Yaffle

As industry techs-up you can dezone as they reach medium and stop them going on to high. Once you have unlocked the electronics rezone and they will start moving up the tech tree again. The trick is to get five at the same time, which can be difficult if tech progress is fast.

In the UK it's called a caution, as in "be careful" and to remind the person they have a right to silence, or more specifically not to incriminate themselves. We have no fifth amendment here (we technically don't have a constitution to amend, just a list of stuff we can't do). In full it's “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in Court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?" I always read the bubble as a stab at humour, albeit one that misfires.

IIRC you get "both" versions when you buy it - so if you buy the Mac one you also get the option to use the PC one too, just not at the same time. Best check beforehand on the EA/Maxis website though.

I'd like to see them stop the way that one pixel of road adjacent to any part of a ploppable requires the destruction of the whole thing if you just need to move the road (or remove it) the tiniest little bit too.

I think you are utterly correct, quite simply the glassbox engine isn't really fit for purpose. My irritation comes from this quote in the blog: "The system performance challenges we encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able to load, much less play with bigger cities." Which implies it's a raw processing issue. I am sure it's not, and I am sure you are right that getting power across a map fails on the current size because of the engine. Life would be so much easier if they would just level with us.

I find it irritating that the idea of bigger cities was not thought about before release - surely any tester would think after 2-3 hours "oh, where do I put the XXXX". But still. The longer this goes on the more this will wind up in text books as an example of exactly how not to release a game. Then we get told it's just "too difficult" to make cities bigger. I buy, a bit, the idea that some machines can't deal with it, but it is at best disingenuous. So here's where my problems with that are: I was told that the simulation was being run on EA's servers, not my machine, so why does my machine specification matter? Please Maxis/EA, be at least slightly consistent with your announcements. I know my machine is fast, but still when SC runs it uses far less than 4% of the CPU. That's a lot of headroom. A parallel would be graphics settings. Every gamer just deals with the way that some machines are more powerful than others. So we have a "graphics settings" slider. You have an older/slower GPU - no problem, set it at the bottom. You have a faster one, set it at the top. Surely a similar slider could be written for city size? Another compromise would be just roads and "ploppables" outside the square. We know this works already thanks to the modders, so why not exploit it further? Minimal map adjustment, or shock! horror! terraforming could allow it to happen easily and give some relief to players. Instead, no compromise. Just "no, we're not going to do that. So clear off and don't talk about it again." That's fine. That's okay, you have my money from this one game. But it's the last of it you will ever see. Maxis and EA both in the "sanctions" bin, never to receive any more Yaffley cash. My other concern is about telemetry - how do they know my machine specs? I don't recall ever saying they could extract them, so I assume it's buried in the EULA. If that's the case, what other data from my machine has EA been harvesting?

I don't alt-tab, but I find the soundtrack gets stuck from time to time. For example I click on a trade port, and then for the rest of my playing time no matter what else I click on I get no music, just the machinery and shouting. Most annoying was when I clicked on Vu tower and had maniacal laughing until I gave up.

...just looked from Blighty and it's GB£29.99 (at today's exchange rate US$48, US$40 pre sales taxes). Must be the extra cost of shifting electrons a bit further or something. Just another reason not to buy it for me.

It's a clever ploy from Maxis/EA - you get to have a useful building and feel good giving money to the Red Cross. Now, donning my cynical hat EA wins here on several points: 1) it sells $2.00 DLC to lots of caring users = profit 2) it gets some good vibes because people feel it is doing good with a charity 3) the donation it eventually makes is tax-deducible = more profit! I think, personally, I'd rather just make a donation directly.

I am sure the modders would know best, but this struck me about the map size. As power struggles to cover the map as it stands (for example) with long streets such idiosyncrasies would become increasingly apparent, leading to what would appear to be a bugfest. As a result I doubt very much that bigger maps will feature in this DLC. Oh, I also noticed that for some reason DLC is a "forbidden" name for a region (I tried to call one "I hate DLC" and it starred out the DLC bit). Back on topic - this has little interest to me at $30, most likely translated to £30. Good luck to those who buy it.

