SimCity V (2013) - screens/artwork and information

The biggest game breaking thing for me is water. It runs out and doesn't seem to ever come back. My city will eventually fall apart from it.

Easiest thing is build a sewage treatment plant and fully upgrade all the tank slots. Go to the water view after it has been there a while, and see where the water is accumulating around it.

Then build the water plant right there. Bulldoze the included stock water pump, and replace it with a filtered pump, add more as needed. Unlimited clean water.

I was maintaining a city of over 300k population with this.


Next challenge for me is sustaining the city without any aid from imports or neighbors after my mines dry up, which is getting pretty close. Probably switch from coal to nuclear, but nuclear takes a shitload of water that I don't have. Hopefully double sewer + water plants can handle it.

Space is just fucking killing me though. Trying to make use of every square inch is hard when all the utility type buildings have add-ons that require many different shapes and sizes.
 
Oh damn I tried that but I forgot to bulldoze the stock pump and I ended up pumping dirty water. So if I change the stock pump, I can put my water system in heavily polluted ground water areas?
 
Oh damn I tried that but I forgot to bulldoze the stock pump and I ended up pumping dirty water. So if I change the stock pump, I can put my water system in heavily polluted ground water areas?

As long as you use the filtration pumps solely
 
You really should cut them some slack. This is an ONLINE game.

instead of relying on your own video card and cpu to render this beautiful game, you are actually controlling a game on the other side of the internet. This idea of controlling a game on someone else powerful and optimized hardware, and then viewing the results on our piece of shit machines is revolutionary!

benefits include:
Less demanding hardware for really awesome graphics.
Less electricity usage.
Minimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance.
Playabilty of these graphics across multiple devices without regards to their hardware capabilities.

Given the amazing technological accomplishment of basically streaming completely an interactive video game across the internet in real time, this is a huge advance. And according to some EA ads, they are already finishing up graphically identical versions for the nexus 7, the ipad and mini, and google glass.

This is really fucking cool. With this tech, im gonna be able to play the latest unreal engine in my fucking eyeball!
 
You really should cut them some slack. This is an ONLINE game.

instead of relying on your own video card and cpu to render this beautiful game, you are actually controlling a game on the other side of the internet. This idea of controlling a game on someone else powerful and optimized hardware, and then viewing the results on our piece of shit machines is revolutionary!

benefits include:
Less demanding hardware for really awesome graphics.
Less electricity usage.
Minimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance.
Playabilty of these graphics across multiple devices without regards to their hardware capabilities.

Given the amazing technological accomplishment of basically streaming completely an interactive video game across the internet in real time, this is a huge advance. And according to some EA ads, they are already finishing up graphically identical versions for the nexus 7, the ipad and mini, and google glass.

This is really fucking cool. With this tech, im gonna be able to play the latest unreal engine in my fucking eyeball!

Your joking right? SimCity is NOT played on some other server running it. It has Always-On DRM meaning you cant play offline. I can guarantee you it is running on your actual PC not something in the cloud. That is also the reason people are so pissed, they have the files, they have the hardware but cant play the damn game. Oh and they paid for it, lets not forget that.

If it were an online game why would it be multiple GB instead of just a tiny launcher you download?
 
benefits include:
Less demanding hardware for really awesome graphics.
Less electricity usage.
Minimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance.
Playabilty of these graphics across multiple devices without regards to their hardware capabilities.

No one outside Maxis even knows how much work is being done on servers vs. local computer (Maxis has said some computation is definitely being done locally). No one - perhaps not even Maxis - knows whether they could have engineered a game that ran just fine on local computers with the tradeoffs that are typical of PC gaming - less graphic details options compensate for less powerful computers.

As for electricity savings, that seems doubtful. Servers draw tons of electricity too and it takes power to send all that data and traffic through the internet pipes (a factor that would be minimal if the game ran locally). Even now, local computers need to be running anyway - arguably at a lower level but that's just it - it's arguable. There's certainly no clear-cut electricity savings.

As for the alleged benefits of "inimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance" - try telling that to folks who have been trying to play since launch. Hardware problems on THEIR servers is still a hardware problem and it has the potential of being much more far-reaching because when those servers don't work or go down, it can affect everyone. If I have driver problems, that's a pain to me but it doesn't affect anyone else (beyond those who might have similar setups that are having the same issues).

Even Maxis has acknowledged this - if you insist on making your game online and make the game and service inseparable, a breakdown in the service is a breakdown in the game. I completely reject the notion in some reviews and comments I've read that "the game is good but the service is bad." No, the game is bad because the service is bad, the two are now inseparable because of Maxis' design choice. They made it this way and they can't have their cake and eat it too.

edited to add - the post I was replying to may have been tongue firmly in cheek. My irony detector wasn't working well.
 
