Towel

A) It takes a long time B) Know one knows how to make it go faster Why not try some things??? How about, place a water pump with the water treatment addition, see what happens? Does the water become irradiated or does it clean up the ground pollution? Do parks do anything? Why not try the Nature parks in a small area and report if anything happens? Does building education in the region improve ground pollution dissipation? Hey try it ... You could be the person who nails a new tip for playing the game!

Pretty much everything is down right now!!!

Actually it looks like he moves toward your garbage from wherever he spawns!

I hope that's not what caused it, because, from my limited playing, there was no other way to properly deal with garbage other than the garbage dump. Recycling will remove SOME garbage and have it be recycled, but not all. It's been confirmed that after 100,000 tonnes of garbage is burned, the lizard monster comes!

Get another city to take your garbage, build a recycle plant, or destroy your garage lot (and it becomes ground pollution).

According to a developer, he recommends the opposite. Place on avenues and keep it off small streets. The entire thread has some useful information on streetcars. In short, don't create intersections when creating the streetcar lines. So that people don't have to go digging: Thinking about it ... I think both points are valid. If you require good traffic flow on a main road, buses can cause massive congestion if you place the stop in the wrong location. After the comment above however, posters still complain about traffic issues. So it's not the answer! Later on he suggests that if this happens, then you have to reduce the number of buses... We'll see!

First things first ... Don't just place stops willy nilly ... Try to map out the transport movements in your city ... Watch a few sims getting to work for example, or going shopping and take note of where they cam from and where they went to. As an experiment, place a few bus stops around your residential buildings, and then just ONE stop at the rough area they are going to work. Watch that the next day to see what happens. Expand from there... A few tips: - DO NOT place stops near congested turns. If everyone is wanting to turn right at an intersection, don't place the stop on that right hand side. It will simply cause more congestion. - Use Park and Rides near your built up residential areas to limit the number of bus stops you have - Buses will travel to the next closest stop every time, so you can dictate the route your buses take by ensuring the next stop is the most efficient path. Perhaps you can then force buses onto under utilised roads by making the next closest stop along those roads.

Traffic Tip: Do not place bus stops willy nilly ... Buses actually cause traffic issues if they have to stop constantly, especially on avenues. Placing a bus stop on the right hand side close to your city entrance, when everyone wants to turn right, will cause endless traffic chaos. Use bus stops sparingly, with park and rides. Focus on putting bus stops or park and rides near your residents with only a few stops along your main roads or at commercial / industrial areas. If possible, try to keep buses on the smaller roads, and not the main roads. You can do this by making the shortest distance between two bus stops on the back roads thus allowing cars to take the more efficient path on roads.

Not unusual, I mean the load on the servers must be massive compared to Beta 3 ... Which is really poor planning and testing!

You need to work out why your Grid City is impractical ... For example: If the traffic is composed of mainly high wealth sims, the public transport may not help! So you need to find out their purpose. Are they shoppers? Is their alternate shopping closer to their homes? High wealth sims will generate a lot of traffic if shopping is not nearby! Is they're low and medium wealth sims, and they're trying to get to work or get home, then consider grouping the residential lots and focus the public transport between the residential zones and their workplaces. Let people closer by take cars or walk. Make sense?

Obviously if you look past all the problems for anything in life they would always score 5 out of 5 but that is not the point. Well he's essentially saying the game itself is 4.5/5 ... However technical issues get in the way. Which is a real shame. I guess the difference might be say Assasin's Creed III ... Anyone whose played the final infuriating mission will know the game itself can be the most frustrating experience ... But there are no technical issues holding it back.

You can only sell excess water / power to other cities to a certain point. If you have 200 kgal excess, and 4 cities connect to yours, then you can only sell 50 kgal to each of those cities, no more!

All it really means is that high wealth sims will cause traffic issues if you don't have decent commercial buildings within walking distance. While you can use streetcars to ferry them around, they will still prefer to drive.

That's because fans usually down vote games on issues, not necessarily the overall quality of the game. Take ME3. The game is amazing, it just has a shocker of an ending. Is it fair to down vote such a massive game because of the ending alone? Sure it should lose some points, and not be a perfect score, but to down vote it that hard? On the other hand Assasin's Creed III, which doesn't have any of the controversey has a user score of 6.6 (with a press score of 80) - http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/assassins-creed-iii To me that's fair. The game has some horrible pacing and design issues, as well as some control and combat issues, but it's not enough to down vote it too hard! ME3 has almost none of those issues, and it's got a worst vote? C'mon!!!

