Akerbeltz

Superb entry Tonraq!!! And very nice book selection by the way ;)

Show it all baby!!! :P

I can see that you put a lot of attention to detail into this :) I'd advise to get a mod to get rid of the barriers at the street ends though. Also, i'd say that the amount of pics deserves more than one post.   Very nice!

I agree with the previous comments, love how you've drawn up the street network!

I enjoyed it a lot indeed, superb attention to detail :)

Promising start, will see what happens with those humble beginnings after the arrival of the Santos Company!  

Just discovered this journal, awesomeness at its purest!! You do not only provide with pleasure for the eye but also with cultural insight and nice day-to-day anecdotes.

This looks promising!

I'd advise hiding the UI for the screenies.   Besides that, looks like a pleasant place to live, with a very european feel. I especially like the last pic of the high-school with the sports area.   Will follow your progress! 

Same here, very crazy, it makes me feel megalomaniac with my avatar and nick all over the place

Been playing for a week now and it definitely is one to be recommended. The foundations fo the game are really solid and it provides for a challenging and satisfactory experience. On the longer run I'd like to see the functionality expanded or even new functionalities implemented. For instance: more industry types and longer scope of the existing ones, a police/criminal system and more public services, among other things. Fortunately, Luke - the one-man-army who's created this jewel - is currently developing a modding kit. So folks, we might have game for a long time to come.

@ SoftcoreGamer I was to jump into the discussion but you hit the nail already. Brilliant analysis!

SC4 without a shadow of a doubt. The reason is simple: SC4 has a much more larger functional scope, more features, more indicators, more management options to take into consideration - even the vanilla version. The functional scope is fundamental as it's the framework the modders work upon. It feels like a proper simulation of a city - for example, you are able to recreate your hometown, to see it develop and change dramatically throught years, you are able to diversify or specialize its industry, to perform civil engineering, to adapt certain living areas to certain age brackets. You can play with a single city for hundreds and hundreds of hours and you'll always have things to do. Is it perfect? No there's a vast margin for improvement as modders have shown. But it feels satisfactory from the point of view of a city simulation. From my point of view Simcity 2013, on the contrary, is not a city simulator. It feels more like an arcade that tries to pander to the players that don't like to put much attention on things and that look for instant gratification. Everything is pretty limited: not a lot of features, controls or indicators, way too much streamlining (AKA cut features), way too flashy, and cities have a very short lifespan. In my opinion, glassbox has been a bluff: It fails to provide with a deep simulation (sims don't have a stable job or house and hence it's pointless to monitor them, for example) because from a mainstream perspective we still don't have the technology to work with an agent system that delivers a deep simulation. It had been more realistic, efficient, bug-free and satisfactory to keep on the statistics model and just use agents-models for punctual aspects: trading, to monitor a few sims that the players would select (as in SC4)... In brief, Simcity 2013, besides being a casualty of the casual, is the consequence of: - Bad management of the project. - Bad business practices and this wretched business mentality where products that by its nature should be specialized (simulation, strategy, RPG) are designed to cater to the maximum amount of possible players, resulting in shallow, boring, arcadey experiences. - Speaking of the latter, we have a very serious systemic problem in the videogame industry. Basically videogaming companies have been turned into investment companies that look for a ROI on the shortest possible time, no matter the means. This industry has been literally kidnapped by indivuals that have no idea of what gaming genres are about and that perform the same shoddy practices that have been carried out in the banking or real-estate areas, to put 2 clear examples. Again, the result are products that are not solid, lack quality and scope and that are consolidied under just one banner: ARCADE (the oldest and more accesible). An absolute regression that only the ignorant or the low-standard ones could tolerate. EDIT: typos

I disagree. From their comments, and the direction EA as a company is moving, they absolutely want SC to actively be around for years to come. They are seriously pursuing the angle of "software as a service" that Adobe and others are embracing, and SimCity falls right into this, and I believe some of the things like always-on and keeping our cities tied to online servers are a small part of that. There is something like $400-500 worth of DLC for The Sims. That's like buying The Sims 10 times over. They want that for SC. They have stated many times that their future is big on micro-transactions and DLC. By tying us down to their online servers and Origin, they have the chance to advertise the DLC and make it easy to get, and if it's easy to get, a lot of people will purchase it on a whim. Because it's going through Origin, EA gets 100% of the revenue (and only like 66% through Amazon). The problem is modding - will EA truly allow us the same level of modding we had with SC4? I do not believe so, because it would have the potential to disrupt said DLC, and I doubt they'll allow us to modify too much in the way of game files. The problem is that we have certain expectations as SC4 players that do not match with SC2013 and EA's stated goals. A lot of us, myself include, keep asking how EA could be so dumb in regards to certain decisions they made about SC2013, and yet ultimately it's not really "dumb" because a lot of those decisions are very deliberate, and had a specific purpose in mind that concerned SC's future. Arguably, we who are still playing SC4 here in 2013 are not SC2013's target audience either. Their target audience doesn't care about modding, they'll happily drop money on all kinds of DLC, and they aren't concerned with city sizes or forced multiplayer/online, or the lack of backing up/saving cities offline. I see where you're coming from and I agree that EA/Mixim initially envisioned SC2013 as a long-run journey where DLC content was meant to be their main income source. Problem is the final product is too simple and lackluster to guarantee enough longevity. Firstly, SC2013 is not a simulator, you cannot apply city-simulation logic to this game and it lacks the features and functionality to be so. In essence, its design is closer to an arcade, casual MMO where the drag to play is focus on personal achievements and making money - no need to explain how alien is this concept to proper city simulation. Also, this design vision is contrary to city-simulation fans - in other words: SC all time fans -, as it's been made abundantly clear in these forums. So, EA/Maxim have opted for a design that's completely alien to its traditional and loyal fans, the ones that've been playing SC4 for more than a decade. First BIG problem. But it's not the only one. Thing is they pretended to make income on the long-run thanks to the "casual market". Problem here is that "long-run" and "casual" don't stick together. Casuals don't have commitment, neither are characterized for a long attention span: They are the kind of public that play the "Next-Big-Thing" for 2-3 months and then move on. Casuals are not bothered by simplistic designs and it's true that they are quite easy to hype up, BUT they are not loyal. In conclusion: Maxim/EA have generated a perfect lose-lose scenario.

