So my brother wants simcity for Christmas, and my first thought was that I wouldn't buy it for him due to it's poor reception.

I know about the server issues the game had at launch, and the online requirements.

But what I would like to know is if they "fixed" the city sizes as I already know my brother will hate this feature, and has no interest in playing the game as a multiplayer game.

I also heard a lot about issues with the games AI, and that a lot of the game mechanics were broken. Would like to know if that have fixed these issues as well.

SimCity is still SimShitty.

Don't get it, seriously. I was so disapointed by it. The city sizes are terrible, the always online is a pain. The DLC is ridiculous. Just no.

When the servers were working I actually had fun with it until I would hit the size limit. After that the whole game is a bummer. They have no plans to increase the city size. As I understand it, the AI issues have had a few patches, which addresed a couple of the problems people had but broke it again in different ways. I'm not sure if they ever worked out the trading problems. I'll have to play another solid chunk of this game before I write down my end of the year thoughts.

I haven't read this, but I saw this the other day and it is relevant.

http://kotaku.com/5989115/simcity-the-kotaku-review/1487243638/@Fahey

They've fixed most of the issues but there are still problems - its still quite enjoyable but you have to be careful and not expand too fast due to the city size limitation. The servers are stable though.

6.5

I heard the expansion was good.

But it's all still overpriced.

I do commend Maxis trying to fix many of the issues with this game, but it's still a mediocre game. They haven't solved the city size issue and have said they can't fix that problem.

So don't buy SimCity. Just don't buy it.

City size will never change according to the devs. It would be too taxing on lower-end systems.

Ehh, if he knows what the game is, then he won't be disappointed. Its a great game, its just not SimCity as fans know it. Once I got past the initial disappointment with what the game wasn't, I ended up enjoying what the game was a whole lot, so it really depends on how much he knows and what he's expecting.

As for "fixing city sizes", they just confirmed the other day that they're never going to change it. Obviously server issues are gone because they were caused by the servers being flooded by so many people on launch, and I do believe you still require an online connection to play.

@galacticpunt:Good movie, and also not wrong haha. But should pick up after Christmas for a while.

It was flooded by the tears of the disappointed.

Man, that is a bummer...I'd have thought most of the issues would've been fixed after the initial hype train and everyone trying to log into their servers. I really wanted to play the game too....

Just get him SimCity 4. It's really a better game.

Except not really. Sure they fixed the whole "Oh shit no one can play our game", but they did not fix the whole "Oh shit no one wants to buy our games because it sucks" thing.

Uh, he wants Simcity so get him Simcity. It really shouldn't matter what you or anybody else thinks about said game. It's a gift, he's not losing anything by you giving him a game for christmas. It's one thing if he asked for a general item like say a toaster. Then you should want to get him the best god damn toaster you can afford. But if he specifically asked for a Hamilton Beach 22351 4 slot toaster then you get that for him (if you can afford it) regardless of what you think about it. To me, seems kinda rude to make quality decisions for somebody your getting a gift for unless you know the product is for sure broken (which from my understanding is not the case for Simcity anymore).

Except the OP clearly said:

But what I would like to know is if they "fixed" the city sizes as I already know my brother will hate this feature, and has no interest in playing the game as a multiplayer game.

Limited city size and practically forced multiplayer are the main complaints (features?) of the game. If his bro don't like that, he won't have a good time. And it seems rude to me to give someone a gift that you don't think they'll like.

Maybe, as somebody else mentioned, get him Sim City 4 (which is awesome) and then some other games that may be similar but different enough to potentially expose him to other awesome things. You could get SC4, Civ V, and Tropico 4, all for less cash than you'd be giving to EA to support that new unfortunate mess.

As someone who has actually played SimCity, unlike most the people in this thread, I think SimCity is a good game. There aren't any server issues anymore and you can have plenty of fun with it. Yes, the cities could be bigger, but if you're playing on your own you can just take all the cities in a region. You can still engage in all the resource trading and so on without having to ever speak to another human being.

There is no "forced" multiplayer, you can just get newer cities started faster if you share resources. Or you can specialise more heavily in each city in a region, so you have more variety.

The simulation is still broken

You run out of things to do after 5 hours

Building cities on different regions is not only slow and cumbersome you quickly learn that making dedicated cities performing one sole purpose usually doesn't work very well and your fossil fuel/education driven city ends up floundering because the aren't enough tourist traps or commerce... basically Sim City sold it's self on specialization but the engine doesn't allow it... so the game can go fuck it's self, maxis did a horrible job with this game.

