Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd be well into this. If there was a Mac version, and my Mac was powerful enough to run the Mac version, and there wasn't this always-on issue to be concerned about. A shared Beexland? Great idea.

Pazland weeps lonely tears.

God damn you people are making me want this. I've just spent my lunch break playing Sim City Deluxe for the first time ever on my iPad, just to get a wee taste of the goodness you lot seem to be enjoying. Alas, it became too tricky to play as the screen became more and more damp through the tears of Sim-envy streaming down my face.

So, the minimum system requirements are higher than strictly necessary.

Not sure if there is free land in Beexville, but chrisriles on Origin, if you could add me, please Pete

Okay, am inviting Beex-stalwart ApplePie and newcomer Teuta, in't that order. Wow, surprised how massively this has taken off amongst you lot. I was expecting it'd just be me, Trooper and inevitable cheevo-hooverer Dimrill for a whiles. Next time I think you're right Trooper, a 16 city site!

The one good thing about the size of cities, starting a new town in a new region is hardly a chore, you'll fill your zone in an hour...

I wouldn't be against moving to a bigger region right now, as opposed to later on. We could try and co-ordinate a bit better, too.

I'd been uber excited since announcement, then the minimum specs meant I was out and so was all for the ignore - however I got an invite to the closed Beta, which ran fine and so gambled £35 on the DVD over the weekend - seems to be good. Just got booted off servers as the kids got home though...

I'm having an odd issue where high-rise apartments are built on one side of the road, then the lot directly behind it is building on top of those high rises using a massive dirt plateau.

Hey, decided to get me some of that sweet Casino action. As soon as I plopped it all of my highrise office blocks were rebuilt as hotels.

Less than three days later they've all, without exception, gone out of business. Demolished them, new buildings being built there are all hotels again.

Wonderful whacky new Origin bug - everytime Dimrill alt-tabs my computer freezes for several seconds as Origin feels compelled to make a noise and alert me to the fact that he is In/Out of game! Despite me teeth-grindingly deactivating said notification system!

That's excellent shit.

"Your city isn't processing properly. We want to try and recover it." Okayyy... "Rolling back to last processable state, this may take several minutes." Hnngh... now it's been trying to load it for 10 minutes.

I'm holding off on this game until it works a bit better.

If the region is over-populated Pete, feel free to give my city plot over to another willing BEEXer

Plan enacted, all industrial has gone, i'm now pretty much pure commercial and residential with a huge sports arena.

Not going entirely well on the budget front

Worth a read:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03 ... t-this-go/

And via a link from that, this bug list:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a0taq/compiled_list_of_suggestions_and_bug_reports_to/

It's a damn shame to see a game I'd looked forward to so much, (and paid so much for ), be in this kind of state - but there is simply too much wrong with it for me to enjoy it.

I really tried to see the positive side (as documented in this thread), but for now I think I'll stick to games that work properly.

The bug lists and comments elsewhere are starting to validate the observations that we've made in this thread, that there's just too much that's either 'undocumented' or simply not working as intended.

Oh well, at least it was cheap at £71

Gog.com have a great idea:

https://twitter.com/GOGcom/status/309328842345050112

Server problems? DRM-free SimCity 2000 needs no internet to play AND it's only $5.99 http://t.co/NEk7aSBmcC #simcity

— GOG.com (@GOGcom) March 6, 2013

I have sim city xl deluxe something somewhere, I think. Maybe I should dig it out.

It does seem the most optimum city for the zone size is around 150-200k residents, which is a real shame as you can get there in a couple of hours.

I might just reinstall one of these buggers, although as memory serves, SimCity 3000 never played nicely with any NT based operating systems.

SimCity 4 it is then.

Not the way I play it.

Two days on-off play and my city has less than 15k residents! I care not for high populations as of yet, though I have just developed a new ridge hillside of dense residential.

Annoyed at the small city sizes? It's nothing to do with cloud processing, and only tangentially related to the low system spec requirement (put in to increase the game's potential audience) -- the real culprit is that even in 2013, Maxis is apparently incapable of writing a multi threaded simulation engine. Fucking amateur hour.

[spits tea all over keyboard]

Really? Blimey that's beyond shoddy.

So unlikely to be fixed then.

Are the small city sizes a big problem then? I've only really skimmed this thread so apologies if someone has already answered that.

Not the easiest thing to patch in after the fact, as you well know. I suppose nothing's impossible, so maybe the seemingly-inevitable "larger cities" DLC will actually include extensive engine rewrites, meaning DLC purchasers will be paying Maxis a second time to do the job it should have done first time.

Nothings impossible, but I suspect its too expensive for them to bother unless the current single threadedness is a.hack for stabilities sake.

Besides, people have given their blessing to the current size by buying it, so why bother.