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You really should cut them some slack. This is an ONLINE game.

instead of relying on your own video card and cpu to render this beautiful game, you are actually controlling a game on the other side of the internet. This idea of controlling a game on someone else powerful and optimized hardware, and then viewing the results on our piece of shit machines is revolutionary!

benefits include:
Less demanding hardware for really awesome graphics.
Less electricity usage.
Minimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance.
Playabilty of these graphics across multiple devices without regards to their hardware capabilities.

Given the amazing technological accomplishment of basically streaming completely an interactive video game across the internet in real time, this is a huge advance. And according to some EA ads, they are already finishing up graphically identical versions for the nexus 7, the ipad and mini, and google glass.

This is really fucking cool. With this tech, im gonna be able to play the latest unreal engine in my fucking eyeball!

Not sure if sarcastic or Chinese...
 
Complete speculation.

No one outside Maxis even knows how much work is being done on servers vs. local computer (Maxis has said some computation is definitely being done locally). No one - perhaps not even Maxis - knows whether they could have engineered a game that ran just fine on local computers with the tradeoffs that are typical of PC gaming - less graphic details options compensate for less powerful computers.

As for electricity savings, that seems doubtful. Servers draw tons of electricity too and it takes power to send all that data and traffic through the internet pipes (a factor that would be minimal if the game ran locally). Even now, local computers need to be running anyway - arguably at a lower level but that's just it - it's arguable. There's certainly no clear-cut electricity savings.

As for the alleged benefits of "inimal pesky hardware setup, configuration, and maintenance" - try telling that to folks who have been trying to play since launch. Hardware problems on THEIR servers is still a hardware problem and it has the potential of being much more far-reaching because when those servers don't work or go down, it can affect everyone. If I have driver problems, that's a pain to me but it doesn't affect anyone else (beyond those who might have similar setups that are having the same issues).

Even Maxis has acknowledged this - if you insist on making your game online and make the game and service inseparable, a breakdown in the service is a breakdown in the game. I completely reject the notion in some reviews and comments I've read that "the game is good but the service is bad." No, the game is bad because the service is bad, the two are now inseparable because of Maxis' design choice. They made it this way and they can't have their cake and eat it too.

The reasons he cited are the general ideas behind cloud computing from the consumers perspective. In theory, your tablet could run a cloud computed game because all its displaying is an image output, a highly interactive video file if you will. So, from the consumer's point of view, you wouldn't need a 600w machine, or even a 200w machine to run a program. The program would be run on highly efficient servers in a controlled environment. The user wouldn't have to deal with the installation of anything, worry about system requirements, or updating any files, it would all be seamless to the user.

That's just theory because companies continue to skimp on the networking aspects of their products.

Of course, it should go without saying that Ocean's post was just a troll post looking to misinform and incite the uninformed.
 
My latest city which is extremely mining heavy:

2ntv1n5.png



The biggest game breaking thing for me is water. It runs out and doesn't seem to ever come back. My city will eventually fall apart from it.

Not to single you out...but is it just me...or do those graphics look no better than SimCity4, with some added lens blur effect on top?
 
It's 3-D now. I would say that, assuming the game runs, the graphics are definitely better than those of SimCity 4. SimCity 4, in contrast, used a 2-D isometric projection.
 
They still are acting like this is the first online PC game ever released.

http://kotaku.com/5989648/it-would-take-significant-engineering-to-make-simcity-a-singleplayer-game

In an internal memo sent to Maxis employees, and made public Thursday, Bradshaw claimed that while "thousands of players across the world are playing and having a good experience," many others were unable to connect to the game, making "the rollout in North America has been challenging."

Fucking kidding me? Everyone saw this problem from a mile away because of obvious factors like not allowing players to preload the game. Now its a simply matter of "Oh we were so ignorant , we've never launched a PC game before with an online component". Unbelievable.

They are also on Twitter doing a live twitter with someone from the support team and they are censoring questions left and right. How fucking sad.
 
