Be Excellent To Each Other

Amaze

Really do want this but also can't afford. However, chances of me buying it anyway increase with alcohol consumption

it sounds very awesome, looking forward to some screenshots from you guys

SimCity UK is a fan group, not an official EA group.

Classy EA. Classy.

Anyway! I'm having great fun now that I can play the thing. I've set up a backwoods city called Vlautin Sound. Let's take a look...

With an elite squad of surveyors I climbed the side of one of Mt. Cinder 's foothills and looked out across the expanse that I would call my city. Well, I say expanse, but new congressional rules set a limit on how big my Nation of Beexville city could be. All merely to protect the endangered llamas. Damn red tape!



I set up shop. Scouting out the coal reserves showed them to be on the plains. The nearest one being just on the cliff edge above the beachside community I planned on founding. I figured it was best to deplete this seam early on, and roll my mines further away as my city expanded, so I picked a nearby spot to start off with. A sexy blue water-tower began pumping up the life juice from the aquifers and a wind plant plucked energy from the air, while a poo-dispenser shunted my citizen's discharges away to a far off corner of the map. My beloved little sims were ready to move in.

These were dirt cheap properties for dirt poor residents, so dirt roads seemed to answer. A more advanced road network would be reserved for my industrial zone. The little dudes quickly moved in, setting up their trailer homes and cabins. So long as the glaciers didn't melt, this beachside community would surely enjoy their little paradise.



The population hit one thousand and they clamoured for a City Hall, and I delivered. I figured it was time to get some industry up and running too, those Spongebob Squarepants toys don't make themselves. Seven industrial units later and I unlocked the right to build a coal mine. At last! Now my city could become true-blue-collar!



And so the following day I looked out over the bay with a sandwich in my hand and nodded proudly at my fledging little city. Where would it go next? A clue lay in the little note a city hall flunky handed me... a department of Education had been built in a far off city by some Hot-Shot Mayor named Trooper, and I would be reaping the benefits? How and in what way I couldn't wait to find out...

Bought. Can't wait to see the can't login screen!

I've gone education and tourism, so you should be able to buy loads of cool stuff if you want. My new town is flourishing! I seem to have built a place that the wealthy want to live in

Hold on, i'll take some pics.

Can I have Grand Haven please?

umm...

Whitewater Crossing
Mineyman

please mr pete. Erm... Dimrill is my Origin thing I think. Yes, I think so.

Summit Vista in all it's glory, note the fern shaped layout, with central commercial avenue.





The scummier end of town...





The nicer end...




Not sure i'd want to live here!

Ah, just read your update Pete. I'll take Ingot thingy. Miney. Me.

Good god Trooper your city looks fab, I'm going to be embarrassed to lower the tone of the region with my efforts

Walked into Game just to see what it cost. 42 quid! Fuck that!

Shit damn, this game looks nice!

Looks a jaggy hell on my 3 year old guffuxcurd

Okay, adding people now. Sorry about the delay everyone, my connection went down at the gallery. Shift's over though and am back home and back in.

I just had a scan around Trooper's city, and to my amusement Pete's mayor's car was driving around the streets

I also now have terrible city envy, Trooper, how the hell did you build such a place so quickly? I dicked around for hours on my first effort, hardly managed to use up half the available space, and it was a sack of shit to boot!

Does it have really high requirements then? I only have WMware on the Mac or my Acer Revo which has integrated graphics.

Might be better waiting for an Xbox or Mac version. Although I'm not sure I'd want EA spaffing their spyware all over my work Macbook (hence I'd prefer an Xbox version).

Not really. It runs spiffy whizzy okay, but everything looks like a PS2 game. I might have to do the dreaded fucking around with turning shit on and off and see what craps out the fuppuz most.

I gather the reason that the cities are so small is so that the requirements can be kept pretty low. I remember at GDC they said that they wanted it to run on "your mom's laptop".

Mac version says it will need 10gb of space. Not prepared to give that up unless it will let me run it from an external drive.

The Acer would be ideal. Although, er, perhaps not as I refuse to let it connect to the internet. Hmmm.

