XisBlue

Interesting read. My initial city was something linear like Residential < mega commercial downtown center > Industrial. While nice looking, it seems like that isn't the best idea. I also thought having lots of traffic in commercial zone was good for sales/whatever, but guess not.

I mix it up like most everyone else. I do play at the 1x speed a lot when I just want to kick back and watch (like watching a house burn right across the street from a fire station w/max trucks just sitting there). I've been finding I play at faster speeds once I max out my planning space, which is far too small IMHO.

SimCity is now officially on The Sims track, so look at that environment to see where SC will be heading from here. Personally, I'm beyond thrilled at the possibility of a Katy Perry expansion pack for Sim City. Could be called "Wide Awake" and feature all-night diners, seedy back alleys with broken glass and needles and biker bars with karaoke....all for $19.99.

Well, this makes me happy. Instead of playing SC, I get to anticipate the possible car wreck on the 18th when they tell us we get The Sims 3 vanilla as our free game. If it's any one EA game, I'd be blown away and beyond thrilled. But unfortunately, I lost my wide-eyed optimism in my youth. I just can't see them letting us walk away with Crysis 3 or something. Still, free is free, so I'll take whatever.

Tomorrow the patch will make all speeds the same as pause.

I would point you to The Sims 3 to see what's in store for SC as far as options and price. I expect some things will be a good deal (probably sale timing needed) and others will make you laugh and/or cry. I can't wait to see if we get single buildings for like $1.99 each left and right.

Great tips. Last night I was playing a new city to complete my 3-city region (really wish the AI would do this so I could have a good 1-city,1-player game). I was tired and not in the mood to fully develop a 3rd city so I just zipped in some zones, a coal mine, trade depot and let it run. No schools or other frills. Next thing I knew, I had about 12,000 sims in the city, a profit of something like $11k per hour and something my main city didn't: police/fire HQs. I played for a few hours later and just didn't build anything else. The city is a cash cow @ 12k people, so what's the point of making it bigger? I ended up adding the mega bus terminal with full upgrades. This city is swimming in cash and running perfectly. If anything, I want to keep people out and enjoy it. For fun I looked for any building that wasn't happy and bulldozed it.

I'm wondering how well the regional stuff is working in general. I think there was a thread somewhere about regional issues. I know I tried gifting as well and the only thing I succeed in doing was making a 2nd city be almost broke. I had thought they sent it by pony express, but after about 10 hours of game time on the fast speed, the money is still vaporware.

Basically, any EA game without a micro-transaction component (like Sims 3, SC'13, etc) is in danger of vaporizing within a couple years when sales dry up enough. I can't wait to see how they do MTs in SC. The Sims 3 stuff is just crazy.

It's nice to see Amazon react to a product that's having serious issues out the gate. However, I'd like to see them follow this up with warnings on all games that have issues or a warning on all new releases that use the Internet in some way. I'm also curious if Amazon is going to let those 1,000+ negative reviews stand or if they'll do a wipe or if EA will "pad" it somehow. At this rate, it's going to take a ton of 5-star reviews just to get the overall score to 3 stars.

Nope. I was playing earlier (on EU server) and then *poof*. Haven't been able to play for a handful of hours on any server. For past about hour-ish I can't even select a server. Once it did let me play for about 8 minutes. That was fun.

Good tip about the bus stops. I admit I went ballistic with mine (school and normal bus).

In the end, you need to figure out what you value and don't value. Other people's reviews only matter as far as technical issues experienced and factual data. You're the one playing the game, not us, so our opinions are basically fluff. Go watch videos showing game play (again, facts & fun level, not opinions). Does it look like fun to you? If yes, buy. If not, pass. Pretty easy.

Issue 01: So I'm enjoying my first Sim City city and all of a sudden, I'm hit with an error that drops the game and tells me I need to "rollback" or "abandon" my city. Gasp! In case this happens to anyone else, you may need to click "rollback" and then exit and restart SC. I kept clicking rollback with no luck, but upon restarting SC I could resume. Looks like the rollback was about 15 min of real world time. Could of been worse. Now I just need to figure out what I was doing since I was in the process of destroying and rebuilding a lot of stuff. Anyone else getting hit with these? I'm just curious how bad they are (figure it will only get better as things improve). Issue 02: After the above issue, I noticed that I was on a East Europe server despite being in the West USA. I wondered if this was a source of my connection problems so I switched servers. And GASP! My city was gone! Maybe everyone else knows this, but I didn't. Looks like your city save is stored on the individual server and not the complete cloud cluster. This presents future issues, but for now it seems ok. I hope they give us a move city save option or complete a true cloud cluster. I want to shift to a server in my area of the world, so guess I need to start over. Kind of sucks, but not a big deal at this point since I've made so many mistakes. As a side note, I wish I could get the AI to control cities in my region when I'm playing a single player game.