ddhboy

Honestly, wait for CXL 2011 to drop. The game is really missing some serious additions like mass transit. They did add buses and the ability to set bus routes, which was amazing, but without trains, subways, monorails, or whatever, its really not worth the effort. I'd say that's Cities XL's main problem, far too much micromanagement on a bunch of trivial issues like entertainment and keeping private industry afloat.

Originally posted by: Androv I don't know, having the rest of the world adversely impact your city would kind of suck. There's enough potential there at the moment - what if someone just makes a city to produce water at a much lower rate than my city does? Everyone will stop buying my water and my city will go bankrupt. If it was possible for some disaster to come along and wipe out half your city, you'd be completely crippled and unable to recover. Using WoW as an example: - if you die, you can res with a minimal money loss - so there's no real permanent 'loss' - other players *can* kill you but there is no permanent damage really, just pisses you off, and only if you're on a PvP server (maybe they could have a PvP planet where you could wreck stuff?) - WoW involves working together in a team to accomplish a goal, much like the megastructures / blueprints will require you to do. - WoW has an auction house where the prices of goods are determined by the player, much like the prices of commodities are determined by players in Cities XL I don't think you'd have many players signing up for a game where, at a moments notice, you could lose half of your city to some freak disaster.quote> Well it wouldn't be a freak disaster. You'd have a global weather system that functions in real time (relative to the game world ofcourse) so if there's a hurricane comming your way you'd know about it ahead of time, and if you know that your ports will ice over in the winter then you plan ahead of time to either de-ice it, or come up with some sort of alternative. If you build up your manufacturing, perhaps with enough R&D, you could create stations to try and change the weather, starting from the most basic devices (cloud seeding) or for cities of a higher level, more impressive technology lie using microwaves to remove storm threats. Ofcouse you'd want to balance it, if your economy revolvles around exporting water or you're a farm town you would want to have it rain more. Ofcourse as you move up your technology becomes more accurate, but you're never 100% able to remove any threats, in fact, the microwave thing could backfire and actually increase the intensity of the storm.

Originally posted by: gyzzzmo I dont know what all the fuz is about. But its obvious that all the ranters are comparing this type of MMO with MMORPG's wich are very different, but that does not mean Cities XL is not an MMO. MMO(g) simply means Massive Multiplayer Online game, and since people are massivly playing this game online and have interaction, this can be concidered to be an MMO. Ofcourse the amount of interaction between players is limited to chatting and trading at this moment, but there will be more interaction later by building projects and contests. This will still be less interaction than in an MMORPG but what the hell can you expect from a citybuilder MMO?quote> The genre doesn't excuse the lacking nature of the MMO portion of CitiesXL. There are tons of other MMOs releasing now that are not MMORPGs, perhaps the most notable comming down the pipeline is APB, which is apparently not going to charge a subscription fee despite its high production costs. CitiesXL is a poor MMO barely deserving of the title, and there could have been some rather simple solutions to fix Cities XL. First off, the game mechanics of CitiesXL means that online play is NOT about building your city, rather its about macro-economics. That said, why can I not create trade organizations with other players in order to protect our economic stability and growth. It seems almost obvious that if I'm an oil producing city, then I'd want to join Cities XL OPEC and protect my trade. Perhaps the perfect model for this type of economic gameplay is EVE Online, and its soon to be released counterpart Dust 514. Allow cities to form trade groups or nations, however the developers want to phrase it, let these groups try to sabatoge the economic growth of their rivals by out producing them, sabatoging them, depriving them of vital resources, or lowering their products prices to the point where they can't compete. Then scrap the coin system and replace it with commodities markets (again, like EVE Online) the value of these commodities will fluxuate depending on how much the world is producing, on who is selling and how much they are. Allow trade groups to impose tarrifs and let them sell to one another at lower costs. Lastly tie trade to infastructure, If you open an airport you can get goods, but not to the same degree that making an industrial railroad or a highway would, and then allow any usage taxes imposed on foreign services to be reflected in the final sales prices for commodities. Additionally, cities with tons of extra money could give loans to other cities in deficit, and set a certain amount of time for the borrowing player to repay their debt. If the debt is not payed in time, then the borrowing player will be forced to take out another debt from a different player, or renegotiate the terms of their original debt. Like real financial companies, cities would be able to sell another player's debt to other cities, sort of like collection agencies. If a player is good enough at debt trading, it could count for a sizable portion of their GDP. All of this would be reflected back in the city building portion of the game as builders would be forced to mantain and grow their cities despite the actions of the other cities playing the game. It would also serve a far more rewarding experience than blueprints, and the challenges of dealing with a world economy where everyone wants to be king would warrant paying a subscription for. Also, we could also put back in the disasters from Sim City games but make the more realistic. Say there was a weather system imposed onto Planet Offer. You could have hurricaines, tornados, earthquakes, volcanos, blizzards, etc, which on the city building side of the game could reck parts parts or all of your city depending on how well you're prepared, or at the very least hamper travel and trade. Say there's a city in Cities XL that is a major shipping port, prefered by most major of the surrounding cities due to its low shipping tarrifs. Now a hurricaine comes and knocks out most of the ports the player had established in his city. Now trade from surrounding cities is also hurt because they no longer have this major hub that they could use to sell to the world market. Much like real weather, certain events can only happen in different parts of the world at a certain time of the year, like a far northern city could have its ships docked because the water surrounding the docks is iced up certain times in the winter. For an example, lets just say that one day I'm looking for new contracts to sell my oil to, and I notice that the oil prices are quite low. I go to my OPEC group and after some discussion we decide to limit the amount of oil that we produce for the next 30 days. Our plan works well and oil prices jump and we all prosper in the additional revenue. Other cities see this and are deeply affected by the lack of oil comming in. In retaliation these cities impose export tarrifs against me, which really hurts because I needed material to help build that transcontinental railroad that the neighboring cities and I were discussing. Additionally a new competitor arrises and undercuts my oil prices, which floods him with new contracts.

