Omniassiah

But usually they at least do it with a product that is connected with gaming (a game store), or is so ubiquitous its moslty a non-issue like ( a Soda brand). This is the first that I remember that has next to no connection to the game.

The reason I blame the Republicans is because they were the ones who went out of their way to shoot down the federal transportation aid that was earmarked for the city. It's not a general political thing, just a specific grudge I have because that delayed the completion of Metrorail by years. I don't live in the inner loop, but I support rail being built there because 1) Connecting every part of suburban Houston by rail will never happen. You'd have to build hundreds of miles of rail to even come close to it. 2) When the commuter rail finally rolls out to the burbs, people who take it into the town will need a way to get around (kind of like the way that Sims in SC will take the heavy rail train to a city then use the streetcars to get to their final destinations). Doesn't matter how many commuter lines you build if people who don't work near the station have to ride the bus or call a cab to get where they're going. One of the things I do like about this game is that it is accurate to the way cities tend to work in the part of the country that I'm most familiar with. Highways dominate, every building has a mandatory parking lot, and mass transit options are pretty much limited to buses and trains. Now if only they could combine that with the ability to break the Sunbelt mold. Well part of the issue with Mass transit in the US is we are just way to spread out over here compared to Europe. I always comment on how there really was no Suburbs in a lot of European citys as the just seem to suddenly stop at the edge of town. Because of this even my small 30k town that I live would require the same if not more transit services then Frankfurt or Berlin. This makes most mass transit either completely useless to most people as it never goes/take to long to get to where you need it to or extremely expensive for they size of the population it would support. Don't get me wrong I loved being able to hope onto a train in Germany real quick and get where I needed to go with out a car, but it would be impossible to get that over here. Sad part is I live on the "more densely" packed east coast and its still true.

Exactly. Bad design, and really kills any chance of making a realistic city/traffic network. It's really sad, because the agent based sim could have been the best traffic simulator ever implemented in a game had Maxis properly designed the agent behavior. They squandered an opportunity here. The lack of Permenant destinations and homes really kills the traffic simulation.

Problem I see with traffic is that it goes for shortest route instead of the theoretical fastest(if all roads were empty) route, and that very unrealistic. Most people will take the route that should be the fastest as opposed to the shortest. Basically the sims should avoid the smaller roads unless they provide a very distinct time savings in travel or are required to reach their destination. Of course you also have the no home/job issue that causes very weird and non-realistic traffic issues as the traffic will never properly distribute to bypasses to get to their home that is farther away.

There is difference between not liking something because its different and not liking it because its different and broke. If the Simulation aspect would have worked at least in a reasonable manner, I could have at least respectfully said its not for me. But the problem is the core game doesn't even function properly to allow me to make the choice. SC13 could have easily been a slightly larger Tropico 4 with out the island dictator comedy, but at the moment we can't even tell that.

Its the fact they aren't even doing the calculations. Basically, if i am reading it right, when simcity does a save it send what your city can spare to the servers. The server just sends that information out to everyone else. Short answer is this is region mode with play-by-e-mail.

Be honest E3 has been on a slow downward spiral of late. Most of the old big boys are using their own fanfests to do what E3 used to do with out the expense and generally better exposure for them. CCP and Blizzard are both planned to be no shows on the booth side of things this year for that reason. Both have been releasing much more information at their own fanfest/cons. Generally speaking E3 is becoming more and more a Console convention then a PC convention especially when you look at the MMO side of things.

Seriously ignore them for as long as you can. its the best thing in the world to do at the beginning. In fact overall you don't place any services till people start to move out because of it.

One thing to watch out is that most computers don't like graphical programs hanging off the edge of the monitor. I would suggest dropping the resolution for your computers max to 1 or 2 below it say 1024x640(guessing there look under your monitor settings) just a bit to avoid that problem

Persistent online server of what? Sorry but your city does nothing if your not logged on. If you don't log in even if all your trades time out or get canceled your city doesn't change. Trading away 200 tokens of Fuel to make your budget positive, All the trades got canceled? Quick log out and trade via the website so you don't lose money in the city. Because again if your not logged in to your city it will sit at a negative budget and lose no money till you log in. That's not persistent in anyway shape or form. CitiesXL has a online savegame storage device, and a basic trade function that I would be surprised if it requires more power then a higher end desktop. In fact there is a Distinct lack of anything that the server handles for you besides saying yep your +3 tokens this and -4 that from trades.

Only thing i think they could have done better with the auto fill and would have faked what a lot of people wanted was to have the fill bleed over the Lots so that you don't see the hard Square edge as much.

Realize that not all Internet are equal. Some people have bandwidth limitation. others may have access to forums and websites through University/Job connections but non http/email ports are blocked. Often getting 1 month of internet is impossible, in the US that is going to cost you an average of $240 for one month of internet since after you cancel you'll have a $200 cancellation fee for not finishing your contract. Internet cafes are about the only viable option and if you don't own a laptop that can run CXL, but instead play on a Desktop, taking your desktop to an internet cafe to activate a game is going to be ugly. While Windows does need to be activated they at least provided a toll free number to call them up and do a phone activation.

Pretty much same as you, Its worse when you consider that you can't add an interchange onto and existing section of high way with out bulldozing the entire highway.

You can it involves building 8 roads straight out from the center, using the 8 way tool, to the same length then connecting the ends with the the curved road tool. Its a bit of a pain but can be done.

Originally posted by: zaroba i really don't see how the planet offer can be factored into the game cost. mainly since EVERY pay to play game will cost hundreds, or even thousands if your a member long enough quote> I don't think its the cost but the value for the cost. At the moment I pay for not one but 3 Eve-online accounts. I still bawk at the cost of CXL online fees. Its not because of the raw cost but what you get for that cost and what it costs them. They have basically a minimum need on the server side for processing power, probably a decient amount of storage space but nothing too excessive. Now this is costing 2/3s the monthly fee as one of my eve-online accounts, that is helping pay for a multi-million dollar server cluster that is closing quickly in on being in the top 500 computing clusters using rapid access solid state Database ramdisks and generally everything possible to try to keep up with us eve players trying to kill the hamsters in the servers. Now add on top of that them providing expansions to the game every 6-7 months and complete game engine overhauls occasionally for no additional cost and thats what puts a lot of people, myself included, in the "is this PO really worth the money" group.