BTW, if anyone still wants to buy the game, I saw the LE version at Target knocked down 20 bucks to $39.99.

Cheetah speed may be back soon - they are testing it on their 'Test' server.

I'd rather have a working and practical AI before cheetah speed.

so when I play I fast forward 3 times, it says cheetah speed. is that not cheetah?

No, it's the same speed as llama speed right now.

I just got through building me a desktop to run this game and a few others and to improve my minecraft playing ability. Origin SN is OlSarge2005

IMO, the reason they didn't include cheetah speed is so that all the cities in a region would develop at the same speed. If you have one player playing on llama speed and others on cheetah speed, it would create a fundamental unbalance in the regions.

I still dont think cities in a region work together good enough to make it work like it should. Power, water, sewage, etc seems to work ok. But if i build city A and want it to be industry and put a power plant, then in city b zone residential the power is still looking to hire for a very long time.

I agree the whole simulation is broken to be honest. I hate the fact that sometimes there is only one connection from my city to region, and it takes forever for traffic to go through.

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IMO, the reason they didn't include cheetah speed is so that all the cities in a region would develop at the same speed. If you have one player playing on llama speed and others on cheetah speed, it would create a fundamental unbalance in the regions.

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What is the difference between one guy playing cheetah speed the same amount of real life time as another guy plays llama speed, and one guy playing llama speed 3x as often as another guy plays at all? Balanced development seems like it has more to do with a healthy region with engaged players than it does how fast they run the time.


Are they tracking unique batches of goods from city to city, or just saying that "right now, City A can provide X quantity of Good Y every Z hours" and so each player sees a different quantity of Good Y moving from city to city based on his speed (or length) of play? Can two players track the same car driving between their cities?

The way I've always assumed the engine works, each city actually sees the other cities as a relatively simple set of demands/capacities and supplies/excesses. They aren't actually interacting; between each pair of cities is a set of accounts whose flow rates have to match according to the temporal frame of reference for each, but don't actually have to share the same frame of reference. You've got intermediaries who "translate" between the guy who is at work and the guy who is playing, or the guy playing at llama speed and the guy playing at cheetah speed.

You almost have to have the ability for cities to maintain exact equilibrium any time a player is gone (otherwise your city gets destroyed every time you leave), and if your city still "works" without changing while you are gone, then you're already taking liberties with the shared frame of reference.

So, lets say City A provides 2 pins per hour (in the classic example from Wealth of Nations), and City B needs 2 pins per hour. City A is frozen because Player A is at work, but Player B is playing at normal speed. Is he still getting his 2 pins per hour from City A, even though City A sees 0 pins leaving his city (and 0 dollars of revenue entering) while he is gone? What if City A is playing at normal and City B is playing at 3x, does City A now see 6 pins per hour leaving his city even though he is only producing 2 per hour? Is City B restricted to 2 pins per hour? Now replace pins with processors, commuters, power, or any other simcity-specific packet.


So, I've written all that, which is a waste of time but I got on a roll.

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IMO, the reason they didn't include cheetah speed is so that all the cities in a region would develop at the same speed. If you have one player playing on llama speed and others on cheetah speed, it would create a fundamental unbalance in the regions.

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Didn't they include it at launch? I thought it was removed only because their POS servers couldn't relay some very basic info fast enough to support cheetah speed.

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Didn't they include it at launch? I thought it was removed only because their POS servers couldn't relay some very basic info fast enough to support cheetah speed.

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Either that or they removed it to slow down players discovering that we are really playing the alpha release.

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Either that or they removed it to slow down players discovering that we are really playing the alpha release.

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All of the above.

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So, lets say City A provides 2 pins per hour (in the classic example from Wealth of Nations), and City B needs 2 pins per hour. City A is frozen because Player A is at work, but Player B is playing at normal speed. Is he still getting his 2 pins per hour from City A, even though City A sees 0 pins leaving his city (and 0 dollars of revenue entering) while he is gone? What if City A is playing at normal and City B is playing at 3x, does City A now see 6 pins per hour leaving his city even though he is only producing 2 per hour? Is City B restricted to 2 pins per hour? Now replace pins with processors, commuters, power, or any other simcity-specific packet.

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The best way to do it is like you were saying earlier where it's simple supply demand values with no real time interaction between the cities and no issues with log on log off or speed differentiation.

