TheMightyEthan Posted March 9, 2013 Report Share Posted March 9, 2013 I like SimCity 2000 better than 3000, never played much of 4. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayc4life Posted March 9, 2013 Report Share Posted March 9, 2013 I never played much of 4 either. Around the time I first bought it, my PC at the time couldn't play it smoothly enough to be enjoyable, so I left it. Went back to it a bit on Thursday to get back in the swing of things before the new game came out, and thought it was alright. 2000 I remember being very good, I had it on the PS1, but my favourite was always 3000. I think it was the in-game music that made it stand out more to me. That being said, I played it for a good 6 hours last night, was able to hop onto EU West 3 after 1 18-minute wait period. Was completely uninterrupted after that, no server disconnect popups, nothing. Got straight on earlier too just around lunchtime with no wait at all. It's more Sims-like, in that you can see what people want and need in their little thought bubbles, or speech bubbles asking you to prioritise different things, but other than that, I actually kinda love the feel of it, despite the smaller city sizes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. GOH! Posted March 9, 2013 Report Share Posted March 9, 2013 SC4 is compatible with Win7, but to be stable on modern CPUs you should edit the preferences in the Steam launcher to make it run on a single core. Nothing difficult or drastic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mister Jack Posted March 9, 2013 Report Share Posted March 9, 2013 Hm, 3000 doesn't seem to be on GoG. I guess that narrows it down a bit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 9, 2013 Author Report Share Posted March 9, 2013 Oh god it uses shortest route path-finding. This kind of AI was supposed to die out last generation, not be in a game in 2013. It's fun because apart from being exceedingly simplistic (in a simulator too) it breaks traffic, since it won't flow along denser roads, and also emergency services since they target one emergency closest and with then entire force. He didn't know it but Chris Nolan made a SimCity V joke in TDKR. NeoGAF also got a bit of fun when they found a Maxis/EA sockpuppet in their threads. edit: Also seems it's tiered too, those with DLC and those without: Fuck it, I've Tropico, I've still got SimCity 3000 working. SimCity 6 may tempt my gaze but price drop and whatever ain't making me touch this game. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 Doesn't that DLC thing break the whole concept of it being okay to rely on others cause if they abandon the city someone else can claim it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mister Jack Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 Something tells me Maxis may not have been entirely in favor of this direction. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 Did you take that yourself? Otherwise I'm skeptical of it's authenticity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted March 10, 2013 Report Share Posted March 10, 2013 http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19xx7d/trying_some_technical_analysis_of_the_server/ A nice thread of what the servers are actually used for. Take home message is... good chances are that the servers doesn't need to be there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mister Jack Posted March 12, 2013 Report Share Posted March 12, 2013 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 13, 2013 Report Share Posted March 13, 2013 Apparently a source close to the development but wishing to remain anonymous has told RPS that the servers are unnecessary for single-city play. Obviously those cities are so small you're going to fill it up really quick, but EA could have saved so much negativity by just letting you do it and then saying if you want a deeper game play online. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. GOH! Posted March 13, 2013 Report Share Posted March 13, 2013 Here's an itneresting forum post about why Sim City's system for tracking Sims, services and utilities is utterly broken. http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060%5B This game is fucked from soup to nuts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 13, 2013 Author Report Share Posted March 13, 2013 Yeah, I'm not sure there's much to redeem it at this point. The price is quite high at the moment (at least on Origin, and even if that was lowered you've still got the always-online component. If the always online component was removed you've still got the issue of the small cities. If the cities were enlarged you've still got the issue of the really dumb AI. And that could take a fair chunk of work that should have been done during development. I'm really confused on the dumb AI actually as everything else I can understand, but it's SimCity, Sim for simulation. That's the part that no matter what is meant to rock. To a large degree it seems more like it was built to be "The SimsCity". A proper naming actually could elevate a lot of the complaints folks have as it. SimCity Regions, SimCity Online, The Sims City, etc. Though of course that immediately carries the stigma of Societies, but there's less expectations on it being a full and true ten years in the waiting/making sequel to SimCity 4. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted March 14, 2013 Report Share Posted March 14, 2013 (edited) http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1a8edf/the_simcity_pr_nightmare_escalates_xpost_from/ Just dig around a bit in the comments. I'm done with this thread and done with EA for a while. Maybe they can turn around like Ubisoft. Meh. Edited March 14, 2013 by MaliciousH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 14, 2013 Report Share Posted March 14, 2013 And now a modder has gotten it running in offline mode. Can't save though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheRevanchist Posted March 14, 2013 Report Share Posted March 14, 2013 Modders have got it working offline. And... "We know that this is our fault so we're giving SimCity players who were affected a free EA PC game download via Origin. We'll have more details for that on March 18." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 15, 2013 Author Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-8 They've made a post regarding some of the "unique permeations" of the game people have uncovered. On one hand it's nice they're keeping folks updated, on the other hand many of the "unique permeations" that folks have come up with that show shitty AI aren't exactly unique and given they were discovered within days of release you'd assume various basic road structures would have been tested during development to check that the AI didn't do silly things in their shiny GlassBox engine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 Yeah, that stadium one where they have the direct dirt road and then that big weird loop of thoroughfare way off to the side might be unique, but having a grid with the occasional wide road and mostly smaller ones it's just how you would expect people to design a city. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jayc4life Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 Eurogamer gave it a 4/10 this morning. Honestly, I can't blame them, it's been problem after problem after problem between getting logged into the actual game itself, the lack of local saving to supplement the cloud save, cities getting lost into the ether, and the pathfinding issues as well. I'm hoping to have something that hopefully resembles a review up of it sooner rather than later (since I'm away most of April), and honestly, games like this makes me glad we have a no-number-score policy, because while the game itself is fun (when you know, you can actually get playing it), I'd be very conflicted as to how I'd grade it. Right now though, I'd avoid at any and all cost. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 So EA removed the discussion about the offline mode from their forums, because it's a "hack", not a "mod". Thing is, for it to be a "hack" don't they have to admit that the online requirement is a security measure rather than a game design decision, thus torpedoing their entire approach to the subject so far? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mister Jack Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 Really, even if EA remarkably got their heads out of their asses and implemented the offline mode everybody wants (not bloody likely), I've just heard too many bad things about the game that are completely independent of the online experience or even bad programming. This video sums it up pretty well: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 I didn't watch that video (because it's 11 minutes long), but pretty much the only complains I've heard are 1) online-only, 2) bad pathfinding (which they claim to be working on), and 3) small city size. I mean, I've heard about some other problems with the simulation, but they all seem to stem out of the bad pathfinding (all emergency services responding to the same emergency, all sims in a neighborhood walking to the same job, etc). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mister Jack Posted March 15, 2013 Report Share Posted March 15, 2013 For me, small city size is a much bigger problem than some people seem to think it is. Obviously the online woes are getting the bulk of the negative attention right now, which is understandable, but the tiny city size means, at least according to what I've read/heard/watched, that you cannot have a self-sufficient city, only a specialized one. The land has certain resources and since you cannot terraform, you don't get to decide what you have access to outside of where you initially build your city. You HAVE to connect to other players/cities to keep your tiny city going in the long term. On top of that, the resources seem to be finite, which has rather grim implications of all the cities eventually becoming unsustainable and collapsing in on themselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 16, 2013 Author Report Share Posted March 16, 2013 http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/16/simcity-bosss-straight-answers-seem-pretty-wiggly/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted March 16, 2013 Report Share Posted March 16, 2013 Wow, I hadn't realized that just last year they were saying it wouldn't be online-only. Kind of destroys the whole "it's been central to the game design from the beginning" argument. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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