Sunfighter

We all know why they arnt there. Why give it to them in their 60 dollar game for free when you can give it to them in 4.99 packs a few weeks later. Interesting tidbit: 2KM in Manhattan is the distance from 1st street to 26th street. Has anybody tried to create a map with a perfect grid pattern? were you able to get 26 streets worth of grids? Curious about this games scale.

100% agreed. Seeing actual water and sewage agents move through your city makes it clear that a.) you have a problem and b.) where the problem physically exists. As far as mass transit go, because of the relatively smaller sizes of the cities (what Maxis terms "intimate" sizes) some mass transit options might not always make sense for the kind of city you're building. Still, passenger trains and ferries are crucial to bring in sims from neighboring cities to fulfill your goals, it seems like their use will be almost unavoidable. Since in the fiction that Maxis is creating here, a city doesn't exist in a total vacuum. I think another reason they have so much trouble with other mass transit options is because the glassbox engine seems to function only on road connections and it seems very time consuming to get it to function on anything else. They worked out that flaw on trains by the game treating the rail lines as if they were roads, hence that early bug where trains were stopping at intersections.

How do you know having a city of 1 million is difficult to achieve?

What is strange is sandbox mode will also disable random disasters. Not sure if you can turn them back on. Not sure if you can manually trigger them either tho i assume you can. But keep in mind that sandbox automatically disables random disasters.

Food isnt a resource in this game. So im guessing it will be up to the regional people to decide if they will allow a person to build small or not. I assume most would, but the more leaderboard obsessed will probably want every town to be big and only big.

Last I checked, their glassbox engine was there to give realism to traffic and people, including cities as a whole. Why should airports be any different? If it's because "they were trying to conserve space in tiles", well that just goes back to another problem. Airports are a huge part of cities. Honestly id say the traffic levels are a bit inflated for the population sizes looking at the various betas and screenshots. In the games defense airports have never been a strong suit of simcity, they are just too large to properly shown. Its always been one thing ive never let bug me realism wise. Though when I was a kid playing simcity 2000 I always assumed each game the maps would be getting larger and larger till we had all the room for this stuff...i would of never guessed theyd be going in the opposite direction.

Considering map sizes, and the fact that a person can commute ONLY to the town next door to work (if I understand correctly). That means the person effectively is only going to commute in a best case senario (aka one edge of the map in city A to the far edge of the other map in city B) 4KM. Thats only 2.4 miles. Thats an extremely short range for a max commute a sim can take. At the very least I hope im wrong, and that a sim can commute to any area connected with a highway or train connection within his sectors connection. That is the best of a worst scenario at least, but from what I read and understand it seems like a sim can only go 1 map over for work..which sucks to be frank. To be honest theyve pushed multiplayer aspects very hard in this game. Seems to me one area of the co-op should of involved city specialization. Where one guy focuses mostly on the housing, others on industry, others on commercial. And the sims and goods travel the whole region via highways and trains. Yea a guy traveling from map 1 to map 16 would be extreme, but the chances of that would be very low since the demand would probably be met by closer maps. But the glassbox engine cant handle that. fine...but it damages the possibilities for specialization greatly.....think of the following... Lets use an example 16 map region, with 4 players. Each player will be forced to have 2 residential maps, 1 industry/connector map and 1 commercial map (assuming the basic idea that each map will be specialized, most wont, but this is an easier to understand hypothetical). Yes the commercial and industry specializations can and most likely will be different for the 4 players. But each players section will have a set demand of R,C, and I that will HAVE TO be met by player because he cant get it from the other sectors. So youll have the same very few cookie cutter options with very little chance for variation over a 16 map region due to this 1 map travel limitation. Its essentially the same ratio and limitation thats been around since simcity 2000. 2R-1I-IC. Each player's section will need to have it. Unless im reading things wrong, this is the way things are going to be. Unless somebody can explain the regional system clearer.

Nothing in this remake went realism first. The main design choices were for multiplayer and leaderboards..nothing else.

