Noobi-Wan

Are your video card drivers up to date?

I agree with the problems but a lot of the proposed solutions seem unlikely to come to fruition if I am honest. I don't know if the plan is to introduce subways later in the piece but having played around with tunnels on some maps I can see why they were put in the too hard basket!

It is better but it would be good if they were on another tab on the attraction specialisation to make life a bit easier.

I want the same things that I wanted for 8.0 I still want to see "minor works" to fill the gaps between cities as modules for the individual city. I would like to see the ability to build suburbs as a residential resource, industrial estates for industry and office parks for commerce etc. Furthermore if you could build a utilities module for the city that the provides power, water and sewage requirements for the city that would be grand. This could allow you to customise the city borders and areas surrounding the city tiles to give a sense of a sprawling metropolis whilst maintaining the 2km city tile restriction. Also I think (with no technical knowledge or understanding I should stress) this may be a little easier on the simulation as each city module would only have a set number of agents going in or out. If you take away the ability to manually lay road for the modules the designers can control the system requirements whilst giving us something that we want (or the illusion of) creating a huge sprawling city that isn't jammed into an unrealistic 2x2 box. The only issue would be creating a road to connect the module to the city. 2 cents done. Pipe dream released upon the world!

No gifting resolution? Isn't this still a big issue?

You don't have to buy it though. I certainly won't be for a while anyway.

Glad to hear you are enjoying the game!

That's cool can't wait to see the new maps. Are there new regions or are they just new maps? Regions buddy, two desert and two with a tropical feel.

So it looks like we will be getting new maps to coincide with the CoT launch. They seem to have new textures, trees etc which is lovely but other than one of the cities being unplayable without the expansion there do not appear to be too many changes there...

I really couldn't agree more! So annoying.

I think you stumbled upon the simcity 2013 forum instead of SC4 which would certainly explain why none of this makes a great deal of sense! In case you wanted to know great works are large projects that a number of cities can contribute to completing for mutual benefits. City hall is an upgradable government building that you get far sooner than in SC4 (I seem to recall a courthouse or something similar you got as a gift at some point). Gifting is a broken part of the multiplayer aspect of the game. As an example I would be able to gift you money for a new fire station if you needed it. The lizard is a disaster. Think Godzilla but not as good. Also the university and many other building have modules that you can add to them to improve function or unlock new buildings. The university has several and so does the oil well. The oil well is part of the specialisations that you can utilise to make further simoleons.

I'm not aware of an issue. What wealth residential is it asking for?

You're welcome! And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids! Here's the thing: you want to blame the developers for the map size? Sure go ahead. They chose to go with an agent system which couldn't support very large maps. If you feel this is an unacceptable tradeoff, all the power to you and please tell the developers that so they can take this into acount for the next game how important map size is. Same goes for other design choices. If you want to blame the developers that the game is forcibly online, or that modding wasn't included in the release or the price or such things, you're just going after the wrong people. That's simply not their decision to make. In fact, some of the original developers left saying they thought it was a disgrace how the game was treated by EA. How is blaming their collegues and the people who replaced them over that fair? But then, I'm just EA's marketing president. What would I care about who's hold responsible for what. Well I'm buying what your selling! The important part of all of this that none of us really know what the working relationship between EA and Maxis is like. We are working off speculation and taking a scatter gun approach when assigning blame. In reality I suspect that neither party is entirely blameless but at least someone seems to be working to fix the problems. What may be worth speculating on is how much this maintenance would be costing. EA have this reputation of being all about the money when it comes to making games but you would have to think that they are eating into their margins by having teams of people dedicated to patches and updates. Like I say this is speculation so there is no evidence to support the theory but it does indicate that the parties on the other side of the fence feel that this is a good game worth investing more time in. If I keep this up maybe one day I can get a job in the EA marketing department!

Referring to city borders, I just want them to be packed closer together. No, I don't mean smaller maps. I mean that the cities would be closer together, like they are in SimCity 4 the cities feel too spaced out. I hear you. I was reading through the design notes PDF (on here somewhere) and they appear to have investigated up to 9 city tiles right on top of one another. The notes were saying things like they needed to ensure fast changes between tiles. It would seem however that this model was also discarded for whatever reason. My money would be on this being possible but clunky in execution or restrictive by way of hardware etc:

Maybe they would have different regions set aside for cities of tomorrow only on the servers?

Your point regarding recent bug ridden games is spot on, I cannot think of any game that has been released in the last ten years that didn't require at least one patch. The hate that maxis are receiving on Simcity seems to have been aimed squarely at EA but has been lost in the mix somewhere along the way. Now maxis are receiving flack for releasing a bugged game and rightly so, at release. The bugs made the game incredibly difficult to play and the server issues were unacceptable. You could argue that releasing an unfinished game was beyond reproach and that everyone at EA and Maxis should be fired immediately but this all seems to have been fixed or addressed in the months since. It also seems like an unjustified attack on people who have spent a great deal of time working to fix some problems that people (myself included) got upset about. Instead of us being grateful the internet as a whole seems to sulk about things that are in all likelihood very difficult to fix whilst ignoring the vast improvement that has taken place since release. As a thought if valve released half life 3 next month and there were a few issues with it I would be willing to bet that the community would be way more forgiving purely because EA had no involvement. Back to Simcity though, the maps are too small is the next criticism that had been leveled since day one. Yes they are smaller than what people are used to in SC 4 or cities XL but this isn't a bug. This is a limitation of the engine as a whole. Without a ground up redesign it would be hard to fix this in any number of updates. I find it exasperating that there are still trolls on the official forums demanding bigger maps despite the top dog categorically stating that they cannot (will not) do it. What is irritating me still is that maxis are using the excuse that you are supposed to be managing the region not the city. This would be fine if the region play worked. This is still the most bugged part of the game. If they could guarantee a fluid experience that worked as advertised then I would be happy. To stop myself sounding like a maxis devotee with EA tattoos in inappropriate places I will say this, if they do not provide an offline mode or provide support for the UGC they are hinting at I will have to pack this game away and move on. If they provide these things I think we as a community will be better placed to effect what is going in the game to provide the sort of experience we were expecting.

