I get that hyperbole is how the internet works, but I've got to wonder where you're getting your feedback. What I've been seeing is lots of people like me who are absolutely freaking out about it, and then lots of people saying that EA has completely ruined the franchise because of reasons. The "lukewarm" contingent is under-represented. I think the accusation came from the fact that almost all of the stuff you mentioned: is included in the game, and several of them are even explicitly covered in their own video. Except for churches, and the actual physical scale of the city maps, it's all there.
Um, this: …does not sound like that: Yes, without sufficient enough scale, those other bits are just insignificant dressing IMV.
So you lied, initially? You didn't just "peer" into the thread, as that sounds like you just took a casual dip. And by your own admission, once again, you've only looked at promo materials, which in any industry are usually woefully ill equipped at giving unbiased information about the game. What it sounds like is that you want SimWorld and instead we're being given SimCity Mark II, which is not what you want. Which is fine. But don't bemoan the game for not having things that aren't even part of the game's premise. That'd be like being pissed that Call of Duty doesn't have enough Master Chief in it.
I would think resources do run out if they're being used up, otherwise there would be no point in emphasizing the cross-city trading that they're trying to do here. While SC4 had unlimited resources of coal or natural gas for power plants, selling the power still used up an accurate fraction of it, and a city that buys the power can't just keep buying infinite power ( I don't think, I haven't tested this in a while). What solution is there then to fix traffic? Is it correct that bulldozing a street is going to get rid of all the connected buildings? Of course, this was usually required in SC4 too, but only on one side if you wanted to build an avenue in place of a road.
Um, no, I did not lie. Perhaps a better word choice selection than "peer" might have been merited, but I did not issue "an intentionally false statement". Your discontent here is irrational and beginning froth over… And no, I was looking for the game to evolve, just like Civilization series or just about any other franchise that has published new versions… …your analogy is bonkers.
I dunno, maybe there's a region-level simulator that's taking care of depleting resources between cities, to handle stuff like that. I can't imagine how they'd handle weird cases otherwise -- like if I'm buying power from my neighbor city's oil plant, and she's buying oil from her neighbor city. It'll be interesting to try out. In the beta, yeah, bulldozing a street removed any buildings using that street. There's a non-destructive "upgrade" tool you can use to move a road up (or down) in the volume of traffic it can handle, but if you're going from road to avenue, you have to demolish everything. My guess is that the way to fix traffic problems is to upgrade the roads as far as they can go, then do as much as you can with mass transit, then see if there's space to add an alternate route to siphon off some of the traffic, and then demolish stuff and replace it with an avenue.
Okay buddy. You're beginning to think that I truly care whether or not you buy the game. There is no "Froth" to my argument. I'm trying to get to the root of what your problem is with SimCity, and you're claiming that you've done all the research, then backpedaling, and now claiming that SimCity5 is no different from SimCity4. Which it obviously is. Very obviously. In fact, that's what most people are complaining about. If you honestly think this counts as some sort of vitriolic attack, the perhaps you need to go back and re-read through lenses that aren't tinted with "Everyone who disagrees with me is attacking me". Because I wasn't, and I'm not. And the analogy is quite appropriate. I'm sorry you don't see why, but further explaining it won't help you any (But if you insisit; you're asking for something beyond the evolution that a game franchise goes through. What you want is to go from SimCity, where you manage cities, to SimNations, where you manage entire countries/nations/quasi-national entities. These two games would be VERY DIFFERENT. So different, that I wouldn't even call SimNations a sequel to SimCity. It'd be like saying that Call of Duty doesn't have enough Master Chief and therefore it's a terrible game.). The fact is, you're upset that SimCity5 isn't the game that you want. Which is fine! My main problem with your post was calling it profound; there was nothing profound about your post, considering it added literally nothing to the discussion (Much like our entire back and forth).
This thread should probably be burned to the ground so we can start over. Christ. I keep vacillating on my preorder, but the fact that this game is worthy of discussion tends to push me towards picking it up from Amazon. I get enough stuff from there regularly that the $20 coupon will get used within a week.
Someone took the time to compile a bunch of info from tweets, the beta, various interviews (etc) about the game into a small "knowledge base" of sorts. Since there's some spoilery stuff in here if you're the type that likes to discover this stuff through gameplay, I'll drop it in spoiler tags (plus it's on the long side):
Cool stuff in there - thanks. In many ways, this seems like an engine ahead of its time. Which is a frequent story in Simcity history. SC3000 had to have its 3-D graphics engine scrapped, and replaced by a more standard 2-d isometric look fairly close to release. Hopefully they'll keep supporting this to the time when computer technology catches up with Glassbox, and we can run large lots (10 million sims+) with this engine.
It almost seems like this would have had a cleaner break with the past SC titles if it had been SimDistrict. I look at these tiles and it makes me think of the various districts and neighborhoods that most actual large cities are comprised of, many of which have their own names and styles. A simulated city makes you envision a whole tapestry - having some of everything - but a simulated district could legitimately only focus on providing a few things and a bunch connected together would form the larger city concept.