Many people have stated this before and I'll say it again: the tile size is not as big of an issue as the fact that the tiles are not contiguous and that you can't place your own regional transportation. This locks you into the small maps and removes the regional flexibility to at least PRETEND you'd made a city larger that existed in SimCity 4. That's what's wrong with regional play. I have another petpeeve that the 16 map regions are actually 4 cities of 4 maps each that cannot share commuters. So you basically have 4 isolated city pockets that can share only basic resources if set up correctly, and nothing else. So a commuter cant go from one area of the region to another to work, he must stay within that contained pocket. Severely neutering the point of a 16 map region. As resources are the only thing to be shared, and again ONLY if the certain connector maps between the isolated pockets decide to make the connection to the next isolated pocket city. Thats if I understand things correctly, i could be wrong. But the larger maps, and from what ive read from others, this seems to be the case.

That bums me out a great deal really as it limits commute traffic and general interaction across an entire region unless a specific map develops in a specific way, though simcity 4 had the same problem I believe as one end of a region couldnt share commute with the other end...(i believe). So a 16 map region set basically is actually 4 isolated cities of 4 maps each (given all equal). The only sharing they can do is with unlocks and resources and total regional population. But its still going to be 4 isolated pockets within a region....curious that theyd do something like that. Right?

Interesting read much kuddos, but a curiosity piece more than anything. Comparing simcity to any real world designs youd have to stretch the imagination and take a lot of liberties as he admitted to doing in the article. In any simcity game i might add so dont take it as a knock on the current game. Though maybe even more so in this game due to the limitations in mass transit options, map size constraints, and lack of design tools when it comes to rail and interstate roadways, exits, entrances, etc.. He did come to the right conclusion though about his town. Traffic is bad there because its a through-town. A look at a map could of told him that. His "town" is only 4.5 miles or so from the downtown core of Manchester. Quotes around town because his town has actually been absorbed into Greater Manchester. They may claim to be an independent town with 15,000 residents, but its essentially become a community with a name and cant expand due to being surrounded on all sides by development with a total pop of 2.2 million. its in that zone where its too far outside the core to be considered part of the city proper, but not far enough away to be called a suburb. A quick look at google earth and you can easily see an even greater problem with his town. Traffic during rush hour will generally want to move in a north-south direction, towards Manchester in the morning and away at night. As you can see a ring a golf courses to his towns north side prevents road development so much so that there are only 2 options for north-south travel. The princess expressway, and Palatine Road. And zero chance at developing anything greater due to the area already being fully developed (unless you destroy the golf courses) So you have only a single 6 lane expressway and a single 2 lane road to handle the rush hour traffic volume which is probably in the tens of thousands range if not 100,000+ range..

Curious about these maps because they seem to demand certain development patterns to avoid being isolated. If you were to select the east most map, and another player or you decide to develop the west most map, would the game treat it as isolated cities since there are technically no connections due to no developed cities on the connection points between the islands? or does the simulator assume a connection even if a map isnt in use?

Not the Simcity I wanted, but a decent enough looking game. I wont pay 60 bucks for it, but I will pick it up at 39.99.... or 49.99 if the long term reviews are positive and/or the maxis team delivers on comments to eventually increase map sizes, provide better city design tools, etc etc... Curious to see how well the glassbox engine simulates on a full 16 map region.

I want my Simcity Pravda now or im leaving!

Whats the blue dotted line on the 2nd to the bottom region? Im curious how some of the regions dont have connecting highways to every individual map, and now the simulator deals with that aspect. Is one section isolated from the other since traffic cant get there...or?

Whats the blue dotted line on the 2nd to the bottom region?

How do you even know if the gameplay elements that are claimed to be in the game even work? Nobody has gotten more than a couple hours worth if gameplay. Visual is ALL people have to go on...you included. Who knows what could be quirky about the interaction between cities because all weve seen is the interaction between 2 at most.... so yea, your comments are premature.

Confirmed as features...but not confirmed as functional yet because nobodies got to see it in action outside maybe a few media people for a few hours..and maxis themselves. Id say give it a few days before its listed as a major improvement over SC4. I like the ideas, but id like to see it functional first before id call it great. As there could be quirks in the engine that we wont see till several hours and several million people populate a region.

