soldyne

I admit there is potential for it to look bad, but, you do have the option of moving the lots around until the footprint orients itself to the direction you want it. the lots don't have to be touching each other side by side all the time, space them out a bit. also, I think it will look better if you use the park fill tool thingy. put in some trees, it'll look nice.

I too dislike the one size zone for all, but, it can be added on to later with patches and such (I hope). anyway, I made what I think was a nice looking city in the demo with lots of curved roads. use the park paint fill tool thing and it looks alright IMHO. but from what others above are trying to say is that perhaps the demo did not show everything?...

This first one I found while scanning through the planet. WTF?! how did this person get 28,000 people when the game forces a close at 22,000? Anyway, I played my final city last night (my demo ends tonight very soon in fact) and I thought the outcome was rather nice looking: If only I knew of a way to toggle off the UI...

I call it Tunnel Maddness! I was experimenting with tunnels and bridges in the Demo and came up with this. I it is hard to see but I have a double decker tunnel in the upper left. apparently nothing intersects in the depths of CXL!

hmmm, biggest disappointment? they did not give us the plopping of buildings they promised, at least not in the demo anyway. as was mentioned earlier, when I am designing a rural neighborhood I don't want suburban apartment complexes sprouting up next the corn fields. or when I am making a suburban apartment complex, I don't want 5 different kinds of architecture showing up, I want it all to be the same so it looks more realistic. as far as PO goes, MC sold out; they are not trying to make a game, they are trying to make a profit. with that said, I will still buy the game as I see a lot potential with it.

I'll admit that the curved road on T3 is much smoother. but, personally, a few bumps in the road on CXL is not going to sway my opinion of the entire game overall. as far as the zoning for different types of residents, I kind of like being able to directly control the wealth levels of each suburb I build. in SC4 you had to get really complicated if you did not want R$$$ to pop up in your R$$ neighborhoods. you had to use some combination of water coverage, zone size, tax levels, land value, and then you had to babysit the area to demolish the stuff you did not want and wait for something you did want to pop up. it got very annoying after a while. sometimes simplicity is preferred.

yep, that is a glitch alright. the same thing happens with tunnels entrances. it is annoying, but, fixable with a patch I would think.

yes. I think this game has a lot of potential in spite of the demo flaws. all the flaws so far are fixable with a few patches. I think the token system gives the game depth and a uniqueness which sets it apart from the SC4 RCI model of city building. I will probably get the 6 mo offer for PO and hope that they get some decent downloads in the first year. after the first year, if the game has not improved I will move on to something else.

