zogleheros

What is this "no more money" stuff ??? How come they don't have money ?

How come they don't have jobs, I have crazy demand for residential ? Is it a traffic issue ?

Recycling Plant puts water in the ground.

How can you not have issues with this ?

Communal bus (the big ones) get stuck on bus stops. Only way to unstuck is turn the stop off and on again. Do you know of a way to refuse entrance to communal bus from other cities ? It's getting annoying.

You need avenues. Lots of avenues.

To remove ground pollution, use a water pump station with filter pumps. After a while the pollution decreases then disapears in the area. I'm doing it right now for a spot where I messed a bit, it's taking really a lot of time. Expo center is an easy way to make some money, if you want to make lots, build and sell processors. But careful, you will go in the red first, and it's not entirely reliable unless you have a good 2M $ in cash (obviously don't wait for that much money, 500k will do at the beginning). That's to ensure you're not going bankrupt if something happens to your production lines, or if you get into a frenzy cash spending.

Steam is having problems ? Yup it's good news they refuse to be bought by EA, they seem worse than Valve, but Valve is not great either.

You're all forgetting Civilization 5. Another old and famous series which went always online with Steam. Well, true, 3 games doesn't make it the norm, but they are among the most famous and successful computer games (at least in sale numbers).

Always online drm is the norm nowadays. You're hoping for something that will never come. If an independent group of people was to make a simcity like game, they would already have done so.

If someone wanted to crack it they could easily. It only took a month to crack the diablo servers and setup private servers. It only took 30 days to capture all the data required to simulate their own and I highly doubt Maxis has the same level of security or knowledge that Blizzard poured into Diablo 3. "It only took a month". Well that's still 27 more days than your average non-server based game. And the pain of using a private server ... What's really annoying is that every company suffers the same server issues at launch, and they don't seem to learn the lesson from others. That's a very bad move for the image of the company, but nothing more, it's actually becoming the norm for computer games. And that was to be expected. How can you test anything with such short beta ?

The problem is not online requirement, it's their inability to make it work.

I'm not sure the online requirement and saves is greedy capitalism. Releasing a game with bugs and broken features certainly is, but ensuring a way to avoid their game getting cracked after 1 day or 2 seems reasonable to me.

While I find it obviously a severe flaw and poor use of beta testing, server issues at launch are to be expected. I really don't know what you were expecting or in which world you're living, every online game has these issues.

Actually, before enlarging city size, the main issue is server stability.

This isn't a new thing. It happens all the time, especially with MMO's and other games with an always-online requirement. That being said, this really sounds like the kind of thing they should have fixed BEFORE release. Most modern MMOs dont have the problems you describe anymore. In fact my last 4 MMO launches have been smooth. The bad starts have been from MMOs years ago. You don't play WoW, or overlook some problems. Often fixes to problems create some other problems, though it's nowhere as game breaking as it seems with Sim City. Btw, which MMOs are you refering to ? SWTOR had a lot of problems with their servers, as did Diablo 3 even if it's not a MMO, and they are respectively 2 and 1 year old. Of course MoP didn't have many problems, but WoW is eight years old, that's hardly a new start.

Well, it would take long and it's not the place to do so, I'll be brief. Hapiness went global instead of local : you captured new cities your whole empire went angry for 50 turns and it was game over. Probably the most telling example, but that caused other problems too. One unit per tile destroyed not only the tactics of fighting, because exploiting the IA became so simple, but it also unbalanced all the production aspect in the cities, and even with crazy build times, you ended up with one unit on each tile of the map and the game became unplayable. But as you just said, some people enjoy it more this way, it depends on one's way to play. I admit I'm making wild guesses on Sim City, I'm saying all the critics I've read so far makes me think of Civ 5, I'm not hating the game yet. There's one point I'm particularly concerned about, it's the small size of the maps. The other point is that usually, when you change a lot of mechanics, it's easy to mess up and disappoint long-time fans.

Obviously : - stacking more than 1 unit / tile. That destroyed the whole balance of the game. - local hapiness. That destroyed the rest of the balance. As for Sim City, I don't know, that's a guess, what do you think it will be ? I hope. The videos I've seen looked cool, but one can always wonder what they are trying to hide with such small beta time.

I fear SimCity is going the same way a lot of other games went, especially Civilization 5. Watered down, simplified to the extreme, one or two core mechanics the series always had traded for something else and sold as a new genius mechanics that just doesn't cut it, released full of bugs, offering tons of expensive and useless DLCs, limited or inexistant beta to hide the lack of depth of the game. Well that's what I fear, I didn't play the Beta, I just described what was Civ 5 at its release. Does it feel similar to you ? And then there was always the guy who said "look at the game from a different perspective" and who enjoyed the game. I'm actually looking forward to the release, and hope it won't be the disaster Civ 5 was for long-time fans of the series, but so many games follow this trend nowadays that the critics I read have become very familiar. Only Blizzard games seem to somewhat avoid this trend, but while other games fail because they want to change too many things at once, their games have actually the opposite flaw, that is to say they don't innovate and take enough risks in their designs. Still I'd prefer more caution from developers, it's cool to change things, but very easy to mess up, and I really really really dislike this new trend of taking the consumer for a dumb and simplifying games to the extreme. What's the point of a gestion game if you can't min/max anymore ?