USA_Pride

I haven't played SC4 in many years, but I do remember this bug. I had four cities all in one corner and highway connections between them all. The traffic kept amplifying itself. My solution was to try not to build highway loops close to each other in neighboring cities.

I once was very active here, and since have become a lurker. Today I came back to lurk again to find that a good man had passed away. I have a tremendous respect for John. He will be remembered by this community.

I remember. I worked at Walmart at the time in the photo lab. Before my shift even began I walked over to the Electronics department and got my copy of SC4. I'm waiting Skylines out to see all the review. I've been burned too many times with buying games at top-price the day they come out.

I thought the graphics in SC 2013 were pretty good, especially when displaying data layers. For me the show-stoppers were No Offline Mode (this is fixed now), and the size of cities (unresolved).

I respectfully disagree. They need to make the code more efficient. SimCity 2013 is pretty cool, but certainly nothing that should tax a modern quad-core with average or better graphics card. Even if what you're saying is true, then EA needed to trim glassbox in order to allow larger cities, or allow larger cities with the understanding that some folks will have a bad experience with them. I remember when my computer would struggle with a large SC4 city, and as technology progressed, it was no longer an issue. They needed to make the code more efficient, drop features, and drop the MMO crap. That would have left plenty of room for increasing tile sizes. MMO adds nothing to the game for me. I don't want to play in a region with a bunch of abandoned cities. How can a region keep players for a long time when the cities take so little time to fully develop?

I actually found myself playing SC2K over the past two weekend. It took me a good amount of time to fill up the city. I could have done 4 or 5 SC2013 cities in the same time. It's rather enjoyable to actually spend time making and growing a city, and have lots of future land to expand to. SC2K is more fun to me than SC2013. Cities: Skylines looks very promising!

ShadeSigma, I hope you find the game to be very fun and play it for a long time. I had no intentions of getting the game after playing the demo\beta. My wife bought it for my birthday back in June, so I finally played it. I had a lot of fun for about a day, but then as I finished my 4th city it just wasn't fun anymore. Why have any attention to detail or care about a city when it was going to be filled from corner to corner in just a few hours a gameplay? It would like being an artist and only having a canvas the size of a postage stamp. It really limits what you can do. You can still create something beautiful, but not as beautiful if you got to chose the size of your canvas. SC4 let's you choose between three different sizes, with the largest being a very good size, that would take days if not weeks to develop. I'd love to have the size of SC4 combined with the eye candy and simulation layers of 2013. Also, 2013 really should have adjacent cities. It just hurts my brain to make a densely populated city with skyscrapers, when you go out to the region view and there is nothing but undeveloped prairie next to it. I love in SC4 how I could make a dense city core surrounded by sprawling suburbs. Instead we have 2013, with it's cities that often have a single freaking highway connecting them to the outside world. Hell, I can't even recreate Rochester Hills, MI, a sleepy suburb of low-density housing and businesses and a population of 70,000 people. There simply isn't enough space in a 2013 map to make a low-density city of this size.

The emergency response simulation isn't very good. My fire trucks and police cars might as well not have lights and sirens because traffic won't pull over. They won't run red lights. They won't use opposing lanes of traffic to get there faster. It's just frustrating.

I agree with this as a possible solution, but it's a frustrating limitation of the game. In SimCity 4 zoning density was independent of the road. So if you had a really busy road, you could change it to a one-way or an avenue, while keeping low or medium density zoning. I wish zoning density was independent of road type in SimCity 2013.

They could keep the map size the same, but make everything else smaller... Or, maybe tell the cops, ambulances, and firefighters that it's OK to drive in opposing lanes if you're responding to an emergencies, instead of watching a house burn down because emergency responders are inept at driving.

Now that I actually own the game (and not just played the demo a few times) I can say that my opinion has not changed. The biggest obstacle this game has is tile size, and not in a good way. I never really get attached to a city like I used to in SC4, where I could spend months making a masterpiece region. In SimCity 2013 I spend, at most, a day making a city. Then I leave it never really to visit it again, since it's filled from border to border. I don't understand what the limitation is. My video card is four+ years old. My processor is the slowest Intel quad core ever made, the Q8200. However, the game is still very smooth graphics-wise, and the simulation speed is a little slow on fully developed cities. Since my computer being as old as it is can support fully developed small cities, I don't get why they could allow larger cities. I think their main consideration was the how big a city could be within the "MMO" format. Meaning, the limit isn't your computer hardware, but instead something like their servers space for saving cities, or perhaps bandwidth. It's sad that this game could be so much more. The Glassbox engine is beautiful. Data views are so rich and useful. The graphics are butter-smooth. The game had such a solid foundation, but then they decided to taint it by trying to shove the MMO part of it down our throat. The way you can develop a small city into a skyscraper haven that has an empty field on the other side of the city border is lame. Even lamer are all the cities where you only have one road in\out. There is nothing realistic about it, whatsoever. I applaud them for making the "Offline" mode, but they really need to just do what works in SC4 - large cities that can be adjacent to each other in regions.

