City Planner

Oh, the OP wants the other members of the forum to compare them for him. Here I came into this topic thinking that you were going to give us the complete and unabridged ultimate comparison as you see it OP. Hmm, well... I think they both have something tremendous in common... Both of the development teams decided in their ultimate wisdom to not listen to the players that were testing their products for them, and then when the game each released the masses of the gaming public (their consumer) that bought the games told both developers in no uncertain terms what "should" have been done with their games before they released them on the public. I remember being a part of the beta (or maybe it was Alpha, I don't remember anymore) of the Cities XL game and the vast majority of their testers chimed in on a couple key topics in their beta forums letting them know about something that was not going to be taken well once the game was released. Montecristo didn't listen and ultimately the game failed. Maxis also doesn't listen, they believe that they know better what the gamers want than the gamers themselves and ultimately they get proven wrong almost every time, the same happened with Montecristo and now with Home Interactive. Comparisons, .. Their both city building games and while each shows that there could be a great game in there, neither of them have lived up anywhere even remotely close to their full potential. Sometimes that was caused by poor design decisions and sometimes because technology is not where it needs to be and they decided to go ahead and make the games anyway, current technology be damned. .. Both of the games makes me sad that they are what they are, and are not what they should be. .. Both of the games were not worth the asking price. .. Both games have totally missed the mark on what the masses of Simcity 4 players have been asking for since Simcity 4 was released oh so many years ago. EA.MAXIS had plenty of data but it seems they didn't want to use it. .. Both of the games developers thought they knew what we wanted more than we ourselves. .. I believe that both developers may have known specifics of what was considered "must have" items in their games by the consumer and both developers knew it wasn't possible but decided to go ahead with development of their games anyway, knowing full well the games would not be received well with the missing "must have" items. They were both of the mind that they can still stuff crap down our throats and we'll come back and ask for more. "May I have some more sir"? .. Both games are ultimately crap IMHO. .. I wanted to say that Cities XL got the map right... It's a nice size, it looks pretty... Then though we discover that it's basically a skeleton on the inside with a painted fabric draped over it. So when we finally got to flatten some areas of the map, it looked like crap because the fabric was already painted to look like a certain terrain feature only now that 3D looking terrain feature was flat and looked stupid. The only thing that either game got really right to me was Cities XL creating the size of the map that they created. Beyond that they both fail terribly. Both games have left us waiting and hoping for the next great city building game, whatever that might turn out to be in the future.

It will likely turn out to be a great tax break for EA

4.5GB of plugins and it's solid as a rock for me. The thing that worked for me was this command line: (oops, sorry I'm on the wrong laptop, this one doesn't yet have SC4 installed) will try to ome back tomorrow when I get on my other computer if I remember.

2003 i remember buying a new computer to run it, paid for it on my Mobil gasoline credit card as Mobil sent out advertisements to sell a 486 dx25 computer and monitor that could be paid for in monthly installements on the gasoline credit card so I took advantage of it so that I'd have a computer that would play SC4 acceptably. Prior to that I was still using my old 286 computer.

Does that also mean it does not lower their happiness levels when a building states that they are still upset about the recent high taxes?

don't be late on pausing after collecting the taxes else you get a lot of buildings saying they are "still mad about the recent high taxes" if you delay the pause too long to reduce the taxes again. So make sure its all done while game is paused (raising and lowering taxes) to avoid any delay in getting taxes back down. Personally I find it rather pointless since money flows like wine in SC13 once you've plopped anything that has the opportunity to make you money anyway then the money comes in faster than I can spend it on such small maps.

with how sensitive whole SC13 subject is right now... you honestly have no idea how many hearts you have broken with your joke.

