MPleines

Free! Hey, we need room for DLC!

OK, let's eliminate the guesswork and do some analysis. OP is right about one thing: when you take scale into account, the new SimCity maps fall somewhere in between SC4 medium and small, while maintaining 2km x 2km dimensions. I'm not going to address the sizes and heights of landmarks here, those are stylized to a large degree. Scale In SC4, you can clearly see a strict underlying grid when you are laying down roads. Each tile in this grid is 16m by 16m. ( 128 tiles to a side of a medium sized map; 2048m / 128 = 16m ) Large skyscrapers (see note 1) have a footprint of 4 x 4 of these tiles, so a square cityblock would measure 64m x 64m. The new SimCity does not display a grid like that, because there's no strict grid anymore, but you can do some analysis on a screenshot with something like the Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop, which allows you to overlay an image with a perspective-corrected grid. The largest skyscrapers I've seen in the official screenshots had a footprint of 4 x 4 times the smallest roadwidth, and we know that that's 24m wide. So a square cityblock containing one large building would be 96m by 96m. Look up City Block in Wikipedia, or measure them in Google Earth (which does have a measuring tool) and you'll find that they usually are about 100m or more on their shortest side in North America. So the scale in SimCity conforms to the real world better than SC4. Map Size From the smallest road width, we could infer that the smallest tile is now 24m x 24m (but see note 3) instead of 16m x 16m in SC4. 2048 / 24 = 85.33... SC4 medium: 128 x 128 = 16384 tiles SimCity: 85 x 85 = 7225 tiles; see notes 2 and 3 SC4 small: 64 x 64 = 4096 tiles Conclusion so, yes, one could argue that SimCity maps are, in fact, smaller than medium in SC4 (but bigger than 'small'), but you can also argue that SC4 allowed you to pack too much into a 2048m x 2048m area when you take real-world block sizes into account. If you'd correct SC4 scale to RW values, a SC4 medium map would actually be more like 3072m x 3072m! The new Simcity maps are a more realistic depiction of a 2 km x 2 km area. Notes 1-When I mention buildings, I'm referring to zoned buildings; not ploppables, nor SC4/RH mods. 2-Actually, 85 x 24 = 2040; in SimCity, there is no strict grid as such, of course, but you can still create one by adhering strictly to a grid in your own layout. 3-In SC4, the 16m tiles were the smallest unit, period. in SimCity, there appears to be a smaller granularity beneath the 24m x 24m tile size though, which does affect the width and placement of smaller buildings in particular. They do not align to a grid as strictly even within a grid-like layout and plots can actually be narrower than 24m i.e. trailer homes and shacks; you sometimes get 5 or even 6 of those along a 96m stretch instead of just 4. Edit: the underlying granularity is 8m. as confirmed in a recent Maxis interview.

Nice write up! btw, what's the building between the Globe Theatre and the Sydney Opera?

I've got no objections against constructive criticism and well-founded arguments, and I actually do agree with some of them, but there are compensations in the new gameplay. What I do find annoying is the constant spamming of every forum and every thread with the same flogged-to-death horse meat. Don't you think that, by now, Maxis and EA KNOW that most of us want bigger maps, terraforming and an offline mode??? This new SimCity goes much deeper than shiny graphics and eye-candy, and dare I say it, much deeper than SC4, even if not by subway. Sure, there are limitations, as there are in every piece of software, it's not perfect. Not to anyones' taste obviously, but, as they say, there's no accounting for that.

Hi, Zpike, if things go sour here, you might want to try http://simcityhall.net/ Very positive attitude; They are specializing in putting together groups for region play. BTW I'm just a member there, not part of the organization. I follow many SC forums but am disappointed with all this repetitive posting of the same complaints over and over again too. On the official EA forum it's even worse, with a lot of trolling and bickering going on.

I think this Simcity will be the best one yet. Sure, there are drawbacks and limitations, but overall the improvements will outweigh the drawbacks eventually, in the full game. Went back to SC4/RH for a while but there's too much tedious donkey-work there (water pipes being the worst).

