civ 5

I've been playing quite a lot of Civilization 5 recently.

I got a bit pissed off with SimCity and have essentially stopped playing.  They've now released the off-line "single player" (like I ever played multi-player!) version, but I've not actually played this yet.  Hopefully it will fix the key issue, which is the ridiculously broken multi-city play, but I'm guessing not.  I think they've just re-engineered it to make it off-line playable, rather than fixing how it does what it does, so I'm guessing it will continue not to make any sense.

Anyway - Civ 5.

I've mentioned Civ3 a lot before on the blog as a game I've played repeatedly and as my favourite of the Civ series.  I found Civ4 quite disappointing - it was pretty and I liked some of the ideas in it, but overall it felt really cramped and compressed as a game, encouraging you just to have, like, 3 cities.

Civ4 I honestly played a handful of times and then went back to Civ3.

Civ5 I followed the development quite closely and was intrigued by some of the new concepts - the game was moving to having hexagonal tiles, rather than squares, and combat was being seriously overhauled.  Given square tiles had some weird impacts on the game and combat has been rather broken for a while I liked the sound of it.

However, when it launched it was one of these new online steam registration jobs and was a nightmare to get installed.   I also then started playing and found a lot of graphical glitches - including tiles I couldn't even see.  It also didn't really seem to explain the new things properly - the advisors just seemed to pop up with links to the civilopedia, rather than actual advice, for example.

I therefore stopped playing altogether.  I had literally only played half of one of the tutorial missions and that was it - I'd give it a few months for patches to be issued and then pick if back up.

Only 4 years passed :/.  I even bought the first expansion pack with the idea of using that as a way to start playing again, but it just sat on my shelf gathering dust.  It was only the combination of the second expansion pack, my being pissed off with SimCity and my complete re-install of my games machine that eventually caused me to start playing the game!

And I have to say I've really enjoyed it.

I mean, it's not perfect, but there's a lot I like.  I like that they've taken some of the core concepts and built them up - you have a lot of smaller events, rather than bigger ones.  So, as a random example, if you're doing culture, you have great artists, great writers, great musicians, but also in the late game archaeology can generate loads of stuff too.  It feels like each of the elements is more in-depth and complicated.

It does maintain the specialisation of cities, which was an aspect I wasn't keen on in 4 - I've always liked building everything in all my cities - but now it's a bit easier to have a mix (so a city that is for gold can also be useful for science), but it's also clear what buildings do what.  If you're doing culture in a city, you have a progression of additional culture buildings that have pre-requisite building of the same type.  It's also helped because the new hex system and increased city influence radius makes cities much more significant entities - you can have loads of citizens doing stuff relating to a specialisation in just one city.

The game does seem to be set up again to discourage large empires, as it was in Civ4.  I'm a little puzzled by the logic of this, as at some point you're going to go to war with somebody and if you're any good at the combat side of things you'll start winning their cities.  And if you're going for a domination victory you have to take all the other player's original capital cities, which means you can't avoid the relevant punishment - the capitals can't even be destroyed.

There are a few options for not having cities as part of you empire - making them puppets, which makes them less of a punishment, but it's still a punishment to have them; or you can raze them, but this can take ages and comes with its own punishments.  Of course, given many of the leaders are often hell-bent on war on the higher difficulty levels this can get quite frustrating.  And those of us who want to build a world-spanning empire, it becomes quite difficult.

As mentioned, combat has been overhauled generally, as we're now only allowed one unit per tile.  The whole thing also works very differently, as combat is now not generally definitive.  Unless there is a significant difference between two units basic strength, combat generally results in damage, so it can take three or four turns to kill a unit.

This is fine, but when you can only have single units on tiles and most units only move 1 or two tiles until the late game it can all get quite frustrating.  It's also very annoying moving armies around when weak ranged units that need protecting only move short distances and need to use up movement points to "set up" for a ranged attack.  This is particularly tedious now every road & railroad you construct costs you gold, making long-distance movement problematic - especially since, of course, one unit per tile also applies to workers.

