CitiesXL

harsaphes

harsaphes

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Just starting playing the Beta today and i have to say i love it. Havent had a good sim city like game to play in a long while. Anyone that was a fan of that series will def. like this one.
 
Heard of this for the first time only yesterday and it looks pretty good, is there any way to get access to the beta without paying some stupid fileplanet subscription or something?
 
i tried to check it out.. looks interesting but refused to let me sign up for a beta key.. so this will be yet another game that goes on the forgotten list..
 
Go to fileshack. Even free File Shack accounts can get a beta, I only have a free account and I just got a key 2 hours ago.
 
Guess there's no more keys available.
I've been waiting on something more "recent" to replace SC4 ...
Maybe this will be it.

Does it work the same ways, like residential zone, commercial, industrial, you can put facilities like police station, etc?
 
Fileplanet does indeed have some more keys to give out, I just got mine.

Just go to the 'login' option instead of 'Join Fileplanet'. The next page will prompt you to create a username/password and then your free Fileplanet account will be created.

Thanks to harsaphes for the information.
 
It seems that it could be restricted by country, i logged in using my old free account and when i click the signup button, to get a new key, i keep getting a password/user prompt.....entering my details doesnt work.

However after choosing a US proxy, it worked immediately. I even switched back to my direct connection afterwards just to be sure, but got the same crap.
 
Be warned that it's a 2.4GB download. Fileplanet still giving out beta keys as I type this.
 
Toytown said:
It seems that it could be restricted by country, i logged in using my old free account and when i click the signup button, to get a new key, i keep getting a password/user prompt.....entering my details doesnt work.

However after choosing a US proxy, it worked immediately. I even switched back to my direct connection afterwards just to be sure, but got the same crap.
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I'm in the US and am having the same problem. :confused: I'd really like to grab a key too, I've been looking forward to this game.
 
Hmm first impressions arent too good.

First of all you have to choose your city area from a list of predefined locations on a online planet.....and have a guess all the best ones are already taken. So you end up (even as a newbie) having to choose a high difficulty location , which either has a low % of flat land or has vast amounts of water on it.

It just got frustrating having to click on loads of unused locations to try and find the best ones and in the end i was beginning to lose interest in the game before i had even loaded it up to design my city :(.
 
I got a key just by signing into my fileplanet account... I'll probably give it a shot soon.
 
Toytown said:
Hmm first impressions arent too good.

First of all you have to choose your city area from a list of predefined locations on a online planet.....and have a guess all the best ones are already taken. So you end up (even as a newbie) having to choose a high difficulty location , which either has a low % of flat land or has vast amounts of water on it.

It just got frustrating having to click on loads of unused locations to try and find the best ones and in the end i was beginning to lose interest in the game before i had even loaded it up to design my city :(.
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Just hunt around you will find an easy one..i did after a few attempts. Also you do play online but i am not sure at this point how that is going to play out..I am sure there is a single player mode..I for one would not pay a monthly fee to play this..but right now the Beta is fun.
 
Quoting their Community Manager on the official forums:

"The 'planet offer' is our online game. Not the solo game. It wouldn't really make sense in a solo game, as the planet is here to allow people to interact, it is very nice to look at but you don't really need it in solo game."

http://www.citiesxl.com/index.php?/.../Itemid,6/func,view/id,95355/catid,6/lang,en/

And then proceeds several pages of flames in response, as well as hints that there will be AIs to trade with in single-player.
 
Not sure how much the NDA allows me to say but does anyone else playing the beta have low fps issues? The game starts slowing down a lot after the city has grown a bit. I find this very odd with the system I have (in the sig). Exiting the city and loading it up again helps with the issue for 15-20 minutes but then it's the same again.
 
I didn't like it. Installed and uninstalled in under a hour. Try playing the tutorial...
 
from the forums alot of people are pretty pissed off at this game, its to simplistic
 
Not sure how much the NDA allows me to say but does anyone else playing the beta have low fps issues? The game starts slowing down a lot after the city has grown a bit. I find this very odd with the system I have (in the sig). Exiting the city and loading it up again helps with the issue for 15-20 minutes but then it's the same again.
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Read the forums. Memory leak that won't be fixed for a few weeks. 20 minutes is the longest you'll play before slowdown until it's fixed.
 
I'm enjoying it for now. Might be nostalgia at the moment.

It's a beta, there's clearly alot of work still to be done.
 
UI is horrendous, avatar creation is .... disgusting, chosing a city location is tedious. I love Sim City games but I thought this beta was awful.
 
I just got in the beta @ massively.com

I don't know how many keys are left, but they only have 85.
 
Good idea, bad implementation, if CitiesXL were a movie it would be one of the "straight to DVD" ones.
 
From the limited amount I've been able to play in the beta (servers have been offline for a few days, and they had a version issue earlier this week), it seem like they have added a fair amount of complexity over Sim City 4.
Buildings have much more specific needs that you have to fill in Cities XL. For Sim City, the city services were almost all about residential happiness; and if you made your people happy, healthy, safe and educated good industry and commerce would follow. But Cities XL seems like you need to babysit individual businesses and industry to make sure they have the all the good and services (and employees) they need to function.
I'm not passing judgement yet, I haven't gotten into a big city and it's still a beta.
 
One of the big problems is that when you get a bigger city it will rely on fuel for everything and that means you will be forced into trading for it, unless your one of the small % who manage to grab a fuel location. So you can imagine exactly what locations will be the first to go once the game goes to retail, forcing everybody else to trade with them and giving everybody else a disadvantage.

The trade system seems horribly unfair and is up and down all the time. On smaller cities its not a problem, but if your a big city and the trade system is down, you could be forced to not play until its resolved, otherwise your city will suffer and you will lose loads. I had this happen on a big city that required Fuel and one of my contracts finished and then due to trade being down......i couldnt get fuel and ended up with -40k income.