After playing the Demo for a few days I have seen some pretty wild trading in the game and on line and I thought it might be a good idea to offer a little primer for anyone who might be interested in trading. At the time of this first edition I am playing the Demo and I am on planet Caliban right now so the market may be different from planet to planet. First some basic concepts: 1 cash token = 10 extra cash flow in your city. thus if your city has 12,345 surplus cash every month, then your city should be generating 1234 cash tokens available for trading. although, I am certain this is a little bugged at the moment, but, that is the basic idea. Omnicorps is supposed to be the bottom of the barrel as far as deals go for either buying or selling. so when you place a deal on the market your deal should be sorted above omnicorp in the list. if omnicorp is above you then no one in their right mind will ever deal with you because you are either too expensive or too cheap (depending on if you are buying or selling). one issue that MC needs to fix at the moment (besides the in game lag) is the wording on the trade window between the online version and the in game version. the wording may be different, but, the concepts are the same. so instead of trying to explain the wording (which will just make things more confusing) I will explain using the numbers. Also, please read over the trading FAQ provided by MC on their main web page as it will give screen shots and provide basic coverage of how all the buttons work in the UI. if you are able to make a trade (for better or worse) then a green check box will be next the deal offer. no green check means you either lack the tokens or you lack the cash. when you make a deal, the deal will last for 5 real days. the deal may be broken if the token supplier runs out of tokens or one of the cities is deleted. I do not think that anyone can cancel a contract before the time limit is up under any other circumstanses so shop wisely. this will require more balancing on the part of MC I think. Trading fundamentals: in one box you will see omnicorp with a token in one column and 166 cash tokens in the other column. this is the window where the city in question is offering to buy a token from your city and they will give you that many cash tokens in return every month. the key here is cash TOKENS, not cash flow. So, if you have an extra farm token and want to sell it to omnicorps they will give you 1660 extra cash every month in exchange. this also means that anyone else that wants to buy farm tokens must offer to buy the tokens at a greater rate than 166 per unit or else everyone will just deal with omnicorp and no one will be trading with each other. in the other box you will see omnicorp with 1 token and 1500 cash tokens. this is omnicorp saying that they will sell to your city a token and you must give them 15,000 extra cash every month in return!!! I know omnicorp is supposed to have bad deals but this is rediculous and pretty much prevents any trading at all. I think this needs rebalancing to make it playable. What this also means is that when you offer to sell your tokens on the market for say 700 tokens that translates to 7000 excess cash flow each month for the other city which can be quite a large burden especially on small citys. Trading Strategies: When placing your bid on the market it is best if you do not place bids for more than 1 unit at a time. if you place a bid to sell 5 units of industry to another city and something happens to your industrial sector and you now only have 4 units then your contract for 5 becomes threatened (because now you are in violation of the contract). however, if you made 5 individual trades for 1 industry token each, if you lose one contract you still have 4 other valid contracts that are still active and the impact is much less to both cities. If you have a token to sell then first look over the market and see if anyone wants to purchase your token and decide if it is worth it for you to do so. if you don't like the deals being shown then place your bid on the market. when setting your price keep in mind the 1token for 10 cash concept. asking for 500 tokens means that you would be putting the other city at a loss of 5000 per month for a single token. if you think it is worth it (perhaps your token is rare and in high need, then go for it, but, if there are others selling the same token, then lower asking price and get sorted to the top of the list. when you are at the top of the list, it means you deal is the best. if you need a token for your city first make sure you have plenty of excess cash. then ask yourself why you can't produce that token in your own city. for example if you need power, why not just build a power plant? remember a small power plant costs about 3000 per month plus pollution. if the best deal on the market is 700 tokens then you need to ask your self if it would be cheaper to just build the plant yourself. if you can't produce the token yourself (like water in the desert) then you may have no choice but to trade. always go for the trade at the top of the list as it will be the best deal. when you are creating a deal for the open market make sure that you offer as much cash as you can afford and get sorted to the top of the list as this will ensure that you deal is made before anyone else. if you can't afford to get to the top of the list then post your deal anyway and hope that the other deals will be made eventually and your deal will rise to the top after a time. in either case, if after a while, your deal has not been taken and you are no longer at the top, then cancel your deal and make a new one. also, if the market improves and your deal is too good, then cancel it and make your terms better. once the deal is made you must keep it for 5 real days, so make darn sure you are ready for it. Demo Caveats and limitations being this is for the demo there are somethings you cant do yet. you cannot negotiate time limits with the other player. there is a flat 5 day limit for all trade deals. you cannot trade one token type for another other than cash. if you want to trade farm for power, then you must first trade farm for cash, the trade cash for power. you can only trade a total number of tokens equal to the number of neighbor connections you have multiplied by 20. basically each connection gives you 20 frieght space to trade with. each token you trade (either buy or sell) will take up 1 freight space. for the demo this is not a big dea, but, will become important for larger cities later on. this number may also be dependant on the type of road making the connection (I have only used small avenues so far). I hope this primer helps people make better trading decisions and also sparks some debat and ideas about trading in Cities XL. Discuss.

