[Megathread] SimCity 5

[zaxlor]

That was answered in the blog with "Now, instead of having one business with an abundance of workers and another without any, you have two businesses with enough workers to work efficiently. "

Except that won't happen when it comes to skilled workers. Or did they fix that bug? It used to be (and probably still is, with the way that agents are called upon and not assigned permanant values with regards to workplaces), that tech 2 or 3 industry buildings needed educated sims to work there, else they go bust from having morons working the nuclear power plant. If you build a tech 3 industrial zone, have all your educated sims move there and THEN build more residential close by to it, what happens? The dummys with no education get called to work there first.

That's not a simulation, that's just stupid. Now if they've fixed the way educated sims commute to work, then that's cool, but I doubt they have.

How does a comercial or industrial building have too many workers anyways? The way that article explains things, the game knows how many sims it needs to get it running, so why are those job hiring agents asking for more workers than is needed? I just don't see how the way they simulate workers has anything to do with "real" life, considering so much of the rest of the game takes from "real" life.

Maybe it needs a better tutorial or something built into the game explaining this in more detail?

While there is some micro managing in the game it isn't about simulating that level of everything. It also helps the city cope with the various disasters that can impact workers. Fire, disasters, Health, Traffic, Crime etc. It doesn't need to track and catalog a database of temporary workers that might never get a job. That is just to micro for the type of simulation that Sim City is designed as. You are simulating the City, not the life of the Sims.

How can you know what's being simulated though, if everything is so damn well hidden? When you play the tutorial, not once does it mention that individual sims don't work at the same job and won't always live in the same house. The game obfuscates it's own rules in order to fudge how it works. You can't simulate anything if you're not fully aware of what's going on, or rather you CAN, but then that's where the enjoyment fails because you're expecting one outcome and getting another.

If you're meant to be simulating a city, surely those types of disasters are exactly what should be happening. Crime waves, heat waves, tower blocks on fires for days, mass medical epidemics, rioting, tsnuamis, earthquakes. Those things should be happening in game, affecting how the sims live. If sim A loses his job and can't find another, that's why he moves out of his house, not because the job agent took too long to reach his home in the morning.

If they are going to stick to their guns with the way sims work and live, at least allow me to directly see how many works are needed for certain buildings and exactly how many live in each house, or area. If there's a way to do this in game, i'd love to know. As it is, you left click on an industial building and it just says "We need more workers!" so you zone more residential only to see all the houses vacant citing "Not enough money!".

[rhorle]

How does a comercial or industrial building have too many workers anyways?

Because there is a minimum amount it can have, and the maximum amount it can have. It isn't that they ever have to many workers, it is that they have more then the minimum amount so those extra workers can be moved to a place that has zero workers. Instead of one place running at capacity and one place not running at all it will have two places running at minimum.

You can't simulate anything if you're not fully aware of what's going on, or rather you CAN, but then that's where the enjoyment fails because you're expecting one outcome and getting another.

The Player doesn't simulate anything, and I'm not sure why you are trying to say that they do. None of the rules are hidden or obfuscated from the game which is what is doing the simulation. The player can figure these things out by experimenting with in the Simulation, or by reading about others experimentation with in the simulation.

If sim A loses his job and can't find another, that's why he moves out of his house, not because the job agent took too long to reach his home in the morning.

Those two are the same exact things. The sim lost his job because one wasn't found for him. You can't have the sim with out the agent. The agent it what the data uses to communicate with everything else in the game. How else do you want the game to communicate that a Sim lost their job? Magic?

If they are going to stick to their guns with the way sims work and live, at least allow me to directly see how many works are needed for certain buildings and exactly how many live in each house, or area. If there's a way to do this in game, i'd love to know. As it is, you left click on an industrial building and it just says "We need more workers!" so you zone more residential only to see all the houses vacant citing "Not enough money!".

You can see this through the population data map. Also just because a place needs more workers doesn't mean it will be automatically solved by creating more residential. It isn't as simple of a game as that.

[SirRobin]

I'm not sure if we can really call Maxis's design decisions stupid or smart. Its just how they chose to make SC5. Now some may like, or not like, the decisions Maxis made. But, they were their decisions to make. Like with BioWare and TOR. Turned out most of the folks who bought that game did not like it enough to keep paying to keep playing. Same with Dead Space 3, or ACM.

Now would I have preferred that SC5's "Sims" remembered where they lived and where they worked? Of course I would have. I loved that part in Tropico and its hardly like Maxis doesn't have a much larger talent pool, through EA, than Haemimont to draw upon to make it work. Would I have preferred larger plots and an offline single-player mode? Of course, and its hardly like we couldn't have had multiple plot sizes as an option for weaker PC's. Something I recall from Civ.

