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.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume most people on this forum have seen this amazing video: I really like the way the player blends city boundaries together rather than treating each city like it's own universe; it looks really natural and prevents you from simply zoning like a mad thing, especially later on in the game when demand/funds are less of an issue. Plus it's satisfying to look at when you turn off boundaries in the region view and it looks like a single city. I therefore decided to overhaul the way I designed cities. A few years ago I used the Seattle region and began building along the coast like this: The problem is that when the city begins to bulk out and I'm trying to match up all four borders, it doesn't look as good. zones are pretty difficult to match up when almost all of your thoroughfares are streets, meaning they don't carry over to the neighbouring city and you can't judge where to zone. Add that to the fact that that every city develops differently; e.g. on the city I'm working on at the moment, the central city only wants hi-rises and apartments, and the city next door will only build those horrid "brown grass suburbs" you get at the beginning, resulting in an ugly deep-green/light-brown clash. but farms are the worst. given the nature of farms, the boundaries are pretty obvious when you start to use large swathes of farmland. So my question is this: How should I go about building a region that looks natural, and makes boundaries almost invisible from the omni-view? Any particular tips? I've seen some really well made regions that more closely resemble metropolitan zones with multiple centres of commerce, and that's the sort of effect I'm looking for. Thanks!

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.

I oversimplified a lot, looking back at my post. but what I'm saying is that nowadays, the main source of anger about the crusades (among extremists) is that the crusaders massacred the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099, when in reality it was fully within the rules of combat. plus as far as I'm aware the Muslims did look the other way; heck some even allied with them against other Muslims. the fact is that nobody wants the levant, it's an unstable, weak region between Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia and it's virtually impossible to set up a core power base there, hence the hundreds of crusader castles. plus at the time of the first crusade there was no such thing as a "united Muslim empire", so besides a few preliminary battles the crusaders were actually ignored. a couple of dynasties (the Zengids and Ayyubids) launched some attacks but never finished the job; they were too busy fighting other Muslims. it was only when the Mamluks actively sought to destroy the crusader states that they finally fell, and it took them only a few years to do so.

let me just tell you that the crusades meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of history - they weren't unusual at the time at all, and at first the Muslims couldn't care less that a small corner of their territory was being taken by these unwashed, pale barbarians from the other side of the eastern roman empire. for about 800 years after the crusades nobody could remember what they were. then you get hack historians from both europe and the middle east in the 20th century who spout nonsense about "clash of civilizations", "racial war", and compare the crusades to iraq in 2003, and all of a sudden everyone remembers what was a tiny, run-of-the-mill invasion. I'm sorry but when people see the crusades as anything other than a few barbarians hired out by the eastern roman empire, it annoys me greatly. the reason they were there for so long (1095-1291) is that the Muslims just didn't care. in fact the word "crusade" and for that matter "jihad" and all their connotations were invented far later.

I've been lurking this forum for a long time and it's sort of tragic to see all this expectation over Simplicity 2013 (I'm gonna call it that) being disappointed by everyone's least favorite gaming company, and in every thread I see the same (perfectly justified) arguments against this atrocity. But I'm gonna play devil's advocate here - maybe I'm repeating what's already been said but oh well - - The engine is pretty amazing. I mean just look at the thing. Sure, the menu interface is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and it has more holes than pumice, but the thing that really got me interested was the agent system. It's a marketing gimmick, sure - but I get the impression that at its inception there was an effort to create a proper game. Simcity 4 vanilla had a traffic simulator that only a mother could love, not to mention the infamous circles-of-schooling-and-policing. However Simplicity 2013 is an actual simulator, however basic and dumbed-down its real application is. Instead of calculating traffic based on raw numbers, for instance, it takes one small step closer to realism by simulating all of those cars. This game may be simplicity societies 2, but it has one heck of an engine overhaul. - Micromanagement and little detailed features was actually what I really enjoyed about Simcity 4. I like thinking of every suburb as it's own place and designing each district as if it was my first, and the little features (basically everything outside of zone-utility-transport) are what prevented Simcity 4 from basically being a Minister-For-Transport Simulator. Things like the water table and being aware of the geography underneath your city open up the horizons for a borderline world simulator, with Terraforming being a whole load more than a fixed sea level and a heightmap. What I find most frustrating about simplicity 2013 isn't the always on DRM or online play - I mean they're the staple of all games nowadays - its the missed opportunities from this darned sophisticated engine they could have perfected given a few more years and some more motivated staff. I'm not too bothered really, simcity 4 will still be there. even if only in my heart. or my hard drive because I rarely have the time to play it Now I might have too much faith in the goodwill of EA here, but let's say they WERE to make simcity 5 (simplicity 2013 is NOT called that by EA or Maxis, so stop calling it that lest we soil a potential future game), and let's assume that this new game used the glassbox engine. Even the basic three changes (sinlgeplayer focus, region play, modding tools) would make it rival the Simcity 4 we all know and love. Even the most cynical gaming corporation knows you can't pull the same trick three times on an equally cynical fanbase (disregard COD and sports games), so assuming Maxis isn't found in a pool of blood in the next few years, this isn't much of a stretch of the imagination. Either way, Simplicity 2013 will be forgotten hopefully and make very little money. They can take our residential zoning but they will never take...OUR SIMCITY 4!! tl;dr They tried

I'm no expert but from what I've seen NAM calculates congestion more realistically, i.e. it piles up at junctions to simulate vehicles queuing at traffic lights. In vanilla SC4, congestion is evenly distributed along a road depending on how many people are using that particular section. About the commute times, since NAM allows Sims to travel further in order to get to work, you may have had a sudden rush of workers from one city travelling to another with more jobs. Installing NAM mid-region is basically asking for trouble, because NAM and vanilla cities require completely different infrastructure. NAM is a great mod; if you want to continue using it, make use of mass transit - trains, subways and buses in particular - along with a few well-placed parking stations. when I use NAM ~50-60% of my Sims use mass transit and I have virtually no congestion on roads.

@lordyboy woow. That's an enormous thread. I'll give it a read, seems really useful even on the first page. and @silvercyric, please do post pictures, i would like to see someone elses take on the region. Thanks for the replies!

None of you will be laughing in march when you have to pay for yoga and hypnosis just to get on to the menu screen.

You might've missed one of the features they introduced: Glassbox is a faith-based engine, so if you begin playing the game with a negative, cynical attitude it won't work at all. They tested must've this in the beta. Personally I think this is a great idea and helps keep the servers free of anybody who questions anything in the game.