I'll probably take a bit of a break from Sim City, just crashed for about the 9th time today.

I'm tempted to pick this up simply for the free game. If I have until March 18th then I'm trying to wait to see what the free game ends up being. I need to know how the game is outside of the server issues.

It's buried in the thread but the game is very good, fun to play aside from two issues.

1. City Size: They said they will address but right now you really run out of space after about 3 hours. You can keep packing people in but it almost forces you into a new spot in the region.

2. Dumb AI: Glassbox has given us amazing things, you can follow your Sims around in their daily life but god forbid a firetruck or a police vehicle gets through traffic to get somewhere they need to be. Also shuttle buses have a nasty habit of backing up behind each other even when there are multiple lanes.

Also AFAIK the free game thing will only be for those who got it prior to the patch that came out a couple days ago.

If you run out of space after 3 hours, you're going to have one seriously ****ed up city. There's no way you can adequately plan out a workable city that will scale in that time frame.

Yes, the AI needs a lot of work, particularly traffic.

I've been trying a city on my own, without anyone else in the region to see if I can get a handle on the traffic and employment.

I laid down a medium avenue in the shape of a D. It extends along the city's borders on one half of the map, with the vertical part running straight down the middle. Inside, I've got zero cross streets, just 4 north/south roads running from top to bottom. The only way to switch streets is to hit an outside avenue and run down it. Someone posted this as a solution to traffic problems on the EA forums, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. So far, I've got 25k pop and I'm getting by with a single fire engine from the crappy cheap firehouse with no other upgrades. I'm impressed so far, but will have to see how it goes when things get bigger.

As for employment, I've still got a TON of unfilled jobs, but they are mainly in the middle and upper class, so I should be able to plant some new areas of high and medium wealth, as I still have 1/4 of the map open (the other 1/4 is taken up by utilities, garbage dump, sewage, water and solar plant).

I only have 12 industrial buildings, and they're at the top, with the wind blowing away from the residential zones. I put 12 little blocks of residential zoning to 4 blocks of commercial zoning in most cases, and when I ran out of space to keep that pattern, I just built residential. It's working well enough to keep me from having a ton of unfilled jobs. Unemployment is a non-issue.

I've been going super super slow, upgrading the infrastructure well in advance of upgrading the streets. I still have a lot of dirt roads in my city, although a little over half are up to medium roads for the population density increase. I have no doubt I'll hit 30k soon, and then I'll reassess where I'm at. Might let it run for a few hours at that to get a bunch of cash before I upgrade to high density roads.

I still have no buses or streetcars and no traffic problems as of yet.

Just out of curiosity can you designate streets as 'one way'?

Both of my cities filled out the map at that point. Then I just started upping road densities and demolishing stuff to fit in higher education, parks, and my various supporting coal/oil/ore buildings. The only thing I have left in the city is to become self sufficient in producing plastics and alloys to get my processor factory up and running. Unfortunately size limitations may make me go build another heavy industry city and focus on that instead of industry and education.

Nope, no subways or highways in this one either.

That's okay for now, but when you hit a higher population, you're going to get death by traffic. The ai sucks so bad it will kill your city.

You can't even make interesting cities with cool layouts because the pathing is so bad. I'm sure you're self sustaining for now, but it can't last. Cities will literally grow themselves to death and there isn't anything to be done about it.

And it needs all of those things. They spent all this time on making cool curved road features but the programming is so bad that grids are the only way to go.

I have a ton of buses and streetcars and the traffic still sucks. Having a great deal of mass transit still doesn't help. I think I have so many buses they are the ones causing the congestion on maximum size streets.

Nuke them from space....

****.

************.

**** YOU MAXIS.

:sigh:

My plan was working perfectly. No traffic problems. Everyone got to work on time. I was making tons of money. Things were going awesomely. I had the infrastructure I needed to expand at my own pace.

And then... Godzilla.

RIGHT THROUGH THE MAP. One side to the other.

Got all my high wealth buildings/parks. Then through my upgraded fire station and hospital. Then through the trade depot and recycling center. Then through the university and school of science.

I took out 150 sims worth of bonds to try to repair the damage. I lost my cashflow with the buildings, so I used that money to replace what I could.

I have one trick up my sleeve that I'm trying right now. I doubt it will work, but that is to upgrade all of the streets to high density immediately. That will give me a lot more cashflow if I can keep the same level of services, and maybe I can recover financially enough to keep the infrastructure upgraded as the services are being used up (like keeping up with power, water, sewage and garbage trucks). That's my main focus.

But, seriously. ****.

Godzilla.

Like, really Godzilla?

Yeah. They have random natural disasters in the game. Can't turn them off unless you're playing in cheat mode.

UGH. **** THIS ****ING GAME.

Last city collapsed. Couldn't recover from the disaster.

Started new city. Just get my ore operations up and running, bought 3 trucks, had 4 full mining arms on the thing . . .

****ING GODZILLA AGAIN. THAT MUTANT MOTHER****ER. Just rampaged right through, destroyed it all. ****ING AGAIN. This city had only been up like an hour, too.

**** YOU.