I just got the game today and it kind of looks like EA\Maxis has given up on first impression. The game updater has a "News and Community" section with two articles from January 2013, nothing newer. There is also scrolling news section complete with broken pictures and broken links that take you to a 404 page at SimCity.com. The game is still updating right now and there is a "View Updates" button on the updater. Clicking on that link take you to yet another missing page\invalid page. At least it seems to be installing and updating the game correctly...

I swore up and down that I would not play this game until they fixed tile size. This morning I woke up a year older than I was the previous day. My 4 year old and two year old came in yelling "HAPPY BIRTHDAY". My oldest handed me a present. I unwrapped it, inside, SimCity 2013. So, I guess I will be playing it after all!

I've got a desktop computer that's a little old with Intel's slowest quad core, the Q8200. When playing a large map the game starts to slow down considerably due to CPU exhaustion. From what I've seen, there is no multi-threading. I've got one pegged CPU and the other three are pretty sleepy. I'm still having fun and all, I'm just going to have to do some much needed upgrading on the system. Perhaps I'll buy a beefier dual-core.

Yup, pretty much this. You're confusing "challenge" with "limitation".

Yeah, that's the issue I have too... The game is sort of doomed from the beginning anyway the moment you don't have room for more mines. The trick there is to use trading posts, not mines. I never use mines because they're useless once gone. I started playing again after the most recent update and this is what I do. Step 1, survive. Step 2, build a surplus firewood Step 3, use the firewood to trade for iron Step 4, build lots of blacksmiths Step 5, build a surplus of iron tools Step 6, use the iron tool surplus to get more iron Step 7, Keeping making more and more iron tools and trade for iron At that point you start to have a huge surplus of iron tools and you can use it to trade for whatever you need. You can even start to depend on trade for essentials like food.

After running with this update it has solved many of the show-stoppers for me. I'm able to have large populations without people walking off to starve and die. Workers now either "bring food" with them, or won't do far away jobs. This makes it more difficult to get far away jobs done, but there are no more mass-extinction events for invalid reasons. The improvements to the trading depots are very nice too, they hold A LOT more in storage now, making it much less of a manual process.

