Sunfighter

Sadly, I want a multiplayer right now. Im in a public region, and I started a new map today on NA East 3. My last experience with multiplayer died out when the public map I joined was full of just empty towns that people claimed but never started on. But now my new map is empty because of the lack of a search or friend function...oi.. And of course I picked the map with like 60% water..so its like...i got nowhere to build to tech up..lol

Thats mostly due to server issues, people are joining then being dumped out and forgetting their cities. My first public region i joined, had only 3 of 16 maps being built on, yet it was full...16 out of 16. Just the 13 others were stuck not able to log on. And now with search and friends disabled, it gets even worse.

I perfer the I dont give a damn spaghetti method. All my cities have a knotted mess look to them, and ironically they function better than grid cities....

And since most plopables are enormous, and when you get some the city is so mature you have to destroy about 2 city blocks for them.

Its okay for maybe 20-30 hours of gameplay. Gets boring pretty quick honestly. There is only so many times you can watch your garbage trucks go around, only so many designs you can fit on a note card. Youll have one grid city, one curvy city, and one crazy city..then youll yawn and leave.

Actually I disagree. You DO have to do it, because once a city gets around 100K your taxes arnt enough to make a steady profit.

I find the opposite to be true invovling city services once the city becomes dense. I found my services were having slower reaction times due to not being able to leave their stations due to traffic on major roads. I have much better reaction times by having the city services out in the boonies. I dont like the city specializations honestly, They make way too much money that makes city taxation pointless. It also makes no sense that cities are making computer chips, tvs, and the like.... My worst disaster was an earthquake that hit my central business core island...it destroyed every building on the island, strangely not a single building outside the earthquake rings were damaged or even caught fire....so it was easily handled.

I notice it says A free game from EA, not ANY free game from EA. So we might not get to choose

You can fit that many on a 1x1 size map, as ive done it with a map thats 50% water. Problem is, the population numbers are fake. Only about 20% of the population actually works as agents, the rest only exist as numbers within the buildings.

Will Wright lost his creative genius way back in the late early 00s. Hes pretty much irrelevant to the PC gaming world

My simcity performance has increased 100% since yesterday...... I now get 2 screens on top of each other telling me im screwed...

To that point, people would spend hours and hours or even days, weeks just on terraforming, before dropping a single bit of functionality in a city. Why take this out of the game? You never realize how important terraforming was till you find yourself one pixel short of adding an addition to your water plant, meanwhile your city is screaming for water..and you realize you have to spend a ton of money destroying and moving your water plant to plop it down on top of your skyscrapers because you have no more room anywhere, spend the money to rebuild said water plant, and all its additions again.......and ALL BECAUSE YOU CANT RAISE ONE PIXEL LAND.

Yea, I understand, I hate the city sizes too. I hope once things get worked out, they can increase the size. They are afraid to though, because then people might find out that population number is inflated due to the small sizes and the scaling is laughable..... That city says it has 96K, but in reality..there are only 21K being simulated via agents..the rest is just a fake number added into the buildings. It also will make you feel worse to know that more than half that map is water..and as you can see almost one entire island is industrial. This is a stand alone city (I have neighbors, but they are empty mayor towns, they cant play server issues). So its full of services, R,C, and I..and has no additional demand being met elseware...if it was, i could easily get at least 300K on that basically 1x1km map

