Titan

I decided to play the game this morning after the update last night and a new issue has cropped up that I've never seen before. Despite having a connection to the highway, the game is telling me I have no connection to the highway. You can clearly see I have a connection in the screenshot below. What am I doing wrong here?

Those buildings are amazing!! Anyone know where you can get them?   Great job with the city building. You are a master!

This is correct. There is a bug currently that applies your pollution to your city from the region even though the region may be empty. They are supposedly fixing this bug in the next patch.

While I do agree that some posts are created from general ignorance, there are still several issues that plague this game. Most of your suggestions are spot on, and I think that if people spent more time developing their cities with better awareness and planning we'd have less negative posts about stupid AI issues. However, this doesn't change the fact that there are core mechanics that need to be addressed. I'm hoping that these issues will be fixed over time, but at the moment they are causing some very real problems for players. Your suggestions are good ones and I've also seen his YouTube videos. I've followed his advice and created some very interesting cities. Still, the same problems keep creeping back up to haunt me. I just hope that Maxis can alleviate some of the more pressing issues surrounding this game. On a side note: I don't feel that complaining about stupid AI (when referring to the AI playing follow the leader when going to and from work) is a stupid complaint. This is at the root of some of the most glaring issues with SimCity. Let's hope they find a creative solution to this, even if they cannot change this behavior entirely.

What amazes me even more is the fact that they aren't actually fixing this problem. They are putting and band-aid on it. Instead of fixing the RCI balance core mechanic, they are saying "oh, you want to have an all residential city, do ya? We'll put a stop to that!". Yes, this is a rather cynical view of things, but I have lost some faith in Maxis. I'd like to play the game that was advertised. I really want to like this game. I really do. At the moment, though, I cannot bring myself to play it one minute more until certain things are addressed. SimCity 4 has been treating me quite well for the past couple months.

I don't think anyone expected it to run perfectly on day one. Games have bugs, and as more and more complex code is introduced into said games, more and more bugs will present themselves. No one is arguing against that. What I'm upset about (and many others) is the fact that the core simulation has some serious issues that affect the end game. Your argument is that I should LTP (as you put it) because I have traffic issues and that so many others out there do not. While this may be the case, no two cities are alike. You cannot simply state that one is "doing it wrong" when each city is completely unique. Unless two cities are carbon copies of each other, one city may have issues while the other does not. It's a well documented fact that this simulation has traffic problems inherent to the games design. Even Maxis has admitted it. Why on earth would they work on patches that attempt to rectify (or reduce) the problems if none existed? You may not have traffic problems because you built your city in such a way that traffic is not an issue. What if I don't want my city to look like yours? Or course there will be cases where certain designs will cause more traffic than others. That's obvious and shouldn't even be considered an argument. If you want proof that traffic isn't unique to just my city, I suggest you visit YouTube and watch the countless users that have run into multiple similar situations with cities that look nothing like mine. In fact, these videos document very well the problems that are rooted to the games very core. We can argue all day long about specific traffic patterns and street/road/highway designs that work and designs that don't. That still doesn't change the fact that there are flaws in the game that need to be addressed. Flaws that should have been addressed long before release. And I'm not speaking about bugs. Bugs are a completely different animal and will always happen when you have multiple people working on the same codes/scripts. That's inevitable. Maxis engineers are making changes to their core simulation that alter traffic behavior. I suppose Maxis should just LTP their own game...

Here's the problem.... SimCity 4 never had constant sims moving about, going from place to place with any accuracy. SimCity 4 handled sims completely different. Sims would pop on the screen, and after a short time they would be gone. There was no real time sims. The simulation itself focused on city development, not the sims themselves (except for gimicky things like rush hour quests). SimCity (2013) has a completely different system in place. Maxis wanted us to believe that sims had lives. They wanted us to be able to follow them and watch what they do and interact with them, as well as being able to manage a city. That was the entire point of the game. If this was intended from the very beginning, why wouldn't they focus on making it work properly? To me, this is a core mechanic of SimCity. This is what this new version of the game is all about. Sure, the main premise was a total city simulator, but a lot of the focus was on the sims themselves. If the sims were never intended to be a functional part of the core game, they would have simply created SimCity 4.5. That's not what we were sold. That's not what was advertised. Do I care that sims don't have their own home or their own unique workplace? No. Of course not. I do care, however, that the core simulation is borked to the point where it is causing massive traffic issues. In my honest opinion these traffic issues will never go away with the current AI implementation. The sims will always play follow the leader to the next empty house or job and this causes traffic problems that cannot be solved unless some clever work-arounds are put in place. For example, they could split up the amount of sims taking one direction to an empty home or workplace. Instead of having them play follow the leader, why not have the sims randomly pick houses that are empty? I don't believe it would be hard to implement code that would tell random sims to pick random houses spread all over the city. This way the sims still pile into the houses until they are full, but not one house after the other. Still, this can create other problems as well. I just feel that this game had so much potential and this one issue is the cause for a lot of other issues. I feel that it was a poor implementation of an engine that had so many possibilities.

So, I find this particularly troubling. Ocean tweeted on the 27th of March that the sims (agents) will not act any differently in the future. They will always play follow the leader. This means that your traffic problems will likely never be fixed. I had a shred of hope for this game until I read this. This basically means that no patch in the future will change how the agents get to and from work. Period. Lovely.

The above changes certainly do not represent a complete list of new version 2.0. Expect further details on the day of the release, that is next week on Tuesday. Yes, I saw that. This is why "hope" was emphasized.

I certainly hope that's not all they fixed. Seems like the list should be much longer than this. I'm not going to hold my breathe that this patch will fix much at all and I'm going to assume that we won't see any significant changes to the core simulation for months. Still, it's a start. I hope the english version is coming soon.

He acknowledged the rocky launch of the game and apologized to people who had tried to play early on, clarifying that his contributions came after the login screen. He finished up his little intro by requesting that anyone with questions about online vs. offline capabilities to please direct the to the EA PR rep sitting in the audience. Maxis Creative Director Ocean Quigley was also there, chuckling at what was obviously an approved slap at the game. The above statement from Shack News proves that they didn't intend this game to be an "online" experience. At least, that's what it says to me. Anyone else think the same? Why would he say "direct your questions about online vs offline to the EA PR rep" ? Why not just say that online is their design philosophy as Lucy said? Something is fishy here....

So, Cities in Motion 2 has been released. I'm not going to post links because anyone looking to buy the game more than likely knows where to get it. I went through the tutorial learning how to use certain aspects of the game and I must say, it's very in depth. Also, the city sizes can get very big. The first city they start you out with in the tutorial is rather small and I was hoping for something a bit larger. I wasn't disappointed. The very next city they put you in is massive when compared to SC5. I can't believe a small time developer can make huge cities work and Maxis can't. Cities in Motion 2 looks rather cool so far. My first hour in it I was definitely intrigued. They may just have a winner on their hands. Anyone else have thoughts?

Larger map sizes are coded into the game already. Apparently they are waiting until they know that the servers can handle the load. Right now, even with these small map sizes, even some pretty powerful computers can't handle everything turned on high. It would be even worse with map size larger than this. However, that's no excuse for not implementing them. We should have that option regardless. I'm going to assume it's mostly related to server issues.

What really needs to be done is let the AI cross the center divider on those avenues. Obviously the low density avenue would be out of the question, but medium and high density avenues should have this feature.

This is a known issue and will eventually be fixed. Nothing much you can do about it atm unless you bulldoze that part of the street and rebuild it. That seems to work for some people.