Kilgry

Haven't seen the video before; thanks for posting the link. It's the first video were I'm feeling a bit more confident in the possible city sizes.

To make matters worse is that EA/Origin is not doing any type of multi-factor authentication similar to Steam (email code), WoW (RSA tokens or app) or Guild Wars 2 (Google Authentication). This is standard stuff these days. Usernames and passwords are not enough for accounts such as these.

Appears Origin was hacked: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-14-ea-origin-accounts-are-being-hijacked

I think I get it now. Thanks for the info! Sounds like there might be hope for larger cities afterall. Just wish we could get some confirmation from Maxis on it. They have been pretty tight lipped about it.

People need to remember this is SimCity take two. On the surface it is the same game...building cities. What is different is the engine. I'm not expecting this NEW SimCity to be bigger, faster, stronger than SC4 out of the gate but it does show a lot of promise for where SimCity could go in the future if the simulation engine is scalable and easily expandable (which I believe is the case). What we are going to get with the new SimCity is a taste of what a true city simulation can be, but only a taste. Previous SimCities were statistics engines. The new Simcity is a simulation engine.

Not only is the vatican itself a city, it is a small country.

True, but many of the things people are complaining about on these forums are based on speculation or Maxis' comments. Though Simcity 2013 gets my juices flowing, I do have to admit that what is cool is the true simulation that is being promised. However, the capabilities shown to us in the videos and screenshots does not seem to be impressing anyone here with its apparent lack of ability to handle the complexity of a true city. It is definitely the right step to take since we all crave realism in modelling complexity, but I think many here believe our dreams might be too high for this initial step. My main questions about the game are around the topic of engine capabilities and with a true simulation it comes down to the raw power the engine can feed on (CPU cores and the like) and how small a detail can it model and how flexible is the engine for adding new details to model? The power questions determine how large a simulation it can handle (how many moving parts) and the detail questions are how well it can simulated reality. It appears to me that Maxis has made a choice to deal with their simulation limitations by forcing us to divide our cities across our regions: industry over here, residential here, etc. Then the stats engine takes over and models the neighboring city relationships to offload the complexity of too many moving parts.

Yes, I've been seeing now the 200,000 quote and the statements that agents can be reused, however it seems to me that an agent needs to be tied to a simulation point (person, water, power, etc) at all times or that simulation point will no longer exist. For example, how does a sim go about their day and if there is no agent assigned to it? Perhaps the question is more, what do sims do when at home and at work? Do they become just a statistic of the building that is tracked or is the sim itself tracked?

I've been really excited about all the SimCity anouncements, but one video comment from a Maxis employee has me quite concerned. Add to that the fact that we now know city sizes will be only 2x2. The comment was about the number of agents the engine is able to track. The comment was that 10s of thousands of agents can be tracked. This number sound reasonable when taking a look at today's CPUs, and also knowing Maxis will build their engine for the lower class PCs. We also know that not just sims count as agents in the game but many other items (power, water, etc.). The problem is that even in a midsize town/city you have 50k - 200k people living there. Cutting that down to households you might see 10k-50k. Add to that all the manufactured goods, water, power, garbage, sickness, etc. that SimCity needs to track, and it seems to me that the engine might not really be up to handling large cities. My hope, but I'm not holding my breath, is that Maxis takes advantage of multi-core CPUs and allows the city sizes to expand with the number of cores running. However, I believe reality is that multi-core CPU will not be used properly nor would Maxis allow the game to run different size simulation if given enough power.

Good news, thank you.

My big concern with Simcity 2013 is whether sims will attempt to find alternate routes based on the time it takes to travel a route and not the distance. If commute hour is heavy on a specific route, will the sims attempt to find an alternate route? I don't wish to see cars piling up on a road and see an empty alternate route go unused.