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pawelk1986
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13 Jan 2013, 3:57 am

I already ordered it:-)

I hope it will be better than SimCity societies.

I tested SimCity: Societies and decided to not buy it because it not SimCity at all.



b9
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13 Jan 2013, 7:18 am

i did not know that there was going to be a sim city 5. i gave up on sim city after i bought sim city societies. i played if for about 1 hour and i was very disappointed, and i thought that if that was the direction that the game was going to be further developed, i was no longer interested.

sim city societies was very much dumbed down. i can not remember well how it disappointed me, but i remember thinking i could not zoom out to see the entire map (and as a result i had to scan the entire region to find where stuff was), and every building was placed by me rather than developing independently based on my planning capacity.

tonight i looked for sim city 5 on youtube (after reading your post) , and it looks promising to a degree, but one can not tell until one plays it. i noticed that the subterranean aspect of the game seems to have disappeared. there is no mention in any of the videos i watched about subways or water pipes. i wonder whether traffic will be an important aspect of the game (although in sim city 4 (rush hour), it was extremely difficult to avoid congestion (a possible bug) without building roads every 4 zoning tiles (which was ridiculous (and led to air pollution etc))).

i hope the game is not dumbed down like most modern sequels to original classics are.



pawelk1986
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13 Jan 2013, 8:52 am

b9 wrote:
i did not know that there was going to be a sim city 5. i gave up on sim city after i bought sim city societies. i played if for about 1 hour and i was very disappointed, and i thought that if that was the direction that the game was going to be further developed, i was no longer interested.

sim city societies was very much dumbed down. i can not remember well how it disappointed me, but i remember thinking i could not zoom out to see the entire map (and as a result i had to scan the entire region to find where stuff was), and every building was placed by me rather than developing independently based on my planning capacity.

tonight i looked for sim city 5 on youtube (after reading your post) , and it looks promising to a degree, but one can not tell until one plays it. i noticed that the subterranean aspect of the game seems to have disappeared. there is no mention in any of the videos i watched about subways or water pipes. i wonder whether traffic will be an important aspect of the game (although in sim city 4 (rush hour), it was extremely difficult to avoid congestion (a possible bug) without building roads every 4 zoning tiles (which was ridiculous (and led to air pollution etc))).

i hope the game is not dumbed down like most modern sequels to original classics are.


I pro ordered special version, it was discount and i hope i don't wasted money.



b9
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13 Jan 2013, 10:36 am

pawelk1986 wrote:
I pro ordered special version, it was discount and i hope i don't wasted money.

no i do not think you wasted your money. the game looks much better than sim city societies.
i am also going to buy the game because it seems that it is an extension of the true maxis software idea of the game. maybe the writers of this game decided that it was "painfully arduous" to lay out the subterranean gridwork for the water pipelines. i always addressed the water first when i started a game in sim city 4. i actually liked building the pipeline grid (7 tile radius area of effect for each section of pipe), and i "arduously" laid out all the pipes for the entire map and joined them to neighboring regions before i began laying out the rci zones.

i also do not think that they have continued with the idea of electrical stancheons that are required in sim city 4 to connect regions accross unzoned land to the grid.

i enjoyed many aspects about sim city 4 that most people would find boring and tedious to attend to, and i do suspect that the creators of the new game may have excluded things that many average people find boring.

a good thing is that the cars on the roads do not simply disappear after a few seconds of their spawning (like in sim city 4) from what i have seen, but they do travel too fast and they seem to be aimless in their destinations. i saw one car going around a roundabout perpetually, but the youtube videos do indicate that what they depict is not the final product.

relax. i think you will not be disappointed. sorry to scare you if i did.



Anomiel
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24 Jan 2013, 12:04 am

b9 wrote:
i enjoyed many aspects about sim city 4 that most people would find boring and tedious to attend to, and i do suspect that the creators of the new game may have excluded things that many average people find boring.

a good thing is that the cars on the roads do not simply disappear after a few seconds of their spawning (like in sim city 4) from what i have seen, but they do travel too fast and they seem to be aimless in their destinations. i saw one car going around a roundabout perpetually, but the youtube videos do indicate that what they depict is not the final product.


