Camlon

While it is true that development cost has been skyrocketing, it doesn't need to be that way. You don't need 5 million sales to make a decent profit. Paradox Interactive have made profit on games which has sold 300K copies. And its not too weird if you think about it. To make cities skylines they have about 10 employees, and lets assume they get paid 100K dollars a year for 3 years. The total employee cost will then be 3 million dollars. But if you sell 2 million copies for a profit of 30 dollars each. (talking about simcity now) then you will earn 60 million dollars. The problem is not that city building games cost too much to develop, the problem is that EA is wasting resources. 1. Not a significant factor compared to other factors 2. Actually it is cheap, I remember I saw advertisments in stores for sim city 2013. You won't find that for Cities Skylines. Their type of marketing is cheap, but also very smart. For instance they let a lot of youtubers play their games and upload videos. 3. So, pretty much the same as what physical stores take from EA. They also don't need to think about production cost. 4. They are not among featured items, they are however in the top sales list. 5. That is similar to many other game companies, and it doesn't really matter. It just means the profit will be shared among two organizations. Most people don't wait for a sale. And currently CIties Skylines is the top seller on steam. I expect them to at least sell one million. That will give them a decent profit and name recognition.

Its not due to commute times, as NAM makes commuters travel any distance. Forget about subway, it won't make a difference. Your problem is lack of jobs for high wealth citizens. You have massive demand for industry, and high demand for commercial. Do something about it and your abandonment problems will disappear.

We are so entitled that we choose to play Sim City 4 instead Or maybe it was just a poor game, and that's why people are complaining. And maybe the reason the complaints of Sim City 4 was "puppy dogs and rainbows compared to the vitriol spewed forth now" is because while Sim City 4 had issues, the original version was fundamentally a good game that was a huge improvement from Sim City 3000. Sim City 4 had regions, superior terraforming, far superior graphics, more dynamic models than Sim City 3000. What does Sim City 2013 have, a flawed glassbox?

It has crashed occasionally, but not very often. It is very annoying when it happens because I forget to save and lose hours of progress.

Seems to me this topic was posted two years ago. I am sure he has solved his problem by now

I think the easiest way is this. Build up your city to low residential demand, and place all the dirty and manufacturing industry in a neighbor. When the sims are getting more uneducated then both of them will drop negative and you will get demand from hi-tech. Hence, when you build industry then only high-tech show up. Much better than trying to tax them away, but end up with unemployment because you are suppressing demand.

Hey guys, you should try out Sim City 4. it might not have the 3D or glassbox, but it is a game that last. No reason to play a broken game, when we got Sim City 4. I have had it for many years, and I am still playing it.

The demand in the game is a little bit messed up, and you will often get residential demand even if there is no jobs. But from what I see you still have demand for Co-$$ and Co-$$$ and you have massive demand for I-M. Remember, rich people do not just work at $$$, they may also work at lower wealth. If you want to avoid unemployment you will need to keep demand for industry at commerce at near 0. Also, I can assure it has nothing to do with distance. Under NAM the max allowable commute times are so long they will travel back and forward on a big map many times.

In SC4 the sims don't really care if there is jobs for them or not. They will come if you have demand for them, and in the beginning you always do. But after a while with no jobs they will leave again. Remember that public services also provide jobs. However, that is very different from SC2013 where you can sustain a city with no jobs and grow a 200K city (30K city). In Sim City 4 you will have a hard time getting anything more than a 1000. Hi, I built an all R and C city, and got up to 400K sims, but then I experienced heavy traffic problems. Although I upgraded roads, put bus stops every where, used the street-car wherever I could, yet it did'nt help. So now, because of the traffic problems, fire trucks do'nt get to fire on time (although the said they fixed this problem on the 1.7 patch), so I loose buildings, doze them, and new sims come over and build again. This scenario repeat itself, and my city moves between 390K to 405K sims. I know that I have to solve the traffic problems, but yet, did not find how. Any ideas ? Bulldoze the Commercial areas and replace them with parks.

The game is not perfect, that's why. Its not a big deal as it does not lead to huge increases in commute times. They don't walk on the other side of the road because they are programmed like cars. It would require a lot of extra programming to have a different transportation control for pedestrians.

