SimCity 5

[RD-BH]

It is also hilarious when:
... Maxisman runs into a burning building to save a sim,
... heals them,
... drives off in his vehicle,
... U-turns and/or goes around the block,
... runs back into the burning building to save the same sim
... who just went back inside the burning building
... over
... and over
... ad nauseum

 

[Maniacal]

So, turns out you don't need any commercial or industrial buildings in your city for it to be a success. Can this get any worse at all?

EDIT: Imgur gallery and explanatory captions about getting his ONE ROAD city to "650,00o" population. tl;dr nonsensical traffic issues but it mostly works fine, except for numerous bugs and crashes.
http://imgur.com/a/gVKs3#d7PboOJ

 

[fret]

Interesting Reddit someSim3modderDude uses same modding tools as Sims 3 on Sim City type thread -

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a8bw7/how_to_mod_sim_city_2013_getting_started_basics/

 

[warpus]

Reading the comments, one guy has an interesting point: that perhaps EA is more interested in making this a SIM city game rather than a sim CITY game.

Meaning that they want to tie this into their Sims universe rather than anything else. Perhaps this explains a bit more of the agent stupidity.

 

[Maniacal]

Except, as they explained before it was released, none of the 'sims' in Sim City have any kind of details, permanent job, or home or anything besides a name and most of them don't even exist in the game world. So they are doing a really bad job of tying it in with The Sims.

 

[PieceOfMind]

So, turns out you don't need any commercial or industrial buildings in your city for it to be a success. Can this get any worse at all?

EDIT: Imgur gallery and explanatory captions about getting his ONE ROAD city to "650,00o" population. tl;dr nonsensical traffic issues but it mostly works fine, except for numerous bugs and crashes.
http://imgur.com/a/gVKs3#d7PboOJ

Interesting. I had this idea last night, that one could use a single road in a big spiral, but actually his idea is much more efficient so should work better. The thought occurred after thinking a good goal would be to have the most simplest road network possible - fewest intersections possible.

Actually I hope someone makes a spiral-one-road city and videos it, that would be interesting to see. Because all buildings are still rectangular though it will be significantly sub-optimal.

To those who have the game, this guy on youtube seems to seriously know his stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUlRib6ZoLLCcO0uV3uOMr8w
His reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5c4z/building_a_no_public_transit_400k_self_sufficient/

 

[cybrxkhan]

Well, it appears like the metacritic score for SimCity has plummeted to 67. Oh boy. Oh boy. This ain't good, this ain't good at all. I'm just hoping that the next SimCity doesn't start off so disastrously... if there is one at all.

 

[Maniacal]

Oh I am sure there will be another Sim City, EA has already disbanded and reformed Maxis at least once, they can do it again.

 

[NBAfan]

Oh I am sure there will be another Sim City, EA has already disbanded and reformed Maxis at least once, they can do it again.

This time we will have an even more integrated online service!

 

[civ_king]

Interesting. I had this idea last night, that one could use a single road in a big spiral, but actually his idea is much more efficient so should work better. The thought occurred after thinking a good goal would be to have the most simplest road network possible - fewest intersections possible.

Actually I hope someone makes a spiral-one-road city and videos it, that would be interesting to see. Because all buildings are still rectangular though it will be significantly sub-optimal.

To those who have the game, this guy on youtube seems to seriously know his stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUlRib6ZoLLCcO0uV3uOMr8w
His reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5c4z/building_a_no_public_transit_400k_self_sufficient/

Unless it is a squared spiral

 

[cybrxkhan]

Here's another very, very bad statistic for EA: "SimCity" has more hits on google than "Pope", and obviously not for the right reasons: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=simcity, pope&date=today 1-m&cmpt=q


I read a comment on one of the news sites that suggested that if this SimCity were made in Japan, all the important EA and Maxis people would be committing seppuku resigning/accepting cuts to their paychecks/bowing for a full 10 minutes to everyone/etc. Man, wouldn't that be fun. Speaking of Japan, I wonder how the international servers are doing...?

 

[PieceOfMind]

Unless it is a squared spiral

EDIT...
Ah good point. You're right. Now someone make that vid!


EDIT2...
More proof of EA/Maxis lies emerging (i.e. justification for DRM disappearing):

Reddit: You can edit highways, outside of city boundaries, they work, and they sync to server!
Link to the video

Works a treat! No region stuff of course, and you have to stay in your city, and there's no way to save the city unless you reconnect... but it's something. The "20 minutes" Kotaku reported on being able to stay playing for before being kicked to main menu for no connection is a random figure the devs put in, very odd.
The simulation continues just fine without

[–]mBucket 6 points 3 hours ago
So does this mean you could go around the whole region drawing roads where ever you want? Even into other people's cities?

