Yup, sounds about right. Note that, despite all the recent improvements on the server side, neither the global market nor cheetah speed have yet been re-enabled. Without the global market, the trading aspect of the game is still severely broken. if and when it comes back, it would be interesting to see cartels and market manipulation emerge.
Ironically, a global market would have been extremely easy to do, would have arguably tied players together in a much more realistic maner, and been a lot more user-friendly to boot…
You’d need some kind of protection against people manipulating it, but that’s nothing new.
I don’t think it was the global market that crashed the servers so much as everyone sim raping the the sim earth sending back a constant stream of sim coal at cheetah speed. Maxis really should have seen that one coming.
There are supposed to be hard minimum and maximum limits on the prices of commodities, but aside from that the market is free to fluctuate between those limits.
I was kind of on the fence about SC5, until I started reading about the regional aspects of it and the small city sizes. I hated SimCity 4 due to the regional play. I want to build a big huge city without having to switch to other regions constantly to build them up. The always online aspect doesn’t bother me as I’m, well, always online. I think I’ll try to find a copy of SC3 instead…
Question: If I play in a private region of my own, do I need to worry about trading resources with other players?
One of the people who made the game now claims EA is lying, and the game could easily be played offline.
Figures.
Well, it wasn’t hard to notice there was something screwy with the claims that the servers were needed for the core of the simulation.
Yeah, that argument was shot the second I saw “connection to the servers lost, trying to reconnect” and the game kept chugging along merrily. If the servers were doing anything integral, it would have had pretty reduced functionality. (Incidentally, this also probably means that the game can be pirated much easier than, say, Diablo 3, since all a clever pirate has to do is simulate the inter-city packet routing. Hard, to be sure, but not impossible).
Is that accurate? Because that sounds awful. I thought the strength of the new game was supposed to be the cooperation and interdependence between cities. But if you have to manage all that stuff manually, then the asychronous nature of the cooperative city building is ruined. Does your whole region get screwed up because whoever is producing some sort of necesary cog didn’t log in for a week to manually gift his items for the next stage?
I’m staggered that anyone believed this nonsense to start with. t was an absurd lie, an OBVIOUS lie.
If EA were hosting, for my game, more computational power than my computer could handle, that means EA would actually have to dedicate more server power to SimCity than was possessed by all their customers’ PCs combined. Of course they cannot possibly be doing that, it’s insane, or they’d have to charge hundreds of dollars for the game or charge a monthly fee.
I agree that it was pretty obvious that they were lying, but you’re overreacing with that logic. If some part of the simulation were handled on their system, it wouldn’t have to have more computing power than was available on that system - it could just add to the work already being done by the PC. Also, they wouldn’t have to have more than the combined computational power of all owners of the game combined - only as much as needed to serve the most concurrent users they’d see at once.
Meh. I didn’t even participate in the beta, but just from watching the various let’s play videos, I figured out that localhost would run all local simulations and the server was only required for regional transactions (and the DRM, never forget the DRM). C’mon, it’s EA; why would you take anything they say at face value?
You can buy services like water, power, and sewage from a neighboring city. You can also volunteer your city vehicles like police cars, fire trucks, and garbage trucks. One set up, they require no further intervention. Workers, students, and shoppers may also commute between cities. This happens automatically, though you can encourage this by building transport services like bus terminals and train stations.
You can gift money, coal, ore, oil, and possibly a fifth item that escapes me at the moment. Aside from money, none of these are actually needed to run your city. Coal and oil are burned in their respective power plants, but you can always buy them from the “global market”. Now it’s possible that you can’t afford to buy the stuff and your power plant gets shut down because it was dependent on regular gifts. If that’s the case, I’d argue that your economy has some more fundamental problems that require fixing.
I guess what I am not clear on is is the Global Market just an abstract pool of resources you can buy from to get what you need or is it more like an MMO Auction house where what is available is dependent on other players selling into the system?
It’s an abstract pool, I believe.
Actually, prices in the global market are supposed to be affected by what resources the players are buying and selling (or else the Trade Specialization wouldn’t make sense). They have shut off that part for now so prices are currently fixed.
No, you do not. You don’t need to trade resources even if you are playing with others. The Global Market works as an infinite sink and source for all resources. And there’s hard upper and lower limits on the prices there.
And resources aren’t traded as much as they are gifted. I don’t think there’s any way to directly sell resources. Instead, you gift resources to another city in your region (controlled by yourself or someone else) and that city gifts you cash.
It is accurate. There’s ways to mitigate it. For example, you can build a trade depot with storage bins for whatever resource you need as input. Fill those, and you have an inventory buffer.
Or more abstractly (and more cheaply, because depots cost cash and space), your neighbor can simply sell their resources on the Global Market and send you the cash for you to buy the resources you need.
So basically the game doesn’t really “Sim” anything? Not entirely sure if I should take the comments as fact, but someone suggests “Ya that’s great until you find out that your citizens dont even need jobs, or shops, or much of anything at all. In fact with no jobs or places to shop your traffic problems are all solved, and your income is quite good.”
I could make some really snide comments right now about the priorities of modern AAA games.
Sure. Here’s a time lapse video of an all-residential city with only basic services and nothing else in the region - no commercial or industrial. Note that this was in sandbox mode, so you have unlimited money and everything is unlocked. The key is that parks provide “shopping” so the sims actually have somewhere to go. If that’s the way you want to play, then you’re perfectly welcome to do it that way.
Hmm, now I want to plant a city in a populated region, give it a bus terminal, ferry, and train station (so the sims can commute to other cities), and just zone everything residential. I wonder how that would work.
Outside of sandbox mode, you’d probably have to be gifted some seed money so you could build those transportation buildings right away. Or start with the typical RCI zones but gradually rezone as your treasury builds until you’re all residential. Mabye plop some tourist attractions for additional income.