Yeah, I have another invite, and I read somewhere that it was 'enhanced' from last time, but not how. Kinda silly.
Went pretty fast for me. I got decently far... which in the scope of how far you can get is actually not far at all. I was just affording to build up medium density, high wealth buildings with the additions of some (expensive) parks before the game ended: That layout looks nice but it was awful. It would work if I had twice the money to put redundant services on both sides of the circle. However, I did like how I had the industrial split away. That city had its fair share of problems. ChuckJ was right, the layout of the roads is going to be the biggest strategic gameplay element here. Traffic is super important. There' sa fire station at that 4-way intersection to the left, and it was an absolutely awful place for it with the amount of traffic at that intersection. The traffic works almost exactly like Tropico 3/4, where a right-turn is nice and efficient, but anyone that has to turn left is going to fuck the whole thing up. That simple fact makes any layout a puzzle to solve. The overlays in this game are fucking incredible. This game has... about 4 times as much information as Simcity 4, and ALL of it is delivered beautifully with graphics and 3D bar-graph styles. It's pretty amazing to look through. You can even see the likelihood that a building is either going to expand, or its residents/workers will move out due to other changing conditions. The notifications are also pretty great. Instead of an advisor getting on your ass all the time, the icon for buildings along the bottom will light up yellow and red colors, or blink, to show emergency situations. And you'll have emergency situations. I had 4 murders before I ever built a police station, and a number of muggings and shopliftings. The awesome thing is that each of these specific occurrences were shown as icons on the city map. Same thing with health issues, and there are like 8 different issues that can occur. Just clicking on the police building menu will show you icons on the map for where your current buildings already are, and click on the icons will show you the range for the buildings as well as editing them, though it's not obvious how much more effective a building will be if you upgrade it. Mostly the upgrades are just a way to provide the service for more people, as opposed to actually extending range. Though I think adding police cars is in a way extending range as more cars patrol farther, perhaps? The city size still bothers me, because I know how small that tile is going to look with avenues and high-density buildings, but the strategic gameplay is still there. The "puzzle" part of Simcity, figuring out how you should fit buildings, I think they've done a great job of it. There are some UI features I'm going to provide some feedback for to EA, like how the menu icons for data sets are in the bottom right of the screen and trying to click on the right-most icons scrolls the screen. I also had no clue how to find out where my resources for coal were coming from. I was getting it locally but clicking on the power plant didn't show me where the supply was, just that there was a local supply and that I was using it. I think this may be a "money sink" for later when you have to spend cash to import coal from another region or from some other global economy source. I don't like the parks. The functionality for extending parks and making one big park out of pieces is... meh. The graphics don't line up correctly on the tree/walkway medium-wealth parks so on close zoom levels park systems kinda look weird and disjointed. They also use a dark green grass that is jarring against the natural terrain grass. This gets better with other park types, though. The high-wealth urban concrete parks do snap together nicely and have various shapes that will fit well into the city layout. The low-wealth fields and playground sets also mesh nicely together. It's just the tree-lined walkways that look odd.
For the people who got back in for the second beta, are there any differences between this one compared to the last?
Damn, traffic really is tough to figure out sometimes. Avenues don't have a way for cars to turn left, and I'm not sure how to handle that. Also, the time of day actually matters. I built a huge swath of residential right during rush hour, and the moving trucks completely fucked my city up for a good 3 hours with bumper to bumper traffic.
Some of the excellent data overlays: The guidelines when building roads and zones. Roads will show dotted lines to show the maximum that a zone will need to build up. The zone itself also has a line show how far it can build out on that road. In this case it's an industrial zone which also shows you wind direction so that you know where the air pollution will go. I imagine some scenarios involving wind shifting are possible. The park building interface and my finished park (click on the park, click on Edit), it brings up little attach points and you can choose from parks in that specific park subcategory... the categories are differentiated by the wealth you want to increase: This is your morning commute when you build a ton of new residential neighborhoods all at once when demand is high... this intersection took 3 hours to clear out:
Where the hell are all the stoplights? I swear I have seen only one street type so far that has stoplights...
Great posts, Pogo. Glad the key went to good use. I want to be fresh for the game itself and don't think I'll give another beta a shot unless something changes dramatically. Given the way you laid out your roads in those screens, didn't you feel like you were creating tons of dead space in those small tiles? I wanted to do more fun/interesting road designs like that as well, but ultimately you have to make things pretty tight to maximize space in the small tile. Is that really true about avenues not allowing left turns? That's crazy talk if so. This game needs roundabouts as an option for intersections, given that traffic and its management is such a huge part of the gameplay.
I think I figured out how to build pretty quickly and get into heavy profits, something I was afraid would happen. Then again, it wasn't hard to figure out how to expand very fast in the earlier games either. I made a more efficient city layout and upped the wealth factor a bit (so much so that my demand for low income residential was through the roof). Still, there's something zenlike about watching the flow around the city. I think I'm set for the time being. Thanks for the code Frank.
