ImaginIllyar

This site is a great place to see what regions/cities have what: http://www.simcityplanningguide.com/2013/08/region-photos.html

I've been playing it a little over 2 months now and absolutely love it. There are still some bugs but nothing that would stop me from playing. I recently switched to playing in offline mode to take advantage of some of the great new mods out and I do find it performs better than it did online.

I agree!

I'm looking forward to seeing that series. One fine tuning tip I forgot to mention - I noticed the best effect if I turned the casino back on just as the tourists started coming out of the hotels and going into the original casino (with tourist map on). My recent casino city has 4 Elegant Casinos. 2 are maxed out with 8 Roulette houses and the other 2 have one of the clubs and 7 Roulette houses. The ones with all Roulette houses make 600,000+/hour and the ones that have the clubs make 500,000+/hour.

Ever notice this? You have one successful casino that's been running fine for a while so you open another next to it. The first one continues to succeed but the new one just doesn't get any visitors, day after day it loses more and more money. I've found that if you just close the second casino for one in game day or so and then open it again all of a sudden it starts making money. It's worked for me in two cities now, both in the Verdant Jungle region and using the elegant casino. Just thought I'd pass this on in case others find it useful.

I suspect that many of the decisions for SimCity 2013 were made in hopes of increasing the fan base and attracting those that have not played previous versions. I'm new to SimCity and have only been playing a little over 2 months. If SimCity 2013 looked like SimCity 4 (crappy graphics) I wouldn't be playing it at all.

I feel like I must be the only one who doesn't mind the small city maps. I tend to make every city some sort of specialization and haven't found a large RCI population necessary at all. I always set up a utilities city and the Great Arcology to provide extra workers when I start a new region. A smaller population makes it easier to keep people happy with services, more room for specialization buildings, less traffic issues and more room for tourists and the fun stuff. There is much more profit to be made with specializations than RCI anyway. Overall, everything just seems to work more smoothly and is less buggy and more stable with less people. More people does not necessarily mean more money, in fact, in my experience it can mean less. I can get 40,000 or so tourists in a city with less than 10,000 residents and all works well, I don't need bigger city maps.

The high-speed Germain train doesn't seem to have this problem. It looks great too