Rufus Honker IV

Regions get in the way of me enjoying the game. I never liked them in Simcity 4, and Simcity 5 was too limiting. I liked it when it was just one city with pretend regions around it I could connect to. If I wanted interconnected cities, I'd play Civilization.

At launch, there weren't enough servers. Now there are too many servers, each with a handful of active players. EA seems to have given up on the game - however all those servers still run. Don't you think, in the name of people who like multiplayer, they should consolidate them? Or if they have quietly moved all the servers onto one, to not give us so many options to pick from?

There was promise there, it was poorly executed. Of course Maxis dropped the ball in forcing us to play online even when we wanted single player, but here's my thoughts on the Simcity 2013 multiplayer experience - and I know things aren't getting fixed. This is just my thoughts. -- One problem with multiplayer was people starting up multiple towns to support power/sewage/water to maximize their city. These people often took choice plots to simply plop a power plant in, thus leaving the bad plots for other players. It was a turn off, when looking for regions, to go in and see the one person in the region had immediately snagged four connected cities. It would have been wise for Maxis to put a restriction on cities owned per region for multiplayer cities, or - like picking sandbox mode - being able to create a "one city per player" multiplayer region - just to encourage working together, and working with what you had. We never did get a "list only recently-created cities" option (freshly made cities were more likely to have actively-playing people in them) in the "join game" interface. Nor did we ever get a filter to find normal, non-sandbox games. (Sandbox is an empty experience to me. You already have all the upgrades, what's the reward for ongoing play?) The only filters we were given were for "regions with abandoned cities" (I still have no idea what use they expected us to get from that) and "sandbox mode" (which ended up being most regions anyway) They really needed an undo option - how many city spaces were wasted because a person messed up their first road so they just left? The global market was a neat idea but didn't really work price wise (often it couldn't keep up with demand anyway). You should have been able to buy resources from players - even if they were "ghost resources". Your neighbor has a working oil field? You should have been able to buy oil shipments the same way you buy power - I click buy and every X amount of time a truck arrives "from that city" if I have a trade depot with the space to store the oil.

I wonder if we're ever going to see another patch.

I suggest buying the game properly. It's not like its very expensive these days.

Traffic: Keep your density low while you're getting the feel of the game. I know it's tempting to grow-grow-grow, but the more people, the more traffic problems. Skip megatowers for now, I haven't used them much but I hear they are ready-made traffic problems - that's why you can research skybridges later. Put commercial in little bunches near and in your residential areas: RRRRRRRCCCCRRRRRRRRRRRRRCCCCCRRRRRR Sprawling business districts look great, but they mean your sims will drive there, and driving there means contributing to traffic. Agente above brings up a good point on the T-intersections. You can go four-way, but I suggest with feeder roads - put (for instance) your residential and commercial east-west and avenues with no development north-south.

We're a little past posting "this game is awful". It's pretty obvious the game is a wash now. However posting how bad it is as EA starts to turn off the lights on its Simcity department isn't going to get us any hopeful fixes before they lock the doors. I still like it - though it certainly isn't perfect - and play it. Right now my aim is to pack 600,000 into a city (without using megatowers) so I can say I properly upgraded a town hall completely. I'll get Cities eventually - after the price comes down and any bugs are ironed out.

If there is a final patch (likely, if/when they shut down the servers), what tweak(s) would you like to see in it? I'm not talking about major changes we shouldn't expect now (larger cities, for instance), but something which would be nice and should be an easy programming job for them. I'd like to see the Large Fire station hazmat garage not require the university upgrade. It's always been annoying that building high density Industry is available right out of the starting gate, but you need to build a space-hogging college and an upgrade to get the hazmat truck. The removal of "distance from main building" restrictions would be nice, so we could put say the casino HQ addon buildings across town.

Does Skylines play like SC2013? (I don't mean "is it better?", I mean "are the gameplay and controls similar?") I've never played a Skylines game, but have played every Simcity.

Yeah, making the online game pay-to-play and released that aspect later, after people had played single-player to work out the bugs for EA (and see if people liked playing it by itself in the first place) would have been more sensible. Of course, EA felt the game couldn't work single-player.

-While the financial addon for city hall may not seem very useful at first glance, it's very handy. Set your taxes for 12% - 11% - 9% and no one will complain. You'll be able to take out 100,000 loans, too. A lot of people go for the addon that gives the large fire/police stations - these things are VERY expensive to maintain when built, wait for better cash flow first. -Put down your low-quality roads first, upgrade when you need to. (You can't upgrade a normal road to avenue, so think that out first). The non-avenue medium and high density roads do not allow for more traffic - don't upgrade them assuming you'll get better traffic flow - you'll have the same traffic flow and more cars. -Sims can cross the street to a bus stop. You don't need to put them on both sides of the street.

Yes, I remember that era of gaming, and may it stay DEAD. I have never had the income flow required to upgrade or buy a new computer with each new game. I, for one, don't care if the game looks stunningly beautiful - I've quite happily played SC2013 on low graphics settings. I care about gameplay. Nowadays most systems bought in the last five years can handle any new game engine. In the early 90's, new games required new cards, CPUs, etc.

It's actually less trouble to build several community colleges the sims go to themselves instead of worrying about busing students.

If you don't even know what game you've downloaded, how can we help?

Cape Trinity! That's nice,one I like to work with. The Space Center is the only one I haven't gotten to work - I'll give it a shot. Thanks!