1641

They need to future-proof games like Sim City - in 10 years maybe our smart watches would be able to run it.

The problem of course with server-based games is that in 10 years you can’t play Sim City anymore.

1642

Not going to happen. This is Maxis. I still have to write 2+ Gig memory over-rides for my own “Sims 3” game. Since the game was coded for the crappiest of processors and memory, it would take a major re-write of the game-code to allow for bigger cities. As the borders increase, the calculations for a full city expands at a startling rate. This is what happens when greed over-rides your mental decision making processes. If they’d written this for quad-core processors we could have cities that were 50% larger if you turned down some of the graphical effects for lower end video cards. The requirement for dual-core is not because it’s splitting data over 2 cores, it’s just because the music is on the 2nd core. But… they wanted to make sure they had the largest market penetration possible…

1643

A very illuminating post, jpinard. Thanks.

1644

We’re creating a new region when the serves come back up. Bottom of this page for more information:

1645

Judging by the response on the SimCity sub-reddit, patch 2.0 is bombing hard. Not only does it fail to address/fix various issues, they’ve somehow managed to create more of them! A post on Reddit goes through the outstanding problems, which includes the mysterious absence of one of patch 2.0’s main features: region filters. It boggles my mind that SimCity still has so little in the way of multiplayer features when they were so adamant about jumping on the “this is an MMO” bandwagon.

1646

My experience with the game last night was mostly positive. I only played for a few hours with a new city, but there’s no complaints from me so far.

1647

I forgot to update last night, but I’m pretty busy these days regardless. Still, it’s a bummer to read posts like Nephrinn’s. Hopefully by the time I get back to it things will have been properly hot-fixed.

1648

Some of those screenshots are pretty damning.

1649

Fucking hell. Sigh.

1650

Tom isn’t thrilled with patch 2.0 either.

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/04/23/the-simcity-tragedy-of-errors-continues/

1651

I guess I should know better, but this is incredibly disheartening.

1652

Yeah I am getting a new bug with buses I never had before, just looping between 2 stops and ignoring the rest.

Traffic does seem a little better, but my city is only around 40k pop, so time will tell…

Conclusion: needs more patches

1653

I’ve played a lot since 2.0, and I’ve not seen most of the bugs on the Reddit list. I also wonder how “objective” that list really is. I’m no Maxis apologist but I bet some people look at an issue list and just adopt them as their own.

Here’s what I’ve seen so far (I had 100+ hours into the game pre-patch):

  • Game has not crashed once, and no rollbacks!

  • Traffic is improved, but there are now some oddities. I sent out a gift, and instead of going straight to my City Hall to grab it (maybe due to heavy traffic) it took a circiutouss route ALL around the perimeter of my city then wound around in bizzare behavoir. After a while it just went poof! and disappeared… probably hit a time limit and then was warped to the destination.

  • All vehicle services are vastly improved except garbage. Nearly all garbage trucks still follow each other.

  • Because vehicles work now, we can use fewer fire & ambulance services to save money.

  • Train Depots to bring in Tourism and Casinos now work well.

  • Trade Depots are working properly… which makes an amazing difference as far as freight is concerned.

  • I have not had a steady rain yet, so I don’t know if water tables replenish. Maybe someone next to a river can comment on whether water stays up where it should since it’s supposed to stay up now as youndraw water from the river instead of the water table ((note: pumps must be “right” next to water".

  • Buildings are much more sensitive so they’re just as likely to go down in density (as opposed to being abandoned), so getting a city full of high-rises is more challenging (as it should be).

  • People are more attuned to venues now. I couldn’t get the Oslo Opera house to do more than just break even, so I replaced it with a different attraction plus an Expo Center and that area has done better. Went back to Oslo Opera as a test, and it tapered off.

  • Ground pollution more manageable.

  • Haven’t seen taxi cab syndrome as I can’t seem to get my commercial to convert to hotels with a domino effect as before.

  • Region play, while a little slow, seems reliable now.

  • Parks don’t seem to be as effective at pushing up land value as before.

  • Since everything else mostly works, data layers are now actually useful.

Negatives

  • Busses still clump too much… The clumping is less and they don’t disappear like before, but they still have 2-5 running around together.

  • Garbage Truck clumping is ridiculous.

  • Residents running out of money… why? We have no feedback on what’s going on in that circumstance.

  • Can’t build a TRADE PORT with appropriate facilities without out gaming the system.

  • Game invites still wonky.

  • The largest, most expensive parks (such as the amphitheater) are not providing high wealth land value. Only medium wealth.

New Negatives on second day since patch released:

  • My Casino which was making $40,000 per day last night, today is losing $40,000. Just like that poof.