My bet would be low land value. With high land value and high demand you are going to get tall buildings. I have build cities with only small amount of residential, and I still get tall buildings. In fact it is often easier to get only tall buildings in those smaller cities.

I would have no problems paying that amount, and I bet most of the people who say "no" here would still pay for it if they are unable to get a pirated copy. Its not like its very much money. Even in China for white collar workers, it is a weekly salary. In western countries it is 1-2 days of work. That's worth it if it will give me thousands of hours of gameplay.

To be able to sell DLCs you need to first have an enjoyable game and a huge player base. They can make as many DLCs as they want for Sim City Societies, but it won't lead to any revenue. There is nothing wrong with DLCs and you can earn a lot of money from it. Sims 3 is an example of that. Its a quite enjoyable game, and has a lot of DLCs that you can download. However, if you release a bad game then people are not going to buy DLCs to fix it. So I still hold the statement. If EA valued their shareholders, they would release better games.

I didn't notice it before, because I was building mostly car free cities. But this time I wasn't, and it seems like everyone will walk if they are not going to another city. I am using custom install, because I wanted to increase maximum commuting time from 600 to 999. Anyone know how to solve that?

If they valued their shareholders, they would release better games. EA has been way too short term focused. In the short term releasing mediocre rushed games is very beneficial. It will cut down on costs, and sales will be almost the same. However in the long term it causes problems. Some of these intended mediocre games are going to be absolutely terrible, as games tend to be worse than expected. That will often destroy the whole series. For instance Sim City Socities flopped, but it did have some sales. They released an expansion and it was a total financial failure. EA needs to get a more long term perspective.

I just made two cities. One of them have about 400K industry jobs, 500K people, and seem to be working fine. However, the adjacent city who was working fine before seem to be bugged. It has 1M people, (2M if you take into account that I have the resident halver mod). At a pretty random moment commute times multiplied by 10, and no one seems to be working at dirty industry and demand for dirty industry fell to -6000. I am also getting some job problems because people are fighting about the limited commercial/manufacturing jobs. But the interesting things is. The census addition tell me that I have drive for 560K dirty jobs, and I currently only have 410K dirty jobs. I tried to destroy industry, but even when the number of dirty industry jobs dropped to about 100K (have to be careful not to destroy too much manufacturing) there was still zero demand for dirty industry, Before you jump in and say it is due to education, My education level is 15 so there should be plenty of demand for dirty industry and there is zero demand for manufacturing and hi-tech. I have also tried to 1. Build subways 2. Destroy all connections. Nothing changed at all when I removed the connections. I destroyed the roads as well. Still zero demand for dirty industry. Any possible explanation? Edit: I tried to make a connection to another new city adjacent to the industry, and found out that the people refused to acknowledge the exit existed and kept taking the same paths trough my whole city. Also, when I went to the empty city which is only adjacent to the big city, the demand for dirty industry was massive. Also, I checked. Demand cap for dirty industry is 100%. But it should increase as freight leaves the city. --- Merged double post, please use the edit-button in the future! Thanks! -timmie

Yes, how dare the creators and owners of that franchise do something with it that displeases the fans! How dare they trying to innovate and come up with something new! Preposterous! How is removing subway innovation? How is forcing users to deal with a weak server innovation? How is smaller maps innovation? How is empty space between cities innovation? How is removal of terraforming innovation? How is making a traffic system that makes no sense innovation. Change does not mean innovation. Innovation is to make something better. The reason I am willing to pay is this. $20 dollars is a very low sum to get a proper sim city game. It might fail, but I am willing to take that risk for $20 dollars. In fact I will pay $500 if I can get a proper sim city game. Hence, I don't see the reason to not back them.

A smaller city section does not mean people will live more dense. You need to get a high population before people will live more dense. In my opinion it is too easy to make dense cities. If nothing is growing, but RCI demand is high then this is likely due to 1. Your city is small OR 2. You do not provide water.

I tried to make a city with no transport system at all, I didn't even bother to upgrade my roads at all, and I plugged the industry on the other side of the map. Currently I have 1M sims, playing it on standard NAM. I have no joblessness at all, even though all of my roads are red. A city like this in real life would not work. Cars would be stuck, the only way to get to work would be walking, (which most of them do) but that would take more than an hour. Most people would move if that was the case. It seems like all joblessness through NAM is through bugs. Not sure whats causing the bug. Z1 reccomends to build a subway, but I don't see how it will make a difference if I can build a 1M sim city with no transport system and hardly any roads. Still smart to build it though, if you don't want your city to be polluted to death.

