USA_Pride

Helevitia's experience is why I'm still afraid to buy the game. I play the public beta\demo of SimCity and it only allows you 1 hour before it trashes your city. In the one hour I was able to fill the entire city from corner to corner. Now granted if I had more than an hour I would have made more careful decisions and done better planning, but it is VERY possible to fill up a city in just a few hours. This means you can't get attached to a city like you could in SC4 as you grow it to a sprawling metropolis via the large tile size and adjacent cities with interconnecting roads. The fact that you aren't allowed to make any new roads in or out of the city and have to use what was given to you is a joke, especially in the cities that only have one way in or out. What cities do you know of in the real world that have a single road leading in and out of them? Even the smallest of cities in the US aren't like that. Until they fix the city size, I'm sitting on the sidelines.

Uh Wut?! That's not how programming works. I actually posed this question to friends whom are embedded software engineers, and they said that no, quadrupling the size would not quadruple the resource requirements. Would an increase in simulation size increase the required resources? Yes, but not to that level. Given how many corners the simulation itself cuts, I wouldn't be surprised if quadrupling the simulation size would only require 1.5 times the current amount of resources. why not make the "CLOUD" help simulation process ? ah right, the "cloud" dont work that way Either way, I think GlassBox as city simulation is broken if it failed to scale. with that kind of limitation, a fate has been sealed Exactly. The "CLOUD" never did a thing for us other than hold our cities, something that our massive hard drives could do with ease and at a faster speed. Glassbox is broken. If it's the reason city sizes are why they are, then it's a failure. Here's another possible explanation for small city sizes: The bandwidth and disk space required to host cities in the "CLOUD". Perhaps localizing the storage of the cities is the first step to larger city sizes for the offline mode only?

They are one step closer to me buying it. Once they address the city size I'll take a long hard look at buying it.

I agree. I appreciate Catman's analysis, but it's their job to either code around it, or make compromises to have a more fun game. The current city size is pathetic and laughable. The game should be called "SimTown", not "SimCity". If the game is only 32-bit, then make it 64-bit, or code it to use RAM more efficiently. If the CPUs are busy making all these calculations, either make the calculations more efficient, or compromise and make less of them so that city size can be increased. The GlassBox engine wasn't all that it said it would be. It's cool to be able to see some of the game mechanics in the different data views, but the majority of the game is spent with these data views hidden. What we do see from the very moment we start a new city is a miniscule city size. In SimCity 2013, you spend your entire time compromising your city design to fit onto the microscopic canvas we've been given. Your dreams are muted and scaled from day one.

I played the "public beta" aka demo. Until they change the city size and allow local saves, I won't buy. The current city size is an unforgivable sin.

Totally agree with your last sentence. It's cool that SC5 has all these agents and it simulates at a deeper level, but it doesn't add much benefit to 90% of the game. Most of the game is spent crafting your city, creating transportation networks, and zoning. After I do a bunch of building I then go into a data analysis mode where I want to see the results of what I planned. It would be cool to have SC5 levels of data, but not at the expense of tile size and graphics. I really don't understand what they couldn't figure out a way to have these cpu intensive tasks threaded out on a quad\octo core machine. The kind of calculations that need to be done would be rather friendly to multi-threading. The big problem for a lot of players out there is that people wanted SimMetropolis, but they got SimTown (minus farms). It's just not fun to populate these little 2 square mile cities over and over again to see the cities turn into nothingness at their borders. Who wants to build a dense urban core if it's adjacent to an empty field beyond the city border. At this point, I still think that SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4 are vastly superior and more fun than SimCity 5. These games let you build sprawling cities.

It's a programming failure that they cannot support larger maps. With today's quad core and beyond processors there is simply no excuse. GlassBox is a pile of junk if it can't run on today computers. It's like having a big shiny car with no engine in it; it's fun to look at, but you're not going anywhere. Now knowing that map sizes will never be larger, I can safely say that I will not ever purchase this game.

This can be read as: "We're not fixing transit, so we're going to bypass it." Well to be fair they didn't bother to fix transit in Simcity 4 either. True, but at least they let us fix it.

This can be read as: "We're not fixing transit, so we're going to bypass it."

The expansion means nothing without larger maps.

