Surely is more challenging to build a well planned out city when you have less space to work with? When you've got less space, the good planning of the space is far more important. When you have a large area to build, the need for skilled planning is much less. It's similar to the Anno games, in Anno, a single island would in no way be able to support a large population of high level citizens, instead, you have to also settle other islands and trade resources around islands. It works incredibly well in Anno, a bit less so in SimCity due to the loading times, but I like that every time I start up a new city, I have to do something different, rather than doing all the same things with every city
So last night, a few friends and myself started a region going. It was going swimmingly for me, 33k residents and making a tidy amount of money. Every time the others came to visit though, I was still stuck in the dark ages with my dirt roads.. Except in my game, I was no where near that stage any more.. I had a full Streetcar setup, Casino HQ and some beautiful highrise buildings. I thought nothing of it so carried on. Load up this morning, I've lost 30,000 residents and I'm back with my dirt roads. Turns out my game hasn't uploaded my world to the storage servers since my dirt roads. So now I'm stuck with a city that I have no energy to rebuild, no motivation to rebuild and it won't let me 'destroy' the city, I can only abandon it, which means I everything is still there and will just create crime for everyone else. Thank you, EA and Maxis, for thoroughly pissing me off and probably putting me off playing a game I was once really enjoying and who's praise I couldn't shout loud enough. You've done a sterling job there.
any one still playing. Patch 3.0 is out and seems to have fixed a lot. Im looking to start a new game with a few people if any ones intrested
Hasn't solved the mass homeless problem or the sudden drops in the education status of the population.
I don't find the homeless problem to bad its just when people abandon a building and Ive never noticed education levels dropping unless traffic stops busses from getting kids to school but that has to happen a few days in a row.
Got this yesterday, playing for about 3 hours and it was building up nicely.... went out to the kitchen to make myself some food. Came back to find a Zombie Apocalypse had torn through my city, buildings burning and virtually all my residents had left! Note to self, DON'T LEAVE CITY UNATTENDED!!!
I've been listening to some old Bombcasts post E3 2012 and the expectation for this game is amazing and makes me want to play it, then I remember what this game is actually like and that I really suck at it and decide not to bother.
I'm fairly impressed so far, the graphics and freecam in particular are very slick. Although my daughter encountered the "disappearing mouse curser" bug, which meant closing a dialogue box in order to continue was impossible, add to that context sensitive ESC key meant ending the process in order to quit the game.
Unfortunately not, the traffic when you get to a decent sized city is still a complete mess. Other than the issue with traffic and a few minor bugs, I still quite enjoy the game. If only Maxis & Co would get their act together and sort out the bits that actually need to be worked on. I had to go into a somewhat extreme method of 'fixing' traffic manually by not connecting all parts of the city together. e.g. industrial zone is linked to a train station in one corner, residential is on the main road with just emergency services and lower education and a couple of small businesses and then the bulk of major commercial and education is in a down of their own with the only access being through airports and boats (slightly more complex than that but that's the basis of the arrangement). It's a stupid way to sort the bulk of the traffic issue, but it'll have to do for now, until Maxis finally decide to step forward and sort it out.
Why would they, when they are too busy milking the paid for DLC, which is clearly selling, because they keep making more! I can't bring myself to play this any more, because despite several large patches over he past few months, which have improved the game considerably, they have still failed to solve the fundamental traffic issue. Traffic affects every layers of your cities function, so to have not addressed the issue still, after all this time is a bit of a kick in the sack... I'm not a fan of the "always on" side of the game, but, it does bring a really good benefit, in that, you can be playing on a big city region with some mates and if you crash or disconnect for any reason, it does not kill the game for the other players. It's a nice feature in that respect and for me of all people to be more annoyed about the bugged traffic than the somewhat useful (but unnecessary!) DRM, you know it must be having a very negative impact on the game play! It is a shame because as a city builder, Sum city 5 has oodles of potential and is a bit more about the city design itself, compared to say Anno 2033, which is more about the efficiency of the logistics chain.
I remember on the original DOS Sim City, to get around traffic issues you din't build roads, only railway lines instead!
