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SimCity |OT| It's not the simulation or city that matter, it's <parameter: string>

Pyrogeek

Member
Is there a way to drive people to your casinos? I can't seem to make any money on them anymore. Especially my sci fi one. It's like -43k a day right now lol.

In my two tests of a casino city, I succeeded more when growing slowly into it. Plopping one of the larger casinos will start to take tourists away from any other casinos you have in place so it's best to have a good tourism base before moving to your 2nd or 3rd casino. I managed to succeed in this by making sure I had plenty of commercial at each value tier using parks to boost the land value as needed.

I started with the first gambling den and added a second when the first was regularly maxed out. For the first den, I went with the add-ons that focused on boosting low wealth tourist attraction and low wealth tourist cap (comedy club was one of them). For the second, I focused on the medium wealth ones (lounge and blackjack parlour).

I didn't add a Sci-Fi until both of those were regularly capped, and even then not until I had a railway, bud terminal, and municipal airport setup bringing in more tourists.

I plopped an Expo center down and also noticed that it would steal tourists from my casinos when an event was running.

So the general strategy is to boost tourism attraction to your city with commercial zoning (and later landmarks) before expanding fast with more casinos.

That's a lot of words. Hope it makes sense?
 
Just got in to NA East 2 with no problems and created three new cities. It's basically unplayable (the way I want to play it) without cross-city interaction turned on and still no cheetah speed.
 
I guess I'll play later, I can't get on to the servers with my cities right now =/


We need to set up Gaf regions on every server lol
 

froliq

Member
Anyone for a Reflection Atoll game? It's the region with 7 cities all connected to each other. Can host it wherever possible, as it seems I rarely have issues with the servers.

Not sure about the status of the city interactions though.
 
Anyone for a Reflection Atoll game? It's the region with 7 cities all connected to each other. Can host it wherever possible, as it seems I rarely have issues with the servers.

Not sure about the status of the city interactions though.

What server are you on?
 

Addnan

Member
The launcher says I can play now, start the game, get through the EA splash screen then it keeps telling me it didn't connect to server. Been trying for about 4 hours now. (EU West 1)
 

Rad-

Member
Anyone for a Reflection Atoll game? It's the region with 7 cities all connected to each other. Can host it wherever possible, as it seems I rarely have issues with the servers.

Not sure about the status of the city interactions though.

There's a Reflection Atoll GAF server up and it has some spots left. It's on Eu East 3 and the region is called "GAF's Island". It's public so you can just search for it.
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Me and somebody else (don't remember their GAF name, oops) are having the exact same problem: We can join the server but we can't go to our cities: It just says the city was unable to load at this time and that I should try later.

I wonder if that's a region thing, because we're both on the same GAF region.

My city was pretty cool too, I kinda feel bad for the people in my region that I can't get back in and keep evolving it.

I wonder if I'll ever get the city back. Maybe I should try to Abandon it, get an invite to the region and try to re-take it again?
 
You know what would make this all acceptable?

Add an offline sandbox mode. Right now, the servers are F'd and clearly, will be for weeks. Pull out the unit test code, stick it in, and at least let us play in a single city-region offline. Let us do something other than continually fail to log in, log in and find out you can't get your city off the server, or get all the way in and not have your city save (rollback) because the server disconnected somewhere along the way.
 

froliq

Member
Couple of people needed for 7man GAF region on NA West 2. Send me a friend request for an invite when you're on the server.

Origin ID is frolique.
 

f0rk

Member
You know what would make this all acceptable?

Add an offline sandbox mode. Right now, the servers are F'd and clearly, will be for weeks. Pull out the unit test code, stick it in, and at least let us play in a single city-region offline. Let us do something other than continually fail to log in, log in and find out you can't get your city off the server, or get all the way in and not have your city save (rollback) because the server disconnected somewhere along the way.

The time it would take to implement that is way longer than this downtime will be.
 
The time it would take to implement that is way longer than this downtime will be.

It shouldn't be though. Way way back in development, individual developers had to unit test their code locally because a server system didn't exist. That's all I'm asking for. A city without region features (already disabled), achievements (already disabled), and local saving (that ... assumes the code base is still around).

EA/Maxis can still authenticate us in the splash screen, but in the game's main menu, there should be a local Sandbox button.
 

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Phil Phish is going crazy on Twitter thinking about SimCity and how this is horrible for Maxis.

However, servers going down on a release of an always online gaming experience is nothing to be surprised at: it was actually expected.

What I think sucks the most, and it's not getting the total attention it deserves, is that this is happening in a game that was mostly known and loved for their single player experience.

The fact that there's no option for a single player game of ANY KIND is the real bummer here: The online experience is great (when it works), it's a clever gameplay mode and it's a real evolution of the series. Except they completely scrapped any kind of singleplayer experience. And since the servers can't cope with the massive beating, there's literally no gameplay experience the user can experience - and it's all because of this great vision of cities cooperating between them, which is a great vision and an amazing thing when it works.

Too bad it fucked up everything else about the game, giving the players no choice on the matter.
 

HT UK

Member
EA on Wednesday: "confident that Origin will be stable for international launches later this week."

......

And after a 20 minute wait all I get it "Unable to load city at this time."
 

Ballistik

Member
If the location of the server does not really affect gameplay, why do they have to label them as they do?

Once all the issues are fixed, couldn't they number them so people don't feel like they are missing out or are having a worse gameplay experience if they're playing on a server that's not on their continent?
 
If the location of the server does not really affect gameplay, why do they have to label them as they do?

Once all the issues are fixed, couldn't they number them so people don't feel like they are missing out or are having a worse gameplay experience if they're playing on a server that's not on their continent?

I assume because the casual fan would just choose a server that was named for their region.
 

macdaddyjoshua

Neo Member
To me, the most mind-boggling question is how does a company with EA's resources not learn from its own (and others') past mistakes regarding online launches not having enough servers?? Why don't they have a *huge* number of servers ready to go at launch, more than their most liberal estimates, and then *scale back* when they get a better idea of the actual demand, instead of trying to hastily *scale up* while the whole community is raining fire on their heads?
 

N-Bomb

Member
To my regionmates - I'm sorry. I was able to play a bit today, but the server issues and evident lack of depth with this game have done it - months of anticipation wasted, and my love of the franchise weakened. I'm on hold right now to request a refund.

I hope you guys can manage to have fun in TG3 soon!
 
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