Sim City 5

[Carmen813]

I had a lot of fun with it, but yeah, the city seemed small. That said, I got to a point where (if I had planned ahead) where my buildings would start upgrading to skyscrapers. It's pretty cool, I like that they are trying to enhance the social aspect.

Will be preordered.

 

[Genx87]

Downloading right now.

Edit: "Unable to load city right now, please try again later" lol

Edit: "Play blocked at this time"

Definitely an Origin game.

 

[waggy]

boo! i really didn't get in. lol

 

[blurredvision]

I played a couple of hours sessions last night. Beta runs pretty good, I only had one instance of "wtf is going on" when I was doing the tutorial and it was towards the end where they wanted me to visit the gambling city. I got stuck on the city loading screen for 5+ minutes, even the music stopped playing. I could only get back to the desktop via task manager. When I switched back to the game in progress, it loaded in immediately and I kept on going.

Overall, I really like the game. I don't mind the small city size because once the full game comes out, you have 4 plots of land in your region that you can control. Basically, you don't have one huge plot, just smaller ones that you are forced to have work together. In my mind, it's a bit cooler because you can specialize and control completely different cities. Plus, I'm sure once they get the simulation aspects under control and optimized, they'll enlarge the plots. One of the developers tweeted about this earlier this week, stating the small size was due to them not wanting to get in over their head with this new simulation system.

The games runs good. I'm running a newer Core i5-3570k with 32GB of RAM, but my video card is an aging GTX275. I was able to turn all the settings all the way up and get a playable game at 1920x1080, but eventually turned off AA (not needed IMO), shadows down to medium and animation down to medium. When viewing the tutorial gambling city, it ran perfectly fine and looks great.

I'm not a SC pro so I didn't get too far with either of my cities. However on my second one, I did go a little faster and had almost the entire plot covered. I was trying to become a "small city" by the time limit, which is 15k residents, but my time ended when I was at 14,990. I was gaining cash at that point by about $10k/hour. At about 45 minutes, I basically just took out all bond loans and started building like mad. My per hour rate was still going up when the game ended. Had no problems paying off all the loans when I put it on cheetah speed and suddenly had over 100k in the bank to spend. I couldn't spend it fast enough. I'm sure it'll get harder as your city start growing up and crime starts, then you start trying to specialize.

 

[Nintendesert]

Downloading right now.

Edit: "Unable to load city right now, please try again later" lol

Edit: "Play blocked at this time"

Definitely an Origin game.

Or a beta. :whiste:

 

[Chaptorial]

Not too sure how I feel about how the zoning system works. I am a control freak and a perfectionist and it feels like I cant control the zoning as well as I used to and that I am not able to perfectly utilize every square inch of land to accommodate max density with the way the curbside zoning works without any depth to measure...

This has been my biggest gripe so far while playing the beta. Still haven't got the hang of it yet in order to maximize and be totally efficient when placing additional zones.

The way roads handle everything from power to poo is a great change however and I definitely don't miss placing power lines or sewer pipes. Overall I've pleased with it and the limited options and time limit in the beta really has left me wanting more.

boo! i really didn't get in. lol

PM sent.

 

[SheHateMe]

Only thing I was confused about last night were my industrial zones asking me to put in a trade exchange or something like that so they could move freight.

What the hell do I find a trade exchange building?

The only alternative was more commerical zoning which starts to look sloppy when you have a doughtnut shop, an ice cream shop, a hotdog stand, and another random food place on the same small block.

I also wish you could zoom in more.

I really don't like how they scarified options to have even sharper graphics because they wanted to appease people who have cheap computers.

Hello, its 2013!

 

[Dominato3r]

Only thing I was confused about last night were my industrial zones asking me to put in a trade exchange or something like that so they could move freight.

What the hell do I find a trade exchange building?

The only alternative was more commerical zoning which starts to look sloppy when you have a doughtnut shop, an ice cream shop, a hotdog stand, and another random food place on the same small block.

I also wish you could zoom in more.

I really don't like how they scarified options to have even sharper graphics because they wanted to appease people who have cheap computers.

Hello, its 2013!

There's a lot more information however compared to Simcity 4. When you're about to plopp a building, look at the bottom right corner. There's so much data it's ridiculous. The simulation is a lot richer compared to SC4, which was essentially the same thing every time.

There's actually a wind map now do get optimal energy from wind farms.

 

[blurredvision]

I played another hour earlier this afternoon and decided to just throw shit down wherever and not really have any kind of plan, mainly to see what would happen. I ran into some interesting, albeit not unexpected results.

