DaveParker

I haven't got very far in the game yet but from what I've seen so far in the early game... I'd like to see an equivalent to SimCity 4's route query tool as I found it incredibly useful to see what route people in certain areas people were taking to commute to work, etc. I know you can kind of get something similar by following the traffic around to see where it's going to but I miss the kind of information I used to get from route query in SC4. Street naming (or some kind of general labeling tool that could potentially be used for street names) would be nice, though it's good that building renaming and district naming is included. There could do with being a way to see all bus lines from where you can select one to manage. The only way I've seen so far is to find a bus that's running on the line you want and get to the line details that way which works but is slightly cumbersome. Minor thing but maybe important for new players - I didn't think it was very obvious how to link up your city to the neighbor connection highway when starting out. You can't extend the highway as it's locked at that point, and until you draw a 2-way road I think the 1-way road is locked so you end up with a 2-way road connecting to a 1-way side of the highway. Overall it's looking very promising so far though and has finally persuaded me to get a new graphics card. Currently on an aging GeForce 9800 and will probably upgrade to a GTX 970 for better graphics / fps in this game.

I'd love to see the same, but I'd like to be able to name everything including roads. SimCity 4 allowed both of these, at least with the Rush Hour expansion pack (I'm not sure about without). SC2000 had this to some extent as well, the signpost tool could be used to name areas of the city. And SC3000 from memory allowed some buildings to be renamed but not all of them.

It's just a visual thing (I might be wrong but I thought it worked properly in CXL 2009 though). However I did have a separate issue where traffic actually would not pass through an expressway-highway conversion piece. This was when the expressway and highway were already in place and I added the bit in-between last. I rebuilt that section and then it was fine, just use the traffic map if not sure (might take a while to show up though).

Originally posted by: ws6daveg So with building industry, is their a noticable gain in building level 3 industry vs level 1 or 2. I have created industrial pockets around the map, but eventually I get "Polution is killing everything" and I then scale back the level 3 industry. But I do notice that by building more industry I can jump from -$35,000 to even if not plus really quickly.quote> From memory level 2 industry has twice the pollution but also twice the output, it just condenses it into a smaller area of the map and employs higher (and more fussy) residents. Level 3 outputs twice as much as level 2 and twice the pollution level while taking 50% more space, but I think its resource consumption is only 50% higher so you get more industry resources for the same number of fuel resources I think. I've not looked at the difference in profit / tax, I think most of my money comes from exports to omnicorp anyway. Pollution is more of a problem in CXL 2009 and the big avatar parks seemed to be the best way to reduce it without resource problems, expensive though. In CXL 2011 as you can trade between your own cities you can stick the pollution causing buildings in various support towns away from your main city. Pollution doesn't seem to be as much of a problem in CXL 2011 anyway though - even in my dirty industrial city of about 250,000 there aren't yet any pollution problems. Traffic noise has more of a negative effect on offices in 2011 though.

Originally posted by: Hybr1d I have another question: Do the residential squares eventually up to apartments, and then to skyscrapers when you hit a certain amount of citizens?quote> No but the higher density buildings get unlocked. I think you need 750,000 people in one city to unlock the high density offices from memory. There's also the blueprints / megastructures which are available from the beginning but are fairly costly.

Once you're at maybe 50,000 pop, specialize in one or two resources. I found oil to be a good one. Unlock buildings such as the fuel cartel that multiply your resource output (effectively reducing how much it costs you to produce one token) till you can eventually make a profit by producing more of the resource and selling to omnicorp. Not much point early on though as it'll cost you more to produce the resource than what omnicorp will pay you for it.

Good luck with that. I'd like to see those kinda of things also, along with being able to set a lane up as a cycle lane which I'm pretty sure was promised before the original Cities XL. My #1 desired feature is the ability to rename roads and/or buildings though. Something similar to SimCity's street labelling tool, or maybe just make the panel at the right that opens when you select a road segment or building editable would be great, that way parts of my city have more of an identity rather than being continuous sprawl. I tend to make up names for different areas anyway in my head but this is difficult to keep track of.

One difference I've noticed in CXL 2011 is noise pollution ends up being a lot higher, especially from traffic noise. I think this is a good thing though as in the original noise never seemed to register much unless you had a lot of wind turbines.

Originally posted by: soltangris Totally disagree. Leisure satisfaction is not that important as the other types. It's intended to be an alternative to satisfying your citizens in cases there are problems (like polution). Besides, it lets you being creative, by trying to combine different buildings.quote> Maybe not really important, though the tip thing at the top constantly tells me that citizens are bored. It seems that every district needs a sports museum, basketball court, ferris wheel and paintball arena.

Is somewhat annoying that I typically end up having to spent more on leisure than police, healthcare and education combined yet it still ends up being the service with the lowest satisfaction rating.

