Hello again ol' friend: Simcity 5 introduced

[Buccaneer]

On-line gameplay should only be an option not a requirement. My PC is the only "server" that should matter beyond simply downloading the game and activating it.

[spleen1015]

There is an article in the latest PC Gamer that really makes me want to play this game. It is too bad they fucked it up with all of these issues caused by an unnecessary design decision.

[Alan T]

I will echo what neon said.. I have actually had a lot of fun playing this game. The annoying part has been the server issues, but I probably have about 15 hours or so into this thanks to the snow day.

Once they get the launch issues worked out, it might be a pretty fun game for those of you who don't care about the drm part.

[Mota]

I switched over to NA East 4 yesterday and since then I've had a pretty much normal experience. I interacted with other cities, no issues logging in, etc.

Overall after my first REAL experience with the game I'm really enjoying it! I played about 6 hours yesterday (!!!), trying to get my city over the 35,000 hump. Trying to balance the 3 tiers of housing to get the right employees for my industrial complex has been very difficult for me. I'm trying to become the education city, but I'm not really seeing any revenue from this, only costs. I guess if my citizens go to other cities and make good money i'll get the tax revenue? I do like the University research projects though, they're really cool. Trying to make a giant solar array to power my city, none of my neighbors are feeding me enough electricity and my current solar plant just isn't doing the trick. Seeing all kinds of brownouts and it's pissing off my citizens.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Just got on Steam. Lots of friends playing SC4 and Cities XL.

[Neon_Chaos]

Originally Posted by Mota

I switched over to NA East 4 yesterday and since then I've had a pretty much normal experience. I interacted with other cities, no issues logging in, etc.

Overall after my first REAL experience with the game I'm really enjoying it! I played about 6 hours yesterday (!!!), trying to get my city over the 35,000 hump. Trying to balance the 3 tiers of housing to get the right employees for my industrial complex has been very difficult for me. I'm trying to become the education city, but I'm not really seeing any revenue from this, only costs. I guess if my citizens go to other cities and make good money i'll get the tax revenue? I do like the University research projects though, they're really cool. Trying to make a giant solar array to power my city, none of my neighbors are feeding me enough electricity and my current solar plant just isn't doing the trick. Seeing all kinds of brownouts and it's pissing off my citizens.

What's your Origin ID?

[Groundhog]

I didn't even realise I owned Simcity 4. I must have bought it in a Steam sale. Anyway, I fired it up Saturday afternoon and..... well, played it for the best part of a day. First time I've ever played a Simcity game without cheats, and I'm turning a profit in 3 out of 4 cities.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Mizzou B-ball fan

Just got on Steam. Lots of friends playing SC4 and Cities XL.

OTOH, it's Steam. If your friends were playing SimCity 5, how would you know?

[Neon_Chaos]

Ugh. Made a big mistake by upgrading to a higher tier of casinos. I'll be scaling back until the region develops more.

Clebrownsfan/Alan feel free to purchase power from me. (I think I have 100 kw/hr free) Just holler in the region wall if you need more power, and I'll see what I can do.

I solved my water problems by a hack-y solution. I put in my large water pump next to the sewage filration system. Basically, unlimited water that gets filtered constantly. I could probably scale the operation up if you guys need me to provide water.

[Mota]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

What's your Origin ID?

It's HeatseekerMota

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

Ugh. Made a big mistake by upgrading to a higher tier of casinos. I'll be scaling back until the region develops more.

Clebrownsfan/Alan feel free to purchase power from me. (I think I have 100 kw/hr free) Just holler in the region wall if you need more power, and I'll see what I can do.

I solved my water problems by a hack-y solution. I put in my large water pump next to the sewage filration system. Basically, unlimited water that gets filtered constantly. I could probably scale the operation up if you guys need me to provide water.

You did something to your city during the weekend that caused my city to go belly up fast. I think i was depending on your buildings heavily for supplying jobs to my sims and suddenly all chaos hit in my town. I nearly went bankrupt and had to get a bunch of bonds and tear down and rebuild a good chunk of my city. I think I finally am back on a better stable footing now and am close to 100,000 residents again.

I had the same water issues though, but did the same thing as you with the sewage station next to the water pumps to take care of it.

[Thomkal]

SimCity connection troubles "almost behind us"; offline mode "not possible" | News | PC Gamer

[spleen1015]

Originally Posted by Thomkal

SimCity connection troubles "almost behind us"; offline mode "not possible" | News | PC Gamer

I like the one commenter who said that sevrer load was relieved because so many people gave up and stop trying to play.

[Alan T]

Here is a night time view from my current city. In the distant right you can see Neon's gambling city that spews constant criminals to my town. To the distant left, you can see Clebrownfans city.

