SimCity (2013)

By TruckWEB
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Grand Master

HawkMan

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1. yes, but you'll quickly end up with "just another 10 minutes" :) but with cheeta speed you can do a lot. but time flows quickly as you're planning out roads and layouts.

2. depends on how much you work on them and how often I guess, I haven't "completeted" a city yet, much less a region. but I just play casually.

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Grand Master

spaceelf

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1. yes, but you'll quickly end up with "just another 10 minutes" :) but with cheeta speed you can do a lot. but time flows quickly as you're planning out roads and layouts.

2. depends on how much you work on them and how often I guess, I haven't "completeted" a city yet, much less a region. but I just play casually.

I can't say I ever finished with one but I have gotten some to a very good place. I've run out of things to do personally, but I've played the game way more than I should've so...

buying the DLC when it shows heh :)

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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1.) Is it something that I can play for short periods of time (like 10-30 minutes)?

2.) Will I still be able to work on my city(ies) a year later? Meaning, how quickly would I "complete" a city?

1. I work on *all* my cities in spurts - I have cities on four servers (NA East 1 through 4), and multiple cities per server. Unless a city goes broke, I can always go back to it.

2. As long as the server exists, I don't see why not - I still have my Sandbox region on NA East 3 from when I started playing. (I started on NA East 3 because NA East 1 and 2 were both full, and NA East 5 and 6 hadn't launched yet.)

3. Origin is indeed similar to the Mac/OS X/iOS App Store, or Steam for that matter - any difference is due to store-specific features.

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Grand Master

Titoist

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Just have to include my experience. I did complete my first city and within an hour I had a catastrophe. This Godzilla like creature will spawn anywhere in the city, but it will always head straight towards the landfill. My mistake was having my nuclear plant beside the landfill. I had a meltdown and now 75% of the city is irradiated and abandoned. However, there is a bright side. Irradiated land can still be used for utilities and industry. While 75% of my city was obliterated, 100% of the healthy part is residential now and my mining industry is still profiting $6million/day. I built an exclusion zone around the irradiated land using only roads and I will never use a nuclear plant again.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Just have to include my experience. I did complete my first city and within an hour I had a catastrophe. This Godzilla like creature will spawn anywhere in the city, but it will always head straight towards the landfill. My mistake was having my nuclear plant beside the landfill. I had a meltdown and now 75% of the city is irradiated and abandoned. However, there is a bright side. Irradiated land can still be used for utilities and industry. While 75% of my city was obliterated, 100% of the healthy part is residential now and my mining industry is still profiting $6million/day. I built an exclusion zone around the irradiated land using only roads and I will never use a nuclear plant again.

You can get *disasters* prior to completing a city - I've gotten a tornado, meteor showers (twice) and, earlier tonight, aliens. (Yes; aliens. And they weren't from Olde Sexico, either.) Fortunately, none of the affected cities were broken by the various disasters - all are, in fact, still running. It is apparently population levels that can trigger a *disaster* - since the aliens, I've had crime waves in back-to-back cities (same region).

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Rising Star

BoomyBoy

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I just heard that they finally managed to crack the game... I thought it was impossible since it has DRM. I have no idea how they managed it but it's all over the internet lol

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Grand Master

crazzy88ss

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So the OSX release date was supposed to be today... and now it's been pushed back to August. WTF. Right when school starts again. I guess I won't be buying it now.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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A check-in from the front lines:

 

I've been doing some cross-platform play (loading cities on either PC or OS X, depending on which OS I'm running) and *this* is why server-side saving is a must.

 

