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.
