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[SimCity] Offline mode is here, just gotta connect online to get the patch first.
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If you bulldoze a jail? They are free! Criminals will be rehabed after a certain period of time in jail. It's safe to bulldoze it then.
The only glaring bugs I see is recycling, and casinos. The trade issue is probably something to do with the servers so its probably not a bug. Traffic? I think traffic is fine now. Once you hit 200k Sims, you have more population density then what the biggest cities in the real world have. You damn well better have traffic problems. Server issues are the biggest issues right now. I have to agree with Delph, I can't really agree with a single thing you said.
I entered the poll for regions, but I'm not really fussy which region to join, or on what server. Let me know if you'd like another mayor in the area.
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Not complaining, just curious. It seems like the game is designed to reach a point where taxes doesn't cover everything.
Which is something I WILL complain about. Why give me the option of changing taxes when you start taxes at pretty much the highest rate people were willing to pay?
PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
Crying realism for the traffic is hilarious considering how unrealistic the game is.
I've reached 300k population and had my profits around 10k.
It was one of my earlier cities too, so I didn't know how to avoid many of the traffic issues and zoning properly.
Now, reaching 600k people for the max city hall level... dunno, I might be able to do it now since I know a lot of tricks, especially that traffic layout stuff.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've had tourism plummet once or twice, but it rebounds later.
I'm beginning to think that people have different versions of the game launcher, since some of us have had little to no issues at all when logging in, and I've noticed that on the Origin friends list, some people show up as "Playing Simcity Limited Edition" and others as "Playing" (As in, it's blank).
Server issues are the biggest issue right now. But they don't annihilate the presence of other problems, just obfuscate them.
Population density brings up another problem with the game; the diminishing scaling of active Sims as a percentage of the total population. By the time you hit a supposed population of 200,000, you probably only have 25,000 to 27,000 'actual' Sims in your city.
I can't access my personal region right now ( MAAAAAXIS ), so I can't pull numbers from that... so random post from the thoroughly inundated Answers HQ for SimCity!
If I remember correctly, there are half as many shopper agents as there are worker agents... so you've got a total number of active, moving people in the city of 22,253 at a population of 129,416. And the higher the population gets, the lower the percentage of it actually exists, so this won't go up all too significantly at a 'population' of 200,000. A population density of 22,253 in four square kilometers isn't high. At all.
This all further ignores the fact that many Sims commute is going to be something less than half a kilometer, and it would take them all of fifteen minutes to walk to work.
that is pretty
Not to defend their traffic model, but traffic running the quickest route is not a feasible, real-time solution, particularly given that the game is a situation in which the network can be changed on the fly, as well as the sources and sinks. Computationally, the algorithm is too intensive. They could use a heuristic, but most heuristics to the problem would be incomprehensible to a layman. Shortest path is really the only reasonable solution I can think of that can be computed quickly enough, consistently, and can be understood without having to read seven research papers.
They could have sims at least prefer higher density roads to lower density roads when weighting which road to take, for example.
NA West 4, invite anyone you want... hopefully our region chat starts working.
I've noticed when SimCity fails to get on a server, it puts my status as invisible for no reason... might be part of why you see friends show up like that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of my cities has 15k profits an hour AND a very profitable oil industry.
I suspected this as well, but after being on the Antarctica (lol) server for 2 days now, those numbers are much more accurate of the population number that is in my city. I suspect now that it is being delayed in updating. Probably to do with the server issues.
But you do have a valid point.
So plant trees, watch for them to die and plant more? Is that how it works? I know about the daisy chaining thing on parks.
Origin: Broncbuster
Casinos aren't worth trying, but I knew this.
Tourism is iffy.
That leaves mining, electronics, and trade for specialization. Oil drilling is out, there's no oil on Huckleberry Isle.
I guess you can do several though, like, a Trade Depot makes sense to me even if I'm not specializing in trade.
I kinda just plopped shit down wherever as well, which is kinda biting me on the bum now. I need to begin making a huge streetcar / avenue loop and redesign my city layout.
