Canuck
1821
Buggy Sim City game? Get outta town.
Nesrie
1822
It amazes me anyone would buy this on MAC. They saw how much fun it was for the Win gamers getting screwed over by EA and lined up?
DeepT
1823
I too am glad people keep posting updates to this once in awhile. I am hoping that one day, people will be talking about how amazing this game is, and then I can finally buy it.
Quaro
1824
The base PC game is pretty ok right now. I hadn’t played since launch and the differences are just massive. Check out how significant a ‘small’ feature like a raise/lower road button makes:
Between that and the change to traffic routing the game plays very differently.
geewhiz
1825
So instead of fixing traffic issue with intersections just do not have any intersections?
Well they said they also fixed the traffic issues.
I wonder if they fixed the traffic issue of cars backing up at the city entrance off ramp.
Quaro
1827
I’m not sure what’s different specifically, but traffic is much better even apart from the ability to have major roads use elevation or tunnels. What they changed was the routing where 500 people could leave work and head for the same house, and when the first person got there, the other 499 would have to immediately turn around and go somewhere else, repeatedly. The same thing use do happen with firetrucks and the like and doesn’t any more.
Damnit , I am reinstalling just to try it now.
Wait wait, do the workers now go to a random house, or do they have ‘memory’ and go back where they live? Don’t make me reinstall this.
Quaro
1830
There is no memory, they’ll choose different houses and jobs every day. I don’t think you could that given the timescale of the game and how much cities change in even a single day.
Nesrie
1831
It’s understandable how you might have thought they had memory, since it was actually mentioned how real these Sims would be here. Then again, maybe it was a huge assumption that by real they didn’t actually mean someone who has a place to live and a job they go to each day… more like that other real person that changes houses and jobs every day. Although if it takes you a few months to get through traffic, maybe you’d have to get a new one each day.
Isn’t that what the cloud is for?
To remember where the workers lived.
So i started a new region and the traffic is more reasonable. my usual population cap would hit 200k and things would fall apart with streetcar and high density roads. New city was low density roads with medium and i was around 175k-200k. Definite improvement.
No, the cloud is for shutting down the game when people stop buying DLC like “COCA COLA FACTORY - ADDS HAPPINESS TO ALL SIMS BECAUSE COCA COLA IS THE MOST YUMMIEST UNLESS PEPSI PAYS US MORE IN THE FUTURE IN WHICH CASE IT’S PROBABLY LIKE THE SECOND OR THIRD YUMMIEST.”
Seriously, please, no one else ever give money to Maxis/EA for this shitstorm. The fact that I contributed to its nominal success weighs on my soul like the knowledge that the mouse I’m using was assembled by whip-lashed third world orphans. They’re probably approximately equivalent.
Quaro
1835
I think it just doesn’t make sense rather than being a technical limitation.
In a ‘day’ the population of a Sim City can change by thousands. How long does it take to build a house in real life? A skyscraper? Even a small house takes months; skyscrapers take years. Yet in Sim City skyscrapers can pop up overnight – swaths of buildings upgrade to entirely new structures, and be constructed / torn down, every single day. A ‘day’ in Sim City is essentially a single day sample of a longer period, perhaps a year or even more. It’s the game going: for this new city year, let’s run through a day and have everyone try and find good jobs, shopping, etc, so we can see how this layout is working.
It would be cool if they had some inertia to it so that people try stay in the same job or house if very little is different, but probably the majority of them would have to change anyway because the state of city has to reflect what’s the layout the player currently sees, not the way the map used to be.
Nesrie
1836
I think you are being too generous with the game’s design. The mess of traffic was not by design. It was clearly a limitation with how these “sims” chose their paths and then never changed them, initially. Having a mass of people, children say, leaving a school and then just blobbing down a street until the houses each have their children and then blobbing down the next one… it’s not just that it doesn’t make sense. Their product doesn’t seem capable of actually providing the simulation they marketed.
The biggest issues with traffic were cars not routing around heavy traffic and service vehicles (buses, ambulances, delivery trucks, etc.) all going to the same destination. Now all cars take into account traffic when leaving and service vehicles claim sites before leaving.
sigh. so they improve traffic a bit but manage to break the gifting system again. lost 2.5 million trying to send it to other towns and poof just gone. I may finally just uninstall this and call it a day. Such a disappointment.
Did you get confirmation of the gift before switching cities?
DeepT
1840
So now, if there are two fires in a city, and 2 fire stations, one truck will go to each fire or will it be two trucks going to the same fire via different routes?
A better example:
In the morning everyone is going to work. Do they all head to the same factory until it is full and then all head to the 2nd factory until it is full, etc… ? Or is it sensible and allocates the factories before the workers start to drive there?
