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.

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

I seriously doubt most here cheat in the game. I'm glad I found this forum. Got reassurance that it wasn't just me feeling disappointed when playing the demo. I could build the city with my eyes closed and still make a profit. By the end of the demo I had something like +7k/hr profits and had upgraded the city hall I think 3 times. I couldn't build fast enough to keep up with the profits I was making. A lot of the core systems are interesting, but it is way too easy and simple to build your city up. Only hope is that it's indeed true that the endgame gets a lot harder. I'm really hoping traffic jams, pollution and demands from rich citizens start to matter later on. Still probably going to buy the game.

My impressions from a playthru: - the new city infra system with emphasis on roads only seems very interesting, but hard to get a good feeling of actual advanced city planning mechanics from just the 1 hour - seems super easy to stay in the positive .. maybe too easy even. I just intuitively placed all my zones etc here and there and kept playing with full speed .. ended up amassing loads of money and increasing the city size super fast. Maybe it's because zoning is free. You can expand your city super quick with next to no additional cost, other than roads. - I hope the game gets much more challenging when you start trying to get and keep rich folks in the city