GMT

yes, because I don't "play" the game, I "sandbox-creative-mode" the game. moolah, demand mods, unlocking rewards,... the full package. I always say: the way I use sc4 is more like building a model railroad.

so... now that this game is finally offline, I came to a positive result considering getting myself a copy. to start of I dug into the sandbox mode to get a hang of the gameplay but soon got stopped by the following issue: the only sandbox-cheat that works is adding money. all other cheats don't have any effect on my game. pollution doesn't change, nor do any public service problems change with the respective cheat. not over the course of several ingame-weeks at least. any ideas?

Don't get fooled. Several "Bundesländer" (aka States) in Germany have a speed limit on the Autobahn somewhere between 100 and 130 kph (60-80mph) with loads of exceptions south of 100 kph. those that don't have a general speed limit put a limit on certain stretches of highway due to whatever reason. That plus the traffic density due to the lack of lanes - the majority is 2 lanes per direction, where possible they remodel it to 3 which gives a lot of construction with speed limits, don't expect to find anything beyond 4 lanes which is very very rare) make it rather impossible to actually enjoy the urban myth of "no speed limit on the german Autobahn" Still 65% of the entire network has no speed limit, but keep in mind that these are splattered across a little over 25.200km (16k miles) all across the nation so longer stretches are rare and like I said already, often are so packed with traffic that you simply can't go much beyond the "Richtgeschwindigkeit" (recommended speed; german law suggests a recommended speed of 130kph (80mph) on unlimited highways and god you better stick to it cuz insurance acts as if it's a speed limit in case of an accident). My car can go about 240kph (150mph) and I am happy if I can go about 160kph (100mph) over more than a few miles... Also, I live near Ramstein AFB, so some 35k US personnel frequent the local roads. Why I say this? Because the step from "No speed limit on the german Autobahn" to "No speed limit in Germany" seems to be very very small... every now and then I read the news of a fatal car crashes on roads other than highways and it turns out it was americans trying out the no speed limit thing on german roads... anyways, that was not the topic here... so. Been to: Almost all of Europe from Gibraltar to North Cape (except eastern countries and the UK) aswell as southwestern USA. Want to go to: Everything else continental USA (there's just sooo much to get from, especially in terms of landscape/geographical variety. non-continental US would be nice to do aswell but not a must-have), Canada, UK, Iceland, Greenland, Australia, Russia, Middle East, Japan... And yes, in this particular order. edit: oh and tek, there's an app called "russian in a month" (also offering other languages) I can totally recommend as I tried it myself (and still am). costs a few bucks but it's a really easy approach to acquire basic reading/speaking skills w/o the hassle of a "classic" aka school-ish lesson system

nice progress on the ESD there but if I may, I'd like to suggest that you revert the changes on the texturing of the perisphere, because the way you show the framework pushing through the skin doesn't feel right, too coarse and too intense if you'd ask me. the framework did push through but not that much and as it was a very dense set of girders and stuff it was hard to see from a distance... this pic shows the underlying frame during deconstruction: and here's a good closeup showing how the actual surface looked and how the frame "pushed" through it: but hey, that's nitpicking, cool enough that someone considers the '39 world fair

