return of the beta

Well I got a beta code for SimCity so my weekend was fairly predictable.

I actually got two, both coming from amazon.  The reason for two was that I ordered the game way back when it was first announced but then amazon cancelled the order (I don't know why but they usually only do that if they've made some huge cock-up with the price or the thing is cancelled).  As such I promptly re-ordered it and hence the two codes.

The intended purpose of this beta was to test the server loads.  Somewhat controversially the game requires an always on connection; indeed the game itself runs on the server as I understand it, so it's not just a DRM thing, they've really got you by the short and curlies.

I believe the beta actually was intended to ran from 00:00hr Saturday to 00:00hr Sunday in America (not sure which time zone) but here in the UK it actually ran from 14:00 Saturday to 14:00 Sunday.  I pretty much cleared my schedule and actually sat down to install and play at about 16:00 on the Saturday.

It took a while to download and install, but once up and running I was straight in - I played the tutorial and then started up the first town.

I have to confess my initial reaction was one of slight disappointment as it seemed to be identical to the previous beta.  I mean, I wasn't going to let that stop me having some games, but I was hoping there's be some differences, but as far as I could tell the same content was enabled in the game.

Except then I made a discovery - the region play was enabled.  Previously it was single city and that was it, but this time there were 3 cities and 1 special project thingy.  Now in the previous beta there were 2 cities and a special project area but you could only do anything with the one city.  This time one of the cities was slightly weirdly blanked off (I wasn't sure if it was meant to represent another player or not - certainly it wasn't that fully fledged, but you could interact with it a bit) and the special project you could see what the options might be, although not actually do them and the third city was also playable.

This second city would clearly have been a good site for an ore mine as it had a big deposit, but unfortunately this content was disabled.  However, it was interesting to try to work how multi-city play might work.

I enjoyed it, but I have to say it looks like it will be a difficult thing to really master.  I mean, sure you can build another city that is itself balanced, but the tricky part was trying to balance multiple cities.

This has always been something of a challenge - you zone for residential, industrial and commercial and getting the right amounts of each of these so you don't end up with jobless people or not enough shops or whatever has always been a difficult thing.  However in multi-city play it's even more of a brain ache - you're now trying to ensure there's enough jobs between cities, if that's what you're trying to do.

One thing I did learn is that when you work on one city the other city is totally paused.  That makes sense but it also makes things a little tricky to manage.  So, for example, if I plop down a fire station in one town and then immediately switch to the region view and share my fire trucks it will let me do it.  However, if I then switch to the other city and keep going and a fire breaks out it's not guaranteed that the fire trucks will turn up.

Why?  Because in my other, paused city, the fire station hadn't had time to recruit any firemen so there's no-one to drive those fire trucks.  In other words you have to wait until your fire station is properly up and running before that element will be properly shared.

I had this with a few things actually - On one occasion I had to wait for people to drive over from one city to get the job of working in the power plant before I could then buy power back.

It's also a little weird how the whole sharing and buying thing works - it seemed to be that I could buy power but I couldn't sell power but I could only sell fire trucks and not buy them, if you see what I mean - the decisions were one way.

This isn't to say any of it was bad, just that it could be a whole new level of complexity.