[Neon_Chaos]

Expect more criminals to come. I am about to give up on funding my police, since we can't stop the crime anyway. I'm investing around 9k per hour on the police, with no end in sight. Might as well go for the moolah!

[spleen1015]

I need to stop coming into this thread.

[CleBrownsfan]

Wasn't able to play as much as I wanted to over the weekend. I should get some playing time tonight. What's the deal with the "Great Works"? Is it worth even thinking about them with only 3 of us in the region?

My city is sort of a mess at the moment. I tried to make it an industrial city (mining ore) but committed a lot of my funds to utilities, police, fire, hospital, ect. I also have a serious problem with traffic... A part of me wants to scratch that city and start over.

Alan, are you "specialized" in one certain aspect? I know Neon is a crime infested casino region

[Alan T]

I was building up as an oil city, but there is only a certain amount of oil under there and I was using it up too fast. Plus tornados have been devastating my oil fields. So I am not sure what I am doing yet other than just building up the number of residents and trying to get stable financially.

I've been working on improving education in the area and might re-purpose my trade depots from oil to high-tech with that.

I did have a huge traffic problem previously which was complicating my fire/police/ambulance/garbage/freight shipping as well.. (like solid gridlock for hours). When neon's city went belly up previously it caused me issues and I ended up taking out a ton of bonds and just gutting the entire residential and commercial parts of my town. I now seem to be handling traffic much better without having it all funnel through 2 specific intersections. There seems to be a better flow and it has improved all of my services tremendously.

I haven't thought any about a great works yet. i want to get my town a little more stable and built up so i can accumulate money before I sink into that. I just recently got my ferry hooked up for water transport, and train is running as well as bus terminals and street cars. Now to do a little more on the education side and then figure out what to do with the oil/high-tech issue.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by pcgamer review

The idea is exciting, but it can be difficult to exploit meaningfully. It’s missing information I need, such as what data influences whether or not Sims will commute to other cities, or what the limit on resource sharing is. I can buy power when I need a little extra, but trying to run a city without its own power plants doesn’t work. I wasn’t being cheeky or trying to test the simulation, I just thought it would be neat to have a dirty city dedicated to coal power supporting a larger, medium-income residential city. I tried: I built a city with a 250 megawatt power surplus to support another, but my powerless city refused to purchase more than 20.8 megawatts despite having a huge power deficit. Why limit how I exploit regional interactions, especially when it’s supposed to be the answer to small city sizes?

Well...if I thought I might someday buy if they fixed the always-on DRM, forget that based on this. Regional interactions seem far too...random per this review.

[Zinto]

Someday I may be able to get on America East 2 so I can join up in the region with you guys.

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by Zinto

Someday I may be able to get on America East 2 so I can join up in the region with you guys.

We are on America West 1 actually, CleBrownsfan moved last week. Since Friday, I haven't had any connectivity issues at all myself.

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

Well...if I thought I might someday buy if they fixed the always-on DRM, forget that based on this. Regional interactions seem far too...random per this review.

Yeah, but unlike the always-on DRM, those kind of arbitrary limits might be patchable.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

Well...if I thought I might someday buy if they fixed the always-on DRM, forget that based on this. Regional interactions seem far too...random per this review.

I don't expect EA to remove the always-on DRM for this title. I do expect that patches (and lots and lots of DLC) to modify the high city interdependency that players currently experience.

[Neon_Chaos]

Originally Posted by Alan T

I was building up as an oil city, but there is only a certain amount of oil under there and I was using it up too fast. Plus tornados have been devastating my oil fields. So I am not sure what I am doing yet other than just building up the number of residents and trying to get stable financially.

I've been working on improving education in the area and might re-purpose my trade depots from oil to high-tech with that.

I did have a huge traffic problem previously which was complicating my fire/police/ambulance/garbage/freight shipping as well.. (like solid gridlock for hours). When neon's city went belly up previously it caused me issues and I ended up taking out a ton of bonds and just gutting the entire residential and commercial parts of my town. I now seem to be handling traffic much better without having it all funnel through 2 specific intersections. There seems to be a better flow and it has improved all of my services tremendously.

I haven't thought any about a great works yet. i want to get my town a little more stable and built up so i can accumulate money before I sink into that. I just recently got my ferry hooked up for water transport, and train is running as well as bus terminals and street cars. Now to do a little more on the education side and then figure out what to do with the oil/high-tech issue.

I am seriously thinking of blowing up the casinos and just going to manufacturing.

[SackAttack]

Luke Plunkett, Kotaku: "seriously, fuck this game. i feel genuinely sorry for the designers who made the amazing game that lies buried beneath all this bullshit."

