@MURDERSMASH said:

@Keres said:

@RVonE said:

Wow, that city space is really really small.

That was my immediate reaction as well. To those who have actually played the game, does it seem like it'll be an issue? Are there ways to get more land?

I tend to build slowly when I play Sim City games, so I wasn't ever able to fill the map up in the 1hr allotted time, but that's just me. According to the devs, the map size is about the same size as the medium maps from SimCity 4.

I could pretty much fill the map in the hour allotted but I think the depth from this game is going to be min maxing your city's planing what you want each city to be then sticking to the plan through out the game. Then once you have finished that start another city in the region to compliment that city fulling the holes that the city does not have. Then rinse and repeat until your region is running like a well oiled machine.

I really liked what they had to offer in that allotted time! Unfortunately for me, I spent all of my money in the first 20 minutes or so and then my city went bankrupt....I definitely formed a better strategy after that! But, the part that stands out to me the most are the data layers! Those pieces of information made the game for me and made it much more fun to look at! They also made it easier from a strategic standpoint too! I am definitely going to be pre-ordering the game!

I'm going to miss terraforming. What kind of a bright mind decided to leave that sandboxy element out? What big city in the world hasn't done some alternations to terrain? Stupid.

For the comments on the space being small. I agree it was tiny in the beta, and in about 40 minutes I was able to fill the whole space with what the beta provided but the fact the building density is now tied to the type of road you build I think a big part of this game will be reshaping your city as it grows to meet the demands at any given time. Plus its my guess that the size of the final regions will greatly vary. Sim City 4 had spaces from tiny to huge and I would assume it's possible to get regions that are the same way in this version with small regions that can help feed into your larger Cities.

One thing I'm looking forward to in the full game is working with the sharing between cities. Sim City 4 had this but the only real affect it had on the cities was the income and whatever service you provided. I'm excited to see what happens when I build a small town that makes a fortune off of collecting everyone else's trash and actually seeing the long term results it :)

@Bevinsky said:

One major issue I noticed was that it's not possible to replace a 1-"tile" street with a 2-"tile" street, which I thought was very restrictive. I have to demolish the street and all the zones around it to replace it? Not good at all.

The zoning is a bit meh. I guess it makes sense to only be able to zone near streets, but what happens to the space in the middle that isn't used? Do the buildings creep in toward the center? Maybe I just didn't get that far in the allotted hour.

Also, where are the different zoning densities? You're not letting me decide where the various building sizes go? Why not? Too much thinking for your average video game player? Gotcha.

You can upgrade a road. Roads have to be upgraded in order for better buildings to be supported. You have to upgrade the roads and the avenues separately. There is a little icon near the bottom right of the road window that shows three buildings: One looks like a single family house, another like an apartment, the last like a skyscraper. You have to have a certain type of road in order for certain density buildings to be built.

I agree with your sentiment on the space in between zones though. I would often have that space and I made certain areas skinnier to accommodate houses but later the building upgrades on density and the space gets used up.

Most of my complaints were address through play time with it since the tutorial that comes with it is incomplete and the manual doesn't have anything. Those pop-up tutorials you could turn on or off really helped.

The one thing I didn't like about the beta would be what seemed like the terrible simulation for emergency vehicles. I had a fire department that was connected to a busy road. A few fires broke out and the fires trucks (about 6) of them were alerted and the fire bell alerted them twice as fast. However, the fire trucks didn't immediately go to the fire because there was a very large traffic jam right outside the compound. So the fire trucks had to wait for the traffic to pass and then they would go to the fire. IT seems like the devs forgot to make emergency vehicle have priority during the sim for road access.

The other thing I didn't like was the park placement. Whenever i wanted to raise the value of land i would place a park but for the placement it seems like i was only able to place the park perpendicular to the road rather than parallel. That was a pain since there were parks that would have fit in the area and wouldn't have come into contact with houses therefore making the house demolished. If I had a skinny park I wanted to place it parallel to the raod so that it would hug the road and could raise the land value without taking up too much space in an area.

