lordax

It's all in the way you play the game and what kind of games you like. I've been playing games since the 80's and I like challenging games. I've never played sim games so SC5 was my first, it only took me about an hour to understand the basics of the game. I have 8 complete regions with all the great works; I have cities with 400k pop to 20k; I have university cities, mining cities, electronic cities, you name it; the only "challenge" to me is starting a new region but after a couple of hours everything is way too easy. For me the game is just an animated wallpaper since you spend about 10 minutes doing actual stuff and wait 20 minutes waiting for the money, after the initial cycle you just spend a couple of more minutes plopping specialization buildings and that's it, just watch everything moving, there's nothing else to do. Sadly most of the time you have to follow a pattern to build your city since if you fail you get traffic jams that kill your city. The only way to have the city "your way" (as promised) is with low population cities where you can have nice road layouts but even that becomes boring after a few minutes since you have nothing else to do. Mind you, I balance my cities with I, C and R very well, I don't like having my cities invaded because of my people needs to find a job or a shop out of my city.

None. Maxis dude is the one you want, he flies to every fire if there are more than one and extinguishes them in 1 or 2 seconds, last night found out that he extinguishes hazmat fires too. Hazmat fires are Tech3 buildings, doesn't matter what density. What I started to do since I've found out about Maxis is to get him the quickly, early in the town's life you have plenty of sick people to have him curing them and giving him lots of "fame" points, then when he upgrades to criminal hunter you can just shut down police for a couple of days and send him chasing them (watch the laser fights! awesome stuff ), when you get enough points for the flying thing, you just sit him there, when you see the red helmet click on him and you can send him to kill fires.

I've never played another SimCity; few months ago a friend introduced me Anno 2070 and I love it; then told me about the new SimCity and how it's much better than Anno (she loves SC4), I pre ordered the limited edition and all, I bought the hype. I've been playing games since the 80's so I know my way around learning how to play a game, is not that difficult these days with the auto save, bullet time or flashback button so I quickly learnt how to play SC. Without reading anything about the game I started to find it annoyingly bugged or just bad coded or good idea, bad execution. When you are on the menu screen you are told that the game is "best played with friends"; however, so far playing with my friend caused more pain than fun; having both cities with high education and no criminals had no point since we send each other dozens of criminals every hour; having every sim working didn't matter, we send each other tons of unemployed sims anyway, clogging our main entrance; plop buses? it doesn't matter if you have enough in your town, we sent each other dozens of them even tho we had about just 6. Then there are a lot of little things inside your city that makes it fail if you don't follow strict rules like just T intersections or this or that; they sold me a game that said "your city", I don't feel it's my city since I can't build it the way I want since each sim will just get literally vomited by buildings to the closest bucket and upon filling that one will go to the next making essential that you build certain way so you don't have mindless sims just sitting in their cars doing nothing to advance while there's an empty way next to them. My friend quit a couple of weeks ago, she's very pissed and disappointed, she expected a real sim game; I confess I expected more of a challenge, there's none, you have literally no much to do: lay the initial roads, zone it, wait for people to move in, plop this or that and wait for people to expand, build the money maker (electronics is the less problematic and most productive) and just leave it there, as a very expensive animated wallpaper because after a couple of hours, that's what the game becomes, nothing to do, nothing to expect but to see the money number grow up. Luckily for me I have 2 computers, one used for communicating with my family and my "main" computer where I play my games, I installed SC on "chat" PC and it's there running, like a very expensive wallpaper.

Hey dude! We want a party, you don't mind us throwing garbage do you?. Ok, have fun. Quest done. After a month I checked the protesters: "they complain garbage wasn't being collected" A month later, they still were there protesting the garbage wasn't being collected. They just protest for sake of protest.

