Kythlyn

I wish they offered a few maps that let you work on your own with a single city. I never liked the switch to region play that started in SC4. I was happy with one place, one city. Now that you mention it, I wouldn't be surprised if the first larger city tile turns out to be in a single city region...

Writing this article made me sad. I want SimCity to be great, but the 2.0 patch feels like launch week all over again. I've lost my favorite city, and ever since the announcement that SimCity Social is being shut down, I've worried that SimCity might suffer the same fate. http://gamerhorizon.com/simcity-the-vanishing-act/

With the recent release of the 2.0 patch, SimCity should be better than ever, but the troubles continue for Maxis' city building simulator. With cities disappearing, it's like it's launch week all over again, and with the closing of SimCity Social, one can't help but to wonder if SimCity might suffer the same fate.

If EA unceremoniously pulls the plug on SC2013 without offering an offline mode or a method of preserving the players' creative content, I'll really give up on them completely. This was an incredibly bad move on EA's part. It was poorly timed, insensitive, and disrespectful to their customers.

It's been a month since the launch of SimCity, and much has changed. This article goes over many of the changes to the game, and tries to answer the question, "Is now the right time to play SimCity?"

EA has updated SimCity to version 1.7, bringing with it the promised improvements to traffic and emergency vehicles. Traffic Improvements: Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues. Traffic improvements: Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections. Traffic improvements: Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage. All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool. Performance improvements for low spec systems. New Server: Asia 2 will be released Tuesday afternoon (PDT)!

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/bd-p/sim-city-misc-issues

EA has provided an update detailing upcoming improvements to SimCity, including a fix for many of the traffic issues in the game. Leaderboards and regional achievements are also being tested for reimplementation.

I've experienced all of the random disasters. Their unpredictable nature has actually forced me to plan ahead and have some emergency savings instead of playing a "paycheck to paycheck " style.

Quite understandable. I experienced everything you mentioned, though in my case the "bus invasion" was quite welcome, as I never had a traffic problem with the city in which I experienced it. Also, it's been a while since I've had a 10-20 minute delay in regional play. My regions are now updating every minute or two. They also just patched some improvements to region play (1.05).

Good find. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this.

I played 66 hours of the game before writing the review.

But that won't get people believing in your reviews, thus people won't rely on your opinions for purchasing games. If you're so out of touch with most of the world on this =/ Also watching cars go from A to B is not useful when the cars drive "randomly" they have no destination so to speak, they are not assigned a job so every morning they look for a new job, making it completely impossible to plan your city because the traffic is chaotic. It doesn't help when you add transport as they are random too so you don't feel like you're making a difference at all. Infact SC4 is more responsive to transport by miles. But Maxis are working on updates for it all given the amount of complaints and Maxis agreed it is a problem. The game feels it was rushed on major aspects, probably for a spring release, when it seemed it could of waited for 2013 winter to be perfect (and better BETA testing would of been smarter) I completely agree that there's plenty of room for improvement in this game, with traffic being an obvious place to start. I think we've all experienced vehicles behaving oddly, and a variety of traffic related bugs. But I don't think the traffic issues prevent the player from successfully planning out their city. Here's an example from my own game: I purposely plopped high wealth parks and services in a residential area that I wanted to upgrade to high wealth. I had already improved a nearby commercial block, and it needed high wealth workers. Since I chose a neighborhood that was a short drive away from those businesses, the new high wealth residents had no trouble making it to work. At the same time, I reduced unemployment and unhappy shoppers from the medium and low wealth populations. I had another city that had a high density avenue that had severe traffic problems which caused every service in the city to become too slow to function. I added streetcars, buses and a train station to the city, and traffic was drastically reduced, despite an increase in the visiting population. For players interested in the details, there is a ton of information available to the player that allows them to make educated decisions for how to plan their city, and the results of their decisions are easy to see, observe and learn from. As far as my being out of touch with "most of the world," we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. There are plenty of players enjoying the game right now.

I think to the average player the cities in the new game will feel much more alive compared to previous games in the series. Whether the sims moving around the cities are persistant simulations or merely a resource moving from A to B, to the player, it should still seem much more believable than SimCity 4 and its vanishing cars. There is value in the fact that you can click on a car and see where it came from and where it's going, and follow it all the way to its destination. I'll be the first to admit that SimCity has plenty of issues, and I would never suggest that it is a replacement for SimCity 4 (which may always be the best game for building massive regions). But I won't disregard what is great about the new game, even if my opinion is unpopular.

Hey everyone. I finally got to spend some time with SimCity on a stable server with no major issues, so I finished up my review. Hope you enjoy it. -Ari http://gamerhorizon.com/simcity-review/