I will start with the good since that puts a positive spin on things: THE GOOD The token system they have designed is interesting and is certianly a different way to make a CB game. we are all very used to the RCI modle of SC4 but this token system, I think, adds another level of complexity to the game which is something many of us are looking for in our simulations. I do think that it still needs some balancing to make it more effecitve. the music that was playing was quite nice. it was soothing and relaxing. There was only 1 theme playing throughout the entire demo though and it got annoying after a few hours. I assume there is only one piece of music because it is the demo so I won't list that as a bad point. the roads and zoning are pretty much as advertised with straight, curved, and angled roads. there are a lot of different types of zoning as well as ploppable buildings. there are a lot of different kinds of roads, more than vanilla SC4 but not as many as with NAM, but, NAM is third party custom content so it is not a fair comparison. I did like the tutorial as it showed the very very basics of how the game works. there is still a lot of details that the tutorial does not show, but, I guess that is up to the player to discover while building their city which is a good thing. other than a bumpy start with installation, I had a very smooth gaming experience. I had no crashes, no glitches, no freezes and I played for at least 5 hours straight until I hit my city limit. I had a few FPS issues but that was due to my system being old, not the fault of MC. even with an old system the graphics still looked good, but, there were a few graphic errors I noticed which will be discussed in a subsequent section. THE BAD I understand that this was the demo and perhaps some things were left unfinished or just not up to full spec, but, since I have nothing else to compare it to, I will have to be honest with my observations. Trading If I don't speak of anything else then I must speak to the trading. the trading has lots of bugs and lag. the lag was so bad that I never really knew what contracts I had started, what contracts I had canceled and what resources I had available to trade with from second to second. I even tried exiting the trade window and reentering but that did not refresh anything. when I selected a contract to start I got no confirmation messages and nothing updated. sometimes it would work and sometimes it would not. sometimes it would update 5 minutes later after I had given up. I also had a heck of a time cancelling contracts. at one time I had 3 seperate contracts with Omnicorp (because of the lag in setting up the contract in the first place) and I just could not cancel the darn things. There was even a time when I logged out of the game entirely and went to the web site, I saw that I had a contract for heavy industry that I never even knew about during the game! when did that happen? according to the history it happend 30 minuets before I logged out! If trading is supposed the main point of PO then they need to fix it ASAP. I don't know if it is bugged, lag due to bad servers or some combination of the two, but, they need to fix it quick. if they can fix the lag issues in trading then I think it will be a great feature and provide a new level of complexity and strategy, but, for now, it is just too painful to deal with. also, I could not for the life of me figure out how to trade 1 token for another other than cash tokens. for example I wanted to trade agriculture for office space, but, the only option I found was to trade agriculture for money and then trade money for office space. perhaps that part is bugged too? The Graphical User Interface The UI (which has been mentioned before) has some issues. the chat window is always on and cannot be closed although it can be shrunk and put in a corner (but it is still there all the time). many of the statistics windows just don't hang correctly and there are overlapping UI graphics with other windows which makes it difficult to see things. most windows cannot be moved or resized, otherwise it would not be such a problem. also, I think that my resoultion was also causing some of the menu size issues, but, a good UI system should scale with resolution. along with UI menus and resolution, some of text in the game was very small and difficult to read. I play on 1280x1024 if MC is listening. the overlays menu, on the right side of screen, for example, has icons which get bigger when the mouse hovers over them. at first this is ok, since I can still see and select the other, closer, icons which it partially covers. however, after about a second of hovering the bigger icon shifts downward about 30% and I can no longer select the next icon. simple fix I am sure, but annoying none-the-less. Also, there is an icon in the lower left corner with a wrench on it called Menu. this button does nothing. perhaps it is just disabled for the demo. The Avatar the avatar graphics are blocky and the movement is jerky (and I am compensating for my computers age). also, you can't walk around as an avatar, you basically point and click your mouse on the map and the avatar just teleports there. the emoticon actions UI on the left side of the screen will NOT dissapear when you exit avatar mode and since it can't be closed it covers up the residential and industrial build buttons. the only way to make the avatar emotion menu go away is to log out of your city and go back to planet mode. again, a small bug, but, very annoying. also, I never could figure out how to visit the prebuilt city they advertise. I will try again later tonight. Information One of the features of Cities XL game play is that many things are locked at the start of a new city. infact you can't build anything until you make your first connection at the edge of the map. you can build roads, but, that is all. then you unlock the city hall, but nothing else, and then you unlock the omni-token building which gives power, water, trash and fuel. I don't have a problem with this really since that is all explained in the tutorials. what I have a problem with is the requirements for unlocking the other buildings. they are way too vague. some buildings that were locked said I needed the full version so I am ok with that. other buildings that were locked said I needed some level of population so that is ok too (perhaps they could use some balancing with the numbers). but some buildings said they needed more small buildings...? huh? what does that mean? some buildings did not even list what the unlocking conditions were so I had no idea what I was supposed to do. some buildings would unlock and the relock after I placed them and that was confusing as well since I did not know what I did to unlock them in the first place. also, there are many points in the game where you click on a building and instead of giving you numbers it just says things like 'few', 'some', 'many'. this tells me nothing and makes it very difficult to make plans or to know what is going on in my city. I have no idea what the individual populations are of each building, only a general overview of total population in the statistics window. more detailed information would make the game more strategic and more involving. Closing I think I have said enough here. if the trading and UI elements can be fixed then I think the other stuff is pretty minor. I also had issues with the zoning/ploppling and saw a few graphical glitches. the zoning issues are probably just me getting used to a new game and the graphical glitches have been discussed in other topics and are easily fixed with a few patches. overall, I would say that this game has a lot of potential. right now it does not compete with SC4, but, over time it could develop into a great city building game. please continue to discuss your own experiences with the demo and I will continue to add more observations as I continue to play throughout the week.

