Sim City Options

[Scan_Man]

Maaaan EA you blew it big time here. Did you not learn from Diablo 3 launch?

Anyway this game is excellent, if you manage to play it. But there are so many servers problems because EA decided to make a single player game online only. I have not been able to play it since launch because servers are busy. Hell, they are so incompetent that at one point they had the busy servers labeled as available and the available servers labeled as busy. And I've had the servers log me off only to try to come back with 30 minute waiting queues. Problem is if you pick another server your city is not there. Hell, I've had cities roll back or be completely erased when I came back to a server. It's very annoying. Yesterday, EA actually removed features from the game because they were causing server instability. What the fuck?

Say what you will about the Diablo 3 launch. Nothing competes with this failure.


But yeah the game is awesome and very deep despite the city size is a lot smaller to past games. But there is a lot more "simulation" to this game than past games though. I like that you now have to gather and manage resources, or import them. People are giving this game a lot of shit on the gameplay side of things, and they are wrong. I understand the city size thing, but I don't think people have played the game long enough to understand the mechanics inside and out. Sim City 4, considered the best in the franchise (which I agree), had 10 years to develop through patches, an expansion, and mods. In this new one, there is a lot more shit you have to pay attention to or it will just domino into a complete disaster right before your eyes. It's really neat and at the same time while makes the game more challenging than Sim City 4.

Like I tried to get away with not building a police station at the start (in Sim City 4 you can wait quite a while before crime levels get to a point where you need police). Well I had criminals coming over from a neighboring city taking advantage that I did not have police. The game is very sensitiveness to these types of things. To add to that, not only is there a lot more money sinks, but building things seems more expensive compared to Sim City 4. To add insult to injury I had a Zombie infestation, which lost 80 percent of my population because I had no money to defend my city. And this is neat too because you can zoom in and follow Sims and it was cool to see them fighting Zombies and hearing gun fire going off in the streets with some people running for their lives and others defending their homes.

It's moments like above that really suck you into this game.

[HC82]

The game is definitely more clever then farmville; although, the game does have its "builds" which are more favorable then others. From a pure variation standpoint, the game has many variations, but from a min-max standpoint, the game becomes more rigid, especially with the current glitches.

How would it be more clever? One of the easiest starting setups is nothing but residential and parks (note, you do not need another city in the region to make this work, its self sustaining), very easy to maintain 80%+ approval with 20k/h till you start to specialize and effective at avoiding a number of design flaws while exploiting the hell out of a massive design flaw. Regional and global markets don't work. RCI is completely busted since industry almost does nothing to a city as commercial does not need any goods, they auto restock supplies. To make industry happy the easiest thing is stockpile their produce in a trade depot, once full just destroy the warehouses and rebuild. Industry will be thrilled for making mass profits "selling" their goods, purely because they went somewhere else and nothing more. The best road design is a serpentine never ending road with no intersections purely based on the piss poor AI design, and this issue starts to arise at a paltry 100k population.

Here is a quote that covers why the AI in this game is inferior to pretty much every previous sim city game cept maybe the original, and even then it is a tossup.

"The problem isn't that the sims have trouble picking the best route from point A to point B. The problem is that when they leave point A, they don't know where they're going to end up. They don't know where point B is. They're all going to the first place that MIGHT meant their current "need," so you've got 400 cars all trying to go to the same house first because that's the closest one to the industrial area or to the city entrance (commuters returning from other cities). This is why fire trucks are still gangbanging one fire and ignoring others: it's the closest one to the fire station. "
At least in the older games I could manually dispatch fire/police/rescue so as to avoid 6 fire engines sitting at a single low wealth house while a school is burning down ignored.

That isn't a glitch, that's the intended core design. Enjoy having uneducated workers getting to your nuclear power plant before your educated workers, purely because its first come first serve, then enjoy your meltdown.

The glitches are recycling centers ceasing to work, supply trucks being destroyed and never replaced, "fake" population numbers, the water tables not refreshing, regional buses from other cities getting stuck at a stop and completely blocking traffic as well as causing any passengers to 'lose their job' due to never making it to work, tourists completely ceasing to visit a tourist/casino city over night causing a fast death, so forth. These alone make the game irritating at points, however on top of what is nothing more than a massively retarded core design makes the game utter shit beyond its pretty facade. It is hard to sandbox (and thus keep replay-ability) when you are effectively punished in many designs due to the poor AI and core game design.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=WH-CdkSqDSs
The vaunted glassbox simulation part of "Simcity 5" at its finest.

Your entire description as to why the game is so easy and broken is also why it's far move clever than Farmville; it has so many inter-working elements in the game that the gamer has to consider. The problem is that they don't work because this game is from a completion standpoint still in Beta. Farmville is just Harvestmoon with heavy social elements. The problem with Simcity is that it's still technically in Beta form (thanks to EA's bullshit), is easily exploitable and needs to be re-tuned, but that doesn't take away from what it does do right or at least what it is trying to attempt on paper(assuming those things actually worked properly all the time). It's like seeing what a game can be versus what it is. Diablo 3 had the some problem and now it's a much better game.

And yes the traffic and firetrucks suck in this game. Good thing is that these are clear things that can be fixed in the future; the question is if it does get fixed and how well.