Psst... You are talking to the guy who wrote the traffic simulator. You can download that one alone, without the NAM, if you want. It's the backbone of the NAM, though. He didn't write it alone. I just felt his post was kind of arrogant. You are right about that.

Um, "they" in this case happens to be me. And yes, the commute limit was not removed. But it is always reset to zero every time the Sims cross a city boundary. It has to be - cities don't keep track of how long their entering Sims have been commuting. NAM was created by a team, not just you. That is just arrogant. Why would you reset it to zero when it cross the border? From what I thought and heard it adds a fixed amount to travel time if you cross the borders. If it resets to zero that would be kind of silly. Is there an alternative version that does not have your silly reset system. But I just did an experiment, and they did travel across the whole large map to get job. I guess the abandonment troubles you may get from putting the zones too far away from each other is due to some other people taking their jobs, and they can't find any available jobs.

Not true - I've had them commute from one corner of a large tile to the opposite one. Additionally, there is no theoretical limit to the number of tiles they will cross for a commute; you just have to be careful how you lay out your cities. Wrong, there is a theoretical limit. They did not remove commute limit. Also, I am not talking about the fast transports. I am talking about roads. With a subway network they can go farther. Again, this is not true with the NAM. Eliminating this requirement was one of the main reasons the NAM traffic simulator was built. Zones can be spread as far apart as you like, even into the next city. But if you want to do this successfully, you will need lots of subways and stops as well. I have repeated these points many, many times. If you can't get the NAM to do something for you, that doesn't mean the NAM can't do it; it very often just means you don't know how to fully utilize the NAM. Please don't assume that the limitations you find in your own game play are built into the NAM, and not merely a result of how you play the game. Even in the next city is not impressive. I can do that without the NAM as well. Of course they have to be close to the border, but that's it, But no you can not spread your cities as far apart as you like with the NAM, The NAM was not created to achieve that. The NAM was created to fix the transport system to make it more realistic. People still have a limit of how far they will go to work. Subways will make them go farther, but it still have limits. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat it. It is wrong every single time. NAM does have a commute limit. BTW: Not all cities have subway. It depends on how you want to play the game. There is not just one way of playing the game.

I think the developers at Maxis are weak. Sim City 4 was not problem free. It had significant problems in the begining, signaling that something was wrong even back then. In fact what made the game too hard for the average player was not the intended game play, but a bad and not realistic transport system. These are the games developed by Maxis since Sim City 4. 2004 – The Sims 2 2008 – Spore 2009 - The Sims 3 2011 – Darkspore 2013 – SimCity I have coloured them after reviews on metacritic. The sims is their easiest and most successful game series. They have the best developers working on that game, and they still managed to mess it up. People still liked it, but it was just ok. All of their other games has been a failure. I don't think Maxis is capable of making a good Sim City game anymore. We need another developer.

Haha, no. They knew exactly how many preordered the game. What they miscalculated was the stress on the servers.

Yes, but not to the same degree. In general in Sim CIty 4 a house contains about 7 - 14 people. And in my experience all apartment blocks contain double of what they really should contain. But at least Sim City 4 has a linear system. In Sim City 2013 they are actively trying to inflate the numbers by having an exponential system. In the begining each house contain 5 people, but then in later game each house contain 34 people. Its silly. I see the faults in Sim City 4 as well. For instance one fault that does not get mention a lot (traffic get mentioned a lot) is how people move into the city. In Sim City 4 they move in if their desirability is high and the RCI is high. But in real life, they also consider how close their job is to their work. Because of this we get the annoying problem where they create huge R$$$ buildings and then it drops down to R$$ due to lack of jobs. I just want them to show the actual population. Not trying to inflate the numbers, so people will think the cities are larger. I actually noticed this before I read the code. I saw a city that contained 900K people, but by my estimation it only had 5000 apartments. Realistically that city should have 20K people. In Sim City 4 it might have 50K people, but not 900K.