Spatzimaus

If you take the crop yields for modern farming, you'd find that a 2x2km tile produces enough food to support about 8000 people, assuming no area was used for anything else. No housing, no power generation, no police or fire, nothing. So in SimCity, a single tile of 120,000 residents would require all 15 other tiles to be filled with farms just to be food-neutral. The amount of food you'd grow in a tile would raise so little money as to be worthless as a city specialization.

Massive pollution problems. I'd carefully laid out my city to minimize pollution, and it's all high-tech industry, and yet I've now got areas being abandoned for air pollution, despite nothing changing for my neighbors. My garbage situation isn't any worse than before. Massive education problems. I've got a university town: grade school, high school, university. And yet, I now have high-rise apartments two blocks from the high school being abandoned because the residents say they couldn't reach the school. If this is because my buses are leaving town to pick up students from nearby cities, then I'd like to revert to the old system, because this stinks. Gambling still doesn't work right. The gambling HQ won't unlock, the tourists are still horribly out of whack, and the most expensive casino can't make a profit even though I've got a tourist-heavy town in a fully populated region. And then there's traffic. I'm still getting huge perma-jams in the middle of my city, on high-density roads with plenty of avenues. Buildings are burning down left and right because my fire trucks can't get to the buildings, far worse than pre-patch. So thanks to this patch, my city has lost about 25% of its population, from 80k down to about 60k. This in turn creates new problems, like lack of workers for the various buildings, which makes things even worse. So this game is going back into storage until they fix their fix, because right now it's just not working.

If they'd said that anyone who pre-ordered gets a free game, then it wouldn't be fair to the people who bought it in the interim. It's still just as broken for those people as it is for us pre-order types, right? Did the people who bought it post-release not go throught the same issues as the rest of us? If they'd said that anyone who bought it before today (the 18th) gets a free game, then it wouldn't be fair to the people who'll buy it within the next few days. The critical bits might be fixed by now, but it's still not working fully yet, after all. And how many people do you think actually read these press releases, or visit these forums, out of the entire game-buying public? (Hint: not many.) So you'd have a whole slew of people who missed the deadline by a day or two, and get nothing. So instead, they put the deadline far enough into the future that hopefully all the critical bits will be fixed by that point, to where anyone who buys it after that point won't feel like they got screwed over. And if you're still thinking of buying, you have time to decide whether to buy it now (and get a little something extra) or wait until it's totally fixed. Yet somehow, this gets portrayed as a negative... As for "a free game", did you look at the list of games? Obviously, some of them are much better values than others, but I find it hard to believe that any of us could go through that list and not enjoy* a single one of those games at all. Sure, you've got four shooter games there, but Mass Effect 3 was pretty darn good (other than the ending) and I'm not a shooter fan. I'll probably go for the N4S game, myself, because the only driving game I've bought in the past few years is GTA 4, and that's using a really loose definition. The list of games could have been a bit bigger or more diverse, and I wish the $20 DLC was an option, but I was pleasantly surprised by what they were offering. *- That's "enjoy" in the sense of "get some hours of entertainment", not enjoy in the sense of "be willing to pay full price for that game on its own".

Recycling centers are fantastic. As with the OP, I hadn't realized how much money you'd get from its byproducts; the addition of recycling fundamentally changed my economy from a steady-tax-profit setup to a deficit-but-trade one. I'm running about a 35k deficit per hour, but making far more than that from Processors. (I highly recommend a rail-based Trade Port, by the way.) The plastic line is useful in its own right, as more city tiles have ore than oil. Alloy is worth more than plastic, but you can create Alloy from Ore+Coal at a Smelting Factory (which requires someone to have placed a Metals HQ and the right expansion). A Smelting Factory can have four production lines in two types, either Metal (uses only Ore) or Alloy (uses Ore and Coal), so if you're on a city site that has both of those resources you're set. In other words, rather than import Alloy to supplement what your recycling gives, you can import ore and coal (or extract them locally) and combine the two on-site to make Alloy for use in Processor manufacturing. I'm currently just selling the processors for a hefty profit, but eventually I'll make TVs for even larger profits. As to what constitutes "endgame", I'll agree with the others: eventually, you hit a point where your city coasts along without any intervention on your part. Your population is completely stable, all buildings are done upgrading wealth and density, and you've got all the power, water, and sewage disposal you'll need. Your city is making more money than you know what to do with, and you're tempted to trigger disasters just to add a bit of unpredictability again. Sure, you can still tweak things, but you're basically done with everything that matters. My own city is stable at ~85k right now (although I'd peaked at 110k), and the only thing that'll cause any changes in the future will be when my ore and coal run out in 3-4 more months. I'm sitting on about three million bucks for use in a Great Work, but my income has been seriously impeded by two of my three neighbors being recently abandoned (and no one else can claim those tiles since the creator was using one of the european tilesets), so I'm probably going to join a new region soon.