Also: Maxisman seems to be pointless. I haven't tried Dr. Vu but the tooltip suggests he's a huge benefit... at the cost of a region wide crimespree.
Spoilered for really really long opinion
Well yeah very much so actually. They have been pretty forthcoming about the efforts they have taken, the have noted the issue with traffic routing, I have played over 40 hours of the game thus far, and while the recycling is irritating, and I crash out of the game once or twice each session I am overall very happy with what I have done.
I've lost cities due to bugs, I've been locked out of servers, I was unable to log in to Arcadian Delta until 4 days after it was launched, On the first couple days it was rare that I could even play at all. I have made cities on probably 7 or so different servers and only until recently I couldn't even play with one of my friends because he was always bugged out of the servers we joined.
Do those things bug me? Yeah quite a bit.
Is the game still fun? Yeah quite a bit more.
Do I still look forward to getting home and playing it each day? Yup
Then again I long ago I realized that if a game has any online element whatsoever that it would not work properly at first. Multiple that by the popularity of the game.
I've been through many an MMO release, the release of D3, and countless other games where things were quite a hell of a lot worse than this. (SWG anyone?) If I can't play the game I go do something else and try again later. I wasn't able to play the game 2 weeks ago and somehow my life went on. The only difference between then and now is that I have paid them $80. Actually that's not quite accurate I paid them $80 a couple months ago, so what's one more week? I know that the developers are not sitting in their gold lined thrones cackling madly at the turmoil they have created. I know that they are typically hard working people who want nothing more than to have people enjoy their game as much as they do.
EA is another story mind you. I don't like them at all, but so long as people buy their games and they get large developers on board they are an evil I will endure. If they offered Simcity in some other way outside of Origin I would have jumped on that instead, so issues with them are pretty much par for the course.
Pretty much what I don't agree with is the attitude people take on the situation, where you assign blame, and what you think of the communication. Maybe i'm just getting old but I remember back when you didn't get any information on why servers were down. They were just down (If you were lucky there was a server status website somewhere), and this was on games I was paying monthly for. The main websites were hammered and you couldn't get information that way, there was no twitter or facebook for devs to reach out to the community through at all. So all you could do was sit there and rage.
I just don't rage as much anymore. I don't feel like I am owed anything, I find the fun in the game and compare it to the problems and examine the net result. If I am having fun overall I really don't care about minor inconveniences. (Oh hey my recycling plant broke, I'll bulldoze it and rebuild it and tweak how I had it set up and see if I can get it running longer).
Maybe I'm just numb to it? After 15, 20, 30, or however many failed AAA title launches (Or rather just game launches in general) I just don't see why there is fresh outrage each time, it's great when a game releases with no issues, it should not be surprising when it doesn't. Yet every time it's the same old outrage, and every time it's forgotten in a couple weeks once the kinks are ironed out. Until the next game.
It sucks, sure I can agree with that, but seeing EVERY new thread blow up with the same old thing is just tiresome. I can understand that some of the frustration most likely comes from fans of the series not being happy that there is a mandatory online element. I can also understand that the issues with the game being related to that online element must also be frustrating.
But the level to which people have escalated the issue is mind boggling to me. But again that could very well be that I'm just conditioned to this stuff and I ran out of rage years ago.
But when you construct your argument using the following:
You quickly move from an actual argument to just mindless rage. And that is what I don't agree with. I understand it. Hell I've been there. But I don't agree with it, because it is not constructive. It is just noise. You basically get to the point where honestly it doesn't matter what they do because it can never be enough, or correct in your eyes (I mean you complained about a smiley...., and took them literally because they said 24/7...come on, you are just looking for things to be mad at now)
In short the game release has been bad, just like many before it, and just like many after it will be. And just like all those it will be forgotten in a few weeks, and just like always the game will iron out the bugs and become more polished as it goes. Should it be this way? Probably not. It used to be that games released in a much more polished state because patches to fix issues were much harder to come by (I remember having to search through the developer site and manually download and apply patches
But in the end creating this persona of a greedy game developer that has no regard for the very people he/she is making a game for is pretty much as far from reality as you can possibly get. I don't know if you have met many game developers, or maybe met some bad ones, but in general the entire reason they get into game development is to make games that people enjoy, and generally nothing makes them happier than people playing and having fun with their game.
