Sunfighter

Make a good game and the market comes to you.

lame, it was about the only hardcore thing about this game.

If theyd just fix the damn memory problems with cities XL.

Its a bug, ive had it happen with firetrucks and police before as well, not sure what triggers it. Though my theory was destroying a building while the police/firetrucks ect are out on call.

Are you certain they were commuters? Did you read up on what they were and/or where they were trying to go? I never liked that region because of that road....because commute traffic going to other cities would in fact have to pass through your city if they were going to another one. Cities with the main highway that cross it will always have that problem. Though I wonder if its better than the ones with the one lane exit cloverleafs in front of them.

Are you sure those people are commuters? Who are they exactly? what are they doing? where are they going? something to watch.

I hope they dont, its the only hardcore thing in the game. And honestly, most the disasters are pretty weak. I had a "major" earthquake, and all it did was knock down 5 skyscrapers in maybe a 2 block radius. I miss the SC2K earthquakes where the entire map would shake, random buildings would be rubbled, and fires would randomly pop up everywhere. The only one thats a real pain is the meteor one. Only because the firefighting AI. The radiation goes away pretty quick.

1) Alloy is expensive so its a balance issue I think. Why would anybody smelt alloy using all those expensive mines and smelters when they can just pick it out of garbage for example? 2) Because the number is fake. They inflated the numbers to make your population look bigger than what it is. 3) Sounds like you need more $$C. Since for some reason they made this game extremely wealth segregated. $$R only shops at $$C. 4) Industry isnt needed. They completely disabled the C to I relationship. C functions just fine without deliveries.

Its smart, because then they can claim simcity was a huge success and disregard all the lessons learned.

Fact is, sales of this game will drop off rapidly after this amazing first week. The first week was only due to the fact EA has great marketing, and itd been 10 years from the last cycle, so there was mass interest in seeing a new one, as well as the older generation wanting to share their game with their children..... It will collapse faster than a German advance into Russia. Its not only a terrible city simulator which kills off the hardcore, its just a downright terrible game too which kills off the casuals.

I do not agree with you as far as this aspect of the game is involved: a sim will stay in your city while he or she is happy and has money. Moroever, happyness can be bought at a shop :-). or be acquired by taking a stroll in a park. It surely is a simplification, but it is not illogical. yea because as long as you have a park, youll never need a job, money or leave your house...okay...

Their system is really dumb and hyper segregated. What they should of done is have each commercial business have a requirement of a certain tracked number for sales to stay in business based on wealth..( aka.....$C will need less sales than $$C which needs less than $$$C). Then have the wealth shoppers weighted, ($R = 0.25, $$R = 0.5 $$$R=1, for example). And just allow shoppers to go anywhere. Obviously this is rough, and would need tuned to get exact numbers. But that simple system is light years better than what is currently in place. Some of the design choices in this game really confuse the heck out of me on why they wanted to go the way they did.

The game has cut so many corners just to get it to work with the glassbox engine that it essentially isnt a city simulator anymore.

If they were smart, they would integrate a way to pay for DLC via using in game resources. That keeps people in the games longer. Lets be honest here, this game isnt a simcity. hell the only way to make vast amount of money isnt even though taxes anymore..its through having a govt owned means of production facility.

Its just telling you your town can have a boat connection.

Yes, so the challenge instead becomes more than just not going broke or having a large population. Having a balance of RCI all in one city AND having a large population that's happy is the true test of city building skill. The mechanics may be strange and some broken but finding the challenge none-the-less is at least trying to get something for the money. How would you know you even had a balance? What is considered a balance? traffic? zoning %? problems? money? Ironically, I think traffic is a sign of a healthy city, and cities that have extreme traffic troubles are in fact the most healthy balance wise, but that the agent system failed the game. Ive redesigned my city a several times over the past 3 days trying to find this mystical balance and stability. The first one had a TON of traffic, but only leaving the city, no buildings ever went abandoned, cept for industrial as they were complaining about the stupids randomly mucking up their works. So I figured I had too much C not enough R to soak up the shoppers. So I removed a lot of C and rezoned R. Traffic stopped...but everywhere...pretty much traffic cleared up completely. The city was lifeless, the tourists dried up, leaving town saying "this town is boring". Population went from a meager 80K to 200K though. Strangely, income went into the red thanks to the casinos having to be shut down and shuttered due to red income. Strange, commercial went abandoned now due to no shoppers. but..the traffic was solved! So today, i tried to revive the C and get the income to the red, and try to tweek via this guys general rules (though not sure I understand it completely, so it still could be me)..... Traffic has now exploded again all over the city this time. Commercial doesn't go abandoned. Industry has places to ship again....yet this time..strangely R is going abaondedon due to..i dunno what...buildings just go abandoned. *shrug* but now im suffering from huge amounts of traffic....looking for work. So i guess I have an unbalance in wealth.... So tomorrow..its time to tweek the parks I guess...plus the citys skyline is uglier than ever. but im pretty even wealth wise.