I've got a mining city, sort of. It's got two ore nodes side-by-side (thankfully downwind of most of the tile) and one coal deposit up on a hill on the upwind side of town. It wasn't intended to be a factory town; I'd intended to make a culture/university town, but the resources were there and the region tourist logic is broken at the moment. For a while, I just had those mines exporting the resources with no processing. It was just a nice little profit, without much effort. Eventually I added a smelter and processor factory (which went well with my recycling center), and eventually I'll add a consumer electronics factory, so I've stopped exporting the raw materials and I'm making far more money now. Sure, my budget is losing 12-15k per hour now, but I'm easily making twice that from the trading.

Exactly. This was my mistake; I'd put my big regional bus depot right next to the entrance, on the LEFT side as you came in, so the traffic jam at that first intersection was pretty phenomenal. The big buses would clog everything up trying to get into their depot. Then, once I saved up a bit of money, I moved the bus depot much further into town, where it wouldn't get in the way of traffic, and things have been much nicer. Sure, it's a bit awkward at times, since that means the buses are now driving through town before leaving, but it's still a net gain.

As the wise man said, "all you need is love". Like the above posters said, it's all about Happiness. Being near a police station, fire station, or clinic adds happiness (and "near" in this case has multiple levels; being very close gives a lot of happiness, being further away gives less). Being near a park adds a lot more, especially if it's a big one; the baseball diamond costs 10k, but it's got enough coverage to make half your city happy. There are other things that add to happiness, but those are the easy ones for upgrading density in a specific area. As to road density, I'd suggest starting with medium-density roads. Dirt roads and low-density roads just don't have enough lanes, and will bog down if someone's trying to make a turn. Medium roads are still fairly cheap, and have two lanes each way. Also, since they allow medium-density buildings, you'll know when it's time to upgrade within an area.

I wonder how much this depends on taxes. If you've got your taxes too high, will it cause families to need both adults to hold jobs (meaning no Shopper in the family since they'd both be classified as Workers) just to make ends meet? I ran into this in my own city, and it seemed to happen after my city dropped from 100k down to 80k (I'd made more industrial plots once I got to high-tech). I'm sure it's not helped by the fact that two of my three neighboring cities are currently empty, so my tourist count is low.

I don't disagree, but my point was that you can greatly improve the process by IMMEDIATELY dividing your traffic onto multiple avenues to lessen the impact of those first minor intersections. Your design forces all highway traffic to stay on the same 3-lane avenue quite a ways into the city, so any stoppage is crippling. Too few cars would be trying to get off the road on those small cross-roads; yes, they should make the lights shorter as a result, but you can fix this yourself. I'm assuming that the angle of the avenue is pointing towards the center of your city; there's a reason that most major cities have a "beltway" going around the outside. My own city (I can post a screenshot later) is basically broken up into three square "neighborhoods", bounded by avenues and with three vertical and three horizontal roads going through the middle. (The fourth quadrant is a hill where I've got power plants, sewage treatment, and a coal mine.) The highway entrance is in one corner, so within the first two blocks an avenue intersects with the incoming road at a 90-degree angle; half the traffic turns right (which takes almost no time since you can turn right on reds) and half continues straight. As a result, the traffic is staying on the avenues most of the time, but with enough drivers using the side roads to keep avenue volume from getting too high. That first block can still get congested, but it's not nearly as bad now that I've built a trade port with a rail connection, two passenger rail stations, and two ferry terminals. We're all new at this game, and it'll take time before we figure out the best ways to do things. In my own city, I think the road layout is as good as it can possibly be for now, and yet I've still made many placement mistakes (like the ones I mentioned earlier) that greatly hampered my city's movement. When I was first expanding my city, I'd have horrendous traffic jams with only 80,000 residents; now, I've got very smooth movement at 100k, and over time, I could improve it even more through a better understanding of how the AI plans bus routes based on stop locations.