Breaking news! Banished 1.0.2 has been released. There are many fixes in it, most notably people are now much less likely to starve to death from having a far-away job. Here's the changelog: * Citizens are now more effective at fighting fires and putting them out. * When fires break out, citizens fighting the fire now run at high speed. * Citizens working in an area where a fire breaks out will now be interrupted to help fight the fire. * Fixed a bug that caused non-laborers to not fight fires. * Citizens fighting fires will only be interrupted by sickness, freezing, or starving. * Citizens will now only search for water in an area around the fire. Far inland areas need wells for fires to be fought. * Increased the number of citizens that can fight a single fire to 50. * Increased the area of effect for citizens fighting a fire. * If enough water is brought to a building on fire, the chance of the fire spreading is lowered. * Fixed a bug that caused buildings on fire not to be high priority. * Fixed a major slowdown in large towns when fires break out. * If citizens are already walking to get food at a distance location and become starved, they’ll now interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn. * If citizens are working far from home and become hungry, they’ll eat food from their home as if they brought food with them. This will not interrupt the current task. If no food is available at home they will interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn. * Because citizens can eat from home when far away, they can better deal with freezing, and visit a warm place when needed. * Fixed a bug that caused citizens not to warm up when eating at home in some cases. * Citizens now won’t be assigned far away tasks without a specific profession (pickups, gathering, clearing, etc) unless the tasks have been around for a long time, or haven’t been assigned to someone local. This keeps citizens far away from walking across the map in most cases. * Citizens now limit the distance they’ll walk in the winter when it is very cold. * Tombstones now decay in 4-6 years instead of 13-17. * Existing tombstones have had their decay time reduced by half. * The trading post volume was been increased to 60000. This allows larger auto purchases to occur without overflowing storage. Existing trading posts need to be removed and replaced for this change to take effect. * Mouse buttons now obey system setting for flipped left/right buttons. * Input options now allow binding of mouse actions. * Input settings can now be bound to any of eight mouse buttons. * Fixed a bug that cause meat and other resources to show up in the corner of the map. * Fixed being able to pop a building back into existence after being damaged by using the cancel removal tool or reclaim button. * Fixed grave count on cemeteries when it is marked for removal then reclaimed. * Fixed crash at trading post when trading, dismissing trader, and then selecting a custom order. * Fixed a bug that allowed auto purchase to over fill the trading post. * Fixed a bug that caused cycling through laborers to show children and students. * Foresters no longer cut down orchards. * Fixed water showing inside merchant boat. * Builders will no longer walk the long way around to the other side of a bridge or tunnel when constructing it if it’s more than twice the distance to the closer side. * Fixed building pause icon staying up when a building completes construction after pausing construction. * Fixed a bug that caused starving or freezing people to get stuck in a loop doing the same job over and over if no food or warmth was available to resolve the starving or freezing issue. * Fixed a bug that caused pending roads to not be cancelable if they were under a tree, rock, ore, etc. * Fixed a bug that caused roads to be unremovable. * Fixed a bug that caused areas to be unusable after roads were removed in certain cases. * Dirt roads can no longer be quick removed by zoning over them with stone roads and then removing them. They now revert back to dirt roads and work has to be performed to remove them. * Placing stone roads over pending dirt roads no longer cause unusable areas. * Disasters are now disabled in tutorials. * Fixed several spelling and grammatical errors. * Fixed crash in audio streamer due to missing thread synchronization. * Fixed a crash that occurred if a video card doesn’t support sampling from a depth texture. * Fixed a bug that caused very wide screen displays to calculate an incorrect FOV. * Windowed mode now allows resizing of the window. * Window position is now remembered and restored on game shutdown/startup. * Graphics initialization now has better error handling and exception recovery. * Added a game launcher that allows changing video settings if the game doesn’t display properly on startup. * The game launcher only shows if an error occurred, on first time startup, ctrl is held on startup, or /launcher is on the command line. * Added selection of refresh rate to graphics settings * Added selection of graphics adapter to graphics settings. * Save games now check for truncation and crc validation to make sure save games haven’t been corrupted. * The scene shown on the background of the main menu now has better error checking in case the file has become corrupt. If the file is corrupt it will show the original scene that the game shows on first time startup. * Files are now created in a temp directory and are moved after writes complete. This stops partial files from being created if a thread crashes while a background thread is performing file I/O.

After about a month and a half of playing Banished hard-core, I'm at the point where it's not fun anymore. Don't let this sound like a negative thing, I played the hell out of this game and got my money's worth. I was playing an average of 2 hours per weeknight and 6-8 hours per day on the weekend for over a month. The issue I ran into is that the wheels fall off once you hit about 500 people. People start making this absurdly long commutes that cause them to freeze and starve before they can get back to their home that's warm and stocked with food. When playing this game, I would not do a large map. Medium is the biggest I can go, and even then as you fill the map up meltdown will occur. This game was amazingly fun, well worth the $20 I paid, and I recommend it to folks looking for a great diversion. I will most likely play the game in the future after a cooling off period.

Here I am 3+ weeks later and I'm still playing Banished hardcore. I still feel I'll tire of it after a month or two. I keep doing things differently like doing the harder start setting, or going for making folks super-happy, using a small map and trying to maximize the space, etc... I haven't tried the mountainous mode yet, I'm saving that for toward the end.

Exciting stuff Andy! I don't know how others feel, but multiplayer isn't important to me. The most fun I ever had in city-builders was SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4. In the past in CitiesXL and in SimCity 2013 multiplayer is forced on us by needing resources, etc...

I purchased the game yesterday. It's very challenging and very addicting. It's like combining Age of Empires with SimCity. There is no war\military aspect to it, it's all about city design, resource management, and survival. I can see the game getting boring after a few weeks of hardcore playing, but it's only $20 on Steam right now. I feel I'm already going to get my money's worth out of it. The best part is that it's made by a single indie gamer, and the game download is only 100MB, and you'd never guess it when playing it!

MandelSoft,

I hope you're correct; that modding can bring larger city sizes. However, I'm extremely skeptical. Modders have done so much for SC4, but I don't think they were ever able to achieve a modification of that nature. If you played SC4 you know well good that a mod of this nature simply wasn't needed. With 3 tile sizes and adjacent borders there was more than enough space to create absolutely anything. There is just too much empty space between cities in SC2013 - space that begs to be utilized and I hope that sooner rather than later we'll all get that opportunity to build larger and better, thanks to modding community. I certainly agree with you about the need and reason, I just don't think modding will get us there. I would love to eat crow on this subject.

I hope you're correct; that modding can bring larger city sizes. However, I'm extremely skeptical. Modders have done so much for SC4, but I don't think they were ever able to achieve a modification of that nature.