ETK

Well there's always Cities in Motion 2 coming out next week.

Simoleons can be traded via waterways, railways or roads. I was able to transfer simoleons from one city to another in the other end of a big region by hopping from one connected city to another, alternating with sea / road / rail whenever necessary for a total of 4 hops.

Otherwise I'm able to create cities pretty well, but I'm constantly running into problems getting high density buildings, especially low-income lots. The reason is I'm not sure how to properly increase local happiness. I'm unable to find any indicators as to what the demands of any single buildings are, and have mainly just resorted to plopping park after park after park to increase happigness. Also, regarding parks, it's not clear to me how much any single park increases the happiness of the area surrounding it. Big parks seem to have a larger radius for their effect, but do they also increase the happiness more than small playgrounds? And do the low level parks increase happiness less than the high value parks, in addition to the land wealth increasing effect? Does traffic, amount / distance of utilities or distance from work affect happiness? Does happiness increase gradually over time if things are good? Help!

A reality check for the complainers and a small defense for Glassbox: No computer could handle the pathfinding computations required for every single vehicle in the city to find the optimal path from A to B. There is no other option than to have simplifications to cope for the massive amount of agents in the network. It's interesting info though, how the simulation works. Have to keep it in mind when planning cities.

None of my or my friend's gift between our cities have reached each other either. Been 2 hours now.

I'm actually having a really good time with the game and I've grown to like the online aspect quite a bit. The issue that's keeping me from playing right now is though that 1) My great work is Arcology got stuck when I tried to initiate it .. it's just initializing the project forever 2) Gifts from one city to another don't seem to work Both issues are essentially problems with online features, I'm hoping they get sorted out so I can go back on playing.

I'm not sure, but I think rich skyscrapers don't house nearly as many people as dense low or medium income houses. So if you want the population to skyrocket, don't build high value parks in your residential areas.

Keep in mind that recycling centers don't seem to work during night time, so if you rely on materials from them you need to stockpile them during daytime to keep the factories running 24/7

Even though those releases were far from perfect, they pale in comparison to how badly this release has gone.

Alright, bought the game. Not able to play, and not even able to log in to Origin to give feedback how bad it is that I can't play a game I've paid money for. I try to log in to Origin and it says "Sorry, this service is temporary unavailable." .. they didn't even bother to write proper english there ... Hey I guess it doesn't matter, they have my money already.

I'm interested in forming a region with Simtropolis players living in European timezones to be able to best collaborate and chat about the region. Playing with Simtropolis users will give a much better hit ratio for the other players to develop proper cities and it's nice to be able to discuss the region here with fellow members. I was thinking to use the Discovery Delta map for maximum number of regions for maximum fun. Also It might be nice for each player to have access to two regions so that there's enough to do and you don't get bored so easily. If there's not enough interest, we can take up more regions per player. Initially, I'm taking 2 (don't know which ones yet). So, taking in submissions. First come first serve. Also include your Origin name here so we can add each other to our friends list. Let's make a great region! Members: Linque (ETK @ simtropolis, GMT+2) - 2 regions Free: 14/16 regions

It doesn't sync during gameplay to keep the player safe from losing progress due to crashes? And you can't manually save during gameplay? That doesn't sound good.

A bit off-topic, but is Origin the only place you can preorder a digital download of the game?

As you can see, Des had already a million in the bank with just one hour of gameplay. If the game is this easy to make money with, you only end up playing either to: - play around making aesthetically pleasing cities, or - trying to optimize your city, tweaking here and there but never really having to worry about anything as you're making gazillions of money anyway I really do wish there would be more challenge than just optimizing for the sake of it. I want to feel like I'm playing a game, and winning, instead of being really good in it with no effort. Other than that, I'm starting to like the new simulation system.

The simulation simply doesn't have enough layers. As Decius said it's all too automatic: you plop the zones and make sure you have enough power, then plop services as people demand them and you're good. Everything is so $%&^! automatic that you hardly have to think when you play. No terraforming No underground layer No mass transit planning Cheap service maintenance costs No cost for zoning No airport, harbor or other special zoning Automatic utilities infrastructure Most notably: No traffic light / custom intersection planning, which could alone make the game very interesting, since it has put so much emphasis on road simulation