You see, here's the thing. If I installed it on the Macbook I'd play it into the ground when I was away from home or on trains, often without a net connection.

But it needs a net connection.

As lovely as Pete's pictures are, fact is that every time I go "I want", I can think of 10 reasons why I shouldn't (not including I hate EA). And if the game had been £29.99 in Game earlier, I'd probably have a PC copy by now regardless.

Lots of roads and zoning them will get you a lot of cash quickly, to then build more roads etc...
It can quickly get overwhelming though, you won't be able to keep up with the crime if you build to quickly.

I'll post my first two towns when I get home, this was town number three

Gah! This is going to swallow my life, I can feel it in my water. Which runs under the streets.

Ha! This is brilliant

As Dimrill has already noted, I can feel the life-suction already.......

The BEEX region seems to be working well too, even with just four of us there. I overstretched my development and my fire coverage didn't keep up, at which point when I had more fires than I could cope with, a fire engine turned up from Trooper's town and my fire chief reminded me to say thank you to my neighbour

I've been volunteering services towards Pete/Trooper/Dimrill as and when I expand any of my services. (Every time you expand something you seem to get one unit for yourself, and one that you can volunteer to a neighbour.) I also got a chunk of Simoleons from Pete when I was a bit short on cash.

Early days to call it yet maybe, but I think they might actually be onto something with this always-on multiplayer aspect of the game.....

Good news: EA are going to give everyone a free game to make up for the balls up.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a464464/simcity-players-to-receive-compensation-for-server-issues.html

Bad news: It's an EA game.

"Grimddd" will take a chunk of the region. I don't mind which.

[edit] Actually Soiree Sands looks nice.

I must stop playing this now (AND NOT BECAUSE I WANT TO), as it's nearly time for Saturday night BF3 shenanigans, but my word the hours just melt away when you're immersed in this game.

My city is a load of shit (feel free to have a look around once you're in the Beexville region ) but I am now starting to get a feel for how it hangs together far better than I did before.

I'm in the process of trying to convert my city into a GAMBLING METROPOLIS as that's apparently what my region is best suited to (tourism), so I'm going to be attempting to eliminate industry and ramp up education as well (education and tourism are a good match according to Pete's synopsis), I'm already buying in power from Trooper and I'm having to ramp up the police as the gambling side of my city starts to make its presence felt.

My density is finally starting to increase and I'm chucking in services and parks as and when I can afford to do so to get the land values up, but I think industry is holding me back with its dirty belching and pollution.

The small size of the city plots isn't holding me back at the moment, as this game is far more focused on improving what's already built rather than simply building more of everything.

The BEEX region itself seems to working nicely too, as far as I can tell we're all helping each other out with services and cash, I'm not quite sure how we're operating in terms of tourism/trade/etc but I haven't found the graphs for that yet

Truly splendid stuff - as good as I'd dared to hope it might be. And by crikey we've been waiting for a new Sim City game for a long time.

Are you able to invite me before you go, or is it just Pete?

Maxis retweeted this earlier.

It's the 'owner' of the region I believe who has to do it, so that would be Pete as he started it off. I had to wait to get an invite from him to join the region. (And Origin itself won't tell you that you've got one, you have to go into the game and then click on the 'invites' icon up in the top right hand corner of the screen on the title screen.)

Hang on a couple of the guys are late (AS USUAL) I'll just fire up Sim City and check if I can do an invite.

It looks like I can do invites to the game to anyone on my friends list, are you 'grimddd' on Origin itself Grim...? I don't have you as a friend on there.

EDIT - Request sent.

My first couple of cities.

Neilville. I hive of scum and villany. Crime is rampant, germs are everywhere, the air is thick with pollutants, and so is the ground.

Take a look at that smog!




And the never ending germ protest, this has been going on since pretty much day 1 and shows no signs of stopping.