Glad you were willing to go on record and say that you think the overpasses will be a DLC you have to pay for. Time will tell. Does update 7 make me wrong?

I'm glad to hear this update has improved a lot of things. I still won't consider purchasing until they give us larger map sizes, and even then, the always-online non-local saves may still be too big of a con for me to buy.

Maybe they read your post. In development, overpasses: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9637389.page. In SimCity 2K, 3, 4 - Overpasses I'll make you a bet you're going to pay for the overpasses. They're going to sell you what the game should be one peice at a time. I've found the best way to send a message is not to buy the game. They actually don't really need to do highways, because the world is so small it just doesn't matter.

Yeah, but the big issue is that SimCity 4 doesn't fall apart until your city is massively huge. In SimCity 5 your city can't even get to a modest size because the map is too small, and yet the wheels still fall off despite how crazy small the city is. The game is still full of fail and it will be full of fail until they increase map sizes and fix the simulator.

I've found that many folks are having issues with too much traffic going in\out of the city. To fix this just build another road going in\out of the city. Wait.... you can't do that in SimCity 2013... Oops.

I sure did. After playing the demo and reading what was going on here I canceled my pre-order. I have ZERO regrets. I hope to one day buy SimCity when they take the functionality of previous versions, including map size, and put it in this one at a reasonable price. The map size is SimCity is a joke. It should be called SimVillage, or SimNeighborhood.

I suppose you'd don't see the giant "CLOSED BETA" sticker on Sim City's picture on Origin? Yes, I did see it. My point is, it's happening now, and I predict it will happen in the future when the game is no longer in demo, oops, I mean "closed beta".

Here you have it folks, this is "always online" gaming. Internet goes out - NO GAME FOR YOU Servers go down - NO GAME FOR YOU This is not a beta. It's a demo. They can't even handle the demo traffic. I'm becoming more satisfied with my decision to cancel my pre-order.

Whoa, whoa. I just read a bunch of the topics here and I'm seeing no mass transit, no terraforming, and a lot of other missing things. It looks like they're taking the CXL route of jamming everyone into a mutliplayer MMO thing. Yuck. I'm canceling the pre-order. I might still buy it, but I'm going to let other people find out the short-comings. Also, it's nice to see people are able to express negative opinions here. That wasn't allowed back in the day when CXL came out.

I don't concur. CXL has been a huge dissapointment. I've shelfed it in favor of Minecraft and 2003's SimCity 4.

SimCity is one of my favorite games, and I have pre-odered it. I noticed though, that they've pushed back the release date to March now. I'm a little bummed, but I'd rather wait than buy a game that isn't finished *cough* Cities XL *cough*.

Just as I suspected. They did a few minor updates (that should have been free), increment the year number, and call it a brand new game! Cities XL has been a huge disappointment from the beginning.

Yawn. Yet another minor, minor update branded as the "next version". Wake me up when someone creates something new from scratch.

Wake me up when someone finishes this game. Until then, SC4 + Community Mods is the most polished experience IMHO.

I like your ideas. Especially having different planets with different levels of resources, that would make each planet a unique experience. In terms of a city-builder with planet\region concept, I've always wanted to see more collaboration between cities. Right now in Cities XL there really isn't much consequence to being adjacent to another city. You just drag a road to the edge of the screen and you couldn't care less what's going on beyond your border. I'd love to see planning between different players over zoning, road infrastructure, power infrastructure, waste-water infrastructure, mass transit infrastructure, etc. For example, right now Detroit, Michigan mirrors what Cities XL is\was like. Yes, Detroit has a mass transit system, but that system only takes you from place to place WITHIN city limits. If you want to go out to the suburbs you have to get off the Detroit system and get onto the "regional" that serves areas beyond Detroit. Another thing that always bugs me in both SC4 and Cities XL is that the simulator gives no penalty for NIMBYs and polution that are on the border. Want to have a posh residential area next to an industrial slum? No problem, just put them next to each other but in different cities. I don't want that to be allowable anymore. No limits to scrollable area - I want to be able to see my city, and every other city all at once. Yes, I would only be able to edit things within my city, but I should be able to see other cities without having to exit out of mine. I should be able to go into the data views for those cities as well. Tibback2000, I like the idea you've started here! Also, your English is actually very good.