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[Beautifully Shaped Monsters]

I have a small hope that they reduced the AI complexicity to deal with the server issues, and will crank it up again once people are no longer experiencing issues.

Otherwise, I hope they work hard to patch it.

 

[storybook77]

I have a small hope that they reduced the AI complexicity to deal with the server issues, and will crank it up again once people are no longer experiencing issues.

Otherwise, I hope they work hard to patch it.

The fire trucks and other services at least partially worked before, in so much as additional trucks would wait for another fire to be reported and report to those rather than going to a fire that a truck is already at.

 

[scurker]

Man, what a disaster this has become. They talked about SimCity on NPR this morning. I don't think I can recall where a launch issue has become so mainstream.

I would hope this would cause EA to rethink their ways, but I still feel like all they're going to do is sweep it under the rug.

 

[Lonestar]

Started seeing some Hazmat Fires. Had to wait till someone else did the necessary work to open up the Hazmat Fire Trucks for the region...

 

[Phreaker]

GAF World's (VW3 2.0) Space Centre is almost complete! Currently in the construction phase and no longer needs materials!

Woah, excellent work neighbor! I am a little late moving on to East 4, but my city is picking up steam now!!

 

[Mii]

So basically, the game needs the Network Addon Mod for the exact same reasons that Simcity 4 needs it, that being that the pathfinding sucks hardcore. Essentially, Maxis gave the new Simcity game the exact same (maybe even worse?) pathfinding that the previous ten year old Simcity game had? I would have thought they might had wanted to do a better job this time around...

Guess not.

Kind of defeats the whole purpose of the Glassbox engine though, doesn't it? And this time you can't use player made mods to fix the errors or laziness of Maxis either.

My hope is that all of this has to do with features disabled server-side that Maxis will re-enable one by one as they determine they have the appropriate servers in place to support the game. A lot of what we are seeing wrong with pathfinding goes directly against what was said in interviews by the development team. My guess is broken pathfinding is either all due to server-side or client-side bugs, or server-side disabled features. Or they really did attempt lying to everyone. I'm sure they knew they couldn't get away with that for very long.

I'd like to think that they weren't just lying when they said the cloud was necessary for some of these computations. They don't have very long left to prove that though.

Regardless, this is exactly the sort of game that needed rigorous beta, and instead we're paying for the beta.

I had a meltdown occur in my city even though my education showed as max (every citizen educated, tech level 3) and plenty of high and medium wealth housing was available. The plant still complained of lack of workers, much like the rest of the entire city. With broken pathfinding, I'm starting to wonder if it makes more sense to put the plant in the center of the city instead.

This led to contamination of my water supply (placed nearby) which a filtration pump doesn't seem to be fixing. Also the money necessary to do this has essentially left me without the liquidity necessary to keep functioning. I would make a profit if i could make it to the time where the next shipment of my processors occurs, but I'm running huge negative hourly cost of around $30k and I had to run through all bonds in an attempt to prevent the nuclear problem and an earlier earthquake disaster that had just occurred. The amount of time it would take to shut down all the services bringing me down to -30k hourly would
1) take forever to do since there is no option to shut down all parks at once for instance
2) make it impossible to function since almost all of the money is going to recycling and processor factory which keep me functioning, and education which keeps me from having another meltdown.
3) kill my high wealth city pretty much immediately. I figure the water issue will do that pretty quickly on its own though

I decided to close out before letting the budget dry up. I've essentially abandoned the city so I at least can leave the high wealth residents and power in the region. Sorry fellow Gaffers in my region.

It would be nice to know what I actually did "wrong" to break my nuclear plant though.

 

[Gandie]

I have the weirdest issue. If I launch the game after a fresh restart I get zero errors. It even runs better than I expected. However, when I quit the game and try to restart it some time later I only get the launcher pop up.
Clicking on play closes the launcher and I can clearly hear some beeping noise, like some morse code is playing. Nothing else happens, I cannot see the game nor close it. Closing it via Task Manager produces weird cracking noises in my headphones.

I'm completely puzzled by this.

 

[Meteorain]

Ok guys I need a bit of help. Why the hell can I not see any of the landscape?

 

[Raven77]

Is it just me (maybe i'm going / am nuts) but did they slow down cheetah speed?

I put it on cheetah and went to the...kitchen and when I came back after 5-10 minutes it seemed like hardly any time had passed.




Secondly, does anyone know of a handy guide for dealing with traffic? Its like, well if my damn city only has 1 ROAD into it from the outside world, how the heck is it NOT going to build up...

