eka

It is definitely possible to make a totally clean city while only trading with Omnicorp. I currently have a city of 800.000 with basically no pollution at all. And I am making $900.000 per turn. I have no heavy industry or manufacturing at all, in fact, I don't even have any hi-tech (because it consumes too much heavy industry). I only have one thing: offices. Plenty of offices, more offices, and even more offices on top of that. And I have all office-modifier-buildings. The net result is around 400 office tokens, which I sell to Omnicorp (I need two highway connections and one large airport to get enough passenger capacity). I also produce a lot of water which I sell to Omnicorp (200 tokens or so). I am self sufficient with electricity (I have a huge wind-mill-park), but I don't sell any electricity. Everything else (food, heavy industry, garbage capacity, manufacturing ...) I import from Omnicorp.

Well, as I understand it, the unpacker tool has been publicly available for quite some time now (see the link by jeremy12 earlier this thread). The issue is about repacking. But the thing is, it's not really rocket science to create a repacker if you have the unpacker and some programming skills. I undersdand that it was a delicate matter before MC announced that PO was going to be removed, but now as it's going to be a pure single player game, I see very few good arguments againts open modding. Regarding the possibility of using the tools to crack the game, I am sure that any copy protection is in the executable and not in the content, so I really don't buy that argument. Of course you could unlock some unfinished/buggy features, but is that really a problem? People wanting to experiment can unlock them, and people playing the game don't have to. The only reason I see is if there is any already distributed but locked content that MC plans to charge for. But is this really argument enough to try to stop modding entierly until it's fixed? And besides, people willing to do that, can't they just download a pirated copy anyway? They have already broken the moral barrier ... My initial plan was to make my repacker publicly available (and release it's source as open source). I'm not really a fan of closed communities, and I am sure there are many very capable modders here not even being able to test the mods they are working on at the moment. What the game (and we) need is a healthy modding community, not stepping on our toes around MC because it might be misued in some hypothetical ways. Btw, did anyone try my proof of concept mod (http://sakharov.ejp.se/temp/mod_395k_budget.patch) ?. I have only tried it on my copy, which is the Limited Edition bought on Steam (without PO at the moment).

Is it really necessary to keep the tools internal when PO is gone? No hard feelings or anything, but I actually got a bit annoyed by the last two posts by Andre090904 in this thread. I don't really like being implied that I'm inexperienced or not able to use a tool correctly. Well, mostly I saw it as a challenge and an excuse and do some coding! So, basically, I couldn't resist but to write my own repacker tool yesterday. It wasn't too hard when you had the unpacker (just had to figure out some checksumming and other stuff that was ignored by the unpacker). It is very rudimentary, but it seems to be working (remember, I did it in one evening). To try it out, I wrote my first mod (and with that I really mean the first mod ever, I have never modded any game before). It is just a proof of concept, the only thing it does is to change starting budget to 395.000 instead of 400.000. I did another test and repacked moaku's Solo Sandbox mod with my repacker, and as far as I could tell that worked as well. I have no idea if my mod works in PO. My subscription has run out, and it's not like I'm going to renew it now. Get it here: http://sakharov.ejp.se/temp/mod_395k_budget.patch edit: formatting and clicky link

I got a second Notre Dame de Paris today, but I only have one (sufficiently large) city. Anyone want it? http://www.citiesxl.com/index.php?option=com_blueprint&id=520197&task=info

That's nothing. I have a bit over 3.000.000 citizens, and I produce all my electricity with wind mills (I import no electricity). At the moment I also produce the 20 extra electricity-tokens needed for phase three of Saint Basil's Cathedral. And oh, did I mention I have a positive cash flow of about 500.000?

I've been wondering a similar thing for oil-fields, farms and junkyards. At first I always made them as big as allowed, thinking that that would give the most resources. But could it be so that they give the same amount of resources no matter how small they are, and I should keep them as small as possible just to save space?

It's the same for me. The game disconnected a couple of times yesterday, and the last time I wasn't able to connect again. I get "Already connected with this account. Logout first.". I tried to reboot both the computer and my router, but it didn't help (and this computer is the only I've ever played the game on). Anyway, when it still didn't work this morning I filed a support issue with technical support, which I haven't heard from since. And I can't log in.