While I wouldn't say it's "intentional", it's a natural consequence of trying to cram every single commuter or freight delivery in through a single connection. Build a couple passenger rail terminals and a couple ferry terminals, and things'll get quite a bit better. (Also: the large bus depot helps a lot.) For freight, the key is going to be the Trade Port, either for a rail connection or a boat one. Getting your goods out through the rail network makes a tremendous difference, since you won't have delivery trucks trying to merge onto roads full of commuters. Now, if they'd given us multiple highway entrances per city this'd be far less of an issue, but you take what you can get. Also, your intersections are part of the problem. You've got several intersections with small roads right away, so incoming traffic is grinding to a halt as cars try to change lanes to make turns. Putting a cross-avenue within the first couple blocks takes a lot of the load off, especially if you design the smaller roads to be less desirable routes. In my own city, the problem I'd had was my inter-city bus depot and main trade depot required a left turn as you came off the highway, which bogged down traffic pretty severely. Also, to get to that trade depot, the delivery trucks had to cross the main roads, which made things even worse. Once I had my rail-based Trade Port, things went MUCH more smoothly.

That's been suggested several times, but there's a much easier solution: a Sewage Treatment Plant. When it treats sewage, it creates clean groundwater, so you'll have a very intense circle-shaped area of water underneath its main building (NOT centered on each filtration tank). The area isn't large, but it's more than enough to fit several large pumping stations, and they'll pretty much never run out of water. My own city of ~100k has a sewage plant with 4 treatment tanks (out of 7) feeding a 2-tank water plant. It doesn't take up much room at all, and produces more clean water than I actually need, especially when I'm buying sewage from my neighbors. And unlike my other water plant near the shore, it won't deplete the water table.

Yes, the Trade Port is the way to go, and I prefer the rail connection to the water one. As of last night, my city has a nice rail freight depot that works beautifully for this, as it's much closer to the industrial areas. Traffic's become a lot better now that I've done this, since the trucks don't have to cross my residential areas to get to the exit. Problem is, to make a Trade Port, you need a Trade HQ in the region, and I didn't need it badly enough at the time to make one of my own. (In the end, one of my neighbors did it for me.) Then, you run into other problems; you can sell the Metal, Alloy, and Plastic that your recycling center produces at a standard Trade Depot, but to unlock the corresponding storage rooms at a Trade Port, you need someone in the region to build a Metals/Petroleum HQ and then build the right outbuilding. Thankfully, someone did that this morning, although it's still buggy (the lots went back to being locked the next time I logged in). (Also, I have no idea if it's just me, but I've never once seen a depot actually store factory freight. Several of my industrial buildings complain about having nowehere to send their freight, and yet my depots are all still empty.) Now, since everyone's still reading, I have a question. As of last night, my city is now extremely profitable making electronics, has three cultural landmarks (Washington Monument, Sears/Willis Tower, and Empire State Building) to bring in tourists, has a university, and provides plenty of power, water, and sewage disposal for my neighbors. Most of my city is wealthy, all of my industries are high-tech, and my traffic problems are now fixed. Everything's going smoothly... except for my Commercial buildings. For some reason, they're going through this really nasty cycle. Many of my residential buildings say "where is the shopping?", and yet every commercial building quickly goes out of business from lack of shoppers. I'll destroy the abandoned building, and a new one will be placed on the spot... but within a day it'll fail as well. The only solution has been to change commercial zones to something else, and yet the few remaining shops still fail. They're all on blocks facing avenues, so it's not like the shoppers can't reach them, and it doesn't matter whether they're near industry, residences, or tourists, they'll all still fail at the same rate. (My taxes are a bit on the high side, at 10% across the board, but I won't drop lower until I finish my manufacturing infrastructure.) I'd done two things right before this process started: 1> Shifted to a trade-based economy. I'm now running a sizeable deficit (over 10,000 per hour) that's easily offset by my massive export profits, but it's possible that the calculation the game is doing for "should I go shopping?" is freaking out because of that deficit. (I've only actually hit zero once, when a traffic jam stopped delivery trucks from reaching the depot. That was when I downsized to ~80k.) and 2> Started placing landmarks. Specifically, the Sears Tower was placed right when this process started; besides just being a tourist draw, it counts as a commercial building with a pretty sizeable capacity, and I make a lot of money off it. So, any ideas on what's causing it?