Good news! All of them. Thanks.

Do you have a University connected to the factories? The workers need to be technically educated, the higher the education rate the more efficient the factories are. Also check all the factories have sufficient raw materials. Importing may work out more efficient than smelting. You may actually find it cheaper to import the alloy and use the space used by the smelter for another electronics factory.

After a fair time away waiting for update 7 I have been playing a bit more (actually over 100 hours in the past three days according to the Origin "hours" counter, a statistic I seriously doubt). Anyway, herewith my observations: I don't think the industry/commercial balance is right yet. Now it is too far the freight requirement route. I seem to need nearly equal amounts of industry and commercial, even then I am still short of keeping the "freight orders" line happy. There needs to be an "import freight" option to help with this. I think there should be no cost for importing freight, unless you can make a profit exporting it. If the latter is the case, make it equal. With this the player may require more trade depots to keep up with demand, but it feels more correct. Sticking with freight, the agent system fails yet again as there are dead spots where deliveries are never made even with near parity on the orders to deliveries. The problem seems to be the agent heading for the nearest sink, and each sink is reset at midnight. Camel-trains are still awful. Sitting watching the garbage collectors they all head off in a line, and wait behind each other blocking the road. I've had an interesting new bug too, being the blockade of the High School by school buses, preventing any more entering (both grade and high school buses seem to want to drop off at the High School), causing the next ones to wait trying to turn in, blocking the road until I close and reload. I still have vanishing utility vehicles, this time all my streetcars just left the map somehow. Game restart recovered them. Bad flickering and artifacts on ATi Radeon card, seems worse now I still wish there was some easy way to force new builds to use the zone space effectively. I seem to be plagued by little dead industrial areas which is aggregated would allow another factory. Many graphical oddities - grass in the road, streetlights/trees popping through bridges etc. The "raise/lower" tool is too simplistic, causing bizarre terrain issues which cannot be resolved. Traffic still unrealistically high, why does every person want to drive a distance they could walk in under ten minutes? Poor economics of the specialties tends to make every city look the same. Maps still waaaaaaayyyy too small, especially given the concept that more industry is needed now It still takes over two hours for me to quit the game - it hangs at the "saving to servers" splash box. If I get bored and press "quit" then the save is corrupted. The solution is to lose the always on (especially as it adds nothing for the player) but I know that will never happen. There's still no way to circumvent the agent system. Power has dead spots at the end of roads, resolving that causes traffic problems. (same for water) this could be fixed with a "power lines" and similar option. I have a feeling this is my last go at it. Six months, seven revisions and we still are just entering a late beta test. All the tweaks have done little other than break my old cities. Fundamentally the agent system is flawed, it needs pulling apart and redesigned for each element it is trying to simulate. My only amusement from it is watching Sims go home and fill up one residence after another as they pull off the road. It's funny because it's so unreal. My basic problem is I feel as if I am playing chess with the developers rather than trying to simulate a city; I mean I have to think first about the agent system, then traffic, then play tetris to make the key buildings fit without dominating the map. It's no longer fun. To coin a phrase (from Soren Jonsen?) the game is having more fun than me. I'm out until the next update.

It's easier to do this if you also have an oil plant for a while and connect the road back up using the oil plant dirt road. All the delivery trucks (not garbage/recycling) can use those, no other vehicles can, keeping separation. The roads remain after the oil plant is destroyed. The issue is that the region trucks will always spawn on the same side, and if you need (say) oil for your "living" side power station then they cannot reach it if it's quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks. I don't know if the utility vehicles can use the roads the mines have or not, may be worth a try. The downside of this is duplication, as everything travels by road you need two sets of every utility, which makes the maps increasingly tight.

A slight diversion - how do I get the Places of Worship? I have been through every building menu, not found them. Loaded the Origin store, not listed. If it helps I am in Europe, UK, using Europe Server 3.