City Planner

The trade system works on a token system. ALmost everything that you build in your city produces towards tokens. For example when you build water towers, they add into the pool of water tokens. When you have more tokens of any given resource that is tradeable that is higher than the amount that your city uses, then you can trade the excess tokens. The message I "think" you are getting is likely a message telling you that you either do not have enough extra tokens to sell them, or that you do not have enough cash "income" to buy them. Cash income is different than the total amount of cash that you have in the city. If you are negative in cash income then the game stops you from trading with your own cities and you can only trade with omnicorp, but as long as you have atleast +1 cash income you can trade with your other cities. If you need cash income then choose one of your other cities that has a surplus of cash income and give it to your poorer city, it will then be positive cash income in your city. It's almost always better to trade with your other cities than it is with Omnicorp since Omnicorp charges so much and gives so little in trading, something like they pay you 35tokens (which is about 3500.00 cash income) for each token, but charge you about 90 cash tokens to sell you any single resource, as you can see that's one big difference. So it's best to specialize some of your cities so that you can simply syphon off those items you need for free if you can't afford to pay for them as you can do exactly that in trading with your own cities, you can just take as much as the other city has to offer and don't have to give anything in return if you don't want to. I can't imagine what went wrong with your bus, other than you need 50,000 inhabitants to be able to even place the bus but you only had 47,000 which makes me think you have been using a mod of some sort to allow you to place the buses before the 50,000 bobbleheads are in your city. Beyond that however, I can't imagine what would go wrong with the bus system as it's never produced any problems for me and your messages are too vague to read anything into them. Maybe if you give us the real wording to any problems that you experience somebody can help you, then again maybe not. Why do you have to always build a city hall first? I don't know, it's the way the game is setup to be. Sure it would be nice to place it later on at some certain population level, however it doesn't bother me to place it first as it's just one little building. My personal feeling is that if I were to compare this unmodded to Simcity 4 vanilla, I feel that CXL2011 is a more enjoyable game. I remember recently reloading SC4 vanilla and hated it. It isn't until I reloaded all my mods into SC4 that it became enjoyable again for me. But to each their own.

The one thing that I do with regards to saving space is to draw out the small farm roads and then i use the black asphalt plaza texture that is in one of the mods to fill inside of the area surounded by farm roads. This way I know later on that I was saving an area for something even if I don't remember exactly what that something was. Oh and then I delete the small farm road around the black asphalt so that I don't have any issues with them, and it just leaves the black asphalt texture as a reminder and a space that I don't build on until I'm ready to place that planned item like an airport in that area.

I honestly can't see what is so complex about trading or mass transit buses. For trading the city your playing is on the left, now choose the trade partner on the right. You choose omnicorp then click the arrow on their side to sell them something, or choose the arrow on your city side to buy something. How is this complex? Mass transit Buses: Can you imagine the screaming if the game was allowed to choose it's own routes? Anyway, I don't see any complexity in this either, you place a terminal and then place up to 40 bus stops, eventually landing back at the terminal again. Nothing complex about it. Honestly I can't imagine how you managed to play for 3 hours and not obtain a population that required you to start placing schools and clinics to keep the bobbleheads happy. I'm an ultra slow builder but in three hours I'm way up into the hundreds of thousands of bobbleheads and need to have placed multiple schools, multiple clinics etc. It just doesn't make sence, and I'm on the verge of calling shenanigans, what with 1 post, and the claim that playing for 3 hours you didn't have to place any schools or clinics, or the only other option seems to be that you may not have fully grasped how the game needs to be played. You may want to give it another go and see how it plays when playing it according to CXL rules. It's not for everybody, and there will always be people that can't break free of the SC4 grasp, but it's atleast worth a 2nd try in my opinion. Anyway, you're entitled to your own opinion, as it's not going to be the game for everybody.

