esa1234

I would agree that the game becomes progressively difficult in direct proportion to population. After you hit one million, in my opinion, the difficulty hits a plateau. It remains a challenge to maintain resources for your city, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes 2nd nature. With that in mind, though, I do think the game is too easy to master. Back to SC4, as others have mentioned, I'm still tinkering and learning after what seems like a decade of playing it. 1/2 the fun (and frustration) is filing through the hordes of user created bats/mods/models/nams/etc. Cities XL cannot compete with this because it's new, so hopefully that complaint gets treated with contempt. However, it would have been a serious nod to the community if MC had given more than passing thought to custom content. Had that happened, and players were able to implement some type of their own models into the game, I bet we'd be hearing more about great looking new buildings and a little bit less about XL's shortcomings. In the end, yeah, XL is way too easy when it works properly. I say that because XL's trade system isn't exactly sailing in calm waters. As it stands, it's really difficult to get anything done, but if it worked the way it should, it'd be easy.

Aside from the aforementioned issues, does anyone else notice that you have to physically exit your city to the main menu and re-enter your city in order for all resources to update properly? I've got 2 500k+ cities in SP that exhibit the same problem. It's also worth mentioning, again, that all these issues were identified during closed beta. The beta was PO, and the problems were abated, but never resolved. Extremely dissapointing to find the same issue in the release version.

I'll give this thing a fair shake, but I have to agree with some of the negative remarks posted thus far. The game was definitely touted as an MMO type "experiment," but there was also a good deal of advertisement regarding its playability as a single player game. Stripping the game of mass transit for single player is begging for dissent and discord, and I have to agree with that complaint. The only other thing I'm willing to be negative about at this point of XL's short life is the game's seemingly buggy state. I was a part of beta, and it seems to me that many well known bugs are still present. That, however, has been stated by many people. Now, if only there was a way to set hot keys........