rigurat

Same here, hit and miss depending on time of day and luck. Last night the Oceanic server was buggy, this morning (Hawaiian Time) I was able to use the Eastern Europe server and have a nice long game, now I'm back from work and it's a no go.

I was at Wallmart during game launch and I was told they had 12 games. Not much compared to their StarCraft 2, and Battlefield 3 launch. Pardon my generalizing but I it seems the kind of people who would play SimCity, especially the people who would pick it up at launch date are older (kind of nerdy) gamers, between mid 20's to 30's. I myself fit in that category. It was different crowd compared to the ones who waited for the Battlefield 3 launch. Are we a dying breed? I mean fans of games that focus on long term strategy, planning, simulation games.

Which do you prefer? City efficiency or style? I ask this question because everyone seems excited with the new curved roads. Even though curved and angular roads look great, it's not very efficient, at least if you're trying to maximize your city space. Since my SimCity 2000 days, it seemed if you wanted to have a city with high population and therefore high income, you'd need to maximize your land area for zoning purposes and minimize hills, valleys, water and other unbuildable terrain and non-essential roads. Even though the new SimCity doesn't use the same tile placement system the previous versions had, the same principle on maximizing space is still there. And this new game provides very small city sizes.

Now that I've played the game for a few hours I'm going for efficiency, I already ran out of space and I'm now working on getting every bit back of empty space between buildings.

In Manila, traffic is really bad. One low cost method of reducing traffic wihtout serious road widening is by implementing the U-turn traffic scheme. It seems to have been very effective. http://xanga.photosfor.us/uturnillustration.jpg align=baseline> A main road with small intersecting roads can cause serious congestion, so the U-turn implementation was enacted on our city to see if it would reduce traffic. This system has it's advanteges because the traffic is always moving forward, unhindered by stop lights. http://xanga.photosfor.us/scuturn1.jpg align=baseline> http://xanga.photosfor.us/scuturn2.jpg align=baseline> http://xanga.photosfor.us/scuturn3.jpg align=baseline> http://xanga.photosfor.us/scuturn4.jpg align=baseline> I know this is already possible with avenues without mods. There is also something not pictured above, ELEVATED U-TURN slots, it kinda looks like an overpass on a freeway, all u-turning vehicles are on the right most lane rather than the left most lane. It ensures free flowing traffic for vehicles who want to change their direction of travel.