[–]AzzerUK 9 points 3 hours ago
Yes - not entirely sure about how other cities see it, I actually didn't test that. It's very LIKELY that all the roads you draw - even really far outside of your city "box" - are only saved to your city. So other cities still see the default clear map, but if they visited you, they'd see highways all over the place.
The highways are fully functional for the city they are placed in, either way!

[–]doktortaru 7 points 1 hour ago
Other cities do not see the roads, just tested in a public reigon.

[–]AzzerUK 10 points 1 hour ago
Didn't think they would, but still - it's a definite sign that we can make cities with more than one highway connection (to avoid that awful bottleneck), and that plopping things outside of that city boundary works just fine (and it works - the sims path-find on the roads placed outside of the city square etc.!). Bigger city sizes can't be far off now...

Wonder if he will get banned...

 

[warpus]

Except, as they explained before it was released, none of the 'sims' in Sim City have any kind of details, permanent job, or home or anything besides a name and most of them don't even exist in the game world. So they are doing a really bad job of tying it in with The Sims.

Well, so far. They could just be planning on tying the 2 franchises closer together later.
Maybe not anymore, but maybe that's why they went with these design choices in the first place.

 

[J-man]

So, turns out you don't need any commercial or industrial buildings in your city for it to be a success. Can this get any worse at all?

EDIT: Imgur gallery and explanatory captions about getting his ONE ROAD city to "650,00o" population. tl;dr nonsensical traffic issues but it mostly works fine, except for numerous bugs and crashes.
http://imgur.com/a/gVKs3#d7PboOJ

I have been thinking ofbuilding a city like that. A lot of traffic problems are caused by intersections. specially when traffic needs to turn left at an intersection as they cross oncoming lanes. I read somewhere street cars can cause a lot of problems when they cross a lot of intersections.

 

[Maniacal]

So, seems like someone has already managed to get Sim City to work in offline mode (no region features or saving obviously, since that appears to be the ONLY things that the server deals with, so all of EA's claims about the servers handling the processing load is a definite lie).
Reddit thread

You can also edit the highways and rail links between cities very easily and the game will even save these changes online (they only show for your own city though, not other people's), there are numerous tools (like terraforming) in the game files but they are mostly locked way for dev versions only.

Man, I didn't really trust EA much before this, but I really have absolutely no faith in them whatsoever now considering they blatantly lied and greatly exaggerated so much about Sim City.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I wonder what they expected to accomplish lying about it.

 

[J-man]

So, seems like someone has already managed to get Sim City to work in offline mode (no region features or saving obviously, since that appears to be the ONLY things that the server deals with, so all of EA's claims about the servers handling the processing load is a definite lie).
Reddit thread

You can also edit the highways and rail links between cities very easily and the game will even save these changes online (they only show for your own city though, not other people's), there are numerous tools (like terraforming) in the game files but they are mostly locked way for dev versions only.

Man, I didn't really trust EA much before this, but I really have absolutely no faith in them whatsoever now considering they blatantly lied and greatly exaggerated so much about Sim City.

You can play offline indefinitely but you can't save and you can't do region stuff. Technically that means it doesn't proof that EA (or Maxis) has lied because they've said that servers calculate the region stuff.

 

[PieceOfMind]

You can play offline indefinitely but you can't save and you can't do region stuff. Technically that means it doesn't proof that EA (or Maxis) has lied because they've said that servers calculate the region stuff.

No, it's clearly a lie, or if not it is at best extremely deceptive...

"An online interconnected world has been part of our design philosophy since day one," she said. "It's the game that we've been wanting to create since SimCity 4 as we've wanted to explore the dynamics between cities as they exist within regions. Real cities don't exist in bubbles; they specialize and trade resources, workers and more.

"With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn't be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team."

source:http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/9/4081464/simcity-interview-ea-maxis-lucy-bradshaw

 

[Marla_Singer]

I'm getting fascinated by all this.

I haven't bought the game but I'm spending hours reading stuff about it everywhere on the net. It's actually impressive how everything seems messed up in this game: not only it doesn't do what players wanted but it does awfully what was put instead.

I'm actually wondering how such a bad outcome could be possible, especially when we're talking about big companies like Maxis and EA.

If lame developpers were guilty for the flawed engine, this could be corrected very early in simply testing it. On the other side, if there is a stupid manager thinking he has a "great idea", enforcing it without listening because Steve Jobs is his model and that's how he was doing, then this can become a disaster.

In my opinion, technical staff can't be responsible of all this. The guilt is necessarily on Maxis managing team shoulders.

 

[PieceOfMind]

I think this is a good article for the purpose of covering the recent mess.
http://news.yahoo.com/simcity-pr-nightmare-escalates-150021213.html