Originally posted by: MCjohnstown Well then. I v'e read all these comments and all the ups and downs for CXL2011. Can someone please tell me if it's worth the 20/30$?quote> That's what people have been trying to say in this thread. But if you need it to be more blunt, then, Yes, I consider the 2011 version of the game to be worth the $20.00 price of admission. It's got a lot that is good about it, and will only be made better if Focus updates and fixes the bugs and the modders are given a bit more access to the files to mod them. The thing that the game suffers the most to me is a lack of buildings. Even with the reported 700 buildings, it doesn't do anything for when a certain social crowd only has 9 to 12 buildings to choose from. The game to me is pure eye candy, it is what SC4 has evolved into with so many people playing sandbox type of SC4 and that's not a bad thing. To use a mod that inflicts millions of dollars in income, and then to use the expert mode of placement allows us to build the city of our dreams, as long as we do so within the constraints of what is necessary to be built in the game to make things function, i.e. don't go building 6500 offices and nothing else, else it doesn't function properly. Yes, a good game that could only be better through patches to fix the bugs, and more enhancements, and more access to the files that modders need access to to keep growing the game. All in all, the 2011 version for previous owners of the game, goes a long way towards completing the game, but it still HAS to have bug fixes to fully complete the game before they move on to any paid expansions or sequels in my opinion.

Originally posted by: MCjohnstown Well then. I v'e read all these comments and all the ups and downs for CXL2011. Can someone please tell me if it's worth the 20/30$?quote> That's what people have been trying to say in this thread. But if you need it to be more blunt, then, Yes, I consider the 2011 version of the game to be worth the $20.00 price of admission. It's got a lot that is good about it, and will only be made better if Focus updates and fixes the bugs and the modders are given a bit more access to the files to mod them. The thing that the game suffers the most to me is a lack of buildings. Even with the reported 700 buildings, it doesn't do anything for when a certain social crowd only has 9 to 12 buildings to choose from. The game to me is pure eye candy, it is what SC4 has evolved into with so many people playing sandbox type of SC4 and that's not a bad thing. To use a mod that inflicts millions of dollars in income, and then to use the expert mode of placement allows us to build the city of our dreams, as long as we do so within the constraints of what is necessary to be built in the game to make things function, i.e. don't go building 6500 offices and nothing else, else it doesn't function properly. Yes, a good game that could only be better through patches to fix the bugs, and more enhancements, and more access to the files that modders need access to to keep growing the game. All in all, the 2011 version for previous owners of the game, goes a long way towards completing the game, but it still HAS to have bug fixes to fully complete the game before they move on to any paid expansions or sequels in my opinion.

LOL Bobblehead. I like that the name is starting to stick - LOL. Just be aware that it is suspected that the cause of a city blacking out might be related to attaching the camera to a vehicle in the game. There is no concrete evidence as of yet and it might not happen the first time or the 5,000th time that you attack the camera to a vehicle, but that seems to be what people have reported they were doing when the city blacked out on them and as of yet, there doesn't seem to be a way to revert the city to a non blacked out city unless you have a previous save that you can load up. So make sure to make a save before you start following any vehicles around, just in case that's truly the cause of the city screen blacking out. Better safe than sorry. I hated losing my 200k city when it blacked out and my last private save was back at like 30k.

LOL Bobblehead. I like that the name is starting to stick - LOL. Just be aware that it is suspected that the cause of a city blacking out might be related to attaching the camera to a vehicle in the game. There is no concrete evidence as of yet and it might not happen the first time or the 5,000th time that you attack the camera to a vehicle, but that seems to be what people have reported they were doing when the city blacked out on them and as of yet, there doesn't seem to be a way to revert the city to a non blacked out city unless you have a previous save that you can load up. So make sure to make a save before you start following any vehicles around, just in case that's truly the cause of the city screen blacking out. Better safe than sorry. I hated losing my 200k city when it blacked out and my last private save was back at like 30k.

On this game more than others, make sure to make your own saves (now that we can) how ever spread apart to what you feel comfortable losing in time spent playing, (i.e. 50k population, or 100k population or 1,000,000 population etc), as there seems to be some problems with some player having their cities crash when trying to open them. I don't believe that it's known yet whether this is a problem of the users having this issue maybe not having enough 'hardware' to support reopening those high pop cities or if it's a problem with the game itself. Seems that more people would be experiencing it if it was directly a problem with the game itself, however better safe than sorry, and take that 15 seconds to create your own save points. I save my game about every 50,000 population as that's about all that I'm willing to lose at one time. You may never need to use the saves, but again, better safe than sorry.

