snwboardn

Pictures are worth a thousand words

Good review and you are spot on. Why are we forced to create these communities of the 1980's? I don't think the small city size has anything to do with PC power, or operating systems I think it has to do with the fact that they know their engine is total garbage... imagine if you could build a city 4 - 8 times bigger than what you can now... With 2 - 3 million people... What do you think your traffic would look like then? Every worker in your whole city all trying to commute to the same job... It makes me sick that someone over there actually came up with this idea and other people signed off on it.

No. But it's pretty close. Origins service duplicates Steam. Gamers who use Steam use Origin. Gamers who use Origin, use Steam. You can buy Sim City on Steam. Of course there are exceptions to the rules, but Steams survey pretty accuratly reflects Origins clients. Yea it might not be exact but I am sure the deviation isn't more than +/-2% I guarantee the deviation isn't +48% to make your statement of "50% of gamers use XP" accurate.

Hey I just added you if I could get in that would be awesome

I like the avenues for trading... Other than my trade depot I never build on avenues, it helps out immensely. Personally I see absolutely no reason to go over 15,000 people for a trading city.

And here we thought the reason cities were so small was because of the load of glassbox on the processor... If cities and population could get any bigger the traffic would be so congested no amount of highway design would save it.

that bridge is deplorable... come ON, really!?!???! Anyway, traffic is still pretty much broken. Yes they released a patch to try to help. But the fact of the matter remains, emergency vehicles still do not take any sort of priority and they ALL go the SAME event, even if you have multiples going on at the same time. Also, they don't do U-turns mid road. No real-life ambulance or fire truck is going to wait to get to an intersection to do a u-turn if there's no physical median in the way and the road is wide enough. if you "follow" an emergency or utility vehicle around for any length of time, you'll see just how broken the whole system is. (actually, you can just follow the zots in power or water view. it's the same thing... broken) Yea I have pretty much given up on Avenues. They seem so inefficient because vehicles can't make left hand turns and have to go to the end and make a U turn. With all of the AI trying to go to the same spot it just makes your city so inefficient. I haven't tried a city with only high density streets yet but my last city was a disaster after about 150k residents.

How many of you guys are actually west coast? Or did you all just click on West 3 because it was the only US server not full like me?

I will add you when I get home...

? Did you guys really not know about this? Thanks for taking the time to look into this stuff.

Of course they did? My Navy recruiter lied to me (told me there were bowling alleys onboard aircraft carriers)... My car salesman lied to me... The door to door salesman lied to me... I am not saying it is right but you do have freedom your freedom is to keep your wallet closed. Like it or not the online aspect is not going anywhere, it was stated before launch and any lie as to why it HAS to be there is irrelevant it is there we all knew it would be... If they remove it one day that is great if not... whatever So basically what you're saying is that companies (or services or whatever) have no responsibility whatsoever and it's the consumer's problem if something like SC2013 happens? Unlike cars or something like that where you actually get to try it out first, we didn't get much of a chance with this game. And the chance we got was well hampered by the servers... and we were ensured that it would be fix with the release. It wasn't. It was a lie... so much of this has been lies. And you're gonna blame the consumer? Pound sand, mate... She said we have no rights... I made a simple statement that we have the right not to buy the game... I am not sure how that is blaming the consumer. If you think I am defending Maxis and EA you are sorely mistaken but there comes a point in time that you have to have some sort of consumer responsibility. If we just mindlessly keep buying products from EA they will never learn, there is only one thing they listen to, it isn't the forums it is the amount of zeroes in their bank account... I voted with my wallet, I am not the owner of this game... How did you vote?

Of course they did? My Navy recruiter lied to me (told me there were bowling alleys onboard aircraft carriers)... My car salesman lied to me... The door to door salesman lied to me... I am not saying it is right but you do have freedom your freedom is to keep your wallet closed. Like it or not the online aspect is not going anywhere, it was stated before launch and any lie as to why it HAS to be there is irrelevant it is there we all knew it would be... If they remove it one day that is great if not... whatever

Lockity lock lock... and a delete for the fun of it

That's definitely something we're looking into, yes. If it works, we'll apply it for all the vehicles (garbage trucks, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, even commuters... That is definitely what I like to hear... I have held off buying... I don't care about constant online connection... But these traffic issues kill immersion. It is good to hear you guys are working on a way to fix them. Keep up the good work and I will buy.

That is good news... i heard they are already on damage control trying to lock out the packages that make this possible. I would definitely leave this as an educational purpose only for the time being. The last thing you want is for your files to be reported to the server as being modified... At that point it technically could be considered "cheating" and you could lose your entire Origin account.