 

[flashburn2012]

Is it just me (maybe i'm going / am nuts) but did they slow down cheetah speed?

I put it on cheetah and went to the...kitchen and when I came back after 5-10 minutes it seemed like hardly any time had passed.




Secondly, does anyone know of a handy guide for dealing with traffic? Its like, well if my damn city only has 1 ROAD into it from the outside world, how the heck is it NOT going to build up...

Cheetah speed has been llama speed for many days now. Maybe one day they will re-enable it.

And traffic is fucked.

 

[Darklord]

Is it just me (maybe i'm going / am nuts) but did they slow down cheetah speed?

I put it on cheetah and went to the...kitchen and when I came back after 5-10 minutes it seemed like hardly any time had passed.

They removed it. And it really fucking sucks. This game needs that speed.

Edit: Also my city is like 85% residential and it keeps demanding workers. WTF?

 

[cripterion]

It's weird to me too, making a city specialized in education, that I always get the complaint that workers aren't skilled enough for my industries.

Anyhow, I feel the cities square should be at least 3 times the size they are now to be able to enjoy and plan my building freely.

 

[mxgt]

Edit: Also my city is like 85% residential and it keeps demanding workers. WTF?

I have this too, my entire map is filled up and 75% of it is residential and I keep getting asked for more workers

Maps really need to be a lot bigger

 

[SRG01]

It's asking for more workers because higher density industrial and commercial employ a lot of people. You can fix this by claiming more cities and filling them with residential spaces.

 

[Raven77]

Thanks I heard they were taking cheetah out, but I didn't know they did.



Also, yes the map size, although good in theory, is just too small, they went too far with it.

Its a 2km x 2km square. I think that they could still achieve their "work together, plan better" mentality and fix the current issues caused by the small land plots by making them 4x4.

 

[storybook77]

Thanks I heard they were taking cheetah out, but I didn't know they did.



Also, yes the map size, although good in theory, is just too small, they went too far with it.

Its a 2km x 2km square. I think that they could still achieve their "work together, plan better" mentality and fix the current issues caused by the small land plots by making them 4x4.

They are supposed to re-enable cheetah once all the server stuff gets taken care of.

 

[SRG01]

Thanks I heard they were taking cheetah out, but I didn't know they did.



Also, yes the map size, although good in theory, is just too small, they went too far with it.

Its a 2km x 2km square. I think that they could still achieve their "work together, plan better" mentality and fix the current issues caused by the small land plots by making them 4x4.

Actually, I'd much prefer it if each region had more spaces to claim. Larger cities are a pain to micromanage, especially if I'm trying to make a specialist city.

 

[f0rk]

The city size would be fine if the multiple city interactions actually worked.

 

[Hari Seldon]

I was server error free all weekend so I got to play the game extensively finally. And yeah, this game is bad even without the server issues. I think I'm done with it, I should have gotten a refund due to the server issues but I was holding out hope that the actual game would be worth the wait. I agree with the comments I saw by Tom Chick, too much of the sharing between cities is hidden or simply broken, and therefore the entire game is fundamentally broken once you get to the point where you understand the mechanics. So for now, there doesn't seem to be any strategy to the game, it is just a city game screen shot generator.

Even without the server issues, I'd give this game a 6/10.

 

[SRG01]

Okay, after playing for a full day yesterday, the game is very good except for a few things:

- Density increases need to happen faster
- Power, water, and sewage all have pathfinding. WTF? It sometimes takes several hours for a "blip" to travel to a particular building
- Random crashes throughout the game

 

[MaximusNeo701]

Saw the thread on the horrible pathfinding and I have been experiencing this since 100k pop and after that you have to completely redo the whole transportation system in all of my cites. Any road that isn't a maxed out avenue is worthless. Throwing more bus stations actually makes it worse, all of my buses stick together in a heard and skip stops, trash trucks pickup from the same location in a giant group and only cover half the city. Shortest path only algorithm is only a small portion of the issue. *protip get rid of the small buses completely and switch to municipal buses, helps having fewer on the road*

Since an agent is created on the fly and given a set of requirements he finds the closest place that satisfies those requirements and plots the shortest path and goes there. It isn't a case of a sim changing jobs everyday. Instead a new sim is created every morning at every house and he always has a new job, he then usually uses the shortest path to get there. Once he arrives he disappears and at closing time a new group of agents/sims is spawned and they all try and go to homes with certain characteristics, many choosing the same home and then a herd all goes the same way and traffic takes literally in game hours to go away.