Since the wind speed and direction is always the same in this plot for the beta test, I decided to throw all my industrial in the upper corner, downwind and away from the beach. I put only one road out there and then kinda forgot about it until much later. I sat there and watched it for a bit and the traffic jam was endless.

http://i.imgur.com/ePCWBJd.jpg

I added an extra road just to see if any cars would take the long way around to avoid the traffic jam. Answer is:

http://i.imgur.com/ea9f8qo.jpg

I ended up turning speed to cheetah and just throwing down as much as I could. Roads wherever, residential where it would fit, hospitals, schools, extra power, etc. Just throwing money at it, since I was actually doing pretty good early on. However, things started going badly, as industrial slowed down, people didn't have jobs, crime increased, people were getting sick (partly because I accidentally left my lone water tower near my industrial zone and they were polluting the water table).

http://i.imgur.com/b5eTzUV.jpg

I could zoom in and hear gun shots ringing out quite often. Blocks of residential weren't getting built, commercial projects were sitting untouched, I was losing $2k an hour not too long after that screenshot was taken. You definitely can't wing it in this game, you have to have some type of plan and take it slow, unless you're a Sim City pro (which I am not).

Really loving this game, can't wait to play with others.

 

[waggy]

so you built Detroit?

 

[Regs]

Waggy just made the kids cry

 

[KaOTiK]

Go to play. Get the message:

Play is blocked at this time

Damn you online!

 

[CA19100]

Same here. Got it late last night; did the tutorial, and it looked like fun. Go to play today, and blocked for me as well! Kinda makes it hard to test...

 

[waggy]

yeah blocked =(

i wanted to make my own Detroit!

 

[pcslookout]

Can I use someone key to at least try Simcity 5 for an hour ? You can have it back then. I just want to see if I should buy the game or not.

If not I understand.

 

[waggy]

Can I use someone key to at least try Simcity 5 for an hour ? You can have it back then. I just want to see if I should buy the game or not.

If not I understand.

all you get is an hour. well 2 if you count the hour trianer

 

[techie81]

Each time you create your own city, you get an hour, which can be repeated all day long.

 

[Dominato3r]

Data layers and the new simulatione gine are awesome. I like the fact traffic is actually simulated now, and accidents/backups have an effect on the overall city.

 

[CA19100]

Seems to be back in business; just enjoyed my first hour. So far, I like it!

 

[KaOTiK]

I really do like it and that is probably what makes me all the more pissed off about the always on, cloud save, and small cities. I can get my cities up to around 22k population before the hour goes and I have the entire area almost filled up.

 

[lozina]

I have an extra key now if anyone wants given out

 

[Wreckem]

Annoying trying to log in.

At first it said I had to wait 20minutes to try and log in. Since then it keeps giving me you'll get to log in in 2minutes over and over.

 

[wanderer27]

I played another hour earlier this afternoon and decided to just throw shit down wherever and not really have any kind of plan, mainly to see what would happen. I ran into some interesting, albeit not unexpected results.

Since the wind speed and direction is always the same in this plot for the beta test, I decided to throw all my industrial in the upper corner, downwind and away from the beach. I put only one road out there and then kinda forgot about it until much later. I sat there and watched it for a bit and the traffic jam was endless.

http://i.imgur.com/ePCWBJd.jpg

I added an extra road just to see if any cars would take the long way around to avoid the traffic jam. Answer is:

http://i.imgur.com/ea9f8qo.jpg

I ended up turning speed to cheetah and just throwing down as much as I could. Roads wherever, residential where it would fit, hospitals, schools, extra power, etc. Just throwing money at it, since I was actually doing pretty good early on. However, things started going badly, as industrial slowed down, people didn't have jobs, crime increased, people were getting sick (partly because I accidentally left my lone water tower near my industrial zone and they were polluting the water table).

http://i.imgur.com/b5eTzUV.jpg

I could zoom in and hear gun shots ringing out quite often. Blocks of residential weren't getting built, commercial projects were sitting untouched, I was losing $2k an hour not too long after that screenshot was taken. You definitely can't wing it in this game, you have to have some type of plan and take it slow, unless you're a Sim City pro (which I am not).

Really loving this game, can't wait to play with others.

Wow, some of the graphics on those look worse than earlier iterations of Sim City.

All the pictures I've seen previously made it so that it's supposed to be much graphically better.

I'm just not seeing it here.

With all the other baggage this is bringing I'm going to have no problem forgetting about this cluster . . .



.

 

[T9D]

One thing I really really hate is how you scroll and move the map. Why don't they just do it like every other game/app on the planet?? The same way they used to do it. (think google maps). It bothers me a lot.

 

[lozina]

Just did a city which reached 32,000 sims and it only started building apartment buildings within the last 10 minutes. Filled up the map. Had to have 6 wind turbines to keep the city powered and my sewage pump was strained, had to build a 2nd water tower and the garbage pickup was bad but I think I built it too late so they were mostly playing catchup even with 4 trucks.

I had over 500,000 simoleons with a hourly rate of +15K so while I thought Simcity 4 was a bit too hard to make money this one seems a bit too easy ... going from the demo alone.