Your actual sims have to go from their actual houses to their workplace, be it a police station or something else. If they can't get to the police station because they're stuck in traffic, that police car won't be manned. That police cars and other emergency/service vehicles get stuck in traffic is to emphasize the importance of roads and mass transit systems. I'd like to see that cars give way to the services with sirens but I guess that "ruins" the gameplay around roads...

Also if you have commercial buildings closer to your sims' homes they don't have to take their car all the time and create more traffic.

The way things operate you get a lot more dense cities that while smaller on the whole are vastly more interesting at the ground level. From what I remember from playing the older games you'd paint big sections with the zones to get those things to build but now you paint stripes along roadways, this sort of changes how much less space you need to create a proper looking city I think. A lot of the size stuff is tied to how the game actually does it's magic as well, and gets exponentially more taxing with the size of your city. My PC is pretty great but I think if I did a good job of filling up the 'medium' sized area that was in the beta it would have slowed it down a tad, noticeably at least. Ideally they would have had an advanced option to expand out the cities, or built in some mod support for city sizes (maybe it's possible still?) but as it stands the sizes maybe be frustrating to someone wanting to recreate real world cities in some sort of scale, though it should also bother those people that there's no terrain modifier also I think. The game itself though is that much more interesting to me though cause it's more rich with detail and under the hood complexity that just a plain large city that looks like some other city someone else created or something :S

The UI in general, and the way the game surfaces useful information, is fucking sick.

It's bumming me out that the game is basically unplayable for me because of constant internet downtime. I BOTH HATE AND LOVE LIVING IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

@Chop: Do you have any way to get a MiFi type thing for maybe better coverage if your internet isn't up to snuff, obviously assuming cell coverage is ok/better than your internet quality. It's a bummer because the internet connection seems vital to how the game is built right now, it syncs your city up every 15mins and I'm sure a bit faster with smaller things if you're connected to another player in your current region.

While I personally hardly have issues with internet, it's not the best here in canada (uploads? what uploads...) but it's basically stable and good enough to play games with no pingz and all that jazz even if I'm doing other things to blow out my connection. All that doesn't matter though if on their end a server goes down and I'm not migrated properly or any number of other oddities that do happen even if you're internet is perfectly stable and fine.

SimCity seems like it's pretty rad though so hopefully you can figure something out so it's not busting your nuts anytime you wanna play it. Maybe get on the devs about it? Shout at them on their forums or twitter accounts and get them to respond to you, it's not totally crazy to desire a way to play the game offline in some capacity... at some point who cares about syncing data up and all that shit if you can't actually play the dang video game :)

If you want a really good look at someone who took the beta about as far as you can, I'll post a link to his You Tube at the end of this post.

I played the second beta. And it was a lot of fun. More than I really expected. But it was also limited by design. You couldn't build the great works, could only claim one region in the first beta and only two in the second. And the available options wouldn't allow you to get too far given than specializations, most of the larger buildings, the high-density stuff we all want, and many many many other things were closed off for beta.

Mostly the beta was there to provide a good look at the UI, the flow of gameplay, and the overall design. And it did this with gusto and with style in my opinion. I missed the first beta, but spent 9 hours playing the last day of the second beta. And I'd dearly love to still have access just to that small slice of the game. I was skeptical about some of the design decisions being an old Sim City player from way back, but I think this one has all the potential in the world. And the ability to upgrade your key buildings makes such a difference to the flow of the game. It's looking to be a really great product and I can't wait to play the full version.

Here are the links I promised:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKsqXBrW3Vr2bXbhuGNfxCi-5-fLDasok

This should take you to the playlist. Specifically I'd like to point you to videos 10, 11, 12, and 13. Those are from the second beta and this guy is really good at showing off the game and what you can accomplish if you know what you're doing. Check it out!

I enjoyed both betas very much, I am very looking forward to it.

I liked the time I spent in the first beta, didn't get into the second one, my only gripes are that even when cities start to fill in and build up, they still feel very spread out and kind of west-coast... or something. I'm from the northeast US where cities are tightly packed in, there is too much weird empty space between buildings, I know that's a pure aesthetics thing, but it still bothers me. I also find the maps to be too small. I managed to fill just about my entire city within the window of a 1 hour beta... It used to take me so much longer to build a full city in the older games.