Yes the DRM is incredibly stupid, but the game has flaws beyond that you know Left turning! AH i hate the left turning cars in this game! The traffic simulator is so bad. It has the potential to be really good, but they just need to tone down the number of cars and rethink how roads are used (aka go out to their local streetcorner and see how cars actually behave). Among other things, of course I dont expect perfection of course, because of the way the agent system is. There are no set jobs, homes or shops a sim has. So everyday its like the mad hatter where he screams "change places!!" And the city fills up on jobs, homes, and shops based purely on how well your transit system is on a first come first serve basis (hence the problem with nuclear power in educated cities..sometimes uneducated jerkballs end up getting there first in the morning commute, taking up the jobs there..and creating....meltdowns)..Im pretty sure thats how the agent system works. This has the downside of creating "wandering traffic" and a herding instinct as they all flow towards jobs..but not with any specific target other than..over there... This also creates demand chaos as one day a factory or store gets full employment and customers, the next it might not just out of sheer random luck that not enough cars passed by it that day on their random meandering... Another problem is the traffic CAN NOT turn left unless its at an intersection or end of the street. An obvious trade off due to how bad the cars already handle left turns can you imagine how bad traffic would be if cars were stopping mid street to turn into a business/store/home? itd be gridlock. But that trade off means cars are staying on the streets longer as if they target a "job" on the left side of the street it will go all the way to the end of the road, U turn and head that way, and sometimes the job is now full..and they go off wandering again. But this U-turn in intersections is playing havok with the traffic AI as left turning cars are now waiting on the U-turn people which they have to wait till traffic is clear the other way before they go. An easy obvious solution seems to be...just let the traffic AI ignore the collision rules when turning left. Dont get me wrong, they allow collsion, youll see traffic clip through itself all the time, but theyve programed to the AI to be as "realistic" as possible, so it tries to avoid it. To the point where its causing massive problems. Heck disabling that realistic Ai would allow cars to turn left into businesses in the middle of the streets and the like...im sure most people would agree, theyd accept the traffic clipping over what we have now... Maxis has stated that they wish for the tile size to increase, they forced it to be small because modern popular computer systems wouldn't handle the larger tile size well. It wasn't a design choice. They may have claimed it was a design choice to make it seem less drastic, but they want the tile size to be big just as much as we do. Yes the DRM is incredibly stupid, but the game has flaws beyond that you know Left turning! AH i hate the left turning cars in this game! The traffic simulator is so bad. It has the potential to be really good, but they just need to tone down the number of cars and rethink how roads are used (aka go out to their local streetcorner and see how cars actually behave). Among other things, of course I don't think they could tone down the number of cars considering the nature of the simulation. each of the cars is an actual agent of the simulation. To get rid of the cars is, basically to get rid of a citizen of the city. Actually they already do, if you pay attention to your population vs the number of jobs in the city...... Youll realize that only about 10-20% of your population actually works/shops/exists as agents. The rest are just numbers.

Yes the DRM is incredibly stupid, but the game has flaws beyond that you know Left turning! AH i hate the left turning cars in this game!

I like glassbox, but only if they do some traffic tweeks, and much larger maps.

Depends how much people enjoy it once they get the servers to actually work reliably. The few hours ive gotten tonight..i dunno..I fairly enjoy the game..but its not a creative sandbox toy anymore for sure..its more of a...i dunno what..ant farm? Tonight I spent a while watching a garbage truck go around trying to figure out the traffic AI, because I have an area of the city..with 1 traffic intersection light...yet a back up every day at 5pm that goes the length of the entire map almost Edit: See...look at that traffic jam...what the heck is going on there lol. The only traffic light is that section just before the bridge. The traffic then loops around the entire island...ending at that bridge just behind the Oil HQ. I cant figure out how one traffic light does that..its almost like the agent system suffers from a herding instinct.

^ basically what he says up there. With a smart population processors and TVs are a way to go, they are fairly unbalanced right now on the money intake. BTW guy above me, do you have a recycling center? Those generate alloy and plastic, could cut down on your import costs a bit.... (dont ask me why recycling centers are profitable, they arnt in real life at all..but whatever)

On the bright side, youve probably not done much yet.

The problem is that EA is using computers from 1970 to run their servers. I have proof!!!! lol..

Whats sad is on a small level, when you get it to work, all the other issues aside, its kinda fun on a staring at an ant farm level from time to time. I spent probably half an hour on turtle speed tonight watching my garbage truck go around and around. (though doing this you will see some boneheaded traffic problems caused by a non-perfect traffic AI and wish to hell theyd make improvements, especially in the left turning logic).

Im more curious by the fact they have extra servers ready for europe...but in hidden status.... yet no new North American servers are showing up even though there are massive problems here in the states. http://worlds.simcity.com/parallelworlds.json

The city can be saved, but the neighboring 3 other cities need to donate money till you can dig yourself out of the hole, but the chances of that on a public server are tiny. I planned to make my first public city very wealthy, then to make it nothing but paved streets...sadly...i havent been able to do much since day 1. Day 2 and 3 have been a total wash with 0 hours played.... due to the obvious issues. And yes i know i can change servers...but I dont want to unless it a new US east one.

They cant, the agent system is universal. It applies to traffic, sewage, water, power, pedestrian traffic...you name it. So if you make the roads one way....EVERYTHING will go one way.

No Simcity accurately portrayed this system, Though id say 2000/3000 was probably the best. Honestly, they should tweek the water to make it at least possible not to run out of water. They also need to add a reservoir great work that provides water to every city in the region for a moderate fee and provides a small amount of worker demand.