Existing issues list from official forum:

Buildings constructing in buildings - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9344307.page

How to destroy someone else's city and claim it as your own.... * amazing this can be done.... - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9346697.page#27518702

Water tables don't replenish = Lost a 10 hour city to this - Just learned you can turn poop into fresh water - Posted here http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/forums/show/4122.page

I destroyed a good chuck of my city to rebuild it and when I put a new firestation, hospital and police station down, they are say they are responding, but they are not roaming in the city, and I got crime and fires off the hook. What is going on here, Maxis please check this bug... - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9347649.page

When a city reaches a certain size, sometimes many of the building lights flash on and off rapidly - this one reported fairly widely as 'flashing buildings' - Page 3 Bad Whippet

Sometimes, removal trucks don't exit the city again after delivering Sims to their homes. Instead, they amass in a particular spot in the city, circling around the same route over and over (and if they get onto the region highway they do a u-turn at the end and come back again). More and more join the queue after moving in Sims. Other traffic enters and exits the city normally when this is happening. - Page 3 Bad Whippet

Region perks and trading doesn't work at all = Lost a city to this because I couldn't receive money or water(This also disabled great works)

- Cars can sometimes get stuck at a stop light forever - blocking up all traffic behind them but never moving.

Helicopters broken. They almost never leave base when you have more then 1-2 - even if your city has 100 crimes a day

Another one is that the MaxisMan gets stuck when looking for fires to put out, it just circles around the building and does nothing until some time later it lands back. - page 3 F.Franco

Trash collector trucks Sometimes have an entire city to cover and fail to cover because they go around in circles and do not collect trash. They also sometimes follow each other instead of maximizing the area of coverage and fail to collect everything because of that.

Time Played = includes time at the launcher and waiting apparently. Yes we all are getting that, most have only played a fraction of the actual time logged

Roads are covered in sand when you zoom out to far

The recycling center has a similar bug. it stops processing the trash and just fills up. - http://i.imgur.com/aVyxyu8.jpg?1

Cheeta speed BROKEN!

Trade Depots still broken even after "fixing them" in the last patch - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9346480.page

When destroying alot of industrial buildings there side crap is left and UN-deletable i.i fenced in barrel of of something... This can not be removed unless you plop a building over it and get lucky. Sometimes that doesn't even work. Zones will not remove this POS and build over it on there own.

I have not been able to successfully save a city for the last two days - Server issue I am assuming but i see this alot - Heres one post http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9347367.page

Servers Broken - Why does the EU have 2x the amount of US servers? and why does the launcher tell me i am ready to play then the game tells me the server can't be connected too?

HD 6970 2GB card 4 months old is over heating in this game unless i set my fan to 80% - yes i understand ATI sucks and runs hot in general over nvidia. I am a A+certified Computer repair tech. So my computer in general is not hot at all and I do have plenty of additional fans in my Cooler master HAF 932 full tower case. Only this game does it not FC3/POE/LOL/GW2/Hitman/COD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161382 - This video card...

The bigger your city gets the more evident the problems are and yes they are game breaking. 5 fire departments through out your 140k pop city with tons of mass transit and everything else needed but hey NO MORE WATER LEFT ON THE MAP.. and ohh don't worry 1/4 of your city burned down cause your fire trucks take 2 days to leave the fire department.

Traffic broken as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck - in what country do emergency vehicles stop and wait for traffic instead of just slowly running red lights or here in America where the game was made we send radio frequencies to the lights to make them all red besides the lane that the emergency vehicle is on

Thanks goes too Azzer007 for providing this list on page 2 of post

All the below are traffic related. But they all have knock-on effects which can destroy a city (since EVERYTHING can fail when traffic fails, now);

Incredibly basic path-finding that ignores road density or congestion, see youtube video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHdyzx_ecbQ

Buildings can get stuck spawning vehicles over and over non-stop until you exit and re-load the city - which if you DON'T do when this happens, floods your entire road network with an instant gridlock very quickly. Can be hard to spot.

Any "service" vehicles (from police cars to school buses) can sometimes all go for the same target at once and get stuck - and EVERY vehicle of that service type will try to reach the same point at once and start looping in a conga-line (conga-lines of 20 police cars, or 10 school buses) which cause instant traffic grid-lock spreading out, while ignoring all other issues of that service type (because every vehicle jumped to the same destination).

Vehicles can only ever turn right leaving a building, never left, which if you don't plan for with enough intersections can lead people to take so long to each destinations.

If you DO build plenty of intersections, these often break down whenever any single car wants to use them, causing your 3 lanes of traffic to act as 1 lane causing gridlocks.

If you build an intersection next to the highway exit, the highway single-lanes cause instant traffic backlog both down the highway and into your city, stopping trade trucks getting anywhere.