Last night I was playing with my friend, we have our city next to each other. She says to me: "great, I have all your unemployed clogging the entrance of my city". I watch my "stats" and I have zero unemployed, in fact, I had 400 unfilled jobs. Watching cars going out of my city everybody was going to great works, not a single car were going to her city (at my left). My city is specialized in electronics, I have full educated people, I have low crime rate, however she was getting about 10 criminals from my city in a matter of minutes. We have our high schools working well, there are plenty of free seats on each of them, however, our school buses (I have 4 and she 6) were picking up students from our cities. So far, having all these "ghost" number or non existent people trying to simulate a "friend" (since is not true or my stats say that I have unemployed people) are only a pain and something that's taking away the fun from the game; we already have to deal with broken or bad coded or stupid AI pathfinding to have to deal with phantom people too. Now I started a new region, just one city on it; I made a big square with round corners, on the base put R, left I and right C, everything is working smooth, pop went to 25k without adding any other street but the one that makes the square, now I have tons of cars "happy! leaving the city!" Where they go? Why they leave? I can deal with the always online thing, I don't have a problem (I realize that many people will have it as they want to play on a laptop while commuting or something), but this so called "social" thing sucks big time, either is bad coded or it fails completely at trying to simulate it.

I was playing with my friend last night, in about 40 minutes at x2 game speed I had 3 meteor showers. My friend told me "what's going on on your town?" Last meteor hit at the 40 minute mark (after the second I started to take notes) just after my friend asked me about my damned town, I got a tornado, 10 minutes later another meteor shower. 2 of those events didn't cause any damage somehow, but the 3 latest one destroyed the solar plant, the uni, hospital and chips factory. About 25 minutes later another meteor shower, I decided to check radiation, I have just a strong orange circle around Uni. I decided to name my city Armageddon, wish I could have Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck instead of Maxis Man and Dr Vu.

Some buildings require $$ workers, I think is the same for $$$ but I'm not sure if they are actually needed for something to work; you will need lots of $$ population for some building like Hospital and University, you don't have enough they will close from time to time. I wanted also a "low houses" town, what I did is to have medium street but didn't put any $$ parks so they will stay at $$ density but $ land value, which gives tons of $$ workers. If you want population without having the entire map filled with little caravans this is the way to go, $ density buildings don't have enough people in them trailer parks

There's a way but requires to spend extra for "nothing". Say you want the tree line horizontally but game wants it vertically, the solution is to put a piece of cheap street nearby and put the tree line, then click on the tree line and "edit", from here you can place more of the same tree line next to it the way you want, so, the trick is to calculate where you place these things (dirt road and tree line) so from there you end up just using one extra tree line to put it where you want, after that you can bulldoze the extra stuff. Hard to explain, if still interested and didn't get the idea, later I can post a pic since I'm at work now ^^"

I was getting complaints that "iron storage is full", wondered why, I have 3 of them, they are set to be sold, so since I was concentrated on checking stuff down the map I decided to check the exit and found this: Iron trucks were there, somewhere in the middle. I patiently waited to see how long they will take to move, it passed 5 in game days, they didn't move a bit. Those 2 other cities are mine as you can see on the icons; as this city, they don't have any traffic problem, you can see in this city there's not even a car in the roads; to the right on the highway there's nothing, I'm at the border of the map, however the game likes to generate people just "passing by"...

Actually read from a developer that "a way to make a quick buck and not having to get a bond was to rise taxes to 20 for 2 ticks (2hs) and put it back to where it was and people wouldn't complain".

Probably too late; you could start shutting down every building, gov, school, water, etc; I had the same problem, you can turn off the buildings so there's a point where you start to make a profit, just wait a bit, when the money arrives you can turn them on again.

Ugh, tell me about it, I had a perfect tourists town when suddenly airport started to vomit literally taxis everywhere, funny thing, I tried to count them and I stopped at 200, when clicked on the airport I had 65 people coming in... wonder if they took one passenger per cab and if the tourist brought 3 bags they shipped a bag in each taxi too...

Not only they are very small, I've tried to get a city in place where you have, the already small map, half covered with cliffs or rivers... Gotta be a joke.

I don't use them in the buildings part. That town in the pic grew to 50k pop and it's doing well, I just need more tier $ pop to fill some jobs. They all come out and just go up until the C and I are filled and if there's no more jobs they keep going up until they hit the avenue and go somewhere else, there's is where I have these "turn around" things. Anyhow, I placed some trees near them just in case, maybe that's why I didn't see any polluted ground.

Hi, sorry if this doesn't belong here. Since there seems to be tools to mod the game, if there's something I like in the game are the people's simlish babbling when clicking on them. I've tried the tool posted here but I can't seem to find a way to extract anything since I get an error when I click on any of the file inside. Thanks.