there's 2 things ppl seem to forget about this "crisis": 1) ukraine is basically nothing but another rope in a game of tug of war between the west and the east since ww2, only that the russians seem to pull harder 2) this crimea-thing is the result of the entire western world not taking russia seriously since the ussr collapsed. at least since gorbatshev, there's been plenty of diplomatic incidents between the west and russia, where the latter came forth with offers and/or concerns and we, the west, just ignored it and did "our" thing, despite any russian input. just to name a few of the bigger: gorbatshev wanted to create a new defense system beyond nato and the warsaw pact, combining both. declined. nato promised not to expand towards the russian border. broken. russia expressed their deep concerns about the nmd-program pushed forward by the bush administration and continued under obama. there were changes to the plan but as a whole, russian concerns were ignored. putin wanted to establish a free trade zone covering europe and russia. despite several offers and obvious economic ties between the regions, europe didn't show any interest. or looking at current events: without any hesitation, we accept the new, formally illegal ukrainian "government" because it removed a pro-eastern president. and if this wasn't enough, we express our full support for a racist party, the svoboda, just because they oppose russia (ignoring that their political mindset equals that of hitler's nsdap) this, plus countless smaller things got us were we are now. the problem is, that, with the fall of the ussr, the western world thought of themselves as the winner in the cold war and started acting as such, losing all "respect" towards russia. also, we consider our efforts to protect and enhance our sphere of influence (especially the us) and our interests as perfectly fine but condemn every such efforts on the russian side of the world. why? we, the west, are not superior in any instance. no one is to be honest. why do we act as if our actions are justified and any other one's identical action is not, just because it opposes our works? not to mention the pro-western oriented media coverage, feeding the fire even more. edit: of course, russia has to learn how to fix figures in their favor on elections and referendums, but what did we expect? even if the crimea-referendum wasn't fixed in favor of russian interest, it would've turned out just the way it is presented now: pro-russian. because the majority of crimeans is pro-russian. but that doesn't match the western mindset so we condemn this referendum as illegal and it's result "forced" onto the crimean people. that the crimea was russian basically ever since the ottoman empire collapsed? ignored. that crimea was russian until given to the ukraine by ukrainian ussr president khrushev thus making it a somewhat questionable move within the ussr? ignored. because it wouldn't fit into the western line of argumentation

if it was possible w/o illegal methods, bigger maps would've been done already for Sc4. Nothing to do with being important or not.

'course like that, you gotta keep it well tempered so it wont lose it's badaboom

bluehead comes to rescue this puppy's soul from the gruesome redhead souleater.

Why is that interesting? Because gamers tend to be quite young... but Simcity is a different kind of game. I'd like to challenge that. There's several studies on games, gaming and gamers that all agree that the average age lies somewhere between 25 and 35 in general and, depending on the individual genre of games/gamers, you can even add a couple years to the average age. basically you can say the more casual the game is played and/or the more laid back the game is, the older the gamer is on average. Your typical hardcore gamer is an early tween, student or in job training and prefers action. gamers are young because gaming is young, that's sort of right, but keep in mind the history of gaming that started after WW2 already and began to bloom in the 70s and that the vast majority of the first gamers already have gaming kinds themselves which puts them in a certain age per se. the demographics in gaming change, recent studies seem to find a lower average age (more stressful life after college leaves less room for fun I guess), but I guess once the first generation of gamers are gone and gaming has "fully" arrived in society as an entertainment-genre (it is already but older generations tend to have their difficulties still which I think is mainly linked to not growing up with it) you find just the same age distribution as with everything else

in my current town I'm approaching 1000 and they just keep on breeding. I decline all nomads just to have a slight chance to keep my population under control. another problem with a town this big is performance. fps really suffers from so many inhabitants haha very funny thing happened (too bad I effed up on screenshots): I ignored nomads for too long and then they decided to leave, some 99 nomads or so, and there was this epic chain of ppl all walking the same path to the edge of the map to disappear. at first I was like what the... but then I realized what happened. I'll try to get this happen again to take a working screenshot lol

raised in a 35k suburb of a 200k central european town, here's my take on it: it depends on age and what you want from life. if you're younger, downtown is where the action is, bars, clubs, shops and so on. you wanna live there cuz you got short commutes, good public transport, depending on the size you might even have everything literally round the corner and can just walk there. you don't need a car and probably dont have one either. you're most likely a college or university student and have a couple roomies. but there comes the time where you want to or actually do found a family and settle down, think about having kids and this is where downtown living really screws up. your job stresses you out, your kids need room to develop and safe grounds to play, which really can't be found in the streets of downtown. speaking of room to live you also need to scale up your living area to accomodate your family and affordable property in the correct dimension is basically inexistent in cities, unless you move to "less desireable" parts of town... which again aren't the best places to raise your kids. and the bigger the city the worse these problems are. suburbs are a prime choice for young families. less traffic, probably less crimes, less noise, fewer ppl, more room, better air quality and generally less stress which really is a factor also for your health. I would never ever consider living downtown. not in my town and certainly not in any town that's bigger. the smaller the city the more suburbish the living is but even in this direction, there's a limit for me because I wouldn't wanna live in a 200 souls village far out in the woods either. a nice single family home in the suburbs, not too far away from everything, preferably slighty uphill so i can enjoy a view towards downtown, with a patch of green in the back and maybe even in the front, with my kid's (or kids') bike/s blocking the driveway... yes that's so much higher on my list than a way too expensive but certainly damn old condo on the 5th floor of a non-elevator appartment block on main street, with a light rail rushing by every soandso minutes and 5 digit daily traffic count 24/7/365, with drunk ppl annoying the peace out of me every weekend... eeew

