jacobhinds

I'm of the opinion that intelligence doesn't really exist, or that the differences between people are far too small to measure. IQ tests are a bit silly; as a child I was far better at them than my sister and I still am, but she was the one who ended up doing far better in school. they're sort of geared towards middle-class first-world males, and the fact that they were invented just before world war II in the age of eugenics should say something about how biased they are. OT: obviously this is the daily mail so it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but I can see why somebody would want something like this; say to have a child that looks like them even given a history of hereditary disease or whatever. the problem, though, comes when you get parents who want tall aryan children, or parents who somehow think they can create super-genius children by mixing the DNA of two medicine graduates. as for the flynn effect, we're just getting better at IQ tests due to urbanization etc. if there was a hunter-gatherer IQ test I reckon we would all fail horribly.

The whole thing about "modern gamer entitlement" seems like a bit of a cop out; if this was a free game and people were complaining about it then I would understand the use of that term. I didn't buy the game so I don't complain about it. but for the people who paid $60 (I'm from the UK, that looks like a lot to me) for a game that is all but unplayable, it's well within their rights to complain. even if some of the points have been beaten into the ground. I feel their frustration because I've bought far cheaper crappy games in the past, and even then i'm able to sell them on.

since power lines often get cut by zones and water isn't that expensive anyway, I always just put whatever's needed in the city it's in. dunno, just seems neater that way. and garbage/utility cities look ugly on the region map. I agree with moose; it feels like cheating when you're either sending off goods or receiving a steady income from a town that is technically frozen in time. I think the furthest I've gone is sending garbage from the crowded CBD to neighbouring farmland areas, but that's it.

I recommend SC4 Launcher: it lets your computer run on more than one core, and as icing on the cake allows custom resolutions. I haven't had any crashes so far, and the simulation is really smooth. only downside is that you can't now grab a cup of tea while waiting for the game to save.

isn't that what experience is? that's in a completely perfect world where abstract forms of production such as services and administration didn't exist, and where merely pushing money around in the form of investments wasn't mistaken for actual wealth creation. but i'm going completely off topic

I am 18 years old (considered "young") and I dislike the idea of money acquisition for it's own sake; seeing what happens to people and companies when they acquire large amounts of wealth is sickening. not to say that I would pirate or steal, but the whole "if it's popular, sell it" attitude means that the motivation is on cash rather than actual content, which leads to the plethora of middle-of-the-road content produced by these large companies. my problem is that most of the world's money isn't gained through being earned legitimately, which is why the constantly toted "money = success" slogan is so out of touch.

The thing is that large-scale mods like this are always better than expansions or DLC, with almost no exceptions. I have seen a few cases where the game developers have offered to pay modders and release the mod as an official DLC, with pretty bad results for all concerned. for an example of this, see the "mount and blade napoleonic wars" DLC, which did nothing to improve the original mod except shut down all its servers to the public and pretty much halt mod development indefinitely. compare this to the 1257ad mod for mount and blade (pretty much my favorite thing in the entire universe), which has been released several times and is constantly being re-designed and improved because the modders are driven by passion rather than pay. you could draw the same parallel with NAM; imagine if maxis swooped in and offered to pay the NAM team to "finalise" the mod, and release it as an expansion pack or whatever. I can't imagine they'd be allowed to continue developing NAM for free after that particular contract. I'm not particularly against DLC, and especially not expansion packs; I know why they exist, but modders are fairly often far superior to game developers, which is what scares them so much. And I would feel so much better giving donations to an amazing mod such as NAM than one of those hack expansion packs that is basically a late patch. see "napoleon total war" for more details.

@linoa06, could I ask how you managed to get your landscape to be that colour?

Style. At least in SC4 and to an extent in SC3000, spacing your cities out and laying off on the density makes cities look nicer as well and allowing you more room for maneuver later on. in fact SC4 actively encourages you to "waste space" with large parks and gaps between developments. I think the main problem with Simcity 2013 is that it is all about building "up" on a comically small plot of land, when cities are all about space. plus I come from the UK, where, like the rest of Europe, straight roads were banned since the western roman empire collapsed. except Barcelona which enjoys special status.

I remember hearing about riots in a thread a while ago, and wondered why I hadn't heard of them, and after some experimenting I found it's darn near impossible to get riots unless you're actively trying. and even then it takes a good half an hour to see one. the conditions are ridiculous; you have to let your mayor rating drop to below 20 or something like that (even one civic building will prevent this from happening) and there can't be any effective police stations (riots are like fire; they won't happen inside the radius of a proper police station as far as I know). Even a casual player would never let it get this bad intentionally. even after all this I went into the kitchen, boiled some rice, came back and there was only one tiny riot. my only guess is that riots were designed to appeal to people who enjoy using the disasters, or just like making really crappy, seedy cities. but even so...

I use a "more riots" mod which means you have riots anywhere below +80 mayor rating. the idea is that since most people are competent enough not to ever see riots, the mod makes it a little more interesting. I lost the plugin and couldn't delete it (lol) and experience riots almost non-stop in the early stages of a city, so I would consider myself a seasoned reactionary. to put it simply, you need at least two, ideally three police dispatches per riot crowd. two on either side to hem them in, and another placed directly on top of the crowd. you'll see them all glitching out in a circle facing away from the police, and they won't properly disperse until you move the police somewhere else. it's an annoying system sometimes because it's hard to tell if a crowd has dispersed. And quite often you get "ghost" riot crowds, where the ambient effects of dust and rioters haven't yet appeared, but they can still set fires and throw petrol bombs. in this case press the "go to disaster" sign and spam police everywhere, before pulling them all back and repeating if they don't disperse. - An Authoritarian Mayor

Granted, but you become so healthy that your immune system becomes immune to yourself. your white blood cells stage a coup and you no longer have control over your body. I wish I had a small hut in northern Afghanistan with a wife and children and a few dozen sheep.

Granted, but he just gives you generic corporate responses to everything you say. I wish for a video game that properly simulates war rather than depicting small snippets of it

Granted, but you can only save the game with the DLC which is free to buy, but costs $5 every time you save. I wish the day was 35 hours long so I wouldn't be constantly distracted from work by having to sleep at the end of the day.