Eventually someone is going to mod in single player mass transit anyway. They could ban you from the PO for it, but what good would it do them? Obviously they need the cash since they're promising trains and such, which as of now has appeared in two trailers (one released before the game was available). That said I think it will be a better game months from now, but until then I'd just stick to the singleplayer and wait for trains and such to appear or shelve it all together and go back to playing SC4 while begging EA for SC5, at which they'll laugh in your face.

I think the problem with a lot of the posts is that they were expecting the game to be single player first, MMO second. Well, it was never going to be that way, and it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to be that way from the get go. Cities Xl HAS all that content already. Its in the .EXE and everything. You just can't have it because that stuff is designated for online only because Cities XL above all is an MMO about trade, not a single player city builder. That said, if you plan on playing the game online, then it will be great. If you didn't want to do that, well then don't pick up the game.

Originally posted by: 0wn3d So... let me get this straight. Your claiming that a persistent world in which many players have the ability to interact with each other and trade with each other while online is not an MMO. I basically just defined an MMO.quote> If this is an MMO then its not a good one. The only real elements of the MMO is that there's a persistant world and players work together. The problem though is that 1. the players aren't actually there with you, rather your just setting up contracts for oil deals or whatever, and two, you don't have shared goals, and the MMO portion of this game could have easily been moded into say Sim City 4. Additionally there is NO reason why this should be a subscription MMO. Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 have NO subscriptions and certainly have higher production costs than Cities XL. Rather Guild Wars make their money by selling copies of the game and expansions. Proper subscription MMOs like WoW and EVE release a constant stream of updates and events that insure that the game doesn't die. This doesn't work for Cities XL because city builder fans will not tolerate not be able to have these additional transportation options offline, and they wouldn't get the concept of paying subscriptions and being able to put stuff down like a trolley down the line because they would have felt that it should have been included in the original game, or part of an expansion pack. On the flip side, MMO players won't play because there is NO teams in Cities XL or shared tasks, and even so what's the point in playing the game forever like a proper MMO is meant for? Eventually you'll max out your city limits, and be able to build up as much as possible, then what? Build another city? The fact that much of the opinion surrounding Cities XL on this site is negative means that the game is going to bomb overall, and it doesn't help matters that in North America the game is more or less download only.

From seeing the news and re-watching the trailers from Cities XL, I'll have to say that while I'm not really interested in the Planet Offer, it seems that its the only true way to play the game. Rather than viewing Cities XL as a city builder, it seems as though the designers have created the game to function more as a geo-economic/political simulator with some city building thrown in. So while Sim City 4 was a true city builder, Cities XL will probably only be better than SC4 online, because then you'll be forced to tackle the problems that real cities (or rather countries) deal with, IE finding trade partners, growing your GDP and attempting to reach sustainable growth. Plus it doesn't help single player any that its missing key features like public transportation, which MC has so greedily made for MMO mode only, with hints that they might sell these things back to us in the form of DLC. So will I buy the planet offer? Yes, but only for 3 months, and after that I can't really imagine going on for much longer, especially when Single Player eventually gets full transportation. The fundamental flaw with the Planet offer is that over time your going to end up with polarized cities, cities that are immensely successful, and those which bombed by over ambitious players. The cities which are successful will likely have the contracts they need and for a newer city rising up, it will be difficult to negotiate trade agreements unless you severely undercut the price of your services. On the other hand the cities that are poor will be in desperate need of your materials, but will be unable to buy them at a price that you can agree to sell them at, so you're stuck trading with other up and coming cities. These cities however will be limited once the planet (server) fills up. Lastly, a major disappointment with the planet offer is that there is no real way to make formal alliances with groups of players. Say I wanted to build a train corridor that passes though 8 or so cities allowing us to trade materials and workers with ease. I can do that in Cities XL, but I can't do that with any official ties. If I'm an oil producing nation, I can't create a Cities XL OPEC and try to control my oil prices, and if my city is a major economic force, I can't go out and create the Cities XL G20 to continue development. In fact, the only way MC has bothered to include this co-operation concept was in the form of blue-prints