I would even like to have an accurate population count, instead of GetFudgedPopulation. Its not like every individual had to have its own drawn Sim. However, Maxis chose to make SC5 another way. Nor is it impossible that Maxis might change some of SimCity's mechanics. They changed the DRM for Spore so its hardly like its something they've never done before.

Once the fiasco becomes a distant enough memory, and EA's internal reorganization is complete, those still at Maxis at that point could certainly be tasked with overhauling SC5. In fact I rather hope they are. Its a very cute game after all.

[Deleted]

I haven't played any SimCity before, but this one i really enjoyed. I wish cities to be bigger, but it's still great.

[Nerraw]

Global Market is (finally) active on the Test server.

[rhorle]

Global Market is (finally) active on the Test server.

I can't wait for all the tears of people whose cities now collapse under the price of goods that have no plummeted

[Rukh]

I'm not sure if we can really call Maxis's design decisions stupid or smart. Its just how they chose to make SC5. Now some may like, or not like, the decisions Maxis made. But, they were their decisions to make. Like with BioWare and TOR. Turned out most of the folks who bought that game did not like it enough to keep paying to keep playing. Same with Dead Space 3, or ACM.

Now would I have preferred that SC5's "Sims" remembered where they lived and where they worked? Of course I would have. I loved that part in Tropico and its hardly like Maxis doesn't have a much larger talent pool, through EA, than Haemimont to draw upon to make it work. Would I have preferred larger plots and an offline single-player mode? Of course, and its hardly like we couldn't have had multiple plot sizes as an option for weaker PC's. Something I recall from Civ.

I would even like to have an accurate population count, instead of GetFudgedPopulation. Its not like every individual had to have its own drawn Sim. However, Maxis chose to make SC5 another way. Nor is it impossible that Maxis might change some of SimCity's mechanics. They changed the DRM for Spore so its hardly like its something they've never done before.

Once the fiasco becomes a distant enough memory, and EA's internal reorganization is complete, those still at Maxis at that point could certainly be tasked with overhauling SC5. In fact I rather hope they are. Its a very cute game after all.

I'm not sure if we can really call Maxis's design decisions stupid or smart. Its just how they chose to make SC5. Sure some may not like their choice to replace the entire game with a giant bowl of elephant shit, but it's really not something you can criticize, it's their design decision and who's to say it is better or worse? Maxis chose to make SC5 another way.


I'm not saying anything on the game itself, a thousand people have already made much more successful criticisms, but that's some poor apologist argument going on there.

[SirRobin]

I'm not saying anything on the game itself, a thousand people have already made much more successful criticisms, but that's some poor apologist argument going on there.

While it may be a poor argument, its the best I could come up with. The results of their decisions speak for themselves. However, they were still their decisions to make.

[Dezerte]

I can't wait for all the tears of people whose cities now collapse under the price of goods that have no plummeted

So that's why it's so ridiculously easy to amass money by going into trading.

[-aiko-]

So that's why it's so ridiculously easy to amass money by going into trading.

Yup, people have been taking advantage of selling at full price. People like me. I've amassed millions of simoleons but my empire will collapse if I don't find another way to stay in the green.

[klaps_05]

Hello

I am currently looking for some kind of TOOL to Simcity 5 to make "city projects" - building the infrastructure and redoing the city from time to time is annoying, is there any program that lets you make the "final" version of your city, or at least what you are going for to have as a project. the same way you draw a building before you build it.

Doing things on paper is somewhat okay, but it takes time and you have to do everything by hand. having the city parameters and drawing tools would make it so much better and effective.

[Deleted]

I'm not looking forward to everybodys city collapsing because of the Global Markets, I run 3 very successful casino based Cities now, absolutely rolling in it! But if peoples cities shut down, I run out of tourists!

Hello

I am currently looking for some kind of TOOL to Simcity 5 to make "city projects" - building the infrastructure and redoing the city from time to time is annoying, is there any program that lets you make the "final" version of your city, or at least what you are going for to have as a project. the same way you draw a building before you build it.

Doing things on paper is somewhat okay, but it takes time and you have to do everything by hand. having the city parameters and drawing tools would make it so much better and effective.

Sandbox mode? You can see if you're city works well then. Unfortunately, designing a city can be fun but to your sims and your neighbors, it can make or brake your city

[Rukh]

Cities XL vs Sim City 5:

Ok. I broke down and bought it. I know I said I wouldn't buy any EA games, but it's sim city, one of my favorite series ever. And yes I know I was upset with all the choices they made, but I've been playing Cities XL and I really wanted to compare the two. The next dragon age is still the only EA game I'm planning to buy, it was just a momentary slip!