That said, I actually do enjoy the game quite a bit and I already preordered it, even paid extra for the "euro-style" cities hoping that they will scratch my itch for a more dense looking environment and I look forward very much to the online components of the game.

The beta limited you by design. You couldn't use the high density roads to get that packed in feel. The full game should allow for all that.

I've also heard it said that the plots in the beta were smaller than what has been planned for the final game, though I don't know if that is truth or speculation. So don't quote me on it or anything. :)

@zzombie13: Where do you guys get that info from? Since everyone keeps repeating that we'll get bigger city spaces, I want to know who said it and when, and I'd love a link to somewhere someone official promised this. Bigger city spaces than they ship the game with by default is a big deal and changes the complexity of managing a city from a small to a big area, there's no way they can resist putting that up as DLC that we have to pay for.

Yeah, the demo was super slick and super fun. Yes, you only got a small playpen to lark about in, but when you get to link up multiple 2 km by 2 km cites in the full game, it'll be super sexy. I do hope to god that the online stays stable for launch.

Oh, and curved roads. Curved. Roads.

Hah, I didn't think you were allowed to get sexy videos out because it was a sexy beta. Looks like I missed out on all that sexy YouTube money. AGAIN.

THANKS MICROSOFT.

@zzombie13:

Question

Could you tell something about the maximum size of a city? Will it be the same scale as a massive city in 3 & 4, or should we expect final cities to be a bit smaller because of the new Glassbox engine?

Answer

The size of our new cities are roughly equivalent to the SC4 medium sized city (2 kilometers square). That said, you can connect cities together inside a region and build out a network of connected cities - each city providing different resources and abilities to its neighbors and the region. For example, one city could be a residential suburb which provides workers every day to a nearby industrial city. The industrial city could be providing power to the suburb. You can play both of these cities yourself, or even run the entire region by yourself, or invite a friend to help out.

@funkydupe:

http://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/_/simcity-2013/maxis-amaa-transcript-r232

Looks like @fattony12000: already took care of that for you, and it's a good thing. Because I've watched so many videos from the betas and dev interviews I'd honestly have no idea where to find you a link. I'm pretty sure that one of the comments came from Ryan Davis when he streamed a run through the beta earlier in February, but again I can't be sure.

I honestly didn't have too much of a problem with the size the beta gave us. Given the region play options, seems like you'll have plenty to do no matter what the official plot size ends up being. Looking at Clearwater and Norwich Hills from the beta, managing just those 2 seems like a lot of content and options. Add in the Great Works and the ambiguous third plot we've seen in the beta but been unable to interact with, I'm not seeing a problem with the way it's structured. At least not for my personal needs and tastes.

I agree with you on this completely. I've been waiting for a Simcity ever since I played 4, and it looks like I'll be waiting for a Simcity for a while still. Isn't it the point of these city builders for you to make a city and manage it, not make a couple of buildings and OOOH and AAAH over how pretty they look.

Honestly, they had a winning formula with Simcity 4, all they had to do was probably update the graphics and change around a few things, and bam, another hit. It seems with this game, though, they're trying to appeal to a wider audience, which is fine and all, but don't leave the loyal players behind and make the game stupidly easy. Free zoning, come on, give me a break. No more power lines and pipes either.

I sure as hell aren't buying this game and giving EA more money in the process. I'll wait for a Simcity game that deserves to be called Simcity. In the meanwhile, I'll go back to Anno and Tropico.

I haven't played it but I've noticed that all the cities look hilariously small compared to past games, the don't even look like cities really.

@missacre: You know with the zoning being free and roads being every service they're actually going far more realistic right? When they build new subdivisions and such now they gas/water/power/cable/phone is all built in as they lay down the roads, it's not dumbing down it accurate, my apartment doesn't have a power line sticking out the side connecting to the nearby houses, that'd be insane, the power goes through the road grid (either above or more commonly these days below) same goes for everything else, water pipes are all interconnected with the road ways and even the storm drains in case of emergencies.

Zoning is also almost completely free compared to the total cost fo build structures/roads/etc. like a percent of a percent. and usually it's just the salary of 2 office workers and 3 surveyors out in the field which are a constant.

Size? Sure you can argue that though.

