cheat-ah

So cheetah speed returned to SimCity just recently.

It makes the game infinitely more playable.  You can now slam it into cheetah speed and it eats up the time like nobody's business.  You may still have to sit and wait of course (for that budget payment to come in or for your buildings to finish upgrading, for example) but now the wait is a fraction of the time.

Indeed, cheetah speed often means you can spend the time pondering where is best to place your new water treatment plant and by the time you've decided you've got the money to place it.  Which is how it should always have been, but it's remarkable how much it helps the game play.

Of course it brings problems as well - bad stuff can happen and be in full swing by the time you even realise there's a problem when it's in cheetah, but that's to be expected.

Not that it totally fixes the game.  There's still a whole load of bugs and stupidity in the game.  While the bugs will be fixed in time I'm not sure the stupidity will be without them completely overhauling the underlying mechanics.  So they've already tweaked the behaviours of agents like garbage trucks and buses so they don't all drive round in a single train, but they now drive around in several mini-trains and often are actually simply taking different routes to the same destination.

But to fix that will take significantly different game logic.  They're all heading to the same place because they're all operating on the same list of priorities that's in the same order.  To have them behave differently you would presumably either need different logic sets for each agent or for the agents to be assigned differently to the priority list or for the list to be worked up differently.  I mean, there are a number of options, but my guess is that to do many of them they would need to rely much more on storing stuff in memory.  And storing stuff in memory means having using of memory if there are lots of them and then you're into system restrictions and presumably they want the game to work on as many systems as possible.

It's a bit of a catch 22.

The real shame is that these things kinda force you to do certain things in the game that are either illogical or make things less flexible.  So, for example, with the incredibly simplistic way that traffic junctions operate (so traffic lights simply rotate around the junction switching to green depending on the type of road, rather than factoring in traffic conditions like real lights) cross-roads become a no go.  If you have a cross road - particularly if all the roads are at the same density level - it virtually guarantees a grid lock.

As such you have to ensure you use T-junctions.  Now if you're clever with it you can still get about the same number of buildings in the space, but the point is why should you have to be clever?  Why are you being forced to avoid cross roads?  Particularly for a game that's essentially recreating the US where the grid is king.

So despite the return of cheetah I'm still hanging on for the 2.0 patch that's hopefully going to iron out a lot of this stuff before I really play it 'seriously'.

They also released the first new DLC for the game.  This was a Nissan Leaf charging station.  So it's basically an advert.

Obviously this has caused some umbrage in certain circles, but I'm really not fussed by it.  The station has a benefit for the game and isn't massively in your face.  Also it's optional - you don't have to install it or use it.  About the only downside is it takes up space in your tiny cities.