Yeah it's an issue. It doesn't help that the guides for medium-density streets don't mesh perfectly with medium wealth housing. What it does work for is high wealth housing. You can see in my shot the apartment buildings that eventually filled out the streets that were goign with the guides, but they're also technically only using one side of those streets. I think the system is organic and it doesn't make for easy space efficiency. For low income housing I did a much better job in the lower part of the picture, making the streets slightly thinner than the guides. I see now that that actually fit suburban homes as well as trailers, so that might be the way to go. Yeah if you look at an avenue, the cars can't pass the grassy median. I don't know how to fix this other than arbitrarily make intersections, but you can't just click to make an intersection either. Maybe Maxis doesn't intend for you to have long stretches of avenue without intersections. My layout above solved the problem a little since I have all those streets branching off the avenue, and it worked out better. My blocks were too long, though. Cars and trucks won't make u-turns in the middle of a street to turn around. This makes real-world sense but it's easy to forget that when you're building long stretches of road. I could have made a slightly tighter grid, and I'll probably try that tomorrow.
I haven't followed this game too closely, so sorry if it has been discussed already. What about public transport in Simcity? If commuting is such a big part of traffic mass transit seems to be the obvious answer. I've read about ferries and busses but haven't actually seen anything in screenshots that looks like an efficient/modern public transport system.
Above ground rail is also an option! Also ... I would think crossing avenue's would allow for a stoplight and left turns.
Damn, the beta is over already. I was hoping to build one more city today. There are transport options. You can't see it but I have about 10 shuttle stops in that city. You build a Shuttle Depot which is like a service center for the busses (no idea if they actually need maintenance, I didn't see them ever go back there) but that's where you build shuttle lots to get extra shuttles into your city. You then build shuttle stops and you can also build a Park-And-Ride, which you can actually see in my last screenshot. The other options are a High Density Avenue that has ground rail on it, which I imagine is a great point-to-point transport going through the middle of a city. You also have train depot to connect to railroad tracks at the edges of the tile. There are boats, probably for freight and transport to other cities. I'm definitely forgetting some minor options but I was surprised to see a busses/trains/boats tab in the mass transit icon, and almost all of it was unavailable for beta unfortunately. It should say something that I immediately wanted to play this when I woke up today. I think there are people on here who share a lot of my taste in city builders and I couldn't wait to dive into looking more specifically at some mechanics and share them, since so many other beta impressions tend not to dive deep into testing out systems.
Dang, size-wise this really looks like something they could plop straight into the Sims as a neighbourhood map and it'd work perfect there. (in fact i'd love to have that map available in the Sims. If i had the Sims to begin with, that is) I wonder if that's part of the plan all along.
I could sort of see it, except that sims in this game are nowhere near the detail quality of Sims 3. Nor are the houses. They would have to be able to import low-quality versions of Sims 3 character and housing models, and considering that's like 5gb of extra information, I don't see how they could justify the payoff. And if you build that town in Sims 3 your computer would shit itself. Like literally. Your PSU would turn off and be like "go fuck yourself" while your RAM shot itself in the head.
Yeah that density of housing, even with just what you can see in the screenshot, looks about four times bigger than what you can manage in the Sims 3.
Yeah i meant it in the "build town in the new Sim City, then import that town as a neighbourhood into the Sims, so you get the road layout, lot placement, building types and stuff like that for your Sims to play in" I was under impression that despite all the grand claims the Sims was actually pretty light on the simulation of anything that wasn't in the immediate proximity of your own sim person/the lot you were currently visiting (similar how GTA games run their "traffic bubble" simulation) so while heavy it might've been possible to do it. idk.
In the Sims 3 you can smoothly follow your Sim all over town, into other sim's homes, and even a lot of the 'in town' buildings have actual furniture inside them. What you'd get from a Sim City export would be both way too big and require a whole lot of work to algorithmically fill in all the detail on the houses/buildings. Much more workable, while still a bit silly, would be to go the other way and import a Sims neighbourhood into Sim City as a miniature sub-region.
Sims 3 strangely had trouble even simulating those basic aspects of life. Sure it had to animate a bunch of things, but there was a very abstracted layer of "pushing" that forced people to disappear and appear in other places dynamically. Simcity 5 actually has every single person in its population traveling, working, going to school, and shopping. I haven't been able to follow one person and figure out if, say, a student actually grows out of school, then splits away from his parents, then finds a job, buys a house, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if this does happen, albeit not at the detail level of something like Tropico 3/4 (though of course that game was only several hundreds of people, all of which had more detailed attributes than Simcity 5).
One thing we might see is SimCity being compatible with the Sims 4. It's not likely, since I imagine that the productions went along separately, but since we know nothing about the production of the Sims 4 yet, it could happen.
I didn't see this explicitly answered anywhere... the stoplights are placed automatically, entirely based on road density. So I think it's something like medium & high density avenues, and high density streets, that get stoplights at intersections. The others get stop signs. And if you cross a higher density street with a lower-density one, the lower density gets stop signs while the higher isn't interrupted. It sounds fairly sophisticated, but I'd bet you anything they're going to release an equivalent of SC4 Rush Hour with more traffic options as one of the earliest DLC packs.