Hey that's life ... thinks take time ... Nothing new with that!

Super-interesting tidbit about high wealth sims not using mass transit. That's great to know. Will definitely keep it in mind at 12:01AM ET! I should edit that ... They won't uses buses, but it appears they will use streetcars, rail, and ferries ... They are just a lot less likely to use it them other wealth sims. It is true they will attempt to walk or drive first on most occasions.

Never said they were

The trouble I have with indie reviewers is usually they have a strong confirmation bias, or or often influenced by elements other than the specific game at hand ... Sure they aren't being bought, and fans of certain indie reviewers can trust that they will have similar tastes. However they are not always objective, and can be just as slanted as a paid for review! The aggregate of indie and commercial reviews is usually pretty accurate to be honest however.

Good News! Ocean Quigley has promised larger city szes, he just won't commit to a when! Maxis is working on reducing the delay between region updates from the current time of around 3 minutes to every 30 seconds or so. Modding tools are also incoming. Maxis want to wait to see how people play the game and get community feedback before building any mod tools (it took 12 months to get a mod tool for Simcity 4).

I am with you on that one ... Here in Australia our internet is billed on downloads, so if you download a 12GB game, that comes off your quota for the month. For a lot of us, we don't want to waste that much on downloading a game we can walk up the road and buy for a cheaper price anyway. But it is also very 'old' policy to have a quota contract with your internet provider. All providers in my country (Netherlands) have something like a Fair Use Policy or Truly unlimited bandwidth. Agree, but here in Australia there is only one type of contract you can get, and that's download quotas!!! We're the backwater of the internet world in that regard!!! Although when the NBN comes around, hopefully that contract method goes!

Efficiency is a loaded word but ... Here's some interesting things on efficiency! For example, high wealth sims will NOT USE mass transit ... So they need to have commercial zones near them (walking distance) to ensure they don't clog up the traffic flow. The opposite is true of low wealth, you frankly don't care and will take the bus across town to buy something ... That's just one example, but efficiency isn't going to mean just building grid like roads etc with transport everywhere, etc ... Efficiency is going to mean more than that. EDIT: I have since learnt that They won't uses buses, but it appears they will use streetcars, rail, and ferries ... They are just a lot less likely to use it them other wealth sims. It is true they will attempt to walk or drive first on most occasions.

I am with you on that one ... Here in Australia our internet is billed on downloads, so if you download a 12GB game, that comes off your quota for the month. For a lot of us, we don't want to waste that much on downloading a game we can walk up the road and buy for a cheaper price anyway.

I come to threads like this and I want to reply with one-liners like "my cats breath smells like cat food" Honestly, that's my opinion on much of the debate in this thread. On the current point of discussion, calling the game SimCity when it's a reboot ... I mean, they don't rename Batman with every reboot do they? Surely we aren't that limited as a species that we let something such as a name get in the way of enjoying ourselves?

AAA titles of late that have gone for "realism" have not only failed commercially, but have been some of the more expensive games. There is a general feeling among development studios that the quest for realism is too expensive (especially with the benchmarks for next-gen graphics) and comes at a cost to gameplay. The prevailing game design philosophy today is to pick a unique feature, often called "30 seconds of fun" and polish it to an absolute mirror shine and then build all the "game" around it with only regard for maintaining the integrity of the core mechanic. SimCity is GlassBox. That is their unique feature. Not Realism. Not City Building. Not City Tiles. Not anything else ... GlassBox. As much as people want it to be many other things, it just won't be. If you don't like what Glassbox offers, that's ok. In fact that's more than ok, it's perfectly fine! Hey lots of people dislike Call of Duty, doesn't stop it from topping the charts but ...

You just described any company that wants to make a profit on the planet Earth! Only the worst companies pull that tactic, many companies like to give their fans/customers more specific answers as opposed to a nebulous maybe. Rubbish ... Name one company that gives specific answers with examples! Preferably a company the size of EA or Maxis too ...