haha I love how the banishers or whatever you'd call the population gather like crazy on the cemetary even tho there's a great tavern in town. anyways quite some hrs into the game I really really hope they come up with new content really fast. totally loving it, but once you got your supply chain up and running along with the city's growth, there really isn't much to do except enjoying the good graphics. that, and I deeeeeespeerately miss eyecandy aka decorative stuff. some planters, some statues, maybe a parkish thing... EDIT: and I wanna have control over stockpiling... like with many other such games where you can decide which good goes to which stock

just. awesome. lovin it.

max 2gb ddr2 is like... soooo last millenium. I think my dad's almost 12yrs old pc has a 2gb max... but it's ddr1 hell, even my old board was able to handle more than 2gb ddr2 and it's almost 6yrs old now. go figure! If I was you, I'd consider putting down some extra greens and buy a whole new system instead of upgrading.

you just gotta love how companies and politicians sell you bullspit as a great idea

I do know how to mod minecraft and of all the fancy tools to make a modders life easier, I wouldn't even touch minecraft anymore if it wasn't for forge and modloader. It's that I'm sick of redownloading and reinstalling everything with every update, waiting for the modders to keep up with the game's version and so on. that's why I decided to stick with one version for as long as I deem necessary.

only with the difference that the game we mod (sc4) isn't changing every few weeks so there's one single way to deal with content and only the dependencies to take care of. not like with minecraft. I even go as far as to call this hassle intentional. I see that there has been a change at all because the original game would run into modding limits pretty fast but as of 1.5.1 I don't see a reason to change everything back and forth at all when it comes to mod compatibility. yeah maybe it even has to be this hassle to make sure mods dont interfere with vanilla content, who knows. sounds logical to me. either way, I stick to my modded 1.5.2. maybe I make a second copy of minecraft which I keep vanilla and up do date just to see whats what

not bad for a first... still much room for improvements, especially towards realism. and in terms of parts used. get yourself the more recent aiport packs for starters.

you should declutter it a bit to get rid of redundant tracks...

oh I do. truth be told, online was more fun with the hacked money still in place because I could finally afford stuff and not live of welfare like I do now and did before. but real fun comes up when I check my storymode characters and see how ridiculously insane I cash in on weazel stocks. bought with all the money I had at 2.something, now they are about to cross 1000. over 36000% return rate, beyond 100 billion. per character. thats fun. remotely. and little. but fun. sort of.

ea sports games are ruined ever since, only serving one purpose: cash-cow. and nfs got ruined the minute carbon was born. the next to ruin is the sims unless 4 comes up with some real new ideas and not just tidbits of improvements over the predecessor.

just read what Molyneux had to say about all this and you know how enormously, giantically, epically huge fracked up this DK reboot is. lemme quote him with one word: "ridiculous"

after merely half a year already 35million copies sold on just two of 3 platforms, one of the biggest gaming entertainment franchises in history, holding several records throughout the entertainment world such as best first 24hrs of sales and the single most anticipated game in the last years... too much focus on multiplayer, single player campaign too short, too little interesting stuff to do, couldn't live up to the hype. "all about the money" comes pretty short as it is way too easy to mass billions in singleplayer for nothing to spend it on and way too hard in multiplayer for everything to spend it on. it's one of these must-have titles tho, because of the incredibly huge scale of the franchise... so yeah you'd probably have to buy it, but expect a game that struggles to live up to the hype created. fyi: publisher take2, compared to fiscal Q3/13, in fiscal Q3/14 (yes this is correct, gaming industrie's fiscal 2014 is almost over) quadrupled it's net revenue almost only because of gta5)

EA. nuff said.