muttoneer

It's sad it didn't work out for MC, but a blessed relief for many of us! I stopped playing the game after a month (though I had subscribed for three). Hopefully the SP game will go on to be a classic now the gimmicky online side is out of the equation.

The flood fill parks are ok for now, but to make a truly eyecatching city a variety of tall trees, colourful shrubbery, water features etc will be needed. However this is eyecandy and I'm happy to wait for this until after the more important issues like mass transit are delivered. On a related note, when building parks I would love to see paths and cycleways included as an option, which would be able to take commuter traffic. Imagine being able to design your own green areas between blocks, with your choice of trees, a bandstand maybe, and some nice cyclepaths taking all your fitness-conscious citizens to their place of work. This is where I would love to see this game end up, but for now the flood fill grassland will do fine

As far as I was aware Mass Transit will be an update, not a GEM. Hopefully therefore it can be fully incorporated into our cities. I suppose I'm thinking back to all the transport discussions on the now defunct Cities XL forums, where it seemed we would be able to have much more control over our traffic lanes, being able to make our own intersections etc. I guess that was too difficult or too memory hungry to pull off

I've been playing for a couple of days now (and have already deleted two planet mode cities which were planned poorly!) I'm still frustrated at the lack of mass transit out of the box but have decided to trust that MC will deliver and so I signed up for 3 months of planet mode in order to do my bit and support them. In the meantime I'm trying to build the perfect city using just roads and am getting a bit frustrated with a few aspects. Firstly there's the junctions. Everywhere a road meets, traffic must stop. I would love to be able to assign priority to my main roads with simple T-junctions, but after building a few sidestreets the journey down one of my main routes becomes very stop-start. Is there any way to do this, or will it be implemented in a future patch? Being able to assign priority would also give me the option of adding slip-roads (exit lanes) to roads other than highways, which would help planning traffic flow greatly. Another slight gripe is that citizens appear to drive everywhere! Everything you build needs a road attached to it, so my thoughts of building self contained little communities with footpaths and pedestrian areas aren't really possible at present. Maybe we'll get car parking areas, footpaths, cyclepaths etc in a future update - I certainly hope so! Finally, the requirement for decorative areas to be surrounded on all sides by roads is a bit frustrating, though I note an icon for trees blanked out on the decorative item menu so I assume there will be options to beautify ones city without using flood-fill after future updates... Overall at present I like the game, despite the limitations over transport. It does feel at times like an exercise in balancing residential plots with available jobs, but the overall look and feel of the game does make me hopeful that in a few months time this will be a very good game. It's not quite there yet though.