not at release. although MC has said many times during development that they want custom content they just don't know how to offer it at this time. also, keep in mind that Cities XL is an MMO and how many MMO's do you know allow third party custom content. I know of none, so when MC does begin offering it, it will be the first. another thing to consider is that the maps are more than just textured versions of height maps. maps in Cities XL need to have resource areas placed in strategic ways on the map so even providing the capabilities of custom map creation is going to be difficult. essentially, MC is going to need to develop a whole set of Custom Content creation tools for their game and that is going to take some time to create (especially to make it user friendly and keep the game balanced at the same time. for a single player game like SC4 CC was easy since it was not online. CC for an MMO requires a lot of thought and balance and that is why MC is taking their time with it.

I think the token situation could be improved if they just replaced all the words with numbers. how many qualified workers is 'few'? how much power am I producing with the small power plant and how much power is the manufacturing plant draining? also, I think they have a lot of lag issues during the game. perhaps they were not prepared for the number of people playing the demo. another point I would like to bring up is that I was chatting in game last night and, unless there is a lot of sarcasm going on, the people actually playing the game seemed to like it overall, except of course for the slow trading system. I know there is a lot of negative discussion on this forum but, I guess there are a lot people out there that feel differently. of course, I too have contributed some negative discussion although I do plan to purchase game at release...sorry I am just rambling now...

well, I just got done with my second attempt at cities XL. and once again the trade screen was so laggy and unresponsive. nothing made sense. I had 5 luxury hotels and no holiday tokens. I had 4 power plants and 3 wind mills with no power tokens. I saved and exited and my online account at the official site showed 1 power token and a contract that was lost that I was never informed of. in game I was making +11,000 C every month, according to the online trade I was lacking fuel and only had +110 a month. it is so confusing... if MC can get the in game trade to work then I think they will have a solid start to a good game. without trade, your city stalls too early, so, it is needed.

interesting find, I don't have SLI but I do have an 8800GTX which is still pretty good even compared to more recent cards (768 MB and 128 core processors). my bottle neck is a single core processor running at 2.7 GHz and 2GB of DDR memory! anyway, another thing I noticed is the lack of options settings. there is no audio or graphics settings. those could have been taken away due to the demo, but, I don't see why they would do that. I would also like to continue my review: TOKENs like I said earlier, the token system is worth getting used to. smaller and early buildings only use and produce 1 type of token making balance easy, but, I noticed that as you get further on in development the buildings start to use and produce multiple types of tokens which will make balancing more difficult in a larger, more established city. the kind of complexity I enjoy in my games. one balance issue I saw was that agriculture only seems to be used by retail shops (like grocery stores, restaurants, etc), but, it only took 5 retail shops of low density to satisfy my population of 20,000 people. any more retail shops and they were going bankrupt due to oversaturation of the market. I had about 20 farms going and they were going bankrupt due to not being able to sell enough food. I had about 3 excess tokens for agriculture but the trade system is too laggy at the moment and i could not sell my agriculture. also, I noticed that pretty much everyone else was also selling agriculture because of course they only needed 5 shops to satisfy their populations. the balance issue is that it seems like the retail shops are too effective. we should be able to build more shops in order to satisfy the same population which would require more farms to support allowing us to build a nice farm area without everything going bankrupt. not only that, it would increase the global demad for food and give people a reason to buy it instead of everyone selling it. also, needing more shops gives us a reason to build nice malls and shopping centers (for all those CJer's out there). right now 5 stores is kind of tiny. another issue I have with the token system is that there is no way to know how many tokens your city is producing or using. in the trade screen you can see how many you have extra of or are in need of, but, there is nothing to tell you how much is being made over all. this makes things in the city rather mysterious. if I want to produce extra water tokens then how many water towers do I need to support my own city and make a surplus at the same time. the lack of numbers makes it difficult to plan out the city as well. If I have a contract to sell 2 water tokens and I have 1 left then how many more farms can I build before my water contract is in trouble? I am sure the community could figure it out through trial and error, but, I think a game like this should list the raw numbers somewhere, possibly as part of the individual building stats. click on a farm and it says it uses .25 water tokens and produces .3 farm tokens for example.