  • Can’t seem to get education numbers up for College like pre-2.0 patch.

  • Education buildings really messed up after your city has gone on a while For instance, I have a fully upgraded High School, capacity 4,800 student in a city of 138,000. Fully staffed by busses and busses perfectly cover the city to bring in everyone waiting at bus stops (which happen to be none). Current # of students attending High School? 229.

1654

Tom made a huge booboo:

The services are not gone from your city. They’re duplicated when you offer them to neighbors. So its a free bonus for you and your neighbor.

But, I am disappointed to see the Great Works project we’re working on has shown zero resources received from Tom or anyone else near us.

1655

Wha…? Does the game tell you that anywhere? Was I just not looking closely at the region interface? Because if what you’re saying is true, there is literally no reason not to assign all vehicles to your neighbor’s cities.

-Tom
1656

I think I read it on one of the blog things on the main Simcity page. But the game definitely does not tell you that and for the longest time I made the same mistake.n There is one service vehicle you do not want to donate to others though. TRASH. Because you will end up with way more trash in your city. If you want more recycled goods however then send out those trucks too.

BTW - I found another massive, horrible bug. All buildings throughout a developed city, can at some point, just stop sending people out to attend school. Thankfully I’ve been in contact with one of the programmers and he’s on the case along with the numerous other bugs. Here’s a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_IM2WqJ7CM

With as surprised as the programmers are about some of these major issues, it appears the EA internal testing teams and the way they’re run are just absolutely abysmal. It’s not the programmers job to make a code change then sit around for 10 hours to see how a mature city pans out. Reminds me of when Paradox interactive outsourced their whole beta test team, and the results were super horrible. They fired that company after a year or two, and rebuilt their own team thereafter which has made a huge difference in the quality of PI’s internally released games. With EA though it’s probably just incompetence and mismanagement as I think they have their own dedicated test teams.

1657

Wait, so how does the trash get to your city if your trucks don’t actually go get it? Are new trucks created? Does the trash just appear at my garbage site? If I were still playing – I’m officially done with SimCity for the foreseeable future – I’d need to test this more. If there’s literally no drawback for assigning all your vehicles to your neighbor’s cities, if you’re just leaving money on the table for not doing it, then why doesn’t it happen automatically that neighbor cities benefit from adjacent vehicles?

Man, I wish this game wasn’t as screwed up as it is. Because I still believe the basic design – multiple interdependent cities a la the islands in the Anno games – is a good one.

-Tom

1658

Will try to answer:

  • To get money from sister city you usually (not always) have to assign at least 3 or 4 of the same vehicle to the same city. If you do just 1 you don’t get the bonus money. But, just 1 can still help you neighbor.
  • I don’t know if trucks have to physically bring trash back (they do route back and forth) or if it’s just automatically added at a constant rate. Same for recycling trucks.
  • If you don’t manually assign any extra vehicles to your neighbors, the game will still donate one at a time when there’s an extreme need. That’s called the “donation or volunteer” service.
  • So outside of trash, you are leaving money on the table, unless you’re only assigning one or two vehicles per city. So to not do it, is to just deny them free help and possibly (not always) yourself some money.
  • The more vehicles you assign to a city in need, the more money you make. I’ve had up to $500 per day.
  • Unless you want insane amounts of trash added to your dump, don’t assign those garbage trucks.
1659

So you’re absolutely right, JP! I assigned every single one of my vehicles to your city and let the game run for several days. I still had ample fire, police, health, and trash coverage. However, despite committing well over fifty vehicles of various types to your city and letting the game run for two months, I didn’t earn a single simoleon for anything but the trash collection. I guess the idea is that if the target city doesn’t need the coverage, it doesn’t pay for it?

So thanks for the correction. I can’t be the only one who missed that! I’ve spent literally dozens of hours playing SimCity and I never realized it worked that way. The presentation seems so unintuitive.

Sadly, I still see all sorts of weird behavior with trying to send resources to the our Great Work (i.e. none of my metal and alloy seem to find their way to it). I think I’m done with this game for good. There are too many brilliant city builders out there – Anno 2070, SimCity Societies, Children of the Nile, any of the Impressions classics – for me to justify spending time with an incompetently built mess like this. :(

 -Tom
1660

This game is too frustrating to enjoy. You have one part of the city that fails because there are not enough shoppers. Three blocks down, not enough shopping… and the density is the same. The water issue doesn’t seem fixed to me. I bulldozed the old treatment plant, found a new location and it’s still sucking up water like there isn’t a river next door and there is never rain. This is not how water is handled in actual cities.