Know if the quality of life corresponds to any of the overlays (such as the environment one) or not? I think the transport capacities of a few of the roads are messed up, I think I saw a paved small avenue on one of the foreign road sets that had a higher capacity and was cheaper than a large avenue, or something like that. Also i've never understood why a large avenue with trees costs less than a large avenue without trees, though that was also the case back in the original CXL.

Second thoughts, trading on the planet view also seems somewhat buggy, at least when trading with omnicorp. If I move a slider one way by a notch then move it back the other way back to where it started I always end up with a completely different number of cash tokens (it seems to divide them by 10). After I click OK and then go back into it, the trade window for the same city + omnicorp then shows 10x the number of cash tokens as previously, which again divides by 10 once I start tweaking the sliders. I also don't like the rule that says if you've a negative cashflow you shouldn't be able to sell to anyone other than omnicorp. What's the point in having cash at all if to do anything you need a positive cashflow, it just accumulates over time and is fairly useless - guessing it'll probably cause an overflow at some point. Also it can be a pain when you're tweaking the settings only for a trade to get automatically adjusted due to a temporary shortage of a resource and then you can't set it back up again and are forced to trade with omnicorp who doesn't pay you anywhere near as much as you can't get back into positive cashflow (well you can but that's not the point it's a hassle to sort out the mess). But the trade bugs are annoying, one minute I might have trades with omni meaning all resources are balanced (0 for everything) and be making 70K a month and then the next minute they're still all balanced and I'm losing 120K a month because I reduced, then put back an export etc. I'm going to try trading with my own cities more as I think that's more reliable, though it'll mean building them up a lot more as oilfields, water pumps etc can't be built till 5000 pop.

Second thoughts, trading on the planet view also seems somewhat buggy, at least when trading with omnicorp. If I move a slider one way by a notch then move it back the other way back to where it started I always end up with a completely different number of cash tokens (it seems to divide them by 10). After I click OK and then go back into it, the trade window for the same city + omnicorp then shows 10x the number of cash tokens as previously, which again divides by 10 once I start tweaking the sliders. I also don't like the rule that says if you've a negative cashflow you shouldn't be able to sell to anyone other than omnicorp. What's the point in having cash at all if to do anything you need a positive cashflow, it just accumulates over time and is fairly useless - guessing it'll probably cause an overflow at some point. Also it can be a pain when you're tweaking the settings only for a trade to get automatically adjusted due to a temporary shortage of a resource and then you can't set it back up again and are forced to trade with omnicorp who doesn't pay you anywhere near as much as you can't get back into positive cashflow (well you can but that's not the point it's a hassle to sort out the mess). But the trade bugs are annoying, one minute I might have trades with omni meaning all resources are balanced (0 for everything) and be making 70K a month and then the next minute they're still all balanced and I'm losing 120K a month because I reduced, then put back an export etc. I'm going to try trading with my own cities more as I think that's more reliable, though it'll mean building them up a lot more as oilfields, water pumps etc can't be built till 5000 pop.

Originally posted by: DaveParker On top of that, if I adjust the sliders with omnicorp so that the "Token trade for Titan City resulting from trade exchange with Omnicorp" reads 0 for all rows other than cash, it still costs me a number of tokens of cash to buy absolutely nothing at all! The actual number it ends up costing me to buy nothing whatsoever varies depending on what order I adjust the sliders in. *sigh*quote> Found a workaround for this. If I go to the planet view and adjust the trade there instead of from within my city, it seems to work. I was able to get my imports and exports properly reset to zero there and then go into my city and set my trade rules up again. Now making 45K a month instead of losing 30K !

On top of that, if I adjust the sliders with omnicorp so that the "Token trade for Titan City resulting from trade exchange with Omnicorp" reads 0 for all rows other than cash, it still costs me a number of tokens of cash to buy absolutely nothing at all! The actual number it ends up costing me to buy nothing whatsoever varies depending on what order I adjust the sliders in. *sigh*

There's definitely issues. If I go to the trade window and view trade between my city and omnicorp then increase my exports of either food or office services any further, I actually get less money in exchange for it! If I then decrease my exports I get even less money again, and I can reproduce this several times by clicking cancel and then going back in. It's not become a major issue yet as my town of approx 19,000 has tons of money, but can see it causing problems later on...