In theory this is great that its unique every time, but when traffic locks up trash, buses, exports, and imports all get stuck in traffic. I've bankrupted a city 3 times since the agent carrying my exports never left the city. My city constantly has a trash problem since the pathing on trash trucks is broken; much like buses, recycle trucks, rail cars, etc.

Anyone who has any idea how a water or electrical system works knows its not like an agent based system anyways. It would try and just fill the empty space, I saw a few houses stayed unpowered for an in game day after a brown out while little agents of powered bounced around area's that already had power since they all chose the same places to power up and stayed in a group moving between the stranglers and not splitting up.

I've never had a server connection issue on NA3, but they need to setup some flags for objects so that agents know if another agent is already on the way there. And tell buses, railcars, and trash trucks to avoid each other and not stick together. Traffic is busted; they obviously used the same pathing for everything that touches a road, and that doesn't work, and it's not even good path finding. To top it off they didn't address the issue of them all choosing the same place to go?

While I am upset the maps are also small I think in the future larger ones will come out in new regions, pay dlc, and better hardware to help push it. But it does present a challenge to keep a city afloat once its big, which is nice in some ways.

Also I think there is a small memory leak, after playing 16 hours total over a few session I noticed memory usage of the client growing slowly and then it never all being cleared after a session.

 

[diffusionx]

I was server error free all weekend so I got to play the game extensively finally. And yeah, this game is bad even without the server issues. I think I'm done with it, I should have gotten a refund due to the server issues but I was holding out hope that the actual game would be worth the wait. I agree with the comments I saw by Tom Chick, too much of the sharing between cities is hidden or simply broken, and therefore the entire game is fundamentally broken once you get to the point where you understand the mechanics. So for now, there doesn't seem to be any strategy to the game, it is just a city game screen shot generator.

Even without the server issues, I'd give this game a 6/10.

This is the most disappointing thing. I cancelled my preorder in January, taking and wait-and-see approach.

I really like what they are going for - region-sharing, high opportunity costs, and detailed individual simulations sounds like a real break from most city sims and a worthy attempt at a sequel that tries something new. I hope they get it right eventually.

 

[Einbroch]

Well, just started today. Origin ID is Lastbeforefirst, send a request! Any open regions?

 

[drizzle]

Saw the thread on the horrible pathfinding and I have been experiencing this since 100k pop and after that you have to completely redo the whole transportation system in all of my cites. Any road that isn't a maxed out avenue is worthless. Throwing more bus stations actually makes it worse, all of my buses stick together in a heard and skip stops, trash trucks pickup from the same location in a giant group and only cover half the city. Shortest path only algorithm is only a small portion of the issue. *protip get rid of the small buses completely and switch to municipal buses, helps having fewer on the road*

That's a good tip. I'll try that next time I'm on my city.

Traffic is busted; they obviously used the same pathing for everything that touches a road, and that doesn't work, and it's not even good path finding. To top it off they didn't address the issue of them all choosing the same place to go?

I really don't care about the Sim traffic being idiots. It's not ideal, but it's fine for what it is - they can't possibly map 120k people. What pisses me off is that the Services traffic is horrible. It doesn't matter if I have 16 or 42 Recycle Trucks on the city, I only get 8k out of 10k recycle bins, because every truck goes to every building together in a endless stream of trucks. I don't even have yellow traffic in my 180k+ city, but the goddamn recycle trucks can't get their shit straight. Service agents (Trash, Buses, Freight) should have their own path finding ai. I really do with they turned it off and used the same path finding for everybody for server-load issues.

I've seen them only having like 10% of storage used and go past buildings filled with trash just so they could dump the 10% off at the recycle plant - it's idiotic.

I really hope they fix it eventually - people have been saying that it wasn't such a problem earlier on. I'm not equipped to confirm or deny that.

 

[Nibiru]

I agree that the maps are waaay too small. You really need to play it a lot to fully realize how gimped this game is in so many ways. It is so very similar to Diablo 3 in that the launch sucked and that the long game is pretty much a fail.

I still have stuff to see in Simcity and haven't even nearly done it all but like D3 I can see being done with this game right after I see all the content. The other Sims kept me interested past the content because you could make a giant city and it could look so many different ways. You could have the burbs, low density agriculture industry all the way up to dense everything. In this game everyone's city ends up skyscrapers because you can't build out. I's a drag tbh.

