Even if you have enough power capacity (e.g. buying enough from a neighbor and your gauge says no excess and no deficit) not all buildings may get power. I wait and wait to hope that the power eventually reaches them, but it seems to be taking a long time! Are there some buildings who use up all the power before it reaches these outlying buildings? Or is it because my road system has a lot of dead ends that are not being reached?
In SimCity 4 I enjoyed organizing and upgrading the road system to make sure there was no ‘red’ traffic lines. We now have dirt roads, low and medium density streets, and medium and high density avenues, and a high density avenue including street car tracks which is cool. But there are no highways!? I guess it makes sense since we don’t have a large city size. But how are we going to deal with large amounts of traffic coming in and getting stuck at traffic lights? As soon as it hits a cross road there’s going to be a street light.
Here’s the region highway view. Quite a bit of traffic trying to get into my city!
Here’s my solution, more high density avenues. But it’s not working! I even added an extra road on the right to try to get some cars to get off the road early! But for some reason they all want to turn left. I added more bus stops, and maybe I’ll start to use the street cars to see if that helps. But they would need a park and ride depot of some sort.
Here’s a view of inner city traffic that may be resolved by high density avenues.
But wait, there’s no one-way streets? I used these a lot in my downtown areas in SimCity 4! They seem much more efficient than large avenues everywhere. They would need to have high density one-ways though.
I don’t think I like the algorithm for traffic to find the right path. It seems they turn around in the strangest places, I guess just to get to the other side of the road for businesses on the other side.
Well, I guess I’ll keep playing and see how it goes.
I signed up for the 2nd SimCity Beta and was able to play the 1-hour long beta a few times on Feb 16th. There were some problems claiming cities and even connecting to EA’s servers, but I was hopeful they would fix it by the time the game was released, and could continue making patches after that. So I pre-ordered and started playing SimCity 2013 when it was released March 5. I know there have been some problems, but I’m hopeful they’ll get them fixed eventually. Here are some notes and some initial screenshots I’ve taken. I’ll make new posts as I find new things about the game.
Lots of people have complained about server connectivity issues and being unable to claim new cities. Luckily I haven’t noticed too much of a problem but I have only started a few cities. I have noticed strange things like clicking the Claim button and then finding out it was already claimed? I also haven’t tried starting my own region yet.
I think it was Wednesday the 6th EA shut down their servers for an update, and we weren’t able to log on at all. That was annoying, but I’m not sure how long it lasted. Maybe half an hour to an hour? Why couldn’t they update a single server at a time?
So I was very hopeful that the emergency response system would be great with this new game engine. Maybe it’s something weird about the road system. But I see firetrucks go down a bunch of roads somewhat close to a burning building, but never the right road. They keep turning around and going down a different but still wrong road, taking a long time to go to the actual house burning down! I’m pretty sure they weren’t meant to do that, they keep going down the same wrong street over and over. Also, ALL of your fire trucks may be at the same burning house, while you have other houses burning down. At least some of them should leave if another fire is worse!
I haven’t followed ambulances around to see how well they drive to injured or sick sims, but I have noticed them take a long time at the clinic or hospital. They should quickly unload the sick or injured sim and immediately go out to get more! I always have a sick person complaining about the sniffles but they don’t go to the clinic?
MaxisMan can be sent out to heal injured, but I tried following him the first time he was sent on patrol, and he didn’t immediately go to someone injured. It’s more like a patrol I guess. How is he supposed to find anyone?
The health system is one area I somewhat struggle with in my cities. I check the Germ data map and see air pollution, ground pollution, and other factors. I know we can add the Wellness Center and Disease Research center on the Hospital to start combating sickness in the city. But how do you reduce the air pollution and water pollution? In SimCity 4 I think all you could do was plant more parks and trees. There was also a third-party plugin that was a huge air filter. I loved that!
What do you love and hate about this new SimCity?