On this game more than others, make sure to make your own saves (now that we can) how ever spread apart to what you feel comfortable losing in time spent playing, (i.e. 50k population, or 100k population or 1,000,000 population etc), as there seems to be some problems with some player having their cities crash when trying to open them. I don't believe that it's known yet whether this is a problem of the users having this issue maybe not having enough 'hardware' to support reopening those high pop cities or if it's a problem with the game itself. Seems that more people would be experiencing it if it was directly a problem with the game itself, however better safe than sorry, and take that 15 seconds to create your own save points. I save my game about every 50,000 population as that's about all that I'm willing to lose at one time. You may never need to use the saves, but again, better safe than sorry.

I like the layout around the lake, it looks pretty and nicely organized.

I can not say definitively that the game has or has not a memory leak. As I understand memory leaks, a program will use memory and not return it to the memory pool, thus continually using memory until the user runs out of memory or the memory use is so high that the software can barely run. Well, after 7 hours of playing, the game still does not exceed 1.4GB of RAM on my computer, this to me would normally tell me that the software does not have a memory leak since it's not exceeding a certain amount. Does the game slow down when people have 1,000,000 or 5,000,000 inhabitants? It should, that's a lot of processing that the game needs to do, if it didn't slow down then I would assume that there is something fudged in the record keeping of the game. For some reason there are some people that think that if their computers can run the latest and greatest games that CXL should perform the same. There not the same game, and it may have nothing to do with optimizing code, it may simply be that the game is at it's limit for todays hardware. It does not surprise me at all that the game will slow down with 1 million residents or 5 million residents, that's a lot of stuff on the screen and it should slow down. One can not expect to get the same performance when you have no residents as when you have millions of them. So, why does the game slow down for some people that only have 10,000 residents in their city, but they play the latest and greatest games on all high settings at 3580x2450 resolution? That's the million dollar question isn't it? The strange bit about it, is that I don't have the latest and greatest computer and yet the game plays at an acceptable frame rate and does not exceed 1.4GB of RAM regardless if I have only 10k residents or if I have 250k residents, sure it gets a tiny bit slower when my screen is full of buildings, but not to the point where I'd have to say something is wrong. Could the game use optimizing? Sure, what game couldn't. The bottom line is that I don't know if FHI fixed the reported memory leak or not, but the game is not showing signs of a traditional memory leak when I play it for hour after hour after hour.

Each piece of road in the cities that don't come with roads already placed cost you some cash income. If you get very elaborate with your roads before your city is producing cash, then you can go into serious debt. it just depends on how elaborate you get with your road network before your city is up and running properly.

Yes, there are issues with the trade system. I've often given Omnicorp some resource tokens and get absolutely nothing in cash tokens back. It seems it's something that Focus will need to fix on their end.

Originally posted by: Sniper296 Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle It worked wonderfully on my computer with Cities XL (2009) but I am afraid to test it on Cities XL 2011. Does it work on Cities XL 2011?quote> I don't know if it will work with 2011 but if the structure of the games files is the same it should, and testing it should not harm the games installation, but back up your saves and mods to be sure. quote> Yes, it works fine with Cities XL 2011. Honestly, without it, I would not likely to play XL11 as the gray boxes are the hugest immersion breaking thing in the game. With this mod, the game feels very natural looking with all the cars moving around. So yes, it works fine in Cities XL 2011.

Can you tell me what to change in the mod that will reduce the people viewing to only the first 1 zoom level? I'm thinking that I don't care about the people walking around my city and would like to reduce any performance that they might be utilizing by reducing the visibility of the people to only the first zoom level, or maybe even better, only to when I am on the very ground level of the game. Is there something I can change in your mod files to accomodate that? I've opened them up but I'm not experienced yet in CXL modding so I'm not seeing what would stick out to me as being what needs to be changed to get people only visible when the player is on the very lowest level, down on the ground walking around the city. Thanks,

I'm pretty positive that the trading system is bugged pretty badly right now. For most trades I will get aproximately 3500 cash income for selling to Omnicorp. However there have been many times that I've sold maybe 5 or 10 units of whatever to Omni, and when I started the trade my cash income for my city was -7,000 and so after trading those 5 to 10 units of resources to Omni, I go back to the city and see that my cash income is still -7,000 It is in my opinion bugged and should be placed on the priority list of things to fix right after any game crashes, for without proper trading, it devolves down into needing to cheat to bring in the income that Omnicorp is not paying the city for their resources. I have reported this as a bug on the official forums a time or two, so let's see if they do anything about it.