First thing, Sim City 5 probably would have got a whole lot less criticism if it were named Cities XL2. Sim City got a lot of flak because it was a successor to an offline series that worked just fine offline. The target market played their sim cities offline. And, they didn't just add online capable features, they made it so you couldn't play offline even if you wanted to. On the other hand, Cities XL started the series as an online city simulator mmo. It was really it's "thing" so people thought it was new and interesting. However it's "thing" actually wasn't all that successful so they turned it in to an offline single player game. If Sim City had been the successor to Cities XL I'm sure nobody would have said a thing. And besides, many of the new features are things Cities XL did years before anyways.

Cities XL is based on the roads. There's no water lines nor power lines, you just have to make sure things are on roads. There's a global market for all your cities to trade goods based on demand. There's a region map, except in cities XL its a whole globe, and cities have different attributes they can specialize in. You can make your oil producing city, or some zones will have none and you can buy it from the other cities. The specializations are a bit different in cities xl, instead of mining and drilling, there's arable land, water, oil, and tourism. Tourism in cities xl works more like a resource, in that you can "use" it up. While oil wells use up oil, tourist resorts use up tourism.

Now, while there are a lot of similarities, there are a lot of differences too, and CitiesXL doesn't come out ahead on all of them, but it does on a few.

The interface on Cities XL is definitely a bit dated looking these days. But, essentially the game has only had minor upgrades since 2009 so some of that is forgiven. Sim city on the other hand looks like something that would make a whole-foods shopping hipster graphic design student drool. They definitely put a lot of contemporary design thought in to the interface, and Sim City Online comes out ahead here. Most game companies put some work in to the interface, but M-EA-xis did some really professional work on this one.

The graphics are higher quality in Sim City too, but given that it is around 4-5 years newer, that can be understandable. As far as the design choices with the graphics, both games look pretty nice, cities xl goes for a bit more real look where sim city looks a bit more utopian. Cities XL does give you more ground cover where sim city everything is sitting on the normal ground. Honestly in terms of looking like a city, XL might come out ahead here. You also can get further "in" to your city and watch your people walking around.

Here is an example of street level view in XL: Link1 and link 2.

Compared to Sim City: link 1 and link 2.

As you can see, its hard to compare. Sim City definitely has the higher quality graphics, but they also went more for a "model" look purposely . These Cities XL pictures are actually from the original game but the graphics really haven't changed since 2009. The Cities XL street view feels more like an alive city and to me, it edges out Sim City in terms of portraying the game "feel" to me. I like the concept of playing a game that simulates creating a city better than the concept of playing a game that simulates making a model of creating a city. The graphic choices are going to be a matter of opinion though.

One thing that does help Cities XL though is that the cities can be much more sprawling. Much, much much more sprawling. The city size in Sim City 5 is tiny! Its really small, on the other hand, cities XL city zones are gigantic. They're absolutely huge. Each city has plenty of room for a down-town, suburbs, wilderness, etc. Each area is a full city where Sim City seems more like city districts-- with big radiation zones where nobody can live in between. Consequently in Cites XL you can do things like this which you'll never see in Sim City. People can say the size is a design choice, and that in Sim City each inch counts and is an important decision, but I have to say, I like the large open areas so much better.

The biggest thing to me however, is the level of micro-management. That's what really sets the games apart. Cities XL is a game more focused on people who have been doing the sim thing for a while. On the other hand, Sim City feels like its been targeted at novices. It feels like a game that was intended for people to go on, tweak some things, and go back to facebook, while citiesXL is more for people who want to spend hours tinkering with the supply and demand of shipping skilled workers from their neighboring city to fill office jobs that are needed to keep the heavy industry growing and supplying resources to their manufacturing plants to keep the shops selling stuff to keep the elites in the city. Cities XL really went crazy with their token system. Everything creates tokens and/or uses them. You can also trade any of them. Money is a token, oil is a token, unskilled workers are tokens, heavy industry is a token, etc. And, transporting them also takes transportation resources for both passengers or freight.

However there is some levels of micro-management in CitiesXL that is just wrong. In Sim City, the level of value of land is based purely on how nice an area it is. Does it have parks or is it in front of a sewage drain off? Does it have a lot of crime or is it close to shops? Etc. On the other hand, in Cities XL, not only do you zone density, but you zone land value too. In other words, you have 9 types of residential you can zone. That is a level of management that just doesn't make sense and actually takes away from the sense of realism. Another thing is your citizens like leisure activities. Who doesn't right? But instead of you zoning commercial and then due to demand, leisure places are constructed, you have to go in to your list and choose bowling alleys or swimming pools or whatever to plop down. That makes no sense. Maybe I'm just used to US capitalism, and I know this game is made by an EU company, but this level of telling people what is going to be built where is just a bit weird. You can build commercial, but that's specifically shops where people buy things. You have an entirely different zoning type for hotels which you also mandate which one and what size is built where, just like the leisure zones.

