Audacitor

Depends on the content and depends on the price. Things like basic mass transit (by which I mean buses, trains and subways only) I will not pay for. They should have been there from the start, and are essential to any serious city building game. I won't pay for updates to tool functionality, either. But new buildings, roads, types of buses/trains/subways, taxis, and so on? Not for more than $5, unless it's a really serious upgrade. And another thing: I have to be able to buy all the game updates PO subscribers get. Otherwise it's just wasted money to me, because no matter how much I buy, the subscribers will have a fuller solo game. I'm one of the people who, if you were to graph their interest in the game on the Y axis, would have shown as a progressive exponential curve. I pre-ordered without doing too much research. I chose not to play the demo so as not to tarnish the glory of the first play. I got burned. It's Spore for city builders. And now I'm torn. Every major problem might well be fixed for PO subscribers, but it might not. If I subscribe and lay down what is, for me, a significant amount of money every month, I might get I what I want. Or it might be completely wasted. And since it doesn't say on the CXL website whether I'll have access to previous updates if I subscribe later, I might not get those updates if I choose to wait.

I won't put in my two cents about a game without letting people know where I'm coming from. If you don't care about that, skip to the green text. I have a long but shallow history with city builders. When I was kid, I managed to make a fully self-sustained megalopolis in the original SimCity, and I loved SimCity 2000, especially it's tight integration with SimCopter. After that, not much happened. I didn't touch a city builder again until SimCity 4, which ran extremely slowly and buggy on my last not-at-all slow Macintosh (and still runs slowly on my current early 2009 MacBook Pro). When I first saw Cities XL, I didn't pay much attention to it; just made a mental note of it. I didn't read the forums, I only read a few a blog posts and so on. When MC started dropping game play videos I got really excited and pre-ordered. Let me say also that I abhor Windows in all its forms save 7, which I haven't tried yet. Until CXL, there was no trace of Microsoft in my house, but I wanted the game badly enough to install XP. (No, I didn't buy a multi-hundred dollar copy of Windows for CXL, I used a long forgotten disk my office purchased so we could use ancient and archaic finance software that our bank was compatible with. When we switched to a different bank, we deacticated the XP machine and kept the disc for future use. Now, several years later, the office didn't need it so they gave it to me on request.) And now my impressions: I'm very dissapointed. Graphically, the game looks great, and for any other city builders that are released in the coming few years, CXL will give them a run for their money, especially when it comes to maps. But the tools for building your city aren't that great. I'll start with roads. Breaking out of the grid is nice, and when you first start playing with it, visions run rampant through your head of trying out unusual city layouts. You can't wait to wind lots of curving roads through your city while still managing great space efficiency. Forget them. You can make curved roads, yes, but you can't make precise curved roads. Want a nice circle? You'll have to settle with your best approximation. A uniform sine wave? Even harder. You don't get any control over the curve itself at all, you just pick a series of points and CXL does what it thinks is best. Want to draw a road parallel to that one over there? Unless you made it with eight orientations mode, no dice. And things get worse once you have an extablished infrastructure. Let's say you've got a nice retail zone you built with the block tool sandwiched between some medium density residential and your heavy density downtown area. To connect them all, there's a small avenue running from end to end. It wasn't always like this, of course. Your residential area used to be light, and your downtown area didn't exist, which is why you have only a small avenue. But now they have lots of traffic going through them, and your retail area is swamped in the crossfire; your small avenue isn't enough anymore. I hope space efficiency isn't something you care about, because if you want to expand your small avenue, you're going to demolish it and a whole row of retail establishments to make room for the new big road. And once you put in the new road, you'll have space left over between the road and the next row of retail establishments. All that wasted space. If you want to avoid this you could designate a couple streets as one way, but that's not what you had in mind, is it? If you want good space efficiency and an appropriately-sized infrastructure throughout your game, you can't have it. CXL takes you all the way out of the grid; you don't get any of the benefits of grid based layout anymore, and that's pretty pathetic. Cities and grids and upgradable road systems all come together to create space efficiency in the real world. But not in Cities XL. The block placement tool is very constrained. You can make blocks of two lots by three lots, and that's it. No where can you set it to 2x2, 1x2, 3x2 or anything else. Another barrier to implementing your layout idea. Farms, oil fields, waste dumps and other things defined by a polygon cannot be snapped into a pefect grid or circle or equilateral triangle. Even if it did have mass transit, it's still not the epic evolution I thought it would be. The simulation is fine, the representation is fine, and the game is perfectly setup to store all the information needed to define a truly non-linear yet intelligently designed and space efficient city, but the suitably complex tools you need to articulate your ideas are scrapped in favor of easier and less capable tools for the casual player. Before the release, I was positive I was going to subscribe to the Planet Offer purely for the new content, but without the tools to use them properly, I'll pass. I also agree with mmmfloorpie: These games have never been about multiplayer MMO garbage. They are about singleplayer! You lock yourself in your room for a month and painstakeningly sit there and perfect your city. The more intricate and nuanced that the sim is, the better. I don't want a game that is "dumbed down" for casual players or that is focused on the online portion. I want a complicated game that has lots of options and takes weeks (if not months) to complete. Right on. Can GEMs do that?