Where's the cheapest you lot have seen this? I really want it, as I loved the Beta. But I have no money just now

I was playing Sim City 4 last night, the city sizes are huge, and I can't imagine Maxis were using a multi-threaded engine then, so why is city size so gimped in the new Sim City?

The depth of the simulation doesn't appear to be any less complex in Sim City 4, and it's got regions with neighbours too.

(For the record, if you've got a Sim City 4 disc knocking around, it runs and installs perfectly on Windows 7 64-bit.)

Wait for it to be very cheap, the potential for disappointment is high.

I'm fucking gutted that I dropped seventy-two fucking quid on the fucking thing.

It's because they have mapped every single sim in your city as an individual, which was a grand idea and probably makes for some great emergent gameplay, but means that any city size increase will have an exponential effect on the calculations.
Plus, as dr g mentioned, it seems they don't know how to do that properly...

I kinda agree, I wouldn't say that I am gutted, but I am disappointed in the game as it currently stands. I had a great weekend playing it solidly and thoroughly enjoyed it or that time, but the limitations are such that I'm no clamouring to go back and play some more.

Lewie had a 'trick' to get it for £18 (switch your locale to India and buy it then switch it back to the UK) - however i'd just suggest to keep checking in on Savygamer to see if he finds anything similar

I dunno man, 10 years since the last SimCity game and we end up with tiny city sizes (far smaller than anything since the original Sim City game), a broken enforced online region model, an always-on internet requirement, jittery servers, and no fundamental advances in gameplay since SimCity 2000, which came on two floppy discs.

That's pretty gutting

I was playing Sim City 4 last night and within a couple of hours I was having more fun than I've managed with the new Sim City game, plus I was looking at the massive amount of room I had to expand into, rather than looking at the borders of a tiny city and thinking, 'Hmmmm, that's not very big, is it?'

It's not even like I'm motivated to totally max out my existing city, because I've had a scan round you and Grim...'s cities and it's blatantly apparent how dreadfully limited the scope and scale of the whole thing is.

The only mileage I can see in the new Sim City game is starting your own region and doing all the cities yourself, to get a proper sort of symbiosis going on, and treat the region as one big city, rather than four small ones.

SEVENTY TWO FUCKING QUID

I feel the same way as Trooper, I think. It's pretty, and it's got some neat touches, but it's not as good as I wanted it to be.

Pick one section that we're all struggling with - roads and traffic. You can't even make one way streets, let alone bus lanes. There's no way to encourage people to share rides to work, and it seems that no-one has a bike. People don't move over for emergency vehicles (which don't know how to cross the road - so they'll sit in traffic on the opposite side of the road to a fire so they can get to the end of the road, turn around and come back), and there are no accidents. Buses sometimes go back and forth between two stops - you should be able to set up a route for them to follow with scheduled stops. There's no subway and no monorail - the only thing you can realistically do is to build a road with a tram track in the middle, but you can't do that because you'd have to bulldoze the original road to fit it in (it's wider), and if you do that you'll knock down all the buildings that are along it, including important (and expensive) ones that you've already built and have no way of moving. All the junctions have traffic lights (or stop signs) - there are no roundabouts or give way junctions. You can't name the streets. There are no articulated lorries - in fact, variation between the cars is small.

I honestly could go on - and I'm only talking about the transport part of the game

It's more like Sim Village than Sim City.

Wonder if it already supports threading but they've limited it to target low end hardware? And sell an expansion pack later? It's not like you can just design something so complex and just shove it in as an afterthought.

The only thing stopping me getting it so far is the idea that they'll release 100's of expansions and this is'll end up looking like and expensive beta test.

And bear in mind that there will be no ability to mod the game as all content will have to be EA on line compatible as well.

No longer available, EA pulled it from Origin India!

I will be keeping an eye out. It is expensive everywhere now.

The lack of modding will be a killer later on for me. Sim City IV is still awesome due to the amount of seriously hard work the modding community put in to making buildings and replacing/upgrading the road system. Pity.

EA source confirms there is no cloud computing processing at the sim level, so there's no technical reason it can't have an offline single player game: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03 ... necessary/

I was pondering the Mac version when it comes out, but I think I've just talked myself out of it.

Damn you Dr Gaywood for being 8 minutes ahead of me as I rushed here with that very news.

Also, I concur re Mac version.

You can just smell the DLC around the corner to address mass transit. I think they're probably hoping to milk it to fuck like The Sims. Katy Perry's Firework Castle DLC anyone? No?

And there was me thinking it was the end of the gaming world when Amiga games started to get advertising in them.

[sucks lollipop]

I do rather feel like I've dodged a bullet here.

It's still fun with some great ideas, but it sort of feels like Civilization 5 at the moment. But with added EA cuntery.

Not a great price but posted on Hotukdeals this morning that says its £33.50 from Tesco

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/simcity ... ct-1498971

It appears that's not true either: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/ ... e#27608142