If you DON'T build an intersection next to the highway exit, emergency service vehicles get stuck leaving the city on the highway because they wanted the other side of the road somewhere close to the highway exit. See this image here;
http://i.imgur.com/NbYRfwR.jpg

Origin account in use, In the middle of the game - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9347953.page

page 4 - Azzer007 - I myself have had this issue as well - siren sound effects get stuck in-game at max volume, louder than everything else... and even if you bulldoze the ENTIRE CITY and empty the map, the siren sound effects stay stuck on

Simcity won't launch - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348062.page

Can't Rotate the Airport - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348071.page

As Much as i don't want to see good bugs get fixed, I don't want to be seen as only showing bad bugs (i plan on exploiting the shut outta this later to be completely honest - Thanks Goes Too IkeAleros page 5- Here's a bug that's beneficial for the player that I didn't see mentioned:

The mayor's mansion provides a slight increase in land value across the city for every upgrade you give it. The first 4 levels require a maintained 75% approval rating for 6 hours each, the next 4 require 80% approval rating maintained for 12 hours each, the next 4 require 85% maintained for 24 hours each, and the last 4 require a 90% approval rating for 48 hours each level.

You can however by pass this. After getting the first 4 levels, if you cannot maintain over 80% you can bulldoze your mayor's mansion and it will retain all its levels and start gaining levels at the every 6 hours and only needing 75% rate. You can get your mansion all the way to level 17 this way, just bulldoze it and rebuild it.

Education Not reducing Crime, Fire Risk, Trash, and power consumption. Thanks goes to SGTUH60LNJ Page 5

So the first two I know do not work. I have had 3 cities with 4 star(hats) of education and one with 5. 1 3 star Tech, 1 2 star and 2 1 star.

Can't enter personal cities - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348147.page

Terrain Too steep - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348180.page

Unfilled Workers- Page 6 Zargrim - I had 3500 unfilled jobs for 15 hours and no matter what I did to fill the jobs no population was unemployed and yet the jobs were never filled. I tore half the map down and replaced it with low density housing and nothing. Nobody would work in my industrial park even though they were all low class and looking for employees. My entire city ended up bugged to the nines after I tried to solve one bug and ended up with many more finally bringing the city to a halt.

Regional Transit buses - Page 7 Zargrim - also get stuck at bus stops. I had to scuttle my entire shuttle service to prevent regional buses from entering my city and causing massive grid lock

Below are thanks to Page 7 PtitRun56 -
population/worker ration is weird (or maybe it was intended like this). Around 10% of people are workers

French police car siren are too loud, even in the lower level of zooming

saved games are server dependent. Adding 100 server will only help new gamers since everyone will try to connect the same server every time

High educated sims don't seem to commute and create Medium/high industries in other cities

Faulty building description/game message - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348632.page

All of these below have been posted by ChemicalAmir - http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9348165.page
I am running on a super high-end machine but sometimes there is graphics/shader flickering of buildings or roads. Turning the filters on and off fixes it, but a longer-term solution would be great

No matter how many health buildings, clinics, hospitals that you put down, the city still seems to always say your citizens are sick

There seems to be a large, large delay in Sim use of transportation buildings like boats, trains and buses after they are plopped sometimes

Aspects of trade, freight and interaction with other players could be better explained - in general the manual could be a lot more robust
The granular detail behind each expense line of the financials could be better - I feel like even if you go into the lowest level of detail for your financial performance I am often left confused and wanting even more detail on how I just had a swing of thousands of dollars in a few seconds, without any one-time expenses like coal or power

There are often huge population swings with no explanation

Sims can be very erratic and constantly ask for things without much relation to whether you actually need the buildings or not

Sometimes if you run the game launcher, the game runs in the background but you can't actually enter the game and have to restart the computer to get the launcher to work again

The map size can be very constricting. I'm not saying it needs to 4x, like many have suggested, but at least 2x? That would feel right

When you close or bulldoze a police station, all the criminal a free even if you have another police station with free prison space

This video shows -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElLcc-gEIoI - how a completely "clean" city's air pollution goes astronomical from one incinerator and then the pollution begins upwind from the incinerator engulfing the entire city.

Buildings being placed WAAAAAAAAAAy to high from everything else! http://i47.tinypic.com/2922zq0.jpg
 
I am willing to bet money that EA/Maxis knew about most, if not all, of those issues along with every other problem so far. I am willing to make this statement in confidence due to the 1 hour "beta" which as it turns out, is not enough time for all of these problems to manifest.
 
So I was fixing my city... rearranging water, sewer, making room for a univeristy, etc.

All of the sudden it says,"City is not processing properly." I have to roll back, and now the city doesn't exist at all (or it won't load if it does). Wow lol
 
Trust EA to be the one to fuck up the launch of an always-online game like nobody has done before. Well done, EA. You are the best company when it comes to generating hate with such little effort.
 