I loved the game the first week of purchase, went back briefly a couple months ago but decided it's a very mediocre simulation game, with Sim City 4 still in existence the is literally not point to playing this game because the stuff it adds hinders the game and the simulation is far shakier than Sim City 4.

@joshwent:

It even says in there he thinks. He doesn't know for a fact. Making a judgement call based on what you think a person like still second guessing said person's want for christmas.

Edit: nevermind says knows misread. My opinion still stands, though, buy the thing he asked for. Let him decide for himself whether he likes it or not. He asked for it after all.

With the intention of refreshing my memory and checking how well they've fixed and updated the game since release, I decided that I would use Sim City as my mindless podcasting game for today instead of pokemon. I spent 30 minutes downloading everything, turned it on, and encountered a game breaking bug literally within 10 seconds of booting it up. I was completely incapable of zoning anything. I spent a solid 5 or 6 minutes trying to figure out if I was doing something wrong, but the game kept insisting that I needed to connect to the highway for whatever reason even though I clearly already was. So yeah. Fuck that game.

@joshwent said:

Tropico 4 was on Steam sale like the weekend after new SimCity launched, and I bought it basically out of spite after genuinely looking forward to SimCity only to find out I wasn't going to buy it after watching some streams/the Quick Look of it.

I had a bad time with Tropico 4. I did the tutorial and thought I got it, but then after building my island for a bit, I would place buildings to be constructed, and my construction crews would never get there and they remained unbuilt lots? I maxed their pay in case they were unhappy or something, my overall island satisfaction/happiness was still reasonable, there wasn't a revolution or anything going on, yet construction crews never arrived. I could not for the life of me figure out why all of my buildings had just completely stalled out.

So anecdotally, either that game is buggy, or I'm just an idiot and the game needs to be better at A) noticing that some aspect of the island is working very sub-optimally, and B) gently reminding the player of why that thing is happening and how you can change it if you want.

How depressing is this thread.

@rowr said:

You think that's bad, I can only imagine what morale has been like at Maxis for the past few months.

Generally when things like that happen in tropico you can puzzle away to work out why things aren't happening and it's generally some sort of logical holdup that's a game in itself to work out. This was one of my biggest gameplay issues with the new simcity once i realised the population is faked, the traffic was broken and a multitude of other small things that take the "sim" out of the city.

I would recommend giving tropico another try as it's difficult at first but quite rewarding once you understand how things work, you definitely need some patience to poke around with it at first.

It's been a while since i played it but as i recall you need to remember that time it takes for your workers to actually get to your construction site takes time away from it being built, if you have suddenly plopped down like 15 buildings it's potentially going to cause headaches. You may not have enough workers to build at your desired pace. Follow one of them through the day and see where they are going and why, potentially you need to place a car garage near your workers and another one near the contructed building, or at least closer if its right across the island.

It pays in that game to consult the almanac frequently, potentially half your population can hate you and the other half love you depending on who you pander to. Potentially all your construction workers could happen to be completely pissed off. It's generally not a simple case of the whole population being evenly happy, you can pay someone as much as you want but if they hate you for other reasons it may not help.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-offline-is-coming

Fucking LOL.

But, but, what about The Cloud™???

Basically confirming what everyone thought from day one, that the always online thing is a load of poo.

HAHAHAHA

lol I did the exact same thing and got Tropico 4 when SimCity launched. I had a blast with it! I hope you had figured it out by now but the simulation in that game is pretty strong as in construction workers would have to satisfy their needs by going home to rest, by going to the marketplace (or farms if you didn't get marketplace) to get food, to goto the church to satisfy their religious needs, and to goto the clinic when their health is low. You need all that and then garages like any other citizens to get to those places fast. So if you have a poorly built city you can actually follow a construction worker around (which is actually a pretty neat way of figuring out what's working and what's not working in your city) and figure out why they're not constructing your buildings in a timely fashion. (whether they're walking everywhere to satisfy their needs, or they are driving but there's one road that's highly congested, etc etc)

@fattony12000: This is perfect.

Haha, Gies, you so silly.

An offline mode helps a little, I guess, but the part where the cities are too small kinda dooms this game forever.

@hailinel: Delicious even

Haha. I heard about that tweet but never actually saw it myself. Glad people very calmly called him on it rather than it becoming a shit show. Faith in humanity: +1