Let me start saying that I'm not an all-time follower of the franchise: My experience with the previous installments limits to SC3000 and, before that, watching my older brother playing SC in his Spectrum. My expectations about SC2013 were that this was to be a city simulator with a strong focus on sinergies with other cities, with weather and climate change influence and with an agents system that promised to make the whole thing more realistic. I took this info from Maxis official channels, I didn't crawl into the forums looking for the opinion of long-time SC fans (dreadful mistake...). I'm not gonna write an essay about my experience with the present game. Suffice to say that this is not a simulator, it lacks the functionality to be so. In fact, it's a game that in its spirit it's closer to the arcade genre or to a facebook online game. It's a shallow, easy and proportionately boring game. Funny enough, it's quite easy to earn gazillions of money and achieve a good level of happiness in no time, all the while the internal processes of the game, the way the agents work, don't make any sense. And I'm not going to mention the bugs.... It's like you cannot apply simulation logic into this game, instead you have to figure out the game mechanics, which are quite arcade-ish, and go with it. And once you have figured them out and your city has consolidated, the game has the depth of a screensaver. To put you an example: In a city simulator you would think that the proper thing to do is to provide with all levels all education. Not with SC2013: Here, the education facilities are estructured as tiers of weapons. This means that with one University and a Basic School you can educate all your citizens. Good God, this game sucks. Sucks hard. Sucks pretty hard. The lack of regard of Maxim towards its consumers' intelligence is appalling. I've seen some post from the developers (Skips and Ocean...) where they try to justify this boutade and their contempt and their silly excuses, as if they were dealing with children, are just insulting. The best part is that I heard many of you commenting how good SC4 and decided to buy it this past saturday. Sure that the graphics are outdated (still, look decent and, by the way, are much more realistic than the present joke of a game) and it has the functionality that you'd expect from a serious city simulator. I mean, you can be creative and apply city-building logic. I take advantage of the moment to ask for good mod recommendations (already got the NAM one ). That's all folks!

By "junk", I think you refer to the containers that are piled up by your factories. I'm not really sure whether they only serve aesthetic purposes or perhaps they affect the amount of goods that are delivered from the factories to the "C" buildings and trade depots. In any case, I never bulldoze them unless I plan to build another facility or expand the existing "I" area. EDIT: Made some tests and I can assure you now that the "junk" only serves aesthetic purposes. They don't even impede factories from upgrading to higher density.

Hey fellow Majors: I'm looking for mature minded, good mannered people to join my newly created region so we can develop sinergies, make profitable business and, all-in-all, explore together all the possibilities of this amazing game. There are 15 spots at the moment, claim your city while it's still fresh!! Region: Amalur Origin Name: Suturi Cheers!

Just a quick note, fellow Mayors: A handful of you have let me know that you decided to abandon your cities in the Amalur region due to bankruptcy derived of poor management, lack of knowledge of in-game systems a/o bugs (very especially the latter). In addition to this, the patch 2.0 (I guess "0.2" would be a better term to define it) broke more things than it fixed. As a result of all this, I have decided to abandon the region too. I'm currently working on a couple of new regions where some spots are still available: "Letsdoitliketheydo!!!" and "West Europe" - both are in the same server EU West 2. Should you be interested, contact me via Origin. Please, note that this game is miles away from being flawless so the idea for the new region would be to have a better understanding of game mechanics, experiment with different layouts, etc. In other words: We are going to take this as a sort a tutorial, without big pretentions, and progress with our cities as much as the buggy estate of the game allows. The only things I ask from the ones that may want to join the aformentioned regions: - No problems about dodgy language, bad jokes and shenanigans. But please, be civic and mature. - We don't want people that start a city just to mismanage it in the midst of a wild rush and abandon it for good a couple of hours later. Be reasonably active and pay a minimum of attention. Cheerio! EDIT: New region joined: "España" (more suited to spanish speakers though)..

Thanks for joining up fellas, we already have some very promising cities going on See ya in-game!