The point is that this is something you should have taken care of long before you reached 100k. If you can't afford it in your primary city, well, you've got a second city; put that department on its city hall ASAP (or found a third city to do that), since the unlocks are region-wide. In general, the first thing I've done in private regions is found half a dozen cities and had each place a different city hall department. The basic water towers are extremely inefficient, cost-wise, while the outflow pipes pollute your groundwater badly. In both cases, the upgraded versions are essential for the long term, since you'll have a problem with water supply once you get a really huge city. Some people use the upgraded water pumps (with the filtered pump upgrade) near old-fashioned sewer outflow pipes, but I prefer putting the Sewer Treatment Plant right next to your pumping station. When it treats sewage, it creates water, so you'll have a small circular area around it that has huge amount of clean water, and I've yet to find a limit. Now, to answer the original question, my latest city (a public region on the Antarctica server) went just over 100k last night, but I've since backed it off to ~80k to avoid traffic problems that were interfering with my trade deliveries. At this point, the amount of taxes I get from people is far less than what I make selling things, so I only need enough population to fill every job. Now, part of this is that I'm in a 16-city region but my 3 neighbors are all low-population, so I'm not getting a whole lot of commuters yet...

What he said. Also, the first Saturday after the game is released is the absolute WORST time to try to log in... and that'd be true even if the international release dates weren't Thursday and Friday. Now, I've been able to play all day just fine; getting in was kind of annoying, since it took a few tries before the game saw the servers up at the start screen, but once it was going I had a lot of fun developing three different cities in my private region. So if you can't get in right away, just keep restarting the client until it works.

If he didn't like the game, he'd still get his cut of the profits, right? In that case, he'd have no reason to claim he liked the new game if he really didn't. Instead, he's claimed he likes the game, and given that its scope is a lot more like the original SimCity games than SC4's massive metropoli, I'm not surprised. Whether each of us agrees with that sentiment is a separate issue, but there's no reason to assume he's lying.

I'd guess you're on the right track, here. Last night, I was getting plenty of commuters back and forth between my biggest three cities, but I started running into bottlenecks that limited this. The biggest was simply the interface with the highway; one of my cities had a perennial traffic jam at the first light, and it sounded like that was making the travel undesirable to many commuters. I hadn't developed far enough to add train stations, though, so I'm sure it'd get better eventually. Basically, just because city A has a medium-wealth job and city B has a medium-wealth worker doesn't mean he'll WANT to commute if the travel is difficult enough. You even see this within a single city, especially for high-wealth jobs (since high-wealth folks won't ride the bus). Work a little more on transportation infrastructure and you might improve it enough that he'd change his mind.

The problem with staying at Turtle speed is that there are certain stages of the game where it's not a good idea to micromanage. When the game first starts, and you're placing the initial tiles, your hourly income will be so low that you'll have to wait a while just to accumulate enough money to do anything. Once you've spent the initial 50k, switching to a higher speed helps there; with every building being low-density, low-wealth, there's not a whole lot you can do to micromanage the systems for better performance, and until enough people have moved in to give you a few thousand an hour in income you won't be buying much of anything. Similarly, there will be times in the mid-game where you're saving up for a major purchase (a recycling center, a university, a nuclear plant, any culture building or casino) but your 4-5k/hr income isn't enough to do so in a reasonable timeframe. When you're having to spend 100k+ to buy the basic building (let alone "necessary" modules), you're not going to want to sit there and watch the game go at a slow pace. (For one thing, the temptation to DO something will be intense enough that you'll have a hard time saving up the amount needed.) Now, I'm not upset they disabled Cheetah speed, because that was just TOO fast. Your city would go negative on power, and by the time you noticed, half of your city had blacked out (including essentials like a waste treatment facility). So I stay on Llama most of the time, switching to Turtle when I want to place something. But Turtle's just too slow for many situations, IMO.

