Ephemeron

Hey, the CXL forums have been rather quiet lately, even today on what is the planned end date of Planet Offer. I myself got bored of posting about Cities XL and stopped following it a few weeks ago. The final shutdown of PO came at 11:25 am (GMT+1) today. I'm sure there was no red button in the MC offices, or a final countdown until when all the planets got destroyed. Personally I think that's a shame. Anyway I thought I'd repost my graphic to commemorate (celebrate, is that the right word?) the occasion. 2009 - 2010

Hmm, I know I shouldn't be having these thoughts but... Monte Cristo said they were putting all their resources into this game. So if it fails they'll go bankrupt. Bad news? But if they do go bankrupt then we (Simtropolis, the modding community) may be able to acess the source code! That means we could do all the ground-breaking, game-changing mods that weren't even possible in SC4. I'm thinking massive changes to gameplay mechanics for a start. New transit networks would come eventually - trains, subways, monorails (In SC4 the networks are hardwired into the game code, which has always been a problem for the NAM team). It might even be possible to expand the 10x10 map, once computing speeds catch up.

Hey guys, I made a graphic. Check it out.

Has anyone from Monte Cristo posted on here explicitly asking for ideas? Has Monte Cristo reopened their own forum? I'm asking because I don't know, but I expect the answer is no.

Originally posted by: chocolate_city Not gonna happen.... guess what ... and of course this is just my prediction (or opinion) It's not gonna happen with .... what is it called again.... Cities XL 2011... give me a break....quote> Sure it won't, but if it doesn't they'll follow it with... Cities XXL 2012... and then if that doesn't work.... Cities XXXL 2013. That's assuming that Monte Cristo actually lasts until said dates.

Originally posted by: Herdervriend if we all make a list here, and around page 5 make a summary, then we post them all to them and ready. That must work...Otherwise it's MC's own fault there so stubborn and they will fail then if they not listen to us NOW... quote> Monte Cristo had a whole forum of ideas. Anything we try to recreate in a single thread cannot compare to this. We don't know if Monte Cristo has kept an archive of it. When I found that the forums were gone, I took it upon myself to create a archive from the Google cache. The archive, though vastly incomplete, contains over 100 pages from threads, including the all-important concepts articles (tr0ub1e must have devoted so many hours to these), the archive threads (e.g. the mechanics archive) which at very least contain lists of important thread titles. I kept blog comments too, mainly as an indicator of peoples opinions. Lastly I kept copies of all the major complaints threads - I simply couldn't let these die. In summary, it's a piece of city-building-game history, kept in a dusty folder on my computer. I should publish it somewhere. Perhaps there could be a place for it in the omnibus.

Hmmmm....(Listens to gut) My gut instinct is that Monte Cristo won't recover from this. They diverted a lot of their resources to the Planet Offer. It actually seemed to be the cornerstone of their sales strategy. The avatar feature is well... redundant now. And people still miss features like terraforming, multiple lot sizes, better farms... to name a few. I don't want to be seen as a bad omen, so I'd like Monte Cristo to prove me wrong.

Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi Reminds me of the time I went skydiving in NZ. Except theres less clouds. I think what makes this more amazing is that it doesn't take the record by a little, its at least 100m taller than the Taipei 101.quote> 100m? Try something a little more like 300m! Taipei 101: 509m Burj Khalifa: 828 m

Originally posted by: soltangris Why do you need to create a truly straight bridge/tunel? As long as it goes where you want...quote> A lot of people seem to hate the idea of a curved bridge. I remember from the original site that some people disliked a particular sceenshot that depicted a curved suspension bridge. Not realistic at all.

You might have a mod that raises the terrain when you install a region, just guessing. Try lowering the terrian in any city to see if you find water. If not then you may have a mod that removes the water from your cities (perhaps you still have part of Simmars installed?). If none of these are causing the problem, then there's nothing that won't be solved by a good old uninstall-reinstall detox.

You can actually combine search terms by using "simcity 4" | "sim city 4" | "simcity4". This search for instance gives you the combined numbers of people who searched for either of the three titles. I combined this with "cities xl" | "citiesxl" and "simcity societies" | "sim city societies" to make this graph. Sadly the picture looks even bleaker for Cities XL, but things could be worse, at least if you compare it to "starpeace" which, for those of you who don't know, is an earlier MMO release of Monte Cristo that flopped. But it's true that all games show an apparent decline in popularity after the peak from the initial hype. SC4 must have just started from a very hig peak, and is declining slowly. Even so this decline does not mean it is stagnating. Try searching for "computer" and you'll see what I mean.

