Sim City (please tell me it's good)

Ulukai on 13/3/2013 at 17:28

Are any of the Tropicos worth bothering with? (Tropico 4 currently 75% off on Steam)

It looks kind of... cheesy.

faetal on 13/3/2013 at 21:01

It is a little cheesy, but fun all the same. Try a demo if one is available.

Yakoob on 13/3/2013 at 21:10

So you guys heard apparantly the "we need servers, they offload a lot of calculations!" excuse is (unsurprisingly) loads of bollocks? Ugh always online games... AssasinCreed, Diablo3, now this, each time a clusterfuck and PR lies. Wonder if gamers will ever learn (nope!).

@Ulukai - I got it a while back, went through the tutorial, and never looked at it again. It's much like settlers/knights of the merchant with the dictatorial spin on it, but for some reason didn't quite grab me. Out of the oldschool city-building-resource-management games, Ive honestly found Knights of the Merchants best, so check it out on GOG if youre itching for one.

Muzman on 14/3/2013 at 01:45

Yeah, John Walker's practically been starting up Occupy Electronic Arts on his own over there.

(http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/)

It's not surprising them choosing to do this with Sim City though, and it's because it has the broadest definition of 'gamers' for an audience (the Sims too). All the cognisant hard-core audience that can occasionally complain enough to get Ubisoft to change its tactics in this direction, is only a tiny fraction of this audience.
It presents an interesting problem, since most people don't care why it doesn't work, only that it doesn't. A consumerist angle is kind of the only one you've got even though you want people to mad about needless DRM as well.

This isn't going to change, however. EA is planning for the future and people will get used to this in time, as far as they are concerned. Short of massive refunds and/or class action or something (and probably even then) they will keep going until the public simply gets used to it.

(I'm still kind of amazed how this keeps happening. I'm sure it's not easy but it seems like people ought to be a bit better at predicting the kind of server loads they are going to get/bandwidth they are going to need etc)

faetal on 14/3/2013 at 09:20

Nicked from that RPS thread: (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop-and-manage-the-city-of-your-d) Civitas Kickstarter.

Ulukai on 14/3/2013 at 10:16

"Modded" for (http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9n5j/you_can_edit_highways_outside_of_city_boundaries/c8vbw6k) offline indefinite play (no saves though).

Brilliant.

Quote Posted by faetal

Nicked from that RPS thread: Civitas Kickstarter.

Promising, but can they deliver all that by November for only $250k?

faetal on 14/3/2013 at 10:40

I hope so, for the sake of my $15.

Slasher on 15/3/2013 at 00:12

Theoretically you can edit a local save game file such that when it syncs with EA's servers it will "edit" other peoples' cities. Now you can go forth and help out your neighbors with utterly massive urban renewal programs.

[video=youtube;ROy6VE5ZsZw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROy6VE5ZsZw&feature=youtu.be[/video]

demagogue on 15/3/2013 at 04:01

Perfect. Brilliant. More fun than a monkey.
I'd have put the words "help out" and "urban renewal" in quote marks myself.

Fafhrd on 15/3/2013 at 07:23

According to the info on the video it won't overwrite the other person's city. He's just enabled edit mode while visiting. Unless he can spoof the user IDs he can't make the edits stick. Which is too bad, because right now I'm playing in a region where there's a guy actively trolling the quadrant that I'm in and I'd really like to burn that shit to the ground.