/SimCity+Societies/review.asp?c=4809

An EA exec said certain features are being considered for an expansion pack, but only mentioned regional play.

I disagree that SC3k was a bad game. I agree some things SC2k did better, but overall, SC3k was superior. If it wasn't for Simcity 4, I would be playing SC3k rather than SC2k.

In the Asian city I couldn't see any roads tho they may have been dirt and I couldn't see them. And I also saw a building that was floating on one corner. A question that I have is how will the sims themselves look? I tried to observe but there were few instances of sims in the videos. One sim, who look like they were wearing a white robe, might have been in both the Asian and the cyberpunk cities.

Sandboxing it isn't the only reason to use cheats. Sometimes there are aspects of the game that arn't enjoyable and if a cheat can change that, then fine. Such as unlocking rewards, turning off pollution, bumping the bank account up a notch, etc., there are many reasons to use cheats. In Simcity's case, cheating is relative considering there isn't any way to win Simcity other than to challenge yourself with your own expectations. At the very least, cheating in Simcity is another way to customize the gameplay to meet ones desires.

Cheese89 is right in that Simcity 4 is a canvas and I think one of the things cheat codes do for Simcity 4 is it expands the toolset. I hardly ever use cheat codes, instead I use mods if it's that important for me to change the game. However, there are times when I money cheat, especially in the beginning of a city, to get past having wait a long time for the budget to build up. I'll usually use loans, but sometimes I'm just impatient. I just want to point out that some people like sandbox freeform play, free from budgets. I prefer the opposite and I grow all my cities from village to metropolis. And I love mods that increase the difficulty and complexity of the game. However, I don't want to force my style of play on those that like sandboxing it so I would like to suggest that in CU when you create your city, there is an option to shut off the budget for true sandbox mode (I believe this will be an option in Societies). Or maybe instead of a budget, it has a running talley of all the costs so you can see how much at any time your city would cost in total.

I wonder what happened over the Lake Michigan industrial pollution dumping fiasco BP was involved in?

I really like the Simcity 4 method where time starts at zero then counts up from there making it easy to tell how old my city was at a glance. And I prefer keeping the focus loosly on a modernish city than trying to recreate fantasy or historical cities. I also liked the mixed system of time related rewards, requirements meet rewards, and conditional rewards and think its a better system than a system of one or the other.

This is very important and thank you for bringing this up. Please take the management of custom content very seriously Monte Cristo. If this is a popular game, then the amount of custom content one uses will be incredible. I used to have a 2 gig plugin folder and out of frustration I'm reduced it to 300 megs after performance and management issues. It would be neat if there was a common repository everyone could update their base plugin folder making a common base of plugins. In that repository would be custom content from the community that is high quality and balanced.

My problem isn't lack of depth, my problem is I really liked the way Simcity played, thats why I bought it and played it. If the gameplay has been removed, then what is it I'm suppose to be looking at as motivation to play Societies? And the company who was contracted to make Societies, which is Tilted Mill, formerly Impression Studios, well, I hate to say it, but I don't like their games. I have Ceasar 3, 4, Pharoh and Childern of the Nile and none of them appeal to me for long term playing. When I see the trailers it reminds me of Ceasar and Childern of the Nile. It's almost as if it was asked what would you get if Simcity were like Ceasar? I'm not overly optimistic about Societies as a result.

It might be all be well and fine if EA actually brought Simcity back to it's roots, but instead Societies is a Ceasar 4'esk game with modern buildings. The odd thing is EA then intentionally limits the game in some ways so it resembles Simcity Classic, such as transportation, but in complete conflict with what they are trying to promote (endless possibilities instead of limited possibilities).

Hilde: If you weren't expecting something already and as a new game, it's fine and seems to have some intriguing aspects, but as the next iteration of Simcity to a lot of Simcity 4 fans, it's little like what was expected and many fans are disappointed.

You describe problems that made sharing cities in Simcity 4 hard. There are ways to avoid these problems. I just wanted to bring awareness as to why working around these problems might be desirable.

Simcity 4 introduced regional play. Unfortunately, it was clumsy and buggy as well as limited. But it did allow a mayor to feel like they could add onto their city and the scale of city building magnified x1000. -The addition of regional play will add greatly to the depth of play in CU, especially if done right. Some features I think would be desireable in regional play would be" -The ability to import or generate terrain maps. -Maps that can be very small or very big. -More than one city can exist on a region and transit can be built between cities that don't share city limits. -Taxes can be collected from the cities in regional play to pay for and maintain the construction of transportation. -The ability for cities to annex land into it's city limits (there are a few good ideas out there on how to implement this, btw).

One of the major short comings of Simcity 4 was how difficult it was to share cities. EA's biggest justification for changing the Simcity RCI formula was it was too dense and difficult to learn for newbies. Part of that problem was there wasn't any decent tutorials or starter cities available for Simcity 4 newbies, either installed or downloadable. But had there been the ability to share cities, mature players could have shared their successful cities with newbies, who inturn could play those cities and see why they are successful. Also, sharing your work for others to appreciate is a powerful motivator to do and create something. If one can share their cities, then it would solve a lot of newbie problems and provide that missing element of motivation that Simcity has in some ways always lacked, especially SC4.