Your population probably didn't "go stupid". Pure speculation, but I'd guess one of four things happened: 1> Even with all of those schools, your town had such a high population that some of its residents still weren't educated. Each grade school only holds 950 students, fully upgraded, and a city with a hundred thousand residents can easily overload two or three schools. Exactly which areas supplied the workers to the building would change based on all sorts of factors, like the exact placement of mass transit systems, so the area the workers were drawn from could have shifted. For instance, a residential building near the power plant, the one where most of the workers lived, could have upgraded its wealth level. Most of the people living there would now be too high-class to work staff positions at a power plant, and take jobs in some commercial building nearby. The replacement employees might have been uneducated, leading to meltdowns. 2> A residential building near the power plant, the one where most of the workers lived, upgraded its density. That meant a bunch of new apartments opened up, and some new folks moved in from out of town. Those new people didn't have the education level to do a good job at a nuclear plant, but got the job anyway because of proximity. Over time they would have acquired an education, but you didn't have that long. 3> A residential building on the other side of the city upgraded its density, and some of your workers moved there because they liked the location better. Their replacements, as with #2, might have come from outside the town and so had little or no education. 4> You just had a run of really bad luck. It happens. Now, items 1 through 3 could be avoided if the game was coded to prefer educated employees over uneducated ones, and only hire dropouts if no one else was available, but I'm guessing the algorithm for this is a lot simpler (i.e., based on proximity instead of qualifications). So pull up the education map for your city, and see how many uneducated folks are in the residential areas nearest the plant. It might be worth it to ensure a school (or at least a library) is right next to the plant.

Yes, it IS an MMO. Just because you wish it wasn't, doesn't make it so. The earlier posters were talking about the difficulties involved with multiple servers (as opposed to a single virtual server whose processing is spread across multiple sets of hardware), and for that, comparisons to previous MMOs are perfectly valid. Besides, there are some of us that DO like the addition of multiplayer. Honestly, it's the same basic setup as the original Guild Wars: a shared economy, but the gameplay is fully instanced to where you can do it by yourself, with friends you've invited, or with total strangers. If you want a single-player experience you can get it, and if you feel like playing a little multiplayer action you can do that too. In GW1 I spend 95% of my time soloing (with NPC heroes), so it might as well have been an offline game except for the economy. Characters are stored on their central servers, and you have limited slots. Sounds a lot like SimCity... To the OP, in the short term all they really need to do is give you a way to see how many save slots you're currently using on each server. If you've got a server with a (10) next to it, you know that's the server you did most of your regions on, while that server with a (1) is clearly the one you used when the first was unavailable. But honestly, these are Day One problems; once the game has stabilized, you won't change servers ever again. Even last night I had no problem getting into the server I wanted and staying there all night, so why would I bother making cities on other servers? When the game first launched I made a couple cities on whichever servers I could get into, but that's not the case any more. Now, in the long term, I'd like to see more detailed browsers. Imagine if you could go to a webpage to see an automatically-generated isometric screenshot of your cities/regions, along with the basic statistics like population, education level, and so on. Besides making it easy to keep track of your regions, this'd let you show those pages to other people if you chose. (As an analogue, remember your personal page on Spore, that showed your creatures to other people.) Even if the pages were private by default (say, with basic password protection), they'd be really handy for personal use.

Filling the map is where the game STARTS, just like how in many other games the game experience really only starts when you hit max level. The initial period, when you're still just placing the basic civic buildings and zones, is just the prelude. When you first fill your map, you'll have around 15000 residents in your town. That's a small enough number that sewage outflow pipes don't ruin the environment, wind farms can supply all your power, the small clinic/fire station/police station are enough, grade schools are all you need for education, you don't need mass transit, a few water towers can supply all your needs, and your city dump doesn't need trash burners or a recycling center. It's easy to make a nice profit at this level, and you can recover quickly from any disasters. (Because of this, it's actually a good idea to get all of the cities in your region to this size and leave them there for a bit until things stabilize.) If your city has any natural resources, this is a good time to stockpile them. Then you start growing. Once your high-density streets/avenues start spawning high-rise buildings, you'll get into the 50k+ range very quickly. Suddenly, all of those things I listed aren't enough, and it takes a lot more work to keep things balanced. Your income will drop (until you start adding the big money-maker specializations), and a disruption to your city will be harder to deal with. Look at the threads about people complaining about a lack of water at 200k residents, or the damage done by a single natural disaster. Keeping a city stable at 100k+ people is NOT easy.

