Here’s a relevant Reddit thread about the supposed server-side processing. There’s some good discussion there about the AI complexity in the game, as well. (Summary: Not good.) Honestly, the more I read about this game the less interested I become.
Don’t do it. Even setting aside any issues you might or might not have, from a non-technical perspective, with the idea of essentially renting a game from EA, the thing is still pretty much on fire (in the sense of “burning down” not in the sense of “hot new item”) right now.
If you are going to buy this game, buy it in a couple of weeks when they get it working reliably.
Perhaps this will help:
I’ve already posted my impressions of the game elsewhere. I won’t repeat them here except to say that I’m liking the game a lot and true region play (when it works) brings something new and different to the Simcity franchise. I have not actually encountered many server problems, most notably with resources not being shared in a timely manner, but I know it has been a major issue for many. With the additional servers and patches, it has gotten a lot better lately.
You don’t need to extract Coal or Oil or other resources, except for Water. You can set your power plants and factories to buy the resources they need from the Global Market. Prices there slowly fluctuate some based on what other players do, but there are hard upper and lower limits on the prices. If you design your cities well, you can simply buy what you need.
So you don’t have to worry about resources, except that the trucks can pass through in a timely manner.
I honestly thought that only worked if you had other cities in the region. Thanks.
There is no need to do this - as others have said, you can keep playing when the servers go down.
What you can’t do when the servers are down is save your game. In fact, you can’t save your game at all - there is no option to do so. It’s like every other online game; you just log out, and next time you log in, everything is still there.
Except, of course, if the servers are down, or if you kill your internet connection and keep playing. Then you just lose everything when you log out.
I’ve been able to play pretty consistently over the last few days and I’m still very “meh” about it. There are some things I like: the ability to quickly upgrade roads, not have to lay pipes, wires, etc.
But that’s about it. I miss my sprawling city where I can build elaborate mass transit systems. I miss clicking on a towering commercial building and seeing the numerous avenues of how the workers commute.
Yeah, I miss that tracking as well.
Same here. However, I love being able to keep my city out of the red pretty easily without resorting to cheats.
As I recall, SC4 didn’t have that kind of tracking upon release; it was only added with the Rush Hour expansion.
The new Simcity (And would it have killed them to put a number after the name?) has tracking of a different sort. You can turn on the data layers and watch your sims get up and go to work. Your kid sims will take the bus to school. Tourists will come from out of town and hit up your casinos. At the end of the day, worker sims will go home and turn into shoppers. Tourists will take the train home or may decide to stay in a hotel. If you turn on the wind layer, you can figure out where you should build your dirty polluting industries. You can find mineral deposits. You can see the water table to place your water plant.
Yep. Those who buy SC4 from Steam get Rush Hour included.
Steam didn’t exist when I got SC4. I had to go to the store and buy it on disc. Same with the Rush Hour expansion. I still have those discs around here, somewhere.
/get off my lawn
IIRC, Maxis sees this as a reboot to the series.
As did, and do, I but I have no idea where. Which is why I now have the Steam version.
Wouldn’t matter.
What EA claims, is that the servers are doing EXTREMELY IMPORTANT VITAL GAME FUNCTIONS. But this cannot be the case, because the funcitons claimed are just that: vital. You couldn’t play at all without them, but people can and do play without - they just can’t save. This rather strongly implies that it’s what we in the biz call a “baldfaced red-handed lie-ification”. I know complex technical terms may be confusing, but it’s extremely common among PR reps to use this high advanced skills to massage public opinion.
More to the point, their claims are pretty farcical: I find it extremely improbable that:
(A) Their servers are doing something that cannot be done much more easily on a home connection, and
(B) That they’d invest in the horsepower to do it themselves.
For evidence of (A), I would point out that such simulations are not at all improbable; real time processing of several thousand actors simultneously isn’t that difficult provided that each actor is a a sufficiently trivial drain on resources. (B) is more of a judgment call, but I highly doubt that they’re actually trying to match up each actor across its region; much easier and more sensible to manage the small number of actors crossing borders for work/leisure/etc and measuring the total region-based demand for different goods and services to see where they flow.
And as far as it goes, EA isn’t exactly above flat-out lying.
Is it likely they’ll turn off the online-requirement? If not, will hackers make a hack so you can go out, buy the game, install it…and hack it so you can play with no internet connection?
Otherwise, I don’t get it. I’ve never played an online-always game, at least not that I know of.
My guess from poking around is that we see such hacks within a week. Seriously. Regardless, I doubt they’ll ever turn off the online requirement.
I’m not going to place any citations, since since my source might not be the most credible, but perhaps credible enough to mention since other, additional comments jive with my own observations. SimCity does not make much appreciable use of bandwidth–typically something on the order of less than 50MB/hour. That’s really not enough if the server were actually running the core simulation.
It appears that the server is required for:
[ul]
[li]Regional transactions[/li][li]Regional interactions[/li][li]Managing the global market[/li][li]Regional wall chat[/li][li]Saving player data[/li][li]DRM[/li][/ul]
And that’s about it. ETA: and obviously some of that could be done locally, or directly player-to-player.
Many people have noted that the simulation runs just fine even when intermittently disconnected from the internet.
The more you think about it, the more inexcusable the whole server fiasco is.
The core of the game is fun to this long-term SimCity fan, but more and more bugs are apparent. I speculate that’ll it’ll be a bit like Diablo 3, and really be the game it should have been only after several months have passed, and interest has waned.
Re: buying resources from the global market. This will work, but with caveats.
For one of my cities, traffic got so bad that it was backed up on the main highway beyond my ability to see the end - apparently all the way back to the next city (which I also owned). So when that other city gifted me coal or money or whatever, it took about a week in game time to reach me as I watched it slowly crawl down the highway.
But if you import it through a trading center or port it seems to work better.
So are people starting to come around to my idea that no one with an interest in the future of games should purchase this product? 