So I was fixing my city... rearranging water, sewer, making room for a univeristy, etc.

All of the sudden it says,"City is not processing properly." I have to roll back, and now the city doesn't exist at all (or it won't load if it does). Wow lol

They need to make "City is not processing properly" one of the official disasters that can ravage the city. That way, Its A Feature™
 
So I was fixing my city... rearranging water, sewer, making room for a univeristy, etc.

All of the sudden it says,"City is not processing properly." I have to roll back, and now the city doesn't exist at all (or it won't load if it does). Wow lol

Exactly the reason I'm not bothering with the game. The core issues of online drm and cloud saving are not being addressed.

Business as usual for these fucks.
 
I am willing to bet money that EA/Maxis knew about most, if not all, of those issues along with every other problem so far. I am willing to make this statement in confidence due to the 1 hour "beta" which as it turns out, is not enough time for all of these problems to manifest.

Here's why their corporate doublespeak about being "caught off guard" and "people are having too much fun" is maddening - they knew the effing preorder numbers. Had they even just planned around that figure, this wouldn't be the same shitstorm.

There's no reason their client-server approach to antipiracy couldn't have been engineered to still be dependent on server to open a session and stream unique assets or keys down, then let the game run locally for the remainder of the session, savedata local and then just cloud synced. Cracking groups would still have a bitch of a time that way because the server still generates stuff the client is dependent on and can't just easily be emulated or bypassed.

Hopefully that's a compromise they at least consider - keep it dependent on server but make it less dependent. And stop jerking us off about the server side being some farm of supercomputers doing off the charts number crunching because "city simulation" is so hardcore. Please. Its a glorified RTS.
 
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I can get in to SimCity just fine now... the problem is finding a damn region to play in. Anyone else having similar troubles?

There are no filters... which is stupid. It shows you regions whether they are full or not, active or not. The only semi useful filter is "Abandoned Cities". No, I don't want to pick up where some other douche left off.
 
so it appears to me that EA and Maxis are the new Ubisoft.

I can't wait for all those fuckers to go out of business.
 
Found another feature gone - The two useless filters that were there for finding games that were worth hardly anything are now gone anyway. Pretty soon we won't be able to build roads.
 
Guess I've been pretty lucky, no major issues besides connecting the first few days. Lot of bugs, but nothing crippling yet. Even all the disasters barely had any impact on my city most of the time.

I'm just out of space, time to start a new city I guess. Also it seems everyone in my region is no longer active in it, good thinking there Maxis/EA.

Seems higher wealth residences have a lower population capacity? Which makes sense I guess. My city had over 300k people when it was all poor and uneducated, then I started improving it for the wealthy and my population cut almost in half.

Managed to make it fully self sufficient and pretty green, with an income of over 1 million a day with exports. I wish there was an alternative to just a dump/incinerator for garbage disposal though.

beaverton.jpg
 
Yea, I'm giving up on it. While it was entertaining when it worked, it's just too much frustration.
 
Looking at that screenshot, I cant help but think "why is this called simcity and not simtown?"
 
Are streetcars broken ? I can not place a streetcar depot ANYWHERe, even if I create plenty of open space beside a road, it just shows as red and says "overlapping" even if there's a huge open area for it to fit.

edit - nm, gotta be ona streetcar avenue lol.

I had another question, regarding the water pumping stations near Sewage dumps.
I put one down, i added a filtration pump to it, but I forgot to turn off the basic water pump. after it popped up warning me the water pump was polluted, I went in to the water treatment plant and turned off the basci water pump, but leave on the filter pump.

However it still keeps telling me my water pump is polluted, even though I have it turned off. Is this normal or will it go away and stop telling me?
 
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Are streetcars broken ? I can not place a streetcar depot ANYWHERe, even if I create plenty of open space beside a road, it just shows as red and says "overlapping" even if there's a huge open area for it to fit.

Are you sure you are trying to place on a High Density Streetcar Avenue?
 
and yes, my previous post is completely tongue in cheek, and referencing the connotation with which ea is representing the "ONLINE" in their descriptions.

i have encountered multiple people, after viewing the videos and advertisements, that come to the conclusion that what i described is what this game is doing.

tech companies deceiving customers is something that pisses me off.
 
Are you sure you are trying to place on a High Density Streetcar Avenue?

Theres a bug in game where a streetcars can't be placed even though you have all the high density avenues and its trying to be placed right off to the side. It really doesn't matter currently because traffic is screwed up.

Now that I think - Maxis was smart to limit the beta's because none of these issues would have been apparent to the consumers.
 
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