Agreed. What's with the knee-jerk reaction to online games? Even if 99% of your gameplay is offline for a game like this, that last 1% still adds to the game experience. In SimCity, we get multiplayer (which we'll ignore, since we're talking about a single-player experience), cloud saves (which I don't like, but which everything's trending towards), DRM (which we hate but EA obviously wants), achievements (don't care), and the global market. Would you rather go back to the old days, when economic systems were horribly abused because values were only updated in monthly patches, and GameFAQs would have guides saying to produce exactly X of these, and Y of those, and Z of that other thing for maximum profits? Connection issues are obviously a problem, and no one's denying that. But as much as this week's server issues have sucked, you can't think they're going to be typical of the rest of the game's lifespan; many, many MMO games (and yes, this is an MMO) had server problems at launch, but all got better quickly. So personally, I'd say the online bit will still be a net gain, as long as you're not paranoid about Big Brother monitoring your gameplay. Now, I'd have liked to see an option for a less active online presence. Something like a once-per-session DRM check and price update, with the savegames stored locally and no achievements/leaderboards/multiplayer allowed in that mode. But, how much extra work would it have taken for them to have two parallel systems, instead of just the one? (Probably more than they could afford, given their other time pressures.)

You do realize they're going to make a fortune on this game, right? The percentage of gamers who actually pay attention to message boards, buy games on day one, and even know what DRM means is a TINY amount compared to the size of the Sims fanbase as a whole. If they can get the gross server issues worked out within a week (and I'm betting they will), most of their customers won't even know about this initial hiccup. So yeah, I'm sure they're worried about your idea of karmic justice...

The others have covered the key issues (difficulty of specialization, region play, and so on), but I'll add one more piece of advice: Don't rush to make a city bigger just because you can. When your city has 15,000 people it's not hard to maintain a nice steady 4-5k profit, which makes it a good time to do things like upgrade your roads, but ramping that up to 50,000 people means that one school, one clinic, one fire station, etc. aren't enough any more. You start needing more civic buildings AND a mass transit system AND recycling/water purification, just to stay afloat, and you'll want to use the larger civic buildings (like the full police station), which means someone in the region has to have built a Department of Utilities. Also, consider power; a small city can be fed off a single wind farm, but more developed cities need either really expensive plants (like nukes) or really dirty ones (coal/oil), and these add all sorts of issues.

Now you're playing Fallout! Super mutants roaming the city, glow-in-the-dark zombies, gigantic mutated geckos, and plasma weapons. It'll be AWESOME. More seriously, this is one reason to use a big region. High Schools and Universities unlock if anyone in the region has built a Department of Education, and if someone's made a college or university then the Sims in your city will commute to get a better education. You don't HAVE to do it all in your one little tile, and the end result is a well-educated citizenry that won't confuse a uranium rod with a popsicle. (Although, if someone HAS made a university, then sooner or later they'll unlock all of those advanced ploppables, like the improved windmills for your windfarms or clean coal stacks. You might not need the nuclear plants at that point.)

Funny you should say that. The worst launch I've ever participated in was Anarchy Online; the server issues were so bad that, in the end, they just gave every player a month of free subscription, because it was basically unplayable for most of the "free" month. This isn't a pay-per-month game, but the same basic idea holds; give a little free stuff, and your playerbase goes from complaining about lost value to enjoying something they weren't expecting. It wouldn't have to be a full DLC. If they came out and said "because you guys were so understanding, we're giving everyone who started playing before March 15th a free packet containing a custom map and a couple unique buildings", I'd be perfectly happy. I mean, I had a lot of fun last night playing, and in a few days I bet these server issues go away, so giving a DLC worth $20 or more would be excessive IMO, but I'm sure they've got a few odds and ends around that they could package up into a mini-DLC, and they could probably whip up something minor in a few days. For instance, imagine if one of the things we got was a Mayor's Statue (like in SC4) that was treated as a Park but had a little more appeal than parks of that size. Not difficult, artwork-wise (take a normal Sim appearance, color it bronze, and stick it on a rock), and it'd be something the later players wouldn't have. Down the road, using those buildings would be like wearing something that says "I survived the SimCity launch and all I got was this lousy T-shirt", and as we all know, the Internet is all about bragging rights.