Performance in game is also quite bad, im playing it with an overclocked E6600 and a 4870. As the game is only single threaded, dont expect any boost using a similiar clocked C2Q. As its only 1-2 months away from retail, dont expect it to go multicore either.

It could be a good game but they need to fix the trading system and spend about 4-6 months polishing the game and bugs it contains.......i dont think they can release in 2 months with a solid game.
 
It is not a bad game-- I actually like it, but I have never played Sim City before.
 
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The game will not have public transportation on release either. That will come as a patch later. I won't support a company who releases incomplete games on purpose.
 
The limited edition of the game comes with 7 day trial to the online mode......every other multiplayer game ive purchased has always had 30days/1month, so to me thats quite disgusting.
 
Ok so I see it available on steam... Anyone play the release version yet? Tempted to bite blind but...
 
Why does a game being online only remove it from peoples "lists".

what are you on 90% of the time your on you computer if not 100%? A thing called the internet. Does the SMALL chance of social interaction in this game scare you away?

People need to stop living in 1998, a game being online only has absolutely no affect to you unless your on dial up.

I will laugh when someone posts that the games social interaction has really no affect on gameplay as well, which is probably the case, other than site selection for our city.

The OMGZ THIS GAYM UZES THE INTERNETS! Users shouldn't be posting here.
 
elleana said:
Online is available for a monthly fee.
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FreiDOg said:
From the limited amount I've been able to play in the beta (servers have been offline for a few days, and they had a version issue earlier this week), it seem like they have added a fair amount of complexity over Sim City 4.
Buildings have much more specific needs that you have to fill in Cities XL. For Sim City, the city services were almost all about residential happiness; and if you made your people happy, healthy, safe and educated good industry and commerce would follow. But Cities XL seems like you need to babysit individual businesses and industry to make sure they have the all the good and services (and employees) they need to function.
I'm not passing judgement yet, I haven't gotten into a big city and it's still a beta.
Click to expand...

Added a fair amount of complexity over SC4? HAH!

Alright, let's list some bullet points for Cities XL:
- No mass transportation except for buses. SC4 had basic rail, subways, elevated rail, monorail, in addition to multiple road types (streets, roads, avenues, highways - ground and elevated). SC4 also had good mods that provided trams, high-speed rail, rural highways, and pedestrian-only roads. What CitiesXL has planned is a joke.
- 1x1 tiles? Everywhere? You've got to be kidding me. All you're doing is plopping these tiles all around. Not to mention that one of the main features they market is curved roads, but they don't even have dynamic lots planned so when you have lots that try to fit these curved roads, you get a major eyesore.
- Where are the city ordinances and the level of fine-grained control of taxation everywhere?
- None of the utility buildings have a realistic effect. A police station provides "police station satisfaction" to buildings in the city. Recreation provides "recreation satisfaction". All of this screams "hey, let's dumb down our shit for users that don't know how to play a proper simulator". In SC4, police stations have a radius of effect as well as an attenuation over that radius, and fought actual crimes committed (and you could see what crime it was in what area to what strength level, alot of it based on the area type). In SC4, the water pumps produce so and so liters of water, and you were to direct those liters of water to various areas of your city. In CitiesXL, your production is a colored orb, and your satisfaction is a colored orb. Way to downgrade the game to the lowest stupidity level.

I played the demo and I have to say, it's not even 1/4 of what SC4 is. The crazy RCI fluctuation is just retarded. I zone several retail store slots to satisfy 100 (full) retail store demand. They all get used and go out of business, then the demand comes back again, and the same thing happens, and they go out of business again, etc. In SC4, it doesn't do that, likely because whatever algorithms they use are smarter and more realistic. Similarly, I think the forced zoning by social class is ridiculous. You zone, and other people worry about moving in to the neighborhood, not "let's zone for executives only in this location" and "let's zone for elites only in this location".

Anyway, that's my long rant. I REALLY wanted this game to be SC5. It's not. It's not even close, and if you follow the entire debacle at Simtropolis, where CitiesXL has been given great treatment from the site, you'll know why. I like the graphics. The 3D is neat. I think SC4 could use that, but at cost to gameplay? Seriously, you guys comparing SC4 to CitiesXL must not have played SC4 extensively. The gameplay details are so different, they're not comparable, since SC4 requires more planning and more of a brain to play successfully than CitiesXL.

Why does a game being online only remove it from peoples "lists".

what are you on 90% of the time your on you computer if not 100%? A thing called the internet. Does the SMALL chance of social interaction in this game scare you away?

People need to stop living in 1998, a game being online only has absolutely no affect to you unless your on dial up.
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Because people want a city builder that they can control. They want to develop the land, the regions, shape the art of their city. You don't go tell a painter that whenever he grabs a paintbrush, he needs to find a partner that will paint on his canvas with him. Why do you think most novels are written from the inspiration of a single person? That's their story that they want to tell. Sim City is the same way. Now, here's the deal, and (probably something you don't know about since you deal with this topic in such a generic sense). CitiesXL is treating single-player as a second class citizen. That means that they don't intend for multiplayer updates, so essentially necessary content that should've been in the game itself at release, to propagate down to single-player. Want the mass transportation that should've always been there but were promised that it would come later? Sorry, shell out some extra bucks, or use our monthly subscription. I think they will have to revise this stand, because if they don't, then the game may very well just bleed cash.
 
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Such a shame to hear that this game's a dud. I bet if you took away the 3D and the subscription multiplayer you would get a game that has no more functionality than Simcity 2000 (which is 16 years old BTW).

Now, if only Maxis took the best of SC4 and added a Simcopter/GTA like exploration component to make SC5... my god it would be epic!
droolik8.gif
 
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