So, in that way, Sim City's more organic growth design definitely comes out ahead. I do have to say its weird how in Sim City that growth is strictly limited by what road a zone is next to and you have to go in and manually upgrade all the roads to get places to grow; that's strange to me and a little annoying. But its still a better system. Cities XL has lots of road types. I think Sim City has 7? XL has maybe twice that but they're all purely about how many cars you can get through. That's better purely for the road part, but the organic growth in Sim City still comes out ahead.

The other thing that Sim City has is the building customization feature which lets you snap on additional parts to a building. That is pretty cool. In a lot of buildings it just lets you add capacity, but even that is a better system than always replacing the whole building with a bigger version of the building. In other buildings though, being able to add on entirely new functionality or specialization is pretty neat. That's a good system and XL doesn't really have something comparable. You do get more types of each building than the whole 2 in Sim City, but you get what you get, there's no customization.


----TL;DR line---
So I won't go in to the major flaws of Sim City, tons of people have already pointed them out very well, and I don't feel like I need to re-hash that. In the end, the big differences are Sim City is more organic in how the cities grow where Cities XL is much more micro-managed and dictated directly by the player, on the other hand, Cities XL has a much better map with great elevation changes and room to make a sprawling realistic city. Cities XL is more intricate in the trade system and city specialization. Which do I think is better? Right now I'm still leaning towards Cities XL though the authoritarian build system does make me wish it had Sim City's system. That's a pretty big trade off. I'm still going back and fourth between the 2009 offline game that started the series online and the 2013 online game that started the series offline. I would say though, if you feel limited by "Sim City make friends edition", you really should try Cities XL. I still haven't tried everything in either game though.

[Nerraw]

Hi Mayors – below you'll find the notes that will appear in Update 3.0 scheduled for release later this week.

Update 3.0 Notes

• New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety.
• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won't move causing traffic to back up behind it.
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers.
• Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources.
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor's city or arcology.
• Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station.
• Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman's Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley.
• Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city.
• Trading: Made gifting more reliable.
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
• RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home.
• RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours.
• RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present.
• RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in.
• Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution.
• Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously.
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.
• Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks.
• Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers.
• Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks.
• Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li....page#28136320

[Rukh]

Well, they updated and now my game no longer works, it just CTD when I try to load a city. I guess that's a fitting end for me weakening and buying an EA game again. Fool me twice, I'm a moron.

[SirRobin]

Well, they updated and now my game no longer works, it just CTD when I try to load a city. I guess that's a fitting end for me weakening and buying an EA game again. Fool me twice, I'm a moron.

Just wait till you see what they are going to do to Star Wars.

[Nerraw]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...o-offline-mode

[Nerraw]

Hi Mayors – below you'll find the notes that will appear in Update 4.0 tomorrow.

Update 4.0 Notes

• New: SimCity Launch Park, an exclusive new park just for our dedicated fans who were early adopters.
• New: Region: Edgewater Bay. Seven city sites in one cluster around a beautiful bay with one great work site.
• New: Your current server will now be shown in the options menu.
• New: More detailed rollover information on buildings telling player’s if their Sims received happiness from a park or from shopping. Previous to this fix, this information was generic.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Global Market prices now dynamically change during gameplay.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Leaderboards are will be active on EU West 3, Pacific 1 and Pacific 2 at the release. We will enable them on additional servers throughout the day.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Region filters are now enabled on all SimCity servers. Players will be able to search for open games by Map Name, Sandbox Mode, and Abandoned Cities.
• Rain Clouds: Fixed an issue where some cities would not have rain clouds to replenish their water table. If you had a city with this issue, you will start seeing clouds again within a game day.
• Fire: Improved response time of fire trucks to fires. Improved the time it takes for a fire signal to reach a fire station.
• Mission updates: Tuned Metals HQ and Community College missions. These were appearing too early, making them difficult to complete. They now appear later in a city’s development.
• Solar Farm Great Work: Reduced fire risk at the Solar Farm Great work. Local fire engines were spending too much time at the Solar Farm.
• Messaging: Improved pre-requisite messaging for Trade Port, Casinos, Smelting Factory and Oil Refinery. It should be clearer on how to unlock these buildings.
• Graphics: Fix for flickering low wealth buildings on NVIDIA graphics cards.
• Education: Fix for an issue some cities experienced where commuting students did not return from a neighbor’s city. This was causing a problem where students would disappear from a city in some cases.
• Tuning: Sims will lose a small amount of happiness if they don’t have a place to shop. Cities without places to shop will see complaints and feel the effect of unhappy Sims. This will emphasize the importance of commercial zones.

[Rukh]

I see they're already starting the milking machine with things that easily could have been in the game on launch.

[rhorle]

I see they're already starting the milking machine with things that easily could have been in the game on launch.

So you would rather have nothing new added to the game? Why must everything be a negative in some fashion?