Right, and Omnicorp prices are high because they are they have a monopoly. What we need is some competition in the token market to drive prices down. However this is MC's representation of a market economy, and they are unlikely to change a gameplay mechanic that would encourage more people to stay offline.

Originally posted by: soltangris why doesn´t somebody get to work on bringing SC4´s graphics to present day and somhow add a grid -free road system? quote> It can't be done with SC4. It would be like modifying an old Polaroid camera to take digital pictures. If you really wan't 3D graphics in a city-building game, then SC4 is not the answer, unless you decide that 3D graphics are overrated. After all radio hasn't been made completely redundant by TV. In that way SC4 will always be 'the radio of the city-building genre'.

I too can sympathise with what you're saying. I have been playing SimCity 4 on and off for a while (longer than I've had this account) - actually a matter of years. And I still haven't built a region that I'm completely satisfied with. I just start with a central city, (which never looks right when your future CBD is covered with low wealth houses) then I start to develop some cities around it, until I decide that there is something wrong with the region and start over. It sucks that I have rarely delevoped cities past 50,000, or hardly ever gotten mid-rises. And for a while I've been reusing the same city names. I am actually quite a creative person, and I feel that someday I might create the perfect region. Luckily I don't have to pay a monthly fee.

I can't be bothered to berate any images, since they all make me sick. I'll just post my own.

Oh boy, I hope I didn't offend anyone with my post earlier. *sigh* It's easy to demonise MC, but it was only really to hide my true feelings. I feel that CXL will never be a perfect game. You're probably thinking "Well SC4 isn't perfect." I just sorta got bored of SC4 after the number of times I have started over because I didn't like my region. And now I'm bored of Cities XL and I haven't even bought the game! I don't wanna talk about it anymore, even though I check these threads every other day just to see if something interesting has happened. Time for me to move on, I think. I need to get away from all this CXL drama.

...when you have a very short commute, which only goes to the nextdoor city tile. Yet somehow it takes an hour or so every day. ...when you never visit the park, you just enjoy living near it. ...when your idea of a fun day out involves going to see a PEG industrial waterfront (or any other eyecandy lot that is configured as a landmark). ...when you delight in seeing dilapidated, run-down parts of your real-life city, and think that it's just "great eyecandy". In fact you'd like to personally congratulate your real life mayor for his great efforts in city-building realism.

You should be glad they aren't making you pay separately for say... roads, or the opportunity to build schools, or even the zones themselves! I can imagine them saying: "Residential and commercial zones are shipped free with the single player game. Industrial zones are exclusive to Planet Offer subscribers." I can actually see that working if all single players are forced to buy their industrial tokens from Omnicorp. And perhaps some Monte Cristo executive reads this and a light bulb appears above their head. Maybe if I'd suggested it back on the official forums, MC would have found a new way to annoy people. Or did they just leave mass transit out of the game because it wasn't ready? When there were so many more important things to work on. At least they got their priorities right with the avatar system, eh?

Originally posted by: Naviss quote> Wow, that looks like San Francisco on crack!

I'll bet there are multiple lot sizes in The Sims 3. Heck, even The Sims 2 had multiple lot sizes, and it's not even a city-building game!! And it's obvious when I play The Sims 2, that my poor sims cannot afford larger houses, and..... you get the point. What were Monte Cristo thinking? Isn't this supposed to be a 'next generation modern realistic city builder game'?

manuelandrei, I can't believe those amazing screenshots. Right now it makes me want to buy the game. The landscapes aspect is just perfect.

The most important thing to get right is the ratio of (monthly) cost to power. This is something a lot of people seem to get wrong. Most people make power plants too cheap (not sure if this is intentional or not). I wouldn't care too much for the values of real world power plants, as Simcity is different to these. I suggest that you use the ingame values for reference. The ingame solar and hydrogen and nuclear power plants should have a monthly cost of $0.20 per unit of power. The wind plants are slightly higher at $0.25, but they have the added bonus of being able to build at the beginning of the game. Gas, oil and coal power plants are cheaper at $0.13, $0.09 and $0.04 respectively, but this is in exchange for the pollution they produce.