Look awesome. But I haven't been able to get a beta key yet, and I don't even know if my system will run it yet. I can't wait for the opportunity to play it though.

I love it when a franchise is able to revitalize itself in an intelligent way, consolidating mechanics in intelligent ways and making intelligent changes to the mechanics which solve long standing issues. It's always great. Unless they fuck it up of course which they tend to do when I have a deep seated love of the originals. I guess what I'm saying is I don't exactly feel comfortable dismissing the opinions of the @missacres of this thread out as when something I love is perverted I feel the same way... but... I think they've done a great job with SimCity. Everything they've said about the game sounds brilliant and everything I've seen of the game looks really really fun. I've already bought it and my body is ready.

<p>The gameplay was a lot of fun. Got to get in about 4 hours for their final beta. Region support is very easy to work with and I truly felt like the online integration enhanced the gameplay. I do agree that they need an offline option but it's still tons of fun regardless. Buy the game, it's fantastic.</p>

From what I've seen I am EXCITED. I preordered yesterday and will be anticipating its launch Tuesday. I am concern about the size of cities you can make, but it seems like it will "work".

The last beta was wicked fun. Loved playing MP with my friends.

@themasterds: I don't think it's wrong to question these sorts of things, and frankly I'm sure some issues will come up, probably some we haven't thought of yet, and I'm sure there will be some server issues as well as some size limit problems. but as you said it seems like they made a lot of smart choices in terms of actual gameplay mechanics and in the UI. For me origin is almost a deal breaker but that doesn't mean I didn't give it a fair shake like a lot of the nay sayers seem to be doing.

I haven't been this hyped for a game in a while. Can't wait.

Love it! Can't wait for March 5th! The last beta let us check out the multiplayer and it's awesome!

I am so excited!! Only one week left to go for us Europeans!

I'm totally in love with this game. I have to say though, the city plot size is a bit of a letdown. Specializations aside (I understand why you can't focus on oil production and casinos), you still don't really have the real estate to plop down all the upgraded buildings that a major G8 city might have and maintain the integrity of a good looking, functional city. If you want every type of school, upgraded police and fire, the large hospital buildings, bus, train, and airport, it just can't happen. Sooner than later you're plopping those over top of existing residential and commercial because you're out of space. A bit of a drag because while this game is all about "one city doing one thing really well" it should at least let you comfortably house all the necessary services and features that make a city a city.

If you can get over that though, you can still create some really great stuff, especially if a large population isn't your thing. If it is your main goal though, expect to cover even more square footage on water pumps, larger dump sites, recycling etc, as well as relocating those huge water pumps after your aquifers run dry (that's right, resources deplete — I couldn't tell if they renew themselves or shift over time due to how short the last beta was).

All that said, even after just a few hours with it, I still consider this a super fun game with a lot of depth and it definitely scratches that creative itch that LEGO and Minecraft tend to scratch. I pretty much just need to abandon the mindset that one city can have all the things and focus on making multiple cities that support eachother. Should be an interesting challenge.

It's 2013. Do you live on top of a mountain or in an undersea bunker? There's literally not one person I know who has a PC that isn't always connected to the internet.

@hunkulese: Just gonna point out that only about 2/3s of Americans have broadband I know a lot of people claim to have very sporadic speeds as well.

Dunno if you could theoretically play this game well with dial up, but that seems pretty impractical.

My sister, for one, since she travels around a lot. But hey, good of you to make blanket statements that are so clearly untrue that it's crazy.

@azteck: What kind of a gaming laptop does she own? I've been thinking about investing in one.

Just to defend EA for once: Wouldn't you at least try to make an attempt at countering piracy? Showing acceptance of piracy by not trying moves will make the threshold people need to cross when illegally downloading a game feel that much smaller. A lot of gamers use desktop computers because they tend to pack more power; and usually they're connected to the internet. Would you make design decisions based on the majority of gamers, or would you make them based on a minority of traveling gamers?

@funkydupe: It's not a great laptop. It can run it with everything on low more or less, so I wouldn't recommend it. I'm sure some people on these forums could direct you though, depending on the budget you have.

I wasn't on board till I saw this video, I then went straight to pre order it on Origin, HIS ROCK CONCERT CAUSED AN EARTH QUAKE!