Mike Fahey, Kotaku: "Earlier I asked if I could just change my review to a giant "FUCK THIS". Stephen thought I was kidding."

Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku: "Sounds like you have arrived at the conclusion I worry I'm headed towards. Bummer."

When three members of the editorial staff for a reasonably major site arrive at the 'great game, but so much bullshit' consensus, that's...ouch.

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

Luke Plunkett, Kotaku: "seriously, fuck this game. i feel genuinely sorry for the designers who made the amazing game that lies buried beneath all this bullshit."

Mike Fahey, Kotaku: "Earlier I asked if I could just change my review to a giant "FUCK THIS". Stephen thought I was kidding."

Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku: "Sounds like you have arrived at the conclusion I worry I'm headed towards. Bummer."

When three members of the editorial staff for a reasonably major site arrive at the 'great game, but so much bullshit' consensus, that's...ouch.

that pcgamer article i posted earlier ended up giving it a 69...so...yeah..

[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

that pcgamer article i posted earlier ended up giving it a 69...so...yeah..

That's the thing. I don't think it's that bad. It's just that everybody spends time with it seems to come away saying "Man, what a great game this would be if not for this other bullshit."

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Originally Posted by SackAttack

That's the thing. I don't think it's that bad. It's just that everybody spends time with it seems to come away saying "Man, what a great game this would be if not for this other bullshit."

I mentioned it before, but this is exactly the scenario that led to the downturn in the Madden franchise. It started like that and quickly degraded to where it stands today. It's a scary thing to see the same thing happening to other franchises. Stupid management handcuffing creative minds is a recipe for disaster.

[Lonnie]

Metacritic has it at a 66 right now, and thats with Eurogamer Sweden giving it a 100.

[Mota]

If they changed the rating for Polygon.com's review from the initial 9.5 to the current 4, it would be even lower!

Hey, I'm really enjoying the game right now, I'm trying to get into the whole production thing with processors to start and trying to break into CPU's and TV's. It's actually quite difficult. My biggest thing right now is getting $$$ workers to fill my positions, I have tons of high density $$$ housing and I still only have 700 workers (70K population). My city has 2,300 $$$ jobs open so there are still 1,700 or so unfilled. Nobody from other cities are coming in either, I have 0 commuters. With the $$ positions I have 15,000 commuters and 0 unfilled positions so that's obviously not a problem there.

[Qwikshot]

So my question is if you don't care about the online always requirement and you hope that the bugs will be ironed out...is it worth purchasing...

I mean compared to 4, is it a signifcant upgrade?

[Alan T]

I liked 4 a ton, I played many many many hours of it. It never was ever fixed or bug free though and relied on modders to get rid of the biggest annoyances. I do not know if this version will have a similar fate or not but so far I have really enjoyed playing it. I don't think that I can say it is better, it is just different. It feels like a sim city mixed with anno a little bit as far as games go.

It is pretty pricey for many gamers I realize, but I have gotten a good 15 or so hours of play time in on it in just three days myself and I don't tend to be at my computer that much normally.

[mckerney]

Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

[mckerney]

It sounds like this super advanced Glassbox simulation that that's part of the reason for smaller city sizes is totally worth it too!

Traffic "AI"... This is why services and traffic are broken! - Answer HQ

One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.

"Workers aren't commuting."
"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."
"Tourism is broken."
"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."

The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.

"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.

Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.

Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.

TL;DR: Fixing the way the game handles traffic and "sims" will fix 90% of the problems plaguing players!

Ultimately, the problem is that the developers have decided to handle sims like they handle any "mindless" power-agent. This results in mindless sims, and mindless services. Mindless services reduce the actual quality of the simulation. Since no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house. The next morning, that agent sets out to find "high-wealth" work. Then after work, may end up in a medium-wealth home with 2 kids! There's no rhyme or reason for the way they behave, OTHER than just taking the shortest (not quickest) path to the nearest open space.

Police services suffer from this as well. They converge on the first crime committed, and ignore the second crime until one car rushes off to deposit the criminal-agent in jail. THEN the other cars can respond to the second crime. There's no zones, and there's no actual "prevention."

Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire. The only thing you get for having multiple fire-trucks is that they put the fires out slightly quicker. Really, you can have the exact same fire coverage quality with only one of each type of fire-unit. "Fire Marshalls" are COMPLETELY random, and just seem to roam around picking whichever building is "most at risk," ignoring the fact that an entire neighborhood is high risk, and the next "most at risk" is on the other side of the city... Which gets them stuck in traffic.

Interestingly enough, ambulances seem to act independantly of one another, but they still refuse to take "right of way" and are constantly bogged in traffic. Medical vans just act like all the rest of the service vehicles.