They mention that it will need loads of oil and ore and will require increased power and water. I suspect they will also generate more sewage and tonnes of air pollution. I think the issues are going to be around servicing the production of omega whilst keeping the population alive long enough to reap the rewards. That said I think the mega towers look awesome. I might wait until this appears in an origin sale before buying it though...

Remember when they said that they couldn't add an offline mode due to, and I'm quoting here "it would take a significant amount of engineering work for this to happen"? Like with offline more only really requiring an edit to a single line, I'm pretty sure that larger city sizes isn't (in theory) too hard to implement. I suspect it would be a very easy thing to do, they just draw a bigger square. What I think has happened is that they have a goal to hit with the hardware required to run the game (ie what is on the back of the box). It was interesting to see the difference in required hardware between the standard game and the upcoming expansion. It would appear that even relatively minor changes cause increases in required performance. I would love to see the results of the testing they did on the game to see if my rig would fit the bill for increased city size. I would bet that they were set the task of increasing city size whilst maintaining performance on the same hardware. They can always: 1) Put the city tiles beside each other! 2) Put options. If my PC can run a city with bigger tiles, why can't I decide? I agree wholeheartedly, the choice should be with us but it has been taken away by the focus on multiplayer and getting as many people as possible playing. This means tailoring a game for the average PC which leads to compromise with aspects of the game. In my humble opinion multiplayer ruined simcity. Everything wrong with it can be traced back to being online and multiplay.

Remember when they said that they couldn't add an offline mode due to, and I'm quoting here "it would take a significant amount of engineering work for this to happen"? Like with offline more only really requiring an edit to a single line, I'm pretty sure that larger city sizes isn't (in theory) too hard to implement. I suspect it would be a very easy thing to do, they just draw a bigger square. What I think has happened is that they have a goal to hit with the hardware required to run the game (ie what is on the back of the box). It was interesting to see the difference in required hardware between the standard game and the upcoming expansion. It would appear that even relatively minor changes cause increases in required performance. I would love to see the results of the testing they did on the game to see if my rig would fit the bill for increased city size. I would bet that they were set the task of increasing city size whilst maintaining performance on the same hardware.

I agree. They seem to have bitten off far more than they could chew with the engine. Couple this with the multiplayer aspect and the need for this to work on old hardware and the prospects of bigger maps were always bleak. This is one of those priceless examples of not finding out what the existing customers want before releasing something. Glassbox is cool but too ambitious. That said I like the game despite the issues and there are glimmers of hope in here (albeit with some rather large ifs). IF we get an offline mode, IF mod support is implemented and IF the modders out there are able to, perhaps we may one day be able to build on entire regions.

If you do buy it from a store. You should be able to get it much cheaper than on origin!

We are discussing cities of the future though which I think allows the developers some artistic license with floating walkways etc. It may not be realistic by today's standards (or the laws of physics) but at least they used their imaginations and came up with an idea of what it might look like. I personally don't object to it. I think this will look mental with a city tile fill of mega towers with inter connecting bridges going to different levels on each one. I agree that underground connections are more realistic but you wouldn't be able to see them in game.

My hopes are continually dashed...

Before this goes way off topic I understand your frustrations with EA and the state of the game as it was released but you have to remember that any additional content by way of DLC is a completely optional purchase. I am not sure why so many people are upset by the DLC. I have bought some of it when it went on sale when I deemed the price reasonable. I haven't bought it all as the balloons are silly and the theme park was expensive to my mind. That said there are a number of things that I would pay for but regardless of the DLC debate this thread was intended for discussion of future additions to the game via updates and patches. I would love bigger maps but there have been numerous discussions on this forum about this point and how the common theory is that hardware probably needs to advance before they can do it on the Glassbox engine. It may be possible one day but it will be much further down the line. I think oneway streets would be a welcome addition along with a few more traffic control options like roundabouts and the ability to merge roads into avenues. Tunnels and bridges have been a breath of fresh air to the game but I would like to see a few more NAM style options (without it becoming too complicated). Speaking of, I would like to be able to have tunnels branch and split underground without the need for holes all over the map to show the junction. The same would be nice for bridges. Great works and regional gifting desperately need fixing. But while they are at it I would like to be able to zoom right in and take a look around an international airport. It was always frustrating for me that you put so much effort in and you then cannot see what you have built properly. Bus lanes might be asking too much but would be a nice option instead of street car tracks or a combination streetcar/bus stop?

When you unlock them in normal mode they become available in sandbox for you to unleash as you see fit. You can select them in the disasters menu.