wow, that is a short glimpse! try uninstalling and reinstalling. I had a crash error when I installed the first time, a reinstall fixed the issue for me. also, remember that there is an entire continent of people downloading the demo and the patch this week so servers might be a little slow.

however, I guess I can use this opportunity to discuss some other observations I had about the demo which were not really good or bad. Zoning I did not like the idea that ALL buildings/lots are the exact same size and shape; square. there are no rectangular lots, or lots of different sizes. this leads to some lots that take up more space then they should (single family housing) and makes some buildings smaller than they should (large office buildings). however, after playing with their free form zoning tool and seeing how they give you the option to zone by blocks, or by 1 zone at a time, it would be much more cumbersome if there were different zone sizes. comparing to SC4, we did not know the zone size ahead of time and just painted an area with a zone type. then different buildings could move in as they found room to fit whether they were 1x1 or 3x3 or 5x4 or what ever. unfortunately at this point I feel the '1 zone fits all' concept is going to be a limiting factor in Cities XL longevity, but, once custom content is enabled a good artist knows how to work with any limitation.

dude, that is way off topic. this is a thread about the demo for a completely different game and, this entire section of the forum is for Cities XL, not SC4. please go to the SC4 general discussion forum to ask your question. \/ and please dont encourage him...

I just added a second bridge going in the other direction from the first bridge and had it go all the way to the city connection. that worked for me. frankly though, don't let the tutorial bog you down, it might be a little buggy. if you can't get it to work, just quit that one and move on to something else. you only have 7 days to play the demo after all.

that does seem odd. are there no mouse over tool tips to explain what the numbers mean? those numbers should have some kind of units attached to it. are those cash tokens, actual cash, number of other tokens, people, apples? I'll be downloading the demo tonight so I have no clue.

90K in debt may be a reason, the game may have a debt limit before you are kicked out of office. there might also be other losing conditions such as residents not being satisfied enough for too long of period. I don't have the demo yet so I don't really know what your experiencing. silos may be triggered by the number of agriculture tokens you are producing, the number of farms indirectly affects your agriculture production. if you have few farms that are producing efficiently that could also unlock them vs having lots of inefficient farms. ***also, ginge51, there is an edit button at the bottom of each of your posts. double posting is considered bad form on these forums. you are new though, so we will give you a break this time ***

you are correct. a cash token is worth 10 credits, not 1000. They must have updated the FAQ because I just checked it and it says just that; 1 token = 10 cash flow.