[mckerney]

Yes. This is what I am talking about... It's the same algorithm handling utilities as everything else. That's why this game is so broken. If I could lay pipes down, then I could separate my sewage from my traffic. Also, if traffic was run by a different system, then the sewage would not be affected by traffic jams... Traffic jams which are on the streets ABOVE the sewage "pipes" that we never see.

.

[DaddyTorgo]

LMAO

What a clusterfuck.

[Draft Dodger]

I think all the naysayers are full of it, because I just saw this in Target and the cover CLEARLY stated that this game had won 26 game awards already

[mckerney]

The more I read about Glassbox the more impressed I get.

Did EA lie about theoretical population sizes? : SimCity

So this is the second thing that has been puzzling the hell out of me today. Did EA lie about how much population a city could support in this game in order to reassure the potential player-base that small tile sizes would be okay?
Check out this thread from the Sim City forums. In particular this post:

So what the hell? This basically confirms a lot of suspicions of mine and others that we aren't actually seeing that many sims in our cities and it also explains why only 1/10 of the population is working. We don't actually have as many people in our cities as we think! EA has stated numerous times that their internal testers were able to get cities of 500k and even 1 million sims, but in reality they may have been blowing smoke up our asses! What the fuck, if I'm having traffic problems at ~100k sims (which is actually more on the order of 10k sims) imagine what would happen if I had 10 times more sims on the streets.
Am I deluding myself or is it a real possibility that this gamebreaking design decision cannot be remedied?

Yet, the total amount of required workers increases with the "phantom" population and not the actual population, causing a worker shortage. This is my biggest gripe with the game. 6 blocks of industrial, 2 block of commercial, dozens and dozens of blocks of residential, and I have a 10k worker shorter. WTF?

So it looks like thing like demand for services and required workers may expand based on the listed population for the city, but available workers and tax revenue only increases based on the simulated population.

[Mota]

Oh wow. All of this makes total sense. Now how do they fix it? Seems like the problems we're having and the fundamental issues causing these problems stretch deeply into the core of the game system. Once you peel back the pretty exterior of this game, there's a lot of rot inside.

[mckerney]

An experiment on the population numbers.

PROOF THAT THE GAME IS MISLEADING REGARDING POPULATION COUNT, AMONG OTHER THINGS... : SimCity

And a video of Glassbox agents in action at the end of the work day.

[HarryLime]

the last few days i have softened on this game.. thought maybe now the launch is over, things have settled down and we could have a great game in front of us..

unfortunately, everything i have read since, makes it look like the launch issues are the least of the concerns!

the glasshouse "engine" looks like a total farce as shown above..

Disasters seem to wreak havoc on most users, destroying hours of work... spend 5-6 hours building a city, only to get a disaster that destroys your town hall and upgrades, rendering half your infrastructure totall unusable!

Neibouring regions just seem to have waaay to much influence on your own city... i can appreciate the intention behind it, but the execution seems poor.

I can forgive the launch issues.. however i can not forgive a garbage AI that does nothing like it was claimed to.

Good bye sim city, my ol' friend!

[Blackadar]

After reading (and seeing the confirmation of it) the stuff mckerney posted, my interest in SC has dwindled to nothing. The whole point of the Glassbox engine and the small cities was so that each "resident" could be simulated properly. But now that it's been shown that is a total farce, there's no way to build a city in any kind of realistic fashion because the underlying models don't work. SC4 had problems with traffic modeling (which was ultimately fixed by NAM), but that's nothing compared to the failures of this type of agent modeling.

[Neon_Chaos]

Casino City has ground to a halt. There appears to be a bugged police car stuck in the regional highway. This is preventing all trucks, buses, etc from getting back to my city.

[Neon_Chaos]

Welp, it eventually fixed itself... but that was fucking stupid.

[Mizzou B-ball fan]

Originally Posted by Neon_Chaos

Welp, it eventually fixed itself... but that was fucking stupid.

Were they simulating the time it takes for a cop to finish up at a donut shop?

[Neon_Chaos]

Wow. That outage just completely set everything off balance. City is practically dead now.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

RPS

Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that [Sim City] “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player. A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.

i am shocked and appalled

[spleen1015]

With Simple AI Like This, Why Does SimCity Need Cloud Computing?

More stuff along that line.

So tragic.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by spleen1015

With Simple AI Like This, Why Does SimCity Need Cloud Computing?

More stuff along that line.

So tragic.

And still another video in timelapse (but still 10 minutes long) shows a city growing to 200,000 population with entirely residential zones—no commercial or industrial zones, no traffic, and basic services.

Nice.

EDIT: This was also the only city in the region, so it wasn't population building to work at a neighboring city.

[NorvTurnerOverdrive]

at some point you stop being disappointed and just have to marvel the sheer magnificence of this flaming dung pile