TCGaz

Originally posted by: tomfoolery_79 Update: I'm up to about 15 hours with the game. My city is 500,000+ people. After playing this amount of time, I can confirm I am REALLY enjoying it. It's really fun up until you get elites, then from elites to the 500,000 it gets difficutly, still fun, but difficult. Then at 500,000 you get higher density offices and buildings etc, that make growth easier. I'm finding it's extremely easy to grow cities, but I'm finding it's extremely difficult to keep them happy on all fronts. Not enough water, food, waste, leisure, etc. Building items that are supposed to reduce these things don't seem to help much if at all.quote> I've been playing for about a week, started two towns and made a hash of them before starting my third town and it's going much better. I'm about where you are with 500k citizens or so. Once unlocking the high density zoning things have picked up and I'm now taking some time from straight expansion to rezone and rework the stuff I did earlier on. Some things I've noticed so far: Leisure seems far too ineffective. It seems no matter how much or what type of leisure I put into an area the citizens are never happy with it. The rating gets to about yellow and no more and the messages saying my citizens are bored keeps popping up. It seems there is nowhere near enough leisure options and what there is seems woefully ineffective. Maybe I'm missing something. Farming: 10 farms = 1 silo; 5 silos = 1 fertilizer plant; 50 farms = 1 fertilizer plant? And the range on that one plant isn't enough to cover all 50 farms. I converted all of my available farmland (on the Peninsula map I think) into farms, rearranged them as efficiently as I could, and was only producing enough food for about 330k citizens. That was with complete coverage of silos and as much coverage as I could get from my single fertilizer plant. Seems like the balance is a little off here. 1 silo per 5 farms might be better. I modified the fertilizer file to lower its unlock requirements and increase its range of effectiveness which helped. I haven't found the silo file yet, but if I do I'll modify that to find a better balance. Placement Snapping: As other people have mentioned it would be nice to be able to turn it off or have a modifier key that can disable it while placing stuff. It's annoying when placing roads anywhere near the edge of the map and the road I'm laying keeps jumping to the edge to place an intercity link. Roads: I'd like to see merge intersections rather than hard stops, especially when connecting roads to expressways. This is pretty minor on my list though. It's unrealistic at worst. Roundabouts seem odd. Since they don't seem to connect to road points (they don't snap like when connecting road to road), I can't tell if they are placed right or working, so I just don't use them. While I like the ability to define what road types to use when placing building zones, I'd like a seperate selector for N-S, and E-W roads (for example) so I can say make the N-S roads small avenues, but make E-W roads small streets. Small point, but it would save time and a lot of niggling with the build tools. Having played most of the SimCity series, I am very much enjoying this game so far. Sure it lacks some polish and refinement in areas, but overall it is fun. If anything I need to play it less because I'm starting to dream in street grids.

Originally posted by: tomfoolery_79 Update: I'm up to about 15 hours with the game. My city is 500,000+ people. After playing this amount of time, I can confirm I am REALLY enjoying it. It's really fun up until you get elites, then from elites to the 500,000 it gets difficutly, still fun, but difficult. Then at 500,000 you get higher density offices and buildings etc, that make growth easier. I'm finding it's extremely easy to grow cities, but I'm finding it's extremely difficult to keep them happy on all fronts. Not enough water, food, waste, leisure, etc. Building items that are supposed to reduce these things don't seem to help much if at all.quote> I've been playing for about a week, started two towns and made a hash of them before starting my third town and it's going much better. I'm about where you are with 500k citizens or so. Once unlocking the high density zoning things have picked up and I'm now taking some time from straight expansion to rezone and rework the stuff I did earlier on. Some things I've noticed so far: Leisure seems far too ineffective. It seems no matter how much or what type of leisure I put into an area the citizens are never happy with it. The rating gets to about yellow and no more and the messages saying my citizens are bored keeps popping up. It seems there is nowhere near enough leisure options and what there is seems woefully ineffective. Maybe I'm missing something. Farming: 10 farms = 1 silo; 5 silos = 1 fertilizer plant; 50 farms = 1 fertilizer plant? And the range on that one plant isn't enough to cover all 50 farms. I converted all of my available farmland (on the Peninsula map I think) into farms, rearranged them as efficiently as I could, and was only producing enough food for about 330k citizens. That was with complete coverage of silos and as much coverage as I could get from my single fertilizer plant. Seems like the balance is a little off here. 1 silo per 5 farms might be better. I modified the fertilizer file to lower its unlock requirements and increase its range of effectiveness which helped. I haven't found the silo file yet, but if I do I'll modify that to find a better balance. Placement Snapping: As other people have mentioned it would be nice to be able to turn it off or have a modifier key that can disable it while placing stuff. It's annoying when placing roads anywhere near the edge of the map and the road I'm laying keeps jumping to the edge to place an intercity link. Roads: I'd like to see merge intersections rather than hard stops, especially when connecting roads to expressways. This is pretty minor on my list though. It's unrealistic at worst. Roundabouts seem odd. Since they don't seem to connect to road points (they don't snap like when connecting road to road), I can't tell if they are placed right or working, so I just don't use them. While I like the ability to define what road types to use when placing building zones, I'd like a seperate selector for N-S, and E-W roads (for example) so I can say make the N-S roads small avenues, but make E-W roads small streets. Small point, but it would save time and a lot of niggling with the build tools. Having played most of the SimCity series, I am very much enjoying this game so far. Sure it lacks some polish and refinement in areas, but overall it is fun. If anything I need to play it less because I'm starting to dream in street grids.