 

[Orca]

Played a ton over the weekend with no issues, then late Sunday I got hit by a zombie outbreak - strangely just after watching The Walking Dead - and it's wiped me out.

I was going heavily into gambling with a high density residential core and carefully planned traffic routing. The zombies wiped out 65 buildings, entire blocks left abandoned.

And then the fires started... My fire departments couldn't keep up. I lost even more buildings.

By the time it was under control my gambling business was belly up, with each casino running big losses because my customer base was dead and tourism was way down. Making matters worse, I had just invested major funds into getting a great works project into the research stage, so I'm flat broke and don't know how I can dig out from this.

I'd just reset my city and start over, but that doesn't seem to be an option?

 

[Rapstah]

People being idiots in traffic is maybe not an issue, but you'd think buses and garbage trucks, which in real life have actual pre-determined paths they're supposed to follow for this exact reason, would work differently. I would love to see their algorithm for it, I would probably personally have gone with some variant of Dijkstra's best path algorithm (weighing road quality and traffic on the road) re-calculating based on known variables to the sim at every intersection but I don't know what kind of restrictions they're working with.

 

[Lonestar]

Hmm, I too will try the "Less buses" move.

Think I might stockpile a load of cash (from Processor/TV trading), then proceed to gut the city and rebuild it in a better design. I keep thinking of how to keep the freeway entering the city, free and clear, instead of heading right into intersections.

 

[Wes]

I must say I'm not really suffering from the traffic problems a lot of you talk about. Sure peak times are busy but apart from one train station with a wait time of 6 hours things are flowing nicely.

I thought up a few traffic calming measures and for the most part they seem to be working really well.

My city population is 185k at the moment with an extra 313k visitors for what it's worth.

 

[flashburn2012]

It seems like they could deploy two fixes to the game that would be relatively trivial (well one is at least) and it would fix many issues.

1. (The more difficult one, but still easy) Modify the AI for services so that they avoid each other when deciding where to go.
2. Double the speed of vehicles. I'd view this as a hack, but it'd help with the traffic situation at least a bit. Hell, triple the speed.

 

[Meier]

Does anyone still play (or ever play) SimCity Social? I took a break for awhile but still check it daily.. kinda fun. Sucks I have no one to play with though (not gonna add random people from the comments on the fanpage). If any other GAFfers want other neighbors, let me know!

 

[drizzle]

I must say I'm not really suffering from the traffic problems a lot of you talk about. Sure peak times are busy but apart from one train station with a wait time of 6 hours things are flowing nicely.

I thought up a few traffic calming measures and for the most part they seem to be workign really well.

My city population is 185k at the moment with an extra 313k visitors for what it's worth.

I'm at 170k residents and 480k visitors and I have zero traffic problems after I forcefully made all my Sims use Street Cars - My streets don't even get Yellow traffic anymore. It's just that the services trucks are really stupid and can't cover the entire city at once.

Traffic is manageable. It's just that the path finding AI is really dumb and you have to work around it.

Your train station with a 6 hour wait time is wrong though. I really don't understand how train stations work. I kinda based it off the old train station we had at my city: We only used it to travel to other cities, never to travel inside the city itself. So, technically, you'd only need one train station. I have like 20k people arriving daily on the train station and then they use the Public Transport system.

 

[Slacker]

Saw this on Reddit this morning and found it handy: an app to do borderless windowed mode that works with SimCity:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2675769

 

[flashburn2012]

I keep thinking of how to keep the freeway entering the city, free and clear, instead of heading right into intersections.

I'm wondering if that's a key issue. Each of my cities have split off to intersections either immediately, or almost immediately after entering the city. If we keep that avenue intersection free for longer, maybe it will better help against traffic congestion. Of course if the city size limitation wasn't there in the first place, I wouldn't be trying to use every damn square inch of the city like I currently am.

Also, the whole "one entrance/exit" to the city is downright stupid.

 

[drizzle]

Saw this on Reddit this morning and found it handy: an app to do borderless windowed mode that works with SimCity:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2675769

I never posted it here because It never came up, but that's what I use: that way I can both scan the thread (and post in it) and play the game.

Also, for some weird reason, it was the only way to make XSplit capture the gameplay screen without SimCity crashing instantly.

It really works.

I'm wondering if that's a key issue. Each of my cities have split off to intersections either immediately, or almost immediately after entering the city. If we keep that avenue intersection free for longer, maybe it will better help against traffic congestion. Of course if the city size limitation wasn't there in the first place, I wouldn't be trying to use every damn square inch of the city like I currently am.