Yeah! The Sim Superbowl!!! Simcity Bulldozers vs. CitiesXL Cranes! Seriously, I like the idea of staging events but I'm really hoping there will be some big sports-specific stadiums too later on for Football, Baseball, Atheletics, Soccer or Tennis, heck maybe even Cricket! An Olympics challenge would be interesting too-build a required set of sports facilities and infrastructure in the city/region to qualify. The possibilities are endless...

Regions make much more sense in this version, especially if you're playing together with friends. We haven't been able to test this in the beta; the multiplayer features were not included. However, you cannot create or modify your own regions, there will be choice of them when starting a new town. The devs have indicated that city sizes might be enlarged in the future. One of the things that set this apart from SC4 is that it plays much more smoothly, because a lot of stuff that would interrupt game-play in SC4 has been integrated better now. The game doesn't stop for you to dispatch firefighters or police, they go out and find fires and crime for themselves, and you can take measures to improve their efficiency and capacity by adding modules to their buildings. This is one of the best features in the new version, it also replaces ordinances, instead of a city-wide ordinance checkbox promoting fire safety, you can add a community outreach module to the fire-station in neighbourhoods with a high risk of fires. These modules aren't just abstract checkboxes or sliders either, you can see them added onto the building. City Hall will also gain more functions and capabilities as you add modules for administration, tourism etc. I really hated having to lay down water pipes in SC4, that was very tedious; water, energy and sewage (new in this game) now are integrated into the road network, you just have to take care of the pumps and power- and treatment plants. There is much more to this game than meets the eye-you can extract coal, oil or ore from the ground, set up refineries and smelting plants to transform them to fuel, plastics or metal for trade or for your factories to transform them into products. For me at least, there's no going back to SC4...

I agree, and I had the same feelings about the hi-tech buildings and casinos looking too fanciful...but the more I look at real new buildings in the Far East and the Emirates in particular, the more I realize that they're not so unrealistic after all! But I would love to see a 1950's pack eventually, with more 50's buildings and, especially, cars!

The creators of Simcity have recreated a very familiar world. It may not be your world or mine, but anyone who's watched Hollywood movies or American TV series situated in LA or Frisco, Chicago, New York or small town U.S.A. (and who hasn't?) will recognize it instantly. I love it myself. Adding a few Champs Élysées buildings for Paris, timber frame houses for Germany or doubledecker buses for the UK isn't going to change that either...it'll still be North American to the core.

Who's to say if a game is 'complete' on release? Who determines what should be in and what should not be? Some say the new Simcity is incomplete because it doesn't have subways and some will say that it's incomplete because there's no terraforming or because the city areas are too small. But there's a lot of new stuff and even in the beta, with a lot of features locked and practically all of the new multiplayer action still missing, it was possible to build a working, growing city, so in a sense, even the very limited beta was a complete game. Not one with a lot of replayability, but with everything enabled the final game certainly will be, I'm sure. Is SC4, even in its latest, fully modded version suddenly incomplete because you can't set up an entire production pipeline from raw materials extraction to bringing finished products to market? Sure, there are things that will probably be added later through DLC, but if they'd take the time to put in everything they could think of, we'd be kept waiting forever. I'd rather have a solid game now and new content to enrich it later.

You can have narrower roads (1 lane in each direction) but the devs tend to use the wider roads in their cities almost exclusively, to create high-density zones, I suppose.

One of the devs has already stated that traffic will not be able to get out of the way of emergency vehicles. You will have to take care not to place emergency stations near a road bottleneck. I wholeheartedly agree with the OP, the new system is much better and also more interesting than SC4.

OK, thanks, hadn't noticed that, I built the casino only once in the beta I think.

Taxis! Never mind their color...that's a new feature isn't it? Anyone know if their presence is linked to a particular structure (station/hotels/casino) or will they appear at random? Didn't see them in beta or earlier screenshots but may have missed it.