There's a mod to fix the traffic (and lots more, it's really advanced) called Network Addon Mod (NAM) :D
http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/ ... w-and-nwm/
You got to have either Sim City 4 Deluxe or the Rush Hour expansion for it to work.

No doubt that Sim City 2013 is going to be visually stunning, but I'm not sure about the simplified gameplay... According to this interview the statistics will still be there at least, but they will make us look for it.
http://tech2.in.com/features/gaming/interview-with-jason-haber-simcity-maxis/653232 wrote:
The game looks quite visual with what seems to be a reduced emphasis on numbers, charts and graphs. Is this a deliberate design move?
Yes. We definitely wanted to make the game more accessible to a wider audience, and part of that is visualising the game through the Data Layers. However, for the players who want to get the details they used to get with the charts and graphs, they can dig into the Data Layers and find a lot of that detail. We certainly have that type of players in our studio—you know, SimCity 4 geeks who love data, and they are pretty happy with what we have here. However, there indeed was this idea to make it more accessible and easier to understand.



b9
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24 Jan 2013, 9:12 am

Anomiel wrote:
There's a mod to fix the traffic (and lots more, it's really advanced) called Network Addon Mod (NAM) :D
http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/ ... w-and-nwm/
You got to have either Sim City 4 Deluxe or the Rush Hour expansion for it to work.

thankyou for your link, however i already have that add-on. i was talking about the original game with no mods.
NAM works well, but the traffic eventually becomes snarled even with that mod applied.

another problem associated with increased traffic flow is air pollution. i usually try to design my residential lots so they have a "driveway", but are otherwise 2 tiles away from the nearest road. when air pollution starts to become a problem, i go into god mode and plant trees on the vacant tiles between the roads and the residential lots. it is an arduous task but nevertheless an enjoyable one, however the effect on air pollution that results from my 30 minute tree planting spree is not sufficient. it seems to reduce air pollution by about 25% and the effect wears off over time. the ordinances like the "clean air act " (if i remember correctly (the computer i used to play it on died about 1 year ago (although i still have the CD's so i can reinstall it, but i have been engrossed in some other games lately))) do not make much difference to air pollution.

another thing that i consider to be unsatisfactory about sim city 4 is the "commute time" enigma.
there seems to be little attention to the coding of the "commute time" aspect of the game.

when i started playing simcity 4 a few years ago, i placed residential regions and separate commercial regions, and (of course) very separate industrial regions.

when my city grew, there was a period of rabid development after i had rezoned the RCI areas as high density.
15 minutes later, the shiny new buildings were deserted and looked shabby, and when right clicked on for an explanation, they reported that their abandonment was due to "commute time too long".
that was the case even if i provided all types of public transport, and their jobs were only a couple of miles away (in the scale of the largest sim city 4 map)

i then wondered whether "traffic congestion" data was being programatically (?) combined with "distance to job" data, and i wondered whether that resulted in impractical and illogical impetus in the flow of the game.

now i allocate my residential and commercial zones like an alternating checkerboard where one residential block is always next to one commercial block. all the jobs in the high rise buildings are filled by the people who live in the high rise residential buildings next door, but sometimes even they complain about their commute time. i wish i could delete them. they are lazy bastards who ruin my game!

one last rant about sim city 4.

it seems to be impossible to fight crime around universities and golf courses and airports.
you can ring their entire perimeter with police stations (i tried that in a test), and yet there is always an incident
that brings up the adviser who is shaking his hand at me telling me to increase police coverage. i have many modded police stations that can supposedly deal with the crime in those areas, but even they do not work.


the only way i could increase police coverage is with a steam roller.




Anomiel wrote:
No doubt that Sim City 2013 is going to be visually stunning, but I'm not sure about the simplified gameplay...

it does not seem visually stunning to me. it looks like a change of graphics engine

Anomiel wrote:
According to this interview the statistics will still be there at least, but they will make us look for it.
http://tech2.in.com/features/gaming/interview-with-jason-haber-simcity-maxis/653232 wrote:
The game looks quite visual with what seems to be a reduced emphasis on numbers, charts and graphs. Is this a deliberate design move?
Yes. We definitely wanted to make the game more accessible to a wider audience, and part of that is visualising the game through the Data Layers. However, for the players who want to get the details they used to get with the charts and graphs, they can dig into the Data Layers and find a lot of that detail. We certainly have that type of players in our studio—you know, SimCity 4 geeks who love data, and they are pretty happy with what we have here. However, there indeed was this idea to make it more accessible and easier to understand.