Just a general message, I'm like a broken record this year, haha, not directed to you especially Bourbon: It is possible to buy video games after they've been released and still be aboard :)

I'm never going pre-order a full-priced game like this again. Learning a lesson watching/reading a lot of the A:CM discussion all over the net. Hype is a wonderful thing for gaming. It means that the games are interesting enough to create a following even though they aren't out yet. Sadly the culture of allowing people to buy games before they're out creates a lot of crushed expectations and frustration when perhaps a painted picture doesn't resemble the reality of the game. After a game is out a singular reviewer can rate a game low, but a player can still love the game, but when many reviews line up and say a game is bad, you should probably move with more caution - and your expectations will attune appropriately.

Half the forum knows this is my last pre-order, so I just hope that SimCity will be an enjoyable experience. In my defense, I pre-ordered after playing the first Closed Beta version of the game and I had fun with it. It was just refreshing to play something with a different feel to it than just blasting fools.

What is the game like graphically? I can't run on max, so am curious to see how it would look on my machine.

I even said as much in my previous post. :) I did on a service with no refund prior to A:CM.

@funkydupe: Because it's Sim City, I was always going to get it anyway. Only games I have pre ordered in my life were GTA IV, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 3 and Fifa 13 all games that turned up to my house on morning of release day and all games I was very happy with, so I have yet to be burned by a pre order yet.

@bourbon_warrior: You've been way more selective in your pre-order practices than me. I'm trying to suggest that people become more selective as well, or even better, wait until even their favorite/most awaited titles have been released and somehow received by media/public, in order to be able to make a more qualified decision that could counter some of the shock disappointment brought by paying up front for something that didn't deliver. Sure, at least for user opinions to become an indicator, it'll take a few days extra wait, but to avoid feeling you've thrown away money, that wait might be worth it. A few days isn't a long time when a game is out and usually relevant for years in most cases for the good titles.

Whether a game delivers or not is still an individual preference/taste kind of deal, but with a pile of reviews/user opinions out there, you'll at least be more informed of what you're spending money on.

I run everything on Medium to keep the frame rate nice and the game looks great. Ultra adds more motion blur and some really nice lighting effects (lights bounce off adjacent buildings etc), but they're not necessary to your enjoyment.

No, I know what games I want to pre-order, just because you are silly about your pre-orders you don't have to preach to the masses about it. I love early morning deliverys on launch day. I prefer to play a game I am truly looking forward to rather than read reviews that detail every mechanic and story beat in the game.

I mean who honestly thought Aliens was going to be a good game?

Yea, i agree with him, i preorder a good chunk of games myself but i also know what im getting into for the most part. I think its fairly easy now days to tell when a release will be shit. Games i'v preordered recently are this, Farcry 3, Xcom, and Borderlands 2. None of them i regretted pre-ordering.

You don't need broadband to connect to the internet. All you need is some type of internet connection to connect to the server and you're good to go.

I'm not sure you understand what a blanket statement is and nothing I said is clearly untrue. How many people do you know that play games on their PC that isn't connected to the internet? Even someone who travels a lot will most likely have internet access wherever they go. When was the last time you stayed in a Hotel that didn't offer free wireless? You're an extremely rare case if you have a gaming PC and no internet and the majority of people who claim about DRM like this do so because they want to pirate the game.

I've never stayed in a hotel that offers free wifi, and I've traveled quite a bit. I'm sure there are quite a few people who have had the same experience. Simply because most people in this community don't move around often, does not exclude the fact that people do. Add to that the fact that a lot of people have unstable internet connections and so on. No matter how you frame it, their DRM (because it is DRM) is complete bullshit and should not be deemed okay.

@hunkulese: Nowadays anything that's not broadband is damn near useless, and for the amount of data/stability this type of always on requires, you pretty much need it as well. All that aside you're getting even more ridiculous with your statements. Going to that old anybody who doesn't like DRM is a pirate cliche dies out among most developers ages ago. Hell there was a game released ON piratebay recently and I think they did pretty well. not to mention the whole Humble movement.Oh and I was at a hotel 2 days ago that didn't have free wifi.