[St. John's] SimCity (2013) - Page 20

rwspencer38 · #**381** Posted **Mar 14, 2013, 3:19 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Copes

You guys should set up a city or two that provides nothing but Utilities. Plop 10 power plants and 10 water treatment plants and then sell it all to neighbouring cities.

funny you should say that haha I setup Western Bay Plains yesterday only to find out that it can't supply my own city because it doesn't have a "direct" road connection. *SIGH*

On a side note, anyone looking for power, garbage collection, sewage collection or water? haha

jeddy1989 · #**382** Posted **Mar 14, 2013, 3:26 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...e-indefinitely

Cool.

how do you play in the Debug mode!?????? I want to be able to modify the freeways

Marty_Mcfly · #**383** Posted **Mar 14, 2013, 3:34 PM**

Started a new region with my girlfriend, I need a breather from Martyville. I can't handle all the crime anymore

jeddy1989 · #**384** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 12:26 AM**

This addresses some of the issues that have been mentioned

SimCity Update 8

Quote:

Hello, I’m Stone Librande, the Lead Designer of SimCity, and I wanted to take a moment to address some of the questions that I’ve been hearing about our game. Now that we’re getting close to resolving our server issues, we’re putting a lot of attention on improving the simulation based on the community’s feedback.

SimCity is built on GlassBox, which is an agent-based simulation engine. At the surface level, GlassBox is designed around the premise that “Agents” are created to carry data to various “Sinks” around the city. In SimCity, you can think of the “Agents” as Sims and vehicles. The “Sinks” are the buildings that receive money, happiness and other resources from these Agents. During development we tested many cities in a variety of scenarios, but there are almost limitless permutations. Now that the game is in your hands we are seeing the emergence of many cities that test our systems in unique ways. It’s great to watch this happen because at its core SimCity is a game about experimentation and exploration. (Of course, it’s not so great when these experiments reveal bugs.)

We are constantly tuning the game and through the telemetry of our players we are shaping and evolving the experience to accommodate many different play styles. When bugs are discovered we will address them as quickly as possible, with updates such as the ones we’ve been rolling out over the past week. Our main focus right now is updating the pathing system that the Agents use to get to their Sinks. Running a successful city means keeping the traffic flowing and we are actively working to make this system better.

We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically. Guillaume Pierre (our lead scripter) talked a bit about the improvements that we are making to the traffic system in the game here. To dig a little deeper our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.

We are working on additional fixes with the pathing of our Agents and these changes will streamline the way that the simulation unfolds in your city. For instance, emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city. We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.

SimCity is a simulation but it is also a game. We wanted to make managing the mundane day-to-day functionality of a city a fun experience. We wanted players to be invested in the lives of their individual Sims, which is why you can click on one and see a name and small story about what is happening to him or her at that moment.

On that note I wanted to take a moment to address a question that’s been coming up: the persistence of our Sims. The Sims in the game are persistent in many respects. They go from a home to a workplace or to a shop and back each day. Their happiness, money, sickness, education level, etc. are also persistent and are carried around the city with each Sim as the simulation unfolds. But many aspects of the Sims are not persistent. They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.

I want to end on some good news. We are slowly re-enabling some of the non-essential features that we had turned off during the week of launch. Regional Achievements are live on a select number of servers and we’ve re-enabled Leaderboards on the Test server. We need your help testing the Leaderboards so I encourage you to go to the Test server so that we can expedite the timeframe in which this feature is brought back to the rest of our servers.

We’ll continue to provide you with updates on the game as we make these changes. We appreciate all of the feedback that you’ve been giving us and I want to assure you that we’re listening. It’s fascinating for us to see all of the different ways that players are testing our systems and we’re excited about making SimCity better with your help.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/ar...mcity-update-8

Ayreonaut · #**385** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 12:55 AM**

I started a new city.

And built the Eiffel Tower

And French-style buildings began to develop

The city is quite circular. And I'm only allowing highrises on the one avenue and around the circle.

Anyone want to pick out their city in the background?

SignalHillHiker · #**386** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 10:06 AM**

I was earning $9,000/hr and had $400,000 in the bank when I went to bed. Everything - power, fire, police, etc. - was good.

I decided to leave it running overnight to save up the last $150,000 I needed to buy Big Ben.

And I woke up to an entire city in ruins, bankrupt, and losing $10,000/hr.

Ayreonaut · #**387** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 2:07 PM**

Haha! Devastating. I'm always nervous to leave games running like that. Big Ben would be sweet though. It takes up so little space, so you could fit it nicely into an urban fabric without having to make a huge space for it.

jeddy1989 · #**388** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 2:12 PM**

me too! because you can't go back to your last save ahhaha because you never save

Architype · #**389** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 6:59 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

I was earning $9,000/hr and had $400,000 in the bank when I went to bed. Everything - power, fire, police, etc. - was good.

I decided to leave it running overnight to save up the last $150,000 I needed to buy Big Ben.

And I woke up to an entire city in ruins, bankrupt, and losing $10,000/hr.

I guess that will teach you something, cities need mayors who are awake - lol.

SignalHillHiker · #**390** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 9:40 PM**

Here's what's left...

I had to shut off EVERYTHING. Even my sewage treatment plant and each individual water tower.

Still wasn't enough to compensate for my expenses and start my city up again.

So I had to raise taxes from 9% to 20%, across the board.

And I'm BARELY holding on...

jeddy1989 · #**391** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 9:57 PM**

signal you must be going for a record on how to destroy cities hahahaha

SignalHillHiker · #**392** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 10:04 PM**

This one I'll get back, though. It's getting better.

And Signal Hill is still the s***t, yo.

SignalHillHiker · #**393** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 10:17 PM**

Fort Townshend is coming back. AND, if it doesn't, I can always build The Rooms on it.

SignalHillHiker · #**394** Posted **Mar 15, 2013, 11:01 PM**

Sloanburg's people can't move to Fort Townshend fast enough...

Look at that gridlock!

Dmajackson · #**395** Posted **Mar 16, 2013, 3:50 AM**

So "The Fax Machine" is getting quite impressive.

Once a small backwater town it grew into a small but unimpressive town over a very slow period of time. When it got up around 20'000 people the city was struck by a meteor shower that wiped out the entire downtown area;

The fire ended up being a blessing in disguise. It didn't take long for the downtown to redensify and the town quickly boomed to 60'000;

The excessive oil deposits propped up the city coffers. With brand new petroleum and trading headquarters, multiple trading depots, and over a $100'000 in oil revenue a month the city boomed to 90'000 overnight!

100'000+ people quickly followed. With this size though the city suffered from an arsonist, and an increase in the homeless population.

Oil money and new parks along with a clean-up of "East Village" provided some new land and over a couple of years the city hit it's peak population of 190'000!

Oil royalties peaked shortly after. The city's coffer collapsed. An exodus occured dropping the population to 140'000. Water started drying up and with no where else to turn the mayor had no choice but to diversify. Small coal deposits, the Globe Theatre, and a new casino has kept the city afloat and it now sits at a healthy 160'000 people.

This city has reminded me of Calgary's history. For most of it's history it was a small city on the edge of civilization. Oil changed all this and the city boomed out of control. Sleek glass towers are both cities way of hiding their excessive homelessness and lack of identity. This city like Calgary's likely future is not good because of the boom-bust cycle. Hopefully like The Fax Machine, Calgary can diversify more and get some of its profits for its uncertain future. Otherwise it could end up like Signal Hill