My city had a problem with too much Commercial generating happy shoppers, who then had no R to go to and thus defaulted to trying to leave the city totally messing up traffic. The only way to fix it was to destroy almost ALL the commercial zones and rezone R. This in effect produced little traffic, and even more baffling the limited C zones left where suffering from not enough shoppers (?!). Its almost like C generates its own shoppers to satisfy itself once a city hits a certain size. I really dont understand how RCI works in this game. I really dont. Explain this to me...High wealth C. Surrounded by High wealth R. With a bit of Mid R mixed in..... yet...not enough shoppers.... So youre saying its due to the R not having enough I or C to make money to spend it? yea? So basically I need more C.....to get more C so C can not go out of business? How....why is the mechanic like this?

I hope they also can add in some improvements to the left turning AI. Ive had far too many intersections where only 1 car is getting though at a green light because the AI is too afraid to turn left in front of oncoming traffic. Honestly, unless they implement some form of left turn lanes (doubtful) they may just have to disable the AI worrying about oncoming traffic when turning left...its the easiest solution IMHO.

As far as I know, kids serve no function in the SIM other than giving you another chance to educate a residence. Neglecting them just removes you from that opportunity. (maybe it increases crime too)

Its not lazyness, its just the game was pushed out well before it should of been. I was saying that before the game was released when all these glitch photos were being posted, when people were insisting it would be fixed in a day one patch. I was like...yea maybe it will get fixed on day one patch..(they ran into MUCH bigger problems LOL), but the fact these existed as the game was gold and during those marketing demos (sorry they were not betas, they just were not) showed to me that the game never entered the "polish" state before the CDs were stamped.

I had the same problem a few days ago. Your causes could be different, but mine was from a unbalance in C zoning to R. Im not sure exactly how the sim works, but for some reason my C was producing an overabundence of "satisified" shoppers that my R just couldnt soak up (which was ironic considering the graphs were saying I still had unsatisfied shoppers). So all that traffic would just default to trying to leave the city. They werent commuting in or out to other towns (region pop was around 1M with a 300K town next to mine) they just...existed...and their one goal was to leave the city via the exit and disappear forever. I killed the traffic by demolishing some C to replace with R. Once I hit a balance the traffic evaporated. It did have side effects though.....Logic would make you think the few commercial zones left would be booming due to less competition+more residents...yet they are going out of business due to lack of shoppers (WTF?) Its almost like C was producing its own demand in my town. And now the graph says I have a TON of unsatisifed shoppers...yet the happyness ratings in all my R went from baseline high density to max rating after this change...go figure... here is the thread where I spent a day pounding my head into the desk trying to figure out the traffic problems I was having..and why no mass transit seemed to fix it.

So I had somebody build a city next to mine finally today. We both have pretty good sized cities. His is a lot larger grid type city, with a strong speciliazation bringing in tons of cash, mine was just a random experiment with road networks that just grew up pretty well. One problem though, we are both commuting to each other, we are sharing a lot of our populations. And this number seems to overwhelm the one highway interstate connection. I already have a rail connection, and a river connection to try to cut down on this incoming and outgoing traffic. Not sure what else I can do other than park and rides at the entrance. But in this picture, you can sorta see the problem with that cloverleaf. Its only one lane. Its causing a huge ball up. Is there REALLY anything I can do to prevent this? Or am I hosed now? Though traffic entering the city isnt faring much better...this is just traffic trying to leave the city...I dunno what I can do to push them out any faster..there are no intersections cept that one far back...there is little in the way of housing and other items to clutter up the road... Traffic elsewhere in the city is fine...not great....but this is the worst area by far...

Diablo 3 sold 12 million, die out quickly? hardly...12 million for a pc game is enormous. How many people still play diablo 3? How many are still buying it? Diablo 2 was STILL being sold on shelves the day diablo 3 came out..do you really think that will happen with diablo 3?

I win by saying it would be a lot like Diablo 3. Sell well, have server problems, but ultimately die out pretty quick with the mass market.

Cant wait till the figure out how to get the zones to build outside the friggin dotted lines. I already knew you could build roads outside them, and the cars use those roads outside the dotted lines..so its not like the SIM just just stops happening.