SimCity

Tuco_sl said:

It just seems like an example of an ambitious developer team trying to create a novel feature in a game and not being able to make it perfect. Personally I'd prefer if they made the traffic simulation more abstract like it is in previous simcity games, but I can appreciate the attempt to do something new. And frankly it's such a challenging problem that I'm not surprised it doesn't work well.

The most depressing thing about it is that working traffic is so unattractive for expansion/dlc sales and so challenging it's very possible it won't ever be fixed.

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Have to play tower defense with roads.

Also for infinite water, stick a h2o pump next to your sewage treatment plant (it pumps water onto the ground) and use only filtered pumps (you can bulldoze the default one that comes with it).

Tuco_sl said:

Another good thing I learned is that the client is able to do most of the city simulation stuff. I'm sure most of the city to city interaction is serverside, but that's much less complex and more easily re-created than bus pathing or RCI demand creation, for example.

That means that it'll be much easier to create a third party simcity server than one for WoW or Diablo3, for example.

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And easier to cheat.

Edit: I'm sure people who really want to pirate this game have made headway with launching the game without having to go through Origin.

Tuco_sl said:

Fake refunds is pretty bad, but I can't imagine getting frustrated enough with the shitty server/game support and then go try to deal with EA support to get a refund, lol. One good thing about buying from Amazon is that they've usually been pretty good about giving out refunds. And part of me hopes that amazon doesn't get the shaft when they refund me but rather pass it onto EA.


Either way this game is going exactly like I and I think any reasonable person here expected. Asking for a refund because an online game's release sucks seems weird.

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I disagree. If the game performs like shit, why should we as the target audience let them report to Wall Street that they sold more copies than were played? The 30-day MBG is expanding into many markets, and I think gaming is one that should be applied to especially if they have server issues.

I just downloaded a patch. I'm hoping Maxis will make some headway with the connectivity and pathing problems. Can't find any notes. A comm lead mentioned a "server update" which may have something to do with it.

We are working hard to resolve a problem that is at the heart of the issues which some players have reported.

Namely:
Trading not working consistently
Unable to load/claim city errors
Getting stuck in a loop in the tutorial

To that end we are currently rolling out a server update which we believe will improve performance considerably. This will involve restarts over the next 4-5 hours across all of our current severs. Minor player impact may occur, such as trading not working consistently and the region wall not working occasionally.

We appreciate your continued patience and support while this fix is being deployed.

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http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9337464.page

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li....page#27456857<---mentions timetable for rolling restarts.

Cad_sl said:

So water doesn't actually run out. You need to put your water pumping station near the water treatment plant; the water treatment plant replenishes the water underneath it. Your pumping station can then pump it out. This water doesn't run out.

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So wait. You build the water pumping station w/ the filtration system attached right by the sewage treatment plant and that keeps water going forever? Since in a sense you are re-using water, like most major cities in RL do.

I fount my issue with my oil town. Can't have your major residential/commercial area between your storage and the region highway access. Which sucks on the map I was on since the oil deposit was right in the middle of the map and the wind blew in a direction where If I put industrial stuff at the entrance it would of blown right over my town.

Since reloading the launcher after the patch (automatic iirc), it is now checking for updates perpetually and basically doing nothing. Perhaps the server restarts they're doing are interrupting the patch system.

No idea Vvoid, but I'll look.

Some other gamers have noticed the pathing issues on the official board. Fingers crossed that balance patches are already being written.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9338045.page

A thread mentioning worker shortages. This is going to be next problem if pathing is ever resolved. Basically your workforce is a small percentage of your total population. Which makes some sense since your population is full of kids and elderly I guess. But the proportions are still a little ridiculous. Something should be done. I regularly have unfilled jobs on the order of 5-20k depending on my city size and proportion of residential. And I zone residential in like 85% of the city.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9338175.page

BIG thread on traffic that occasionally touches on the service vehicle gridlock and pathing problems.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9335021.page

Generally, its not a problem that i couldnt overcome with enough public transport or better road density or better planning.

But i have this one issue, i dont know if its a glitch in the game or what.

In front of my college, there's a gridlock between the college worker vehicles and the school busses. It is causing all my city service vehicles to be stuck in the jam -garbage trucks etc.
When i looked closer i found that the busses dont move in and from the colleges carpark, there are cars that can't come out.

I ended up bulldozing that college and moving it elsewhere, because i couldnt figure it out.

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Downloaded the patch. Now I can't go more than 5 minutes without the game crashing to desktop. Loading server and game fine so I guess that's a plus...

To the people complaining about traffic: you just suck at the game, seriously. It takes a good amount of practice/planning, but after a dozen or so play-throughs with incremental improvements I've managed to get a city up to about 160k pop with zero traffic problems. I've been running an oil > recycling > microprocessor > global export production line that criss-crosses the whole city with zero problems. I don't want to give away all the secrets, but the key is to minimize intersections on your major avenues connecting to the highway and then to do some secret sauce with how you lay down the zones within blocks and bus stops (protip: never use the ctrl key when zoning, that's all I'll say). Anyway, there likely are a few glitches in the traffic pathing, but for the most part I think people are attributing to bugs what is actually the byproduct of their poor traffic management skills.

Anyway traffic management seems to be the linchpin of this game. If you plan it right from the start you end up spending half as much on services as you would otherwise, and if you are producing any exports within the city you can easily double your productivity. Its worth doing a lot of experimenting with it to perfect your strategy.

Also, not sure if anyone has posted it already, but I discovered last night the key to water management is placing your water pump adjacent to the treatment plant late game. I've found that to be totally sustainable even in tiles with low starting water and no sea access.

Tuco_sl said:

Hey if you want to deal with getting a refund then go ahead. I just feel like anyone surprised by simcity's release must be new to gaming or really confused.

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So you're saying that launch day failures should be an accepted part of the gaming industry? They've got you trained to just accept it my friend. And you shouldn't.

No, he's saying that everyone should have completely expected it when buying the game.