Hmmm, I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling that the 'Staples Center' in Los Angeles, CA. makes some pretty hefty tax payments to the city with all the venues that they have their from concerts to sports. I can think of a lot of things that MC could have simply increased the costs on if they needed to have a money sink in the game like most games would, heck they could have even just increase road maintenance and then had all the leisurely type of services pay into the treasurey. Parks would make sense that they cost the city money since they need to maintain them, with that, a jogging track would be on a park. Libraries, absolutely should cost the city money, same with Museums, music and art schools, in my mind are private enterprises, and in real life costs a heck of a lot of money to get enrolled in. Public eductation facilities like public elementary school, high school community colleges, are all things the city would pay for. Public swimming pools to me would be in parks and recreation which of course the city is paying for. But yeah, you're likely correct, it would not surprise me if they had originally planned out a third category but somebody cut it to save the budget and or time problems which would be a shame because it just looks really well... Un-simulation to have those buildings stuffed in there where the city has to pay for them. Still, it's okay and all if you can overlook little things like this.

Originally posted by: jazyje . I don't like achievements --- they make me feel like I'm 8 years old... Is there a way to turn those off? Lastly, the game feels snappier; however, I noticed a definite DROP in the quality of building textures and I run everything on high -- has anyone experienced that as well?quote> Yes, thankfully Focus realizes that not everybody likes achievements. Myself probably more than others find achievements to be little more than a gimick. So, yes, you can turn off the achievements in the options panel and they won't show on your screen, nor will they even accumulate. Building textures to me look the same as they always have, some where always better than others, some more crisp and others softer, usually the softer ones don't look right as they look like they are lacking detail, however I don't think that is anything new to 2011. Overall and enjoyable game. Not perfect by any means and personally I'm hoping that Focus figures out their own direction to take the game and does it. I don't particularly care for MC's design, where things like bowling alleys cost the city per month, that takes any form of what we can call simulation and drops it out the window. With that said, it's not a bad game, it's quite enjoyable for the most part and I feel satisfied with my 20.00 purchase. Obviously I hope they will continue to improve on it and put out patches, expansions and sequels to make it one of the best CB games, however Focus is going to have to put it's own Focus on the game to do that.

Originally posted by: soltangris Well, the trains and busses are supposed to look differently according to the road setting you choose on city creation. And all those 'cosmetic' changes... they were much much needed tweaks that make the game much better balanced and polished. I guess they're not that much, but with them the game finally looses that 'unfinished' feeling. Still, my cities are still small, I can't judge well everything. A hint for people with graphic problems: Turning off the item 'Atmospheric display' improves noticeably the performance, while keeping all details. Atmospheric display is the haze that grays out the city when you zoom out - it's not that important.quote> Thanks, I was under the impression that the haze that grays out everything from a far distant zoom was there to improve performance, sort of like a fog and was killing me to figure out how to get rid of it. Now that I've turned off atmospheric display the nasty haze is gone and the performance increased a little bit. However, without the atmospheric display, many buildings look like cartoons that are drawn in a comic book, and the atmospheric display seems to place something around the buildings themselves even at close level zooms that just makes them not stick out like a sore thumb. Still, to get rid of that awful gray haze when viewing from a distance is well worth the cartoon looking buildings every now and then.

Also build the largest avenue that you have available to you when you place your city links, its been reported that it allows more freight traffic and thus the freight can go farther into the city where it needs to get to.

If you have the Steam version of the game then visit the official forums and download the 'temporary steam fix' from the technical forums there. It is reported to make the GUI in the steam version as responsive as it is in the Metaboli version of Cities XL 2011.