from what i have seen on youtube, the game has been severely dumbed down. i saw in a clip where all the player had to do concerning his initial water requirement was place a water tower next to the street, and the rest was taken care of automatically. there was an animation that showed which houses were now connected to water, but the player did not have to lay the pipes (i loved that "chungg" sound when i placed a pipe in sim city 4).

the writers of sim city 5 have included a series of in game "spreadsheets" that reflect the data that currently governs the game (at the time of inspection during a game), but the players input to that data is very small.

i do not think it will be a good game really. i think it will be boring because it will hold my hand when i just want to be free.



aleclair
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24 Jan 2013, 11:54 pm

A lot in SC5 looks to be done automatically. Too much, perchance. Sometimes I am excited and other times worried.

When I watch the gameplay videos I notice there's no zone density also. Reading the tooltips in the videos leads me to believe that the density of the zone will be based on the road it's placed on.

Many years ago Maxis expressed a desire to "go back to the roots" of SimCity and strip away the complexities that had emerged by the time of SC4. It looks like they've done that. I think I am going to hold out on SC5 until the reviews come out and the mod community starts playing around with it.

I mean, they've been doing phenomenal things with SC4 since the mid 2000s. With the NAM and RHW mod as well as the sheer number of custom buildings you can pretty much make any city you'd ever want to make. That's going to be hard to beat with SC5.

I guess in defense of the new SimCity, SimCity 4 wasn't that great when it came out, since it shipped with missing/broken functionality. It took the expansion pack and about three years' worth of user modding to make the game fantastic. So it's possible if SC5 is moddable (and is modded) it'll get up there.



Zaswe12
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25 Jan 2013, 12:01 am

I haven't played a Simcity game since...I was 6? I think it was Simcity 2000 or something, I just know that you could summon aliens.

I'm actually pretty excited for Simcity 5, I haven't played a strategy/simulator game for over a year now.



b9
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25 Jan 2013, 12:53 am

i have just researched the game and i will not be buying it.

you can not play off line in single player mode.
you can not save your game on your hard drive etc etc.

read this!

http://sc2013thedeception.blogspot.com.au/



Zaswe12
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25 Jan 2013, 3:38 am

b9 wrote:
i have just researched the game and i will not be buying it.

you can not play off line in single player mode.
you can not save your game on your hard drive etc etc.

read this!

http://sc2013thedeception.blogspot.com.au/
When there is a game, there will be a crack, Pirate Bay, I have faith in you.



Laz
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25 Jan 2013, 8:18 am

The way the online component works is a similar system to what Diablo 3 has

If you frequent any communities involved in the "scene" you will discover that this kind of setup has made Diablo 3 impossible to crack or effectively pirate properly. The new Sim City game will potentially be the same problem to overcome

If you wish to access the closed Beta for the new simcity game Nvidia are giving away 1000 keys on their facebook page if anyone is interested


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ebec11
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29 Jan 2013, 4:09 am

Tried the beta and I LOVED it :) I already wanted to buy it, now I super duper want to buy it :D
Honestly I could never figure out the water piping, so it turned me off the whole series. I feel like it's going to be a good game, simplified or not.



mmcool
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29 Jan 2013, 10:12 am

Laz wrote:
The way the online component works is a similar system to what Diablo 3 has

If you frequent any communities involved in the "scene" you will discover that this kind of setup has made Diablo 3 impossible to crack or effectively pirate properly. The new Sim City game will potentially be the same problem to overcome

If you wish to access the closed Beta for the new simcity game Nvidia are giving away 1000 keys on their facebook page if anyone is interested

no it is not like that games one.
it just asks a server if the game is real copy each time you login and chnage city
so won't be hard to crack



Northeastern292
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03 Feb 2013, 2:50 pm

I played the beta, and I have this to say: I'm not thrilled.



pawelk1986
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05 Feb 2013, 3:53 am

Northeastern292 wrote:
I played the beta, and I have this to say: I'm not thrilled.


You not liked it?