With that said the next thing to do is to get rid of the idea that commercial needs to be in a central location. Also get rid of the idea that industry needs to be clustered in a specific location down wind. I will tell you why. When you cluster everything together you are forcing a city full of commuters into those specific areas. Think about 20,000 shoppers hitting the same cluster of roads at once. No road in the game can handle it. No matter how intricate you make your network or what size or density, it will break down and clog up. I may be misreading you, are you suggesting that I stick industrial in with the residential housing? I already spread out and disperse commercial within the housing area so that the sims can get to their "neighborhood" local commercial store as fast as possible and hopefully they don't want to drive all the way across the map to get to Joe's Bar & Grille instead of just walking down to Moe's Bar & Grille that is right on the corner of their own street. It seems really unpredictable to me what with the way that the sims just grab the first house for the night and the first job building that they come across that has a vacancy for them. Since we don't really know where any of them are going to go home to, or go to work the next day, it seems really uncontrollable to me. But I'll keep tinkering with it as that's what I enjoy doing in CB games, always trying to get things to run as smooth as is possible. Oh +Rep to ya Epic-Nemesis

The service roads are great to do a direct link from something like the oil fields to a trade depot that is near to the entrance/exit of your city, in that way there is no traffic slowing down the oil field trucks delivering the oil to the trade depot and if the trade depot is right next to the entrance/exit to your city they go right out with it. On cities that have oil in the right place I use the oil field service roads like this, also nice since the service roads don't cost anything. Oh and I just add a bit of regular road to plop down the trade depot on, and then connect the service road to the regular road, since no vehicles except for the service trucks can make use of the service road from the building they came from then there is never any traffic in between the oil fields and the trade depot..

I was just thinking about this again... If the park and rides are meant to get cars off the roads, wouldn't it just be better to not use them at all so that the sims don't need to drive their cars at all to the park and ride, instead just use the regular bus stops and in that way they need not even take their vehicles onto the roads at all. Of course this would assume that buses and street cars actually worked properly & you have enough bus stops in good locations so that the sims can simply walk to the bus stop.

I had hoped that they'd work in the same fashion as the OP stated, where I could place down a mass of park and rides on the first cross street when entering my city, and have all the expo attendees stop there and grab a ride up to the venue, but that doesn't seem to work. Plus imagine how many of those buildings it would take to accommodate a full venue at only 80 sims per building. Personally, I think it's just one of those "features" that wasn't thought all the way through unfortunately. Would not be surprised to eventually see a rush hour expansion for this one that tries to fix up things like this as well as adds in mass transit. Buses are just a nightmare. Once I placed down the UK bus depot, my traffic went to hell with masses of neighbor buses lining the highway waiting to get into my town. I finally just bulldozed the bus depot as it just made traffic worse instead of better.

The lizard will show up regardless if you have no trash. I've had it show up when I had 0 trash in the field, all trash had been burned. I think it's quite random with regards to a couple of the disasters. Yes like others, I too believe that we should have the option to turn off disasters, OR to choose which ones we wish to allow. For examples, I'd allow the earthquake disaster but none of that zombie nonsense or meteors etc.

Buying it is only a decision you can make, I would suggest that you actually go to the official forums and have a look around, not just at the hate topics but any love topics you might find too and see if it's something that you'll like. Maybe go to twitch.tv and watch some live streamers streaming the game might help you to choose too. People on this site like every web site are from all over the world, not just the U.S. No there is no terraforming in this version of the game. I'd only recommend the game at this point if you can get it on a good sale price, maybe amazon for $39.99 might be comfortable although in all honesty, I think the game in it's current state is probably more of a $20.00 to $30.00 game

There are still many bugs. The server stability seems to be greatly improved, but still no cheetah speed mode. There are many things that will NOT be fixed as they are design decisions, so if any of those items bug you then I guess you should skip it. If on the other hand they don't, then sure why not. I'm sure you'll find that the price will drop even further but who knows when that will actually happen. My guess is that Amazon ordered too many and with all the bad press from players on Amazon reviews it's not hard to believe that they dropped the price to try to get rid of a bunch of copies that they overbought on.

It's funny in a weird sort of way that Origin says that I've played Simcity 2013 for over 106 109 hours(I forgot my launcher was sitting open in the background). However, it also counts the hours that the launcher is just sitting open on my screen as play time. In actuality I've probably played no more than about 30 hours of actual play time and a bit of that was spent just logging into every server to make a list of where my cities are actually located. It will be funny when EA/Maxis comes out and says how many hours people have "played" simcity. All be considering how many hours people have just left the launcher sitting on their desktop and not actually playing the game. As for me, yes I'm bored with it already. Perhaps if it had built in voice chat in the region I might be more interested in playing if there were others playing in the same region at the same time as I am playing.