Also, the whole "one entrance/exit" to the city is downright stupid.

On some other game I had multiple entrances to the main strech of road and it didn't matter, everybody instantly wanted to turn right when they arrived at the city.

This tiem around, however, traffic flows much better. I think it's because I put a lot more of Avenues perpendicular to the main road, so most of the cars rather go to the avenue than to veer right immediately on the first road.

I live in a city that only has one entrance from 4 different inter-municipal roads and boy, that really is an actual problem.

 

[StUnNeR H2K]

Also, the whole "one entrance/exit" to the city is downright stupid.

I think this is the biggest problem. I think every city needs atleast two, and some do if the road cuts theough the city. Hopefully they address this. In the meantime best solution is to avoid making the city start at the entrance so local traffic isn't coming by the intersection.

 

[Jhriad]

Fuck this fucking game, an earthquake came along and took down my university and trade HQ

Why the fuck can't we disable this shit?

Been curious but if you've built a school or researched something and your university is destroyed/bulldozed do you lose the unlock(s)?

 

[flashburn2012]

I had an earthquake take out my trade HQ, coal mine, and all my garbage services. That hurt. Especially since even though the add on building from the trade HQ wasn't destroyed, I had to rebuild it anyway since the main building was.

 

[Lonestar]

Well, some cities have the rail (haven't tried rail + Trade Port Rail Loader yet).

There's Water for boats. I assume (haven't tried it yet) that the airport has some sort of cargo ability).

But still, that one freeway entrance is the linchpin of all cities.

 

[drizzle]

Ok, so I had two bus Depots, the municipal one and the regular one.

I closed down the regular one, but it doesn't seem that the regular buses go away?

What the hell?

 

[storybook77]

I honestly don't remember the service vehicle issue being there in the beta or before the first updates. I think it got busted after release.

 

[Wes]

Your train station with a 6 hour wait time is wrong though. I really don't understand how train stations work. I kinda based it off the old train station we had at my city: We only used it to travel to other cities, never to travel inside the city itself. So, technically, you'd only need one train station. I have like 20k people arriving daily on the train station and then they use the Public Transport system.

At least that's 2000 people off the road!

My trains don't make a loop in my city so the incoming trains from the region can take one of two routes, and this station is on the route that is seemingly never taken. I'm leaving it there for now to experiment with it later.

(This screenshot was taken on a day a train turned up for a change.)

 

[flashburn2012]

At least that's 2000 people off the road!

My trains don't make a loop in my city so the incoming trains from the region can take one of two routes, and this station is on the route that is seemingly never taken. I'm leaving it there for now to experiment with it later.

(This screenshot was taken on a day a train turned up for a change.)

Except, it's not really getting anyone off the road. And actually, it's probably adding people on the roads. Watch when people leave the train station, a ton of them will start driving cars. I guess the train stores cars?

 

[storybook77]

Except, it's not really getting anyone off the road. And actually, it's probably adding people on the roads. Watch when people leave the train station, a ton of them will start driving cars. I guess the train stores cars?

I'd assume some people went to the train station in their car to travel to another city and upon returning, went back home in their car?

 

[drizzle]

Uh oh, got the "this city is not processing properly"

That city is prolly fucked now.

 

[maabus1999]

So I got the limited edition from the EA India Store for $27.

Playing last night I noticed I was getting Hero/Villian quests and I could also put down numerous European themed buildings.

Wasn't this the deluxe editions perks? Or am I confused?

 

[flashburn2012]

I'd assume some people went to the train station in their car to travel to another city and upon returning, went back home in their car?

I have my doubts. I'm pretty sure right when I opened up my dock, I saw a boat dock, and cars drive away.

 

[drizzle]

Oh god, I had to actually destroy the old bus stop so the regular buses would disappear. Otherwise, they would just keep working.
Maybe if you disable the bus garages, they'll keep working?

 

[Duesy]

Uh oh, got the "this city is not processing properly"

That city is prolly fucked now.

I just got this too. Had 5 million saved up and now I can't load the city. GG.

 

[Wes]

Except, it's not really getting anyone off the road. And actually, it's probably adding people on the roads. Watch when people leave the train station, a ton of them will start driving cars. I guess the train stores cars?

Yeah the station seems to have a 2000 block car park. I presume underground.

Speaking of which I wish you could build an underground train system (at some huge expense if necessary - like it causes all buildings above ground to be demolished for a certain number of months whilst it is being built).