Town 2 was Balls.
Left set of balls was residential, middle square commercial, right set of balls industrial. All should be fine right?
Wrong, the residents are poor and abandon their houses in droves due to having no job and no money, the factories close due to there being no workers. Yet no matter how many tram stops or bus stops I put down, they never seem to want to hook up with each other Because the sims have no money, they don't spend in the commercial zone, so shops close everyday. Add to that the constant influx on criminals from Neilville, and things aren't really that healthy...

Behold the oddly-named and massively over-crowded Dizzyland.



There's lots of rubbish

Looks like Birmingham.

The whole fucked up server issues with this game is no surprise for me. I've played FIFA Ultimate team since it started and every single year at the start on the internet trading and then on the game itself the servers have been overloaded and barely anyone can use it. EA are insistent on using their own servers and having online passes for games but they are probably the worst for online gaming from my own experience, again to go back to FIFA ultimate team, their servers are down so much it's ridiculous, especially for a part of a game that's been going on for 5 years.

Fucking Dizzyland, constantly sending over arsonists and robbers!

I really want to get this, just to create a horrendous city that ruins it for everyone.

But it seems that Grim... has already done that!

How did you get so many skyscrapers and stuff so quickly? I really must be doing something wrong. It takes my sims ages to decide to go to higher density, even when I give them parks and schools and they're all happy.

In all fairness Runcle the servers haven't really been 'fucked up', I've had one wobble since release (and I've been playing it since release) when it presented me with a 20 minute queue to connect, other than that it's been rock solid.

Trooper and Pete had a couple of issues, but in the main it's been fine, and by all accounts Dimrill and Grim... were straight in with no issues.

Having now experienced how the shared regions work, I have to give a thumbs-up to the model that Maxis have gone with, it really does add a whole new dimension to Sim City and I've been surprised at how well it works.

Yes EA should have put a basic offline mode in there, and yes it sucks that one day they'll turn the servers off, but in the here and now, it's a bloody good game and it's working well - and even then, they've issued a very forthright public apology for the problems that people have had and we're all going to get a free game.

On balance, not that bad, really?

The plot size is starting to become really limiting once your cities grow in size.
I have a constant call for more industrial and residential zones, yet my zone is full to the brim of both. Also, I'm supposed to be tourism specialised, so I think i'll plop down an arena. Pick it up and it is almost the size of a quarter of my zone in and and of itself!

Annoying. All this cool stuff to put down, but you can't because there isn't the room.

Had another wobble this morning. Went into my town and I was missing my airport? Seems I had lost about 30 minutes, which was annoying. Carried on playing, then visited Dizzyland to see if there was anyway I could put a roadblock in Came back to my town and the airport was back, and the stuff I had done in the last 5 minutes was lost this time.

I think the idea is to bulldoze over some of the shittier things in your city and replace it with the really cool stuff.

I'm logging in now (hopefully ) and I'm going to see if I can start to successfully deindustrialise my area to focus on tourism.

Sure, but there just isn't enough space. I don't have any shitty things left to bulldoze, and if I bought more than half a dozen cool things, there wouldn't be anywhere left I could zone to make sure the city can thrive.

A little trip through Summit Vista in the dead of night.
No idea why it records it so choppy, when you play the game it is silky smooth, also the camera is a bitch to control when you are that close to stuff...

Ack, famous last words.



Also, like an utter twat I accepted the 'Do you want to learn how to claim a new city?' tutorial and then found myself locked into it with no way to get out of it unless I actually claimed a new city, (I think it may have coincided with the servers going down hence it all sort of locked up a bit), as such I've now claimed another city in the region, I'll see if I can unclaim it when the servers come back up, or if maybe Pete as the boss of the region could just hoof me out please if I can't do that?

What great work are we going for? I'd quite like to see an arcology I'm already recycling and creating metal and plastic but I can easily swithc plastic to alloy, and someone will need to start making TVs...

You can abandon towns, so I assume that will free it up again

Well that'll teach me to open my big fucking mouth.

Decided to go for a nice stroll around the quay whilst waiting for the servers to come back up, now we have this:



I could choose another server that has space available immediately, but of course that won't have Beexville on it.

Oh well, I'll make lunch instead.