But maybe I just have a rosier outlook on the industry than most people. That's entirely possible
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http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/03/12/game-scoop-simcitys-other-problems
The ground pollution "should" dissipate naturally if the source of the pollution is taken care of. I say should because I don't know, but I feel like it makes sense. I do know that planting tress will suck up ground pollution, and then die from it.
a water pump with the filtration addon should also suck the pollution out the ground.
MaxisMan is pretty useless. He can only initially rescue one injured sim at a time for a fee of $500. Once he's earned enough renown points from doing that you gain the privilege of buying him a new sports car to chase criminals with... for $1,000 each. I didn't get much further than that since my city was choked in traffic by that point. It was amusing to watch him sit in gridlock with his superhero music playing around him, though.
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Yes and no.
Basically Yes. At first when you place the processor plant if you go to your tech level view you can see it will have the corresponding tech level you have achieved. It will produce processors based on that so long as the workers are college educated (or maybe just educated, not sure on this point) Also you can see from the displayed "xxxx processors produced today" at the very bottom when you select your plant.
However it will slowly degrade the tech level over time (pretty sure this is a bug, I think it's just not refreshing the tech level like it is supposed to) and eventually you will be back down to 6000 or 4600 per day instead of up around 9800 crates/day (assuming full upgrades)
You can fix this by bulldozing and rebuilding the plant temporarily but I'm pretty sure overall it's a bug.
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I've tried MaxisMan. He's pretty useless; he only helps your city when you pay him to.
At first he can only rescue a single injured sim in your town for $500 - and he never always successfully did that before returning to base in my city. Once he gets enough renown points by helping injured sims you can buy him his 'Turbo Machine' which lets him capture a single criminal sim for a grand IIRC. I didn't get much further with him than that because that particular city got choked by traffic and it was amusing to watch him sit in gridlock with his sports car and funky superhero music playing.
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I've tried MaxisMan. He's pretty useless; he only helps your city when you pay him to.
At first he can only rescue a single injured sim in your town for $500 - and he never always successfully did that before returning to base in my city. Once he gets enough renown points by helping injured sims you can buy him his 'Turbo Machine' which lets him capture a single criminal sim for a grand IIRC. I didn't get much further with him than that because that particular city got choked by traffic and it was amusing to watch him sit in gridlock with his sports car and funky superhero music playing.
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It does go away over time, I've seen it. Radiation however, Radiation is forever
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Your Maxisman sounds awesome. I must have gotten some kind of temp apprentice covering for the real guy since he just popped out of his house when I prodded him to, did one thing, then drove straight back home.
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"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Neither should anyone else. Do not encourage these incredibly foolish and harmful trends! I feel like the trainwreck of simcity launch provides an opportunity to draw some clarifying lines in the sand.
Unfortunately for me, fortunately for sim city fans, beneath all the mess simcity is actually a promising game and as evidenced by this thread, lots of people are playing it and enjoying it. It would be nice if developers would learn and say "Maybe we shouldn't require online access for single player" but I doubt that is going to be their takeaway.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
It could of been a single player game like the old ones, but they decided to go in a new direction, and try something else.
I agree in principle that a game like Sim City should have an offline single-player component. There really is no reason why I shouldn't be able to make a region of my own, offline, and populate it with my own cities without EA's servers borking it all up.
However, I bought Sim City knowing that it was always-online because the multiplayer aspects of it sounded so cool. The biggest gripe I have with the game is that the multiplayer stuff isn't working correctly... I mean, the region-sharing stuff is awful, but also what's really killing my buzz about this game is that I cannot even find public games to play in because the feature that is supposed to allow me to search for games is completely broken.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think the 'online only' component is what's wrong with this game. What's wrong is that EA/Maxis released this game before it was even remotely ready, and that is what should be unacceptable to fans.