How many games (for any OS) have different save-game formats for different operating systems?  (I don't know about you, but this has been, in fact, one of my biggest peeves about multi-platform software in general, let alone gaming - different file formats.)  Server-side saves allows for save-format abstraction - it doesn't matter what OS the game client is running.  (I have expanded my server count to a staggering nine - NA East 1-4, NA West 2-4, Test, and - don't laugh - Antarctica.  The southernmost server for Simcity obvious has a reason for being - and it's NOT a test server; that is completely separate.)  I flat out LOVE being able to pick up exactly where I left off - and have the OS I'm running not matter whatever.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Has anyone (else) grabbed the Cities of Tomorrow ULC?  Yes - I said ULC (for Un-Lockable Content) not DLC (Down-Loadable Content), and I said it for a reason; like quite a bit of the add-on content (Heroes and Villains, for example), it simply needs to be "switched on" (in this case, by entering the correct unlock code) as opposed to relying on the (rightly-criticized) patching process.  The process for unlocking, therefore, is identical no matter where you purchase the ULC - in my case, I purchased it via GameStop (the former Impulse e-store) for two reasons (both of which make sense) - it's cheaper than other US retailers, online or otherwise ($19.99USD), and they are *fast* - I had my unlock code within a minute, and this included the time needed to download and install the GS/Impulse client.  I took the unlock code I was given to Origin and plugged it into Redeem a Code - just like any game, DLC, or ULC.  I already had Update 9 (the rather large update that included a truckload of new regions), and we WERE told (via the Release Notes for this update) that most of it was, in fact, aimed right AT Cities of Tomorrow (though the new regions, etc., don't require it).  There's a rather good reason why , it turns out; if you have Update 9, it's simply waiting on you - to unlock Cities of Tomorrow - as you download nothing.  What redeeming that code does is tell EA "Yes - I purchased the content legally - here's the receipt." - EA then tells Origin "He/She is authorized - unlock Cities of Tomorrow."  It's a rather "sneaky" way of delivering new content - however, it's been around for years in games - it's not new (or even unique) to EA.

 

However, expect a fair number of "lipstick-on-pigs" snarking comments from the haters.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Yeah, I have it.  I like it, but I'm pretty stacked for games to play so haven't done too much in it.

I understand that - the only reason I have time to explore this content is that I'm in a temporary lull between repairs (of other folks' computers).

 

Still, once you do, like Heroes and Villains, there are two sides to the conflict.

 

There's the Academy (MaxisMan) the technovators, and then there's OmegaCo (Dr. Vu), the polluters and pushers of Tech Addiction.  Going either way does NOT stop you from adding the other side to the conflict - in either a city OR a region - no more than plopping MaxisManor stopped you from adding Vu Tower, or vice versa.  (It's entirely possible to have OmegaCo, the Academy, MaxisManor, and Vu Tower in the same city - but whatever for?)

 

And "futurizing" a city triggers some interesting things at the "tipping point" (generally, if you reach eighty-five percent or more of the city area - Academy, ControlNet, and OmegaCo-related structures ALL push the futurization curve; in the case of the Academy, this even includes civic structures, like parks).  The change in the school busses is not even the most striking (yes - the busses DO change - from the old-style Crowns to almost clones of the Daimler/Thomas Saf-T-Liner C2) - the biggest change is in (don't laugh) the garbage trucks that cart the trash to the Atomizer (which, appropriately, is an add-on to the Garbage Dump).

 

I haven't done any video capturing myself - yet; however, there's plenty of it on YouTube (for the curious).

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Grand Master

spaceelf

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Well, rather I played a bunch of it the first day I had it, but then I just went to do other things.

 

I've been waiting for my new computer to do much aside from Warframe with friends and State of Decay heh :)

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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Well, rather I played a bunch of it the first day I had it, but then I just went to do other things.

 

I've been waiting for my new computer to do much aside from Warframe with friends and State of Decay heh :)

As I said in my earlier post, I don't fault you for that.

 

Cities of Tomorrow is a bit more graphically intensive, and not just a little bit, either - it gets tempting to turn the detail UP to savor the holo-signage, and not just on the MegaTowers, either.

 

No previous version of ANY city-building game had even caught up to SimCity (the core game) in terms of graphical goodness - I pointed out THAT detail back during the second closed beta.  Apparently, despite the criticism over the bungled launch, always-online requirement, etc., Maxis STILL found time (and methodology) to crank the Graphical Goodness Capability Meter up to 11 .  And it didn't take a MegaTower (or even the Academy) to whack me over the head with a Clue-By-Four, either.

 

In Cites of Tomorrow, holo-signage is darn near everywhere - and as I said before, not just the MegaTowers.  It's on commercial buildings, factories - it's even featured with parks. (There are three "future" park structures - the Excitatorium, AR Sports, and Millenium Park )  There's even a Challenge where these new structures (it's actually easiest to use the parks) play a major role - if I can wangle my way to getting suitable HARDWARE capture gear, I may actually feature it in a YT video, since nobody else has so far - my currently low streaming/capture settings are due to my not being able to capture at desktop resolution currently.

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Grand Master

PGHammer

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I have a new PUBLIC sandbox region on the Europe West 1 server (Neomasters Europe Two) - bring your creativity and your manufacturing! (PGHammer20607B on Origin)

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Grand Master

DrunknMunky Veteran

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Quick question for SC2013 vets; what happens to private regions/towns you abandon? Are they gone forever or do they turn into "ghost" regions that no one can ever claim?

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