I haven't bought it yet... But I am itching for the bugs to get ironed out so that I can. The only way it flops is if they just abandon it, without fixing the bugs... The only thing that bothers me is more of what I consider bugs seem to be working as intended. I will give it a few months and see what Maxis does, it is completely up to them to redeem themselves.

I really am not sure... You would think something like this would have been fixed if it was simply able to be patched... I am afraid that it might be a deeper problem with the engine itself. I just cannot imagine how they got away with this... I mean all of these developers who had behind the scenes access had to have seen this. Either all the guys who wrote on here with their discussion on preview builds were about as deep as console kiddies or they were playing with a different build. I hope that it is the latter, but at this point time will only tell. It is hard not to think that the reason there was only a 1 hour demo/beta was because they knew their product was crap and they didn't want people to figure out how crappy it really was.

Technically people are not agents just visual representations of numbers... An agent is basically a ping packet, that says "I am a job I need 10 people" , it shoots out from a job or a shopping center and hits the first number it sees, a number being a house with 10 people or a building with 200. The problem seems to be that it doesn't seem to change the ping packet so that same ping packet keeps going around the board saying "I need 10 workers" When in fact there are already 100 workers on their way, they just haven't gotten there yet. It almost reminds me of how a broadcast storm starts when you plug in a bunch of hubs together. It is the only way you can do agents without having a 1:1 ratio of agents to sims. If each sim sent out their own "ping", it would eventually be too much to handle. I don't know if anyone has played Cities in Motion but they do a much better job at giving the illusion of a living breathing city... I think it has it's own pathing problems but it does a decent enough job that I have never noticed anything on this magnitude.

That is absolutely ridiculous... The fact that each agent technically finds a new job every day, and a new house for that matter... That is definitely not what Maxis had us sold on when they touted their shiny new glassbox engine. That is what it really boils down to, this Glassbox IS NOT what they made it out to be, and quite frankly I would rather go back to a statistical model with a larger tile size and updated graphics. I was really excited at first about simulating every person and was willing to overlook the small cities for new innovation, but this is like handing in a term paper that you copy and pasted off of Wikipedia.

So glad I waited... There for 2 months I was counting down the days to buy simcity but I decided to wait and let the bugs get ironed out. I am really glad I did... I think Maxis will redeem themselves and eventually patch the glassbox engine. As far as EA goes I hope they crash and burn but we all know they don't care they are already counting their money. I bet they are in the board room this morning saying, "The problem isn't always online the problem is we need to make them pay a monthly fee too!" EA is so far gone... Sorry to all that bought this anyhow willing to overlook some of the problems that might arise, I too was very tempted.

You are going to need to throw some actual stats out there with respected references, you know like you learned to do in college? I highly doubt a game that is based on online PvP met its downfall by piracy... Were they pirating game keys to play online as well? Pirating is there I will give you that but pirate servers that host online games are few and far between and most probably do not even know they exist.

What about traffic getting backed up forever? I am not sure exactly what caused it, some people claimed it was sims crossing the road in my game it was building trucks halfway in a lot and halfway in the road... Has there been any headway in this department?

And the ugliest airport ever award goes to.... lol ginx...

I didn't realise you could do that. I think I'll do that too. It is only available thru the Origin Store. @Charizard Development costs have been double and tripling the past 6 years. Development costs are expected to double again within the next 5 years, due to the demand for better graphics. Thus you either need to sell more copies and/or raise prices to breakeven. $70 and $80 dollar games could become the new norms. I understand that and inflation plays a role too. But the game isn't worth that much money to me. Like I said if the game was like its predecessors then I would gladly pay $80 to help support the devs. But EA has refused to listen to the fans in order to appease the casual/multiplayer crowd and as a result they won't be getting my money. I beg to differ. Seriously this game is more "hardcore" than the previous Simcity titles, due to the DLC, multiplayer, acheivements etc... You really need to learn what a "casual" gamer is. Are you serious? How does DLC, multiplayer, or achievements make this game more hardcore? Who other than hardcore gamers would spend almost $100 on a video game?! My wife is what I consider a casual gamer, logs on to words with friends plays the free version of zynga games... But would never ever spend a dime on them because in her opinion "only a loser would spend money on a video game."

snwboardn's review My only complaints are A) the path finding system really needs work... In real life you take a different road not because it is a shorter drive but because it offers less traffic.. I too had a major breakdown in my traffic because a moving van was blocking an intersection.I made a bypass hiway as best as I could around my city, but nobody used it because it wasn't the shortest distance... B) You need to be able to see your coverage better for schools and other amenities. My school was maxed out with students but I couldn't tell where the cutoff was.