A common issue with the placing of the current fixed-size lots is that a lot looks like it should fit somewhere, but doesn't quite. Sometimes a 2x3 grid of lots will fit somewhere but then you demolish them to build new ones there but in one of the spaces the lot doesn't fit so you end up having to stick a park / plaza there. One idea could be if the game could detect when the lot will almost but not quite fit there, and then automatically scale the lot in one or both directions to squeeze it in. It'd be limited to just a few percent so it wouldn't look any different to the player, and the scaling shouldn't pose a problem as the graphics are all scalable 3D anyway. I'd be surprised if it ever happens though and I'm not sure what technical issues it may introduce that I've overlooked. Originally posted by: abvex I am getting a real bad feeling about Focus and the CitiesXL Developer. I rather have EA buy them and do the next simcity with an optimised version of the citiesxl engine. quote> Don't really like that idea tbh. I can't remember at what point EA bought Maxis but I thought it was nearing the end of SimCity 4s completion and instead of fixing the issues with commute / random abandonment / pathfinding they added loads of pointless sims integration and U-drive crap. Then brought out SC Societies which was just a huge joke. They've messed up several other games I liked after buying them out as well. Originally posted by: ilikeseattle The thing is that the early previews mentioned that there were smaller lot sizes in the Alpha so why do they not just dig those up? There was probably only 1 or 2 buildings for each of these lot sizes for each of these zones but with custom content, it would be fine.quote> It'd be good if they were introduced. Even if there's not many buildings of that type it'd at least give something to plop in the smaller gaps. Originally posted by: abvex I just don't think the current devs are competent enough to truly fix this game...if they haven't done it by now....what will another month do? They'll do some minimal optimization of the code that gives you a little more fps...thats all. No real memory leak fix nor the game actually using multiple cores. Which are the BIGGEST issues by far....then the broken trade and notification system....then we can start taking about road networks and lot sizes then mods.....quote> I think they've done pretty well so far personally, though I do wonder how much of it was already in place but just not switched on in the last Cities XL (things like trains were in the trailer videos a long time ago). I've never noticed the memory leak myself, but agree if there is one that it should be a priority to fix. I don't think the game is ever likely to utilize multiple cores very much, it'd probably involve rewriting half the game and result in bugs and random crashing a lot more frequently.

I'm not sure, it might overlap somewhat with the existing office, leisure and retail buildings.

My computer spec: Intel Core i7-920, GeForce 9800GTX+, 3GB DDR3, Intel X25M SSD and a separate 7200rpm HD which CXL is installed to, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Bought CXL 2011 via steam as the other store (that was sent out to CXL owners via email) wouldn't take my card. I had the original via steam as well. Issues so far... - Steam does this "one-time setup, preparing for first use" thing each time I launch CXL 2011 despite the fact I've launched it several times now. Each time I have to give it permission to run through UAC. - The first time I ever launched it and went to create a new city, the globe appeared (and could be rotated) but no menus or buttons appeared at all. Clicking the city slots on the globe, pressing escape etc all did nothing and I ended up having to terminate the process via Ctrl+Alt+Del. This was after first playing through the first and the last tutorial. - The game runs really, really slow. Even with no buildings on the map at all, it's way slower on my system than a 500,000 population city in the old game. Scrolling around, rotating and zooming don't seem too bad, but each time I click a button in the user interface etc there's around a 5 second delay before it responds. - Last night I created my first city, just a very small one for now. This autosaved part way through and then autosaved again when I used the back button to get back to the globe. I exited and started the game up again today. The city shows up on the globe with the name I gave it. If I use the load button the savegame shows up with a little thumbnail preview of my city but when I click on it the option it just replaced with a "Start new city" option. I've tried a variety of methods and can't get my saved city to load up, it just keeps giving me a new empty map (but with the name I gave it when I created the city last night).

Just discovered the "Official Steam version fix" in this forum. This resolves most of the issues I was having and I've no complaints about the performance now Steam is still doing that one-time setup thing each time I launch the game. If I just click No when UAC asks me, it runs fine so I've just been doing that. The other issues I had previously haven't re-occurred since.

Just gave it a try - makes a huge difference seems to fix all the performance issues I was having

Same issues here with the UI, I wasn't aware of the steam patch prior to reading this topic so thanks for that info, I'll check it out. Also I dunno if its related to the UI but I get a random jerk every 4 or 5 seconds. It's annoying when scrolling around and suddenly it leaps and I'm left somewhere random on the map with a completely different rotation angle and lost. It's pretty consistent and doesn't seem to be related to what part of a map I'm looking at at the time etc, it's more like some background thing on a timer that runs every few seconds.

Originally posted by: philemon1976 Will there be the option of naming streets or even Neighbourhoods or landmarks? quote> I'd also like to see this. Even if it's just a simple text field on the panel that appears when you click a building or road section (the bit where you edit the style of road etc).

Tried XP SP3 compatibility mode on the CXL executable and steam shortcut - didn't seem to make any difference apart from Steam telling me I shouldn't use compatibility mode and it stopped the "Steam Client Service" thing coming up asking for permission to change my computer, which it normally does every time I launch CXL 2011.

Tried terminating steam while CXL was running (steam doesn't let you close it normally), that didn't seem to have any impact. Also tried playing with the detail settings - seems to run at the same speed on both lowest and highest settings. The basic frame rate is fine, the problem is every 4 or 5 seconds or so a sudden disorienting jerk happens (like the screen doesn't update for a second and then when it does you've scrolled past whatever you were looking for, etc), and the buttons in the user interface (both the overlays thing at the right, and the construction menu) all take several seconds to respond when clicked on. I think the menus are supposed to animate as well but instead they just freeze for a few seconds then appear suddenly.