For example:
Player A is playing at turtle, player B at cheetah. Player A is has a water availability of 800 gallons per hour, player B is using 100 per hour but growing. All player A sees is incoming of 100 per hour and B sees 100 per hour going out. B isn't really paying A, and A isn't really supplying B, both are just coming as static supply and payment values.

This way, if player A logs in and B is out, he is earning his money, but it's not really coming out of B's pocket, it's just the server saying the income is coming from B. When B logs in and A is out, he's paying his money, but it's not going to A, it's just deducted from his funds per hour.

The bad part of this is that it shows how simplistic all of these processes should be for the server to maintain. I think this GlassDoor simulator is actually what is getting in the way of a good concept of region play. If they had kept it the old way where the city is simply a visual representation of a database then it would have been kinda fun with specializations and multiplayer.

^^ Thats a good summary. Also, am I the only one who couldnt care less about the stupid ****ing glassbox engine? The last thing I want to do is micromanage a bunch of stupid ****ing sims.

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The bad part of this is that it shows how simplistic all of these processes should be for the server to maintain.

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Yep. The complicated part is all at the intracity (offline) level rather than the intercity (server) level.

The most computationally difficult part should be the "real" sim people, but a) most people don't really care about that, and b) the sims aren't unique entities, so the people who would want to follow their sims around can't, and c) it's so poorly executed that the "feature" breaks the game. Way to go, you broke your game by adding a feature that people don't want and that doesn't work anyway. Brilliant.

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Are people still playing on the TexAgs12 on the Oceanic-2 server, or has it been abandoned?

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Yeah. I've been playing there some but haven't logged on much recently.

...

Just downloaded a Free Nissan Leaf Charging Station DLC. Not sure what if any benefit there is to it yet.

Also, is it just me or have the challenges been set to start in 5 days for two weeks now?

[This message has been edited by AgDev01 (edited 4/2/2013 6:41p).]

Mac version coming June 11!

Servers will be cross-compatible and those who purchased the PC version through Origin will have access to the Mac version for free (YAY!).

It's not a port, but made from the ground-up optimized for OS X.

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-mac-release-date

Also, Cheetah speed is now back.

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Mac version coming June 11!

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Awesome! Apple lemmings can feel our pain too.

Does cheetah speed just mean your traffic jams develop at a faster speed, so your city becomes cluster ****ed faster? Cheetah speed is not the problem with this game lol.

Have any of the big issues with the game been fixed yet? I haven't logged on since release week.

Yes and no. It seems the issues with server lag are diminishing, but some of the key gameplay limitations are still around... such as small build area, slight traffic issues, and population scaling =/ number or size of buildings. It's like an arbitrary number that just inflates if you check off some boxes (education, mass transit, etc).

Any idea when they're going to open this game up to modding, if ever?

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Any idea when they're going to open this game up to modding, if ever?

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It may be a while due to the fact that one of the first mods that was created showed that you didn't need to be constrained by their artificial city size and that you could play offline.

2.0 on Monday... might give it a try sometime next week. More likely I'm not sure I'll be interested again unless they make cities bigger.

https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-updates

I didn't realize how much I'd miss being able to zone low high medium and have different areas of my city at different densities until I didn't have enough room to really do it.

I love how the first update is that the mayor can drive a fancy car or limo to work. I've been looking forward to that one for years!

But yes, 2.0 seems like it is going to be the beta update to the alpha.

Well, the 2.0 patch is happening at 1pm Pacific today. We'll see how much it helps.

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Residential Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.

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What is this?

Anyone play yesterday after the patch?

I haven't played in a fortnight

#1 im waiting on a new computer to get shipped
#2 I don't plan on downloading it again until I see some positive feedback on changes regarding the glaring issues with the game currently

Lag issues declining because no one is playing this pos anymore?

You know where I am unhappy, subways. Where is my damn subways, we had them in SC2000 or so, why cant I get them now? I dislike that there are no elevated trains or subways to relieve my traffic. Traffic is easily the #1-5 problem with the game, other than the sync crap and offline stuff.

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You know where I am unhappy, subways. Where is my damn subways, we had them in SC2000 or so, why cant I get them now? I dislike that there are no elevated trains or subways to relieve my traffic. Traffic is easily the #1-5 problem with the game, other than the sync crap and offline stuff.

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You have to hold back something for the expansion.