casper2433

RE: Spatzimaus I agree it was much more micromanagement than previous games, but i really thought it was great. I was able to see the flow of power to each building in my city. With that i was able to see trouble spots in my city, where maybe the agents were being used up before they got to a specific location. resulting in brownouts in spots. This allowed me to easily spot fix things before i really messed up and had city wide power failures. The economy is, from what i experienced, a delicate balance between different densities bewteen each RCI zone. While i wasnt able to test this, seeing as how i was rushing to build as much as i could within the hour, I was able toward the end of beta, to maintain a balance of demand for each zone. As such one of my last citied did break the 100K population mark. I did have an issue with some of the ploppable buildings such as schools, becoming land hogs as you expanded them. They simply took up far too much space. I also agree that the tiles are a bit too small. I was also able to stuff the city full in half an hour time, however i do believe this hindered a lot of us in the beta, simply because we built everything quickly, the game simply didnt have time to figure out what the density is goint to be. In one game, i simply built one little square block that maybe took up a tenth or less of the total tile, and i did see it was easier to control the density of this small square than if i had rushed and built the entire tile up. In a half an hour on this test, this small city block reached skyscrapers and 40K population in a little over 30 minutes. I believe this is because when you create limited space for people to move into, the demand will go up quickly. Then add a park or something to increase the density of a certain income level, and immediately much larger buildings are formed and the population starts rising until the next plateau. However, when you set the entire tile with roads and zones, there is no demand since sims can pick and chose where they want to live. In the time it took to fill the entire tile with residents and increase the demand for more density, the hour was almost up and you have a massive 2kX2k town of 20k people. In essence the one hour time limit was in itself a pitfall. I also noticed education plays quite a big part in this game. In my first few games i has a LOT of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings and almost all of them had closed due to no management available to staff the business. When i started building more schools, people became better educated, and my abandoned buildings went down to 0. Also as a side effect, businesses boomed, technology level advanced and density increased. Honestly the graphics to me were fine. Yes they were a bit cartoony and could be a bit more realistic. The buildings were only bland in the beginning. As the density rises and large skyscrapers were build, the buildings looked much more polished. I figure it is like any other game out there where the top level stuff is the best looking. You dont start a new character in World of Warcraft, and immediately get nice shinies. You start off with crap gear and you have to work for the better looking stuff. Same with this game. I started off with nasty trailer parks, but eventually developed apartments, then skyscrapers. My skyscrapers were gorgeous and it was making me giggle every time one popped up. As for the region play, I again think we were given only a sample of what a region could be. If you look up some internal testing vids or even some of the official teaser vids, some of the regions i have seen have twice or thrice what we had in our Beta region. I think it is going to be a blast to be able to build like 10 different cities all in the same region and each with their own specialty. If you think about it, Sim City is looking more like Sim State. I had a few bugs where the game wouldnt alow me to zone in places where there was no reason that i couldnt zone there. In one game the game wouldnt let me zone at all and i had to start a new game to fix it. Most of your problems seems to be user error as the game gives you the tools to monitor your power and water to see if you will soon be running low. With these tools, if used properly, you can plan ahead and fix problems before they even arise. If you were getting massive blackout, it isn't the games fault that you didn't pay attention to the power gauge and see you had progressively less and less of a surplus so you could take action before you ran out completely. Same thing with the clinic. You can click on the hospital icon and see how many people died, got sick, got injured, and were treated each day. If you see big numbers in the death department, you know what to do. If you click on the clinic itself, you can see if the beds are filling and if so, expand the building before people b1tch and moan. But in all honesty, I really can't blame you for that error, considering there is a crapload to monitor and with just an hour to do as much as you can, it is very difficult to keep an eye on these things if you are rushing to build roads and stuff. Once the game is released and we have all the time in the world and we will be able to take our time with our cities and it will be easier to manage all these things and i bet you will not run into the same problem. OMG i know! The schools seemsed insanely massive once you maxed out its expansion. Also some of the parks and sporting venues were equally massive and the range of effect of these didnt seem to be worth it as it didnt stretch that far for how much space a simple baseball diamond took up. I found the road grid annoying as all hell. I would be trying to snake a road and the road would automatically snap to a grid line away from where i want it to go. I tried looking in the options for a way to turn this off, but i didnt see any. As for the problem with why you have a trailer park in a place with high income modifiers, well i kinda explained that above. The Residential and Commercial zones had 3 demand meters for each income level. If the high income demand was low, then that is why you see trailer parks there that are not evolving. Also another factor is the space you provided for said building to expand. Sometimes the buildings around it will expand into high density buildings, but they leave that trailer no room to expand. If you click on it, it might say something like, "No room to increase density." So you see, it is trying to increase, but there just isnt room. I found out that spacing residential zoning out helped this, instead of just painting the entire road green. I have seen a number of rant posts about the "dead space" in the game, but that dead space is needed for buildings to expand and grow. This isnt 1980s Sim City where buildings are confined to the red R square and at most 2 of those squares comine for a large hotel. In this game you must provide the space for your city to grow. this is why my lottle city block did so well and grew so fast, because it had the demand and the space to go for it. I really think there is a lot we have to discover with this game. I think we were given a teaspoon to taste from the lake that is this game. I have a suspicion that there is so much you can do with this game, that the devs know that you wont be able to spend time on terraforming or stuff like that. There will be so much to do and monitor that having massive cities much larger than the 2k x 2k tiles we have, will be impossible to monitor and manage. In some of my cities where i filled the tile, by the time i finished fixing the problem for residents on one side of the city, another 2 would pop up bitchin got stuff to be fixed. I dont know what i would do if i had just double what we had.