Originally posted by: LordOscar Some interesting parts : "The corner-stone is a solid city building game. We’re going for the Sim City 4 spot." quote> WTF? you cannot compete with SC4 if you remove mass transit, only give us 5, non-linkable maps and no ability to add custom content. What were they thinking? "The second challenge is to give easy access to the genre. (...) But we did a survey of 70,000 [City Life] registered players and we discovered that 83% told us that the game was too difficult [to get into]. (...) The unique challenge is to ease the entrance to the game (...)" quote> Did they ever ask what was difficult about it, perhaps it was that whole social web thing they had going on there and had nothing to do with city building part, but, I guess people will make up what ever statistics they want to hear. "We’re integrating it with full social network functionality (...) We want a guy to fail to make the contracted resources, and then receiving an angry e-mail from someone else. We want that kind of thing to happen. (...) I think it’ll be like natural selection." quote> no comment on this... not sure what he is talking about here... "[solo players] may not play for a few weeks, (...) They’re not willing to spend three hours a day playing. We don’t want to push them into an experience where their progression is limited to the time they have to put in. That’s not this type of game. These people have more money than they have time. (...) The business model must reflect what people are willing to buy." quote> *blink* *blink* what "solo players" are he refering to? I play my games every day and on the weekends I may spend 5-8 hours at a time on the computer playing my games and I work a full time job. my games are my stress relief; my hobby. I have more money than time? when did this happen? Why don't people tell me these things? perhaps he should have stressed who he was refering to by "these people". I am 'willing to buy' a complete game, not some hyped up demo version which is what the single player is turning out to be. "Journalist : [With Cities XL], everything you pay for is extra on top of what a traditional City game would be. Jerome Gastaldi: If we were leaving out content from a soloable game, we could have a back lash. But we’re not going to do that." quote> your not going to do what? take mass transit out of single player? ok, thats nice of you for being honest with us *end sarcasm*.

Since this site is going to be the proxy forum for Cities XL I would like to re-establish one of the topics from the offical forum that I had fun participating in. This topic is for people to list their ideas and suggestions for future GEMs. We already know that a ski resort and beach resort GEM are going to be available. some things to consider about GEMs are that they need to follow a few basic rules: 1. They should be able to sustain themselves as a fully fuctional Tycoon Game in some aspect (micro management of something withing the city) 2. They should be able to affect the city in some useful way (increase tourism, provide new sources of industry/power/money, attract some kind of citizen or business, etc). 3. They should be able to be seen in the main city as some kind of building or lot that can be selected in some way. For example a weather GEM does not make much sense, but, a zoo GEM is a great idea. That being said I will start off with some of my ideas. feel free to discuss GEMs at your lesiure. Hospital GEM - This would allow you to build a privately owned health care complex which could be anything from a small clinic to a large university cancer research facility. it can take the burden off of your city funded health care system and perhaps even provide health boosts to the city depending on what kind of medical research you do (cancer, aging, mental health, child care, cardiac, etc). this GEM could also create new events for the city that are based on Health issues. instead of just having a percentage/number for the overall health of your city, it could give details about the cities health and provide different kinds of research paths to ensure your citizens are properly cared for. it might even provide a new kind of tradeable health care token which allows citizens from other cities with health care problems to use your health complex which then increases the overall health of the other city. Justice GEM - this would allow you to build and micro manage a complex justice system, including a police HQ with SWAT research, forensics labs, court system for criminal and civil cases and even a prison system with various levels of security. this GEM would benefit the city by providing extra protection, increasing safety and attracting higher quality residents to the city. This GEM could created new events for the city based on different kinds of crime including a more complex criminal system. are drugs becomming a problem in downtown? fund a vice unit! Trade your security tokens and house other cities criminals in your prisons. Fire and Rescue (FAR) GEM - This would be like the justice GEM only for fire stations; Fire HQ, special rescue teams. this could create new disasters in the city beyond the standard building fire. there could be different types of fires (electrical, arson, chemical, wood, wildfire). there could also be floods, mudslides, earthquakes, building collapse, sinkholes, and each type of disaster would require special training for your fire and rescure staff. a well played FAR GEM would increase overall safety in your city and attract more citizens as well as making the standard fire stations in the city more efficient (putting out fires faster). Trade safety tokens and reduce other cities likely hood of disaster (simulates sending your rescue crews to other cities to help out in times of need).

We have all gotten used to the style of SC4 having played it for so many years. once we start using the bendy roads of Cities XL we will get used to it and we will start to see great cities from great city builders and we will all be inspired by the new look. we just need to give it time. I personally have been waiting for "bendy roads" for many, many moons and I am glad to finally see some one implement it in a modern game. I agree that having square lots makes bendy roads difficult to use, but, MC has the ability to alter this later with patches (at least I hope so). all games like this are a little rough at first, but, if we give it some time I am sure it will turn out very nice and easy to use.

that is interesting to me. I would like to experiment with a farming community when the game is released. I won't be able to play this game for a while though, I need a better comp. if you can post some pics along with your findings I would be very interested to see what you have.