Well I am of the opinion that games should get different levels of leeway on graphical issues based on their scope. Simcity has a very tiny scope to your comparison of a FPS for example. while an FPS might have less complexity overall (which is questionable, depending on whether the game has a physics engine and whether the weapons are hit scan or not and all the scripted crap that seems popular with FPS these days...). All the action in simcity takes part in a 2x2 cube, while an FPS is in a always changing environment. So a graphical mistake in an FPS is more forgivable and ultimately less visible than one in simcity would... Its like how your less likely to notice a damaged box in a warehouse full of boxes then if you had only 4 boxes in a 2x2 get up. Simcity insists that it take place in a tiny little box...so that box better be perfect if they want my 60 bucks is all im saying. Scope is key.

Nobody has enough time with the game yet to see if the regional play even functions as you say correctly. So visual stuff is all people can comment on the regional stuff, your positives included. All your stuff is just marketing hearsay till people get more than an hour to play and get to dig into the guts of the engine and see how it functions with say...16 cities..

Its not just one graphical bug, there have been several showing up even though the game is in gold state already. From the trains stopping at intersections for cars, to the lack of correct rail crossings, to the civic center roads, to the road intersections, to the trees in the road, etc etc... My point was never the one mistake, but the several taken together. It shows that the game never went into polish stage before gold. And when you take into account the small maps...you have to wonder where all the dev time has gone and why? Its the engine. They are running into issues with the engine they hadnt anticipated and its pushed them well behind schedule..and typical of EA, instead of delaying they are pushing it out in a no polish state because they know people will buy it. 60 bucks is a blockbuster PC price point. If they demand that price point, and expect the limited map sizes to be okay, the lack of landscape editing to be okay, the lack of regional freedom to be okay, the always online to be okay, and the general lack of mass transit to be okay , then then sure as hell have better have what limited stuff they have in the game at launch to be god damn polished to gleaming... and yet they havent done it. Its not just one picture. Its the big picture, all off the bugs already seen. Where was the dev time spent? It wasnt on polish thats for sure, it wasnt on building signage, thats for sure....soooooo the only logical conclusion is the engine..

These kinds of polish issues really worry me. You shouldnt be seeing glaring polish issues like these on a 60 dollar title thats already in GOLD status especially when these are the advertising pictures..... When you consider the map sizes...this seems to indicate the Devs have spent all the dev time on the engine, which implies serious engine issues and zero time left for polish. yea yea...day 1 patch blah blah blah...how many things have been mentioned on this site alone that we assume will have a day 1 patch for now? And thats IF they dont have any network issues. Which we know they did have on the demo day. Call me crazy, but I think with the 1 hour limited demos....the signs of zero polish work..... I think there is something seriously wrong with the glassbox engine that rears its ugly head several hours into a game.

The little animations were there in Simcity 4. The difference now is that the animations accurately represent what is going on in the simulator. In Simcity 4, they were purely aesthetic, but now you can actually learn something about your city by looking at them. Accurate to what exactly?

I think it will go like diablo 3. Initial strong release just due to namesake. A few months of fun. Then large portions of the population leave due to boredom//design choices. It will be extremely important for them to expand the maps as its the biggest limiter to creativity right now. And thats what simcity is about really, sandbox creativity. It is pretty much what keeps people playing. If they plan on selling stuff on their little store then they are gonna have to keep the people playing. Right now I see it as like giving a person the opportunity to paint, but then only giving them a notecard to paint on. Sure the Picassos could probably do some amazing things on that notecard, but the average joe will be pretty limited. They will do a few grids, marvel for a few times at the circle roads they make. Maybe a few squiggly roads...then what? theyve reached their limit. I dont think the resource mechanic will hold their attention very long. Great works wont take that long to do by the looks of it. Nor will the simulation itself hold their attention, yea it will be fun to watch the ants go about their business, but thats not playing a game, thats watching...and the novelty will wear off extremely fast. Ultimately we are all here to play a game, and watching little cubes being made at a factory or puffs of smoke from a smokestack or little sims doing their animations ISNT as important as maxis seems to think it is, i dunno why they focus so much on that stuff as they do in their trailers, it just wont hold the players attention long enough to make a store viable.

Not really. only the blockbusters demand that kind of price. Simcity is a blockbuster due to its heritage. But the gameplay itself really only would be warranted for a 39.99 title really. I can give you a list btw of my recent buys: Impire: 19.99 Aliens:CM (terrible btw) 49.99 antichamber: 19.99 DMC: 49.99 Farcry 3 49.99 Crusader Kings 2: 39.99