I've been offline for a good 20-30 minutes so it's obvious the game can easily be modified for offline use. If they are worried about piracy, just add a simple authentication check when the game starts up, or check once an hour. Either way, the save games need to be local to avoid loss of productivity. I've already lost an hour or so of gameplay due to a local crash or server fault. A message appeared saying something like "your city is inconsistent and needs to be reverted to an earlier state. We will now take you to the title screen".
Is anyone seeing intermittent failures when loading a city? It just sits on the white load screen forever cycling through the messages (herding llama's, updating desirability, etc..). I need to ALT+F4 and restart the game, hoping the cloud data is still in tact. It happens around 1 in 5 city loads.
Games a fake. People who think they did superbly in the game?.. -> http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6oeo/proof_that_the_game_is_misleading_regarding/ Part of the game engine itself is misleading..hahaha ---- Edit Another part of the engine too is misleading, SIM's every day look for new work (defined as per closest path).. rather than have a fixed workplace. Source -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qV6PrEjaH8Q#t=701s
Start origin...wait..wait..sigh ..Processing large file. Please wait.. sigh Simcity has been updated, please restart...sign "Featured today" Origin advertisement pops up...sigh I just want to sit down and play the game, not wait 10-15 minutes every time.
Another quote from a user, regarding a part of the core gameplay mechanics. "Ultimately, the problem is that the developers have decided to handle sims like they handle any "mindless" power-agent. This results in mindless sims, and mindless services. Mindless services reduce the actual quality of the simulation. Since no sim actually owns a house, they don't REALLY care what ammenities are built around it. THIS is why it is nearly impossible to have distinct districts of each wealth level... A low-wealth agent may very well end up in a high-wealth house at the end of the day. Why? Because it was the closest open house. The next morning, that agent sets out to find "high-wealth" work. Then after work, may end up in a medium-wealth home with 2 kids! There's no rhyme or reason for the way they behave, OTHER than just taking the shortest (not quickest) path to the nearest open space. Police services suffer from this as well. They converge on the first crime committed, and ignore the second crime until one car rushes off to deposit the criminal-agent in jail. THEN the other cars can respond to the second crime. There's no zones, and there's no actual "prevention." Fire services also send every unit to the first available fire. It's utterly pointless to try and "decentralize," because every truck from the city will still converge on one fire, ignoring the other three until it's out. Once the first fire is out, they all rush to the next fire. The only thing you get for having multiple fire-trucks is that they put the fires out slightly quicker. Really, you can have the exact same fire coverage quality with only one of each type of fire-unit. "Fire Marshalls" are COMPLETELY random, and just seem to roam around picking whichever building is "most at risk," ignoring the fact that an entire neighborhood is high risk, and the next "most at risk" is on the other side of the city... Which gets them stuck in traffic. Interestingly enough, ambulances seem to act independantly of one another, but they still refuse to take "right of way" and are constantly bogged in traffic. Medical vans just act like all the rest of the service vehicles." Source -> http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellane...hy-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060 ----- Edit SimCity?..its like SCAMcity and the SIMs are nothing but dumb freeloaders. I pity the players who think trying to play around these stupid game behavior/rules as a great achievement. HAHA...
I have just been reading that thread Raiga, and i wanted to post it: "Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!" The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead." Kinda like how EA's customers are... they are a herd of mindless sheep who gather to buy a shiny turd, which EA calls it a game... So where Maxis trolling EA's customers when they developed the resident agents in glassbox? haha ironically in that video i linked, at about 4:10 minutes mark, the guy with Maxis logo on his back gets a baseball to the head by EA guy... ironically accurate! try to host a sports event or trade with other city in your region, wait until the mindless ants create traffic jams of tens of kilometers on the freeway and your cities start to lose money! but hey, it is smart to have ONE freeway that connects all the cities in your region that you cannot edit... really smart on Maxis part
Closest? Again??? Maxis already screwed up with that once in SC4, having sims trying to travel the shortest distance rather than shortest time, making a real mess of the transit system if one does not use the NAM mod. And now they are repeating the same mistake all over again? lol
No you screamed for days about the game being single threaded because the server handled all of the simulation.
http://uk.gamespot.com/simcity/vide...g=Topslot;SimcityAWeekLater;SimcityAWeekLater SimCity - A Week Later
they almost nailed it with the agents, until they sayd: hey lets copy paste the power, water and rest of utilities agent's AI to the sims agents...
Some stuff there I agree with, some not. The inter city/regional play is hit and miss for the most part. I can setup a 3/1 region pretty quickly solo, but when 3 players get to do this, I can easily be the only one with any decent infrastructure and I soon require sims to fill jobs, or, have sims which want to commute to another town for tourism/jobs, and the other players have left the region or have only built a basic city, screwed it up, run out of simoleans, and basically moved onto something else. This makes the time I spent building up my city meaningless, and I can't take over one of the cities, because they would have not abandoned their city for another person to 'fix'. Animosity breeds contempt. When it works though, you can have a great 16 city region running with tons of sims/tourism/commuters and resource sharing with all the specialisations spread evenly across the regions/mini-regions. Also; joining a region without the need to build any infrastructure, education, transit, fire, police, medical etc and just start to lay down roads and zoning with the primary goal of providing everyone else with residents to work and play is refreshing, but sadly rare. Like I say: hit and miss. I'd also add that link on a prior page is very close to the mark; it really does feel as if the number of residents are statistically inflated or deflated sometimes and, without actually pausing the game and physically counting the people walking around or queuing in traffic, is hard to know the truth.
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/simcity-servers-arent-required-offline-mode-possible-report-6405218 SimCity servers aren't required, offline mode possible - Report Surprise, surprise! NOT lol.
All the stuff I'm reading about the game just makes me laugh. Sadly the huge sale numbers are probably already in.
First DS3 and now SimCity... What's with EA and these "insiders" lol Yep, especially since it's few days old news
been playing it all night. good times. what I don't understand is why are people getting upset because the game doesn't need internet connection to be played? the online thing is only there for one reason, drm, can we get over that? Why is always online such an insult to people who are... always online???
Because we shouldn't be force to be online to play a game we purchased. You can't play during maintenance and what if EA decide to shut the servers down? You lose your game. Not everyone has a stable or fast connection. We are at the mercy of EA with this type of DRM which is exactly what they want. That and micro-transactions which I bet will come with time.
Request vs command issue I suppose, with the latter being source of much irritation and hate. That and EA lying about it certainly doesn't help. But I don't see any reason to be upset over this, same with pretty much the entire gaming industry since the entire thing is, you know, completely optional luxury industry.