To be honest, it's like playing two separate games - the combat system is like playing a table-top war game a la Warhammer, only you're playing it on a risk board.  That means loads of obstacles and bottlenecks and restrictions making everything horribly frustrating and inefficient.

But then this is Civ - combat has always been poor, and judged with that background, this version is actually much better.  And there are good things - it's easy to tell what's going on, and the combat predictions are generally accurate and cities have their own defensive strength and ability to attack.

They've badly broken diplomacy, though - I mean, it has a few nice ideas, but key elements are gone, and generally the AI behaves illogically.  To be honest, the AI is generally bobbins - even now, with two expansions, it does daft things and can be very predictable.  Espionage is also rubbish (if they do a further expansion, I hope these get serious work) and you're almost better off ignoring it.

Wow - this is going on a bit, so I'll just mention scenarios and leave it there.

Previous versions of civ have generally had scenarios, but I've mostly found they weren't worth playing.  However, the scenarios that come with Civ5 are actually quite good.  They change the game on more fundamental levels and work as separate games.  They're also generally short enough to enjoy but without eating too much time.

The game also has very good support for modding and they've taken the right approach when it comes to add-ons (when compared to EA with SimCity), which appears to be the good side of it being a steam game.

simcity

So...  simcity.

They released the game back at the beginning of August and the 7th (I think - I've lost track a bit) patch came out in August/September.  That's 6 months.  And I think it's only now that they've finally addressed all of the stuff that was either broken or (more depressingly) badly designed/implemented.

In some ways this isn't uncommon nowadays.  Modern games are super complicated things that have to excel both in terms of visuals as well as content.  During the early days it was all about the content - the game itself - but nowadays there's an expectation that games will look great too.

That obviously makes them expensive to develop, so there's always going to be a temptation to rush them out before they're really ready.

This is particularly the case for testing.  It must be very tempting to just do some basic testing, rather than big-scale betas.  It must be quite expensive to do proper testing and fix the game before it some out.  The temptation to release it quickly and effectively treat the first few months an extended test (one where they're paying you to test the game!) and then fix stuff later in patches.

Which is pretty much what's happened with SimCity.  Some of the stuff they've finally fixed with the last few patches makes the game operate like it probably should have done at the beginning.  Don't get me wrong - I think plenty of the stuff they've put out was probably always intended to come out as extra content and some of it has occurred to them after release (like the road height thing), it's more that some of the stuff is effectively the final version of the code that simply wasn't ready at release, or they've had to come up with because their original design was broken.

I find it all a bit disheartening and the time this has all taken and my desire not to waste time on a game that wasn't ready has meant I've not played it a great deal recently.

However, they've just announced the first proper expansion for the game, and it looks rather interesting.  It's basically a raft of things to make your cities "future cities", and includes some nice stuff

The problem is that I also think he fundamental "model" is broken.  It was clearly the intention to make a multiplayer SimCity, which is fine as it goes, but the problem is that SimCity isn't a multi-player game.  The mechanic they've chosen to achieve multiplayer seems okay - smaller cities that are interconnected, but the problem is that when you play single player, the method they've used for "simulating" other cities is just a mess.  You have to keep exiting the game (this is the only way you can force it to save) simply in order for the other cities to look even vaguely like they did when you last played them, and even then they still don't work like they should.

I mean, this whole notion they had of one city "doing garbage" another "doing industry" another "doing education/research" only looks like it might work in proper multiplayer, with all the players playing at the same time.  I say this, because I've never played multiplayer and have no interest in doing so.  I've therefore only played single player, and I can assure you this mechanic doesn't work like it should when played that way.

The thing I find bizarre is that it seems like such a simple thing to achieve.  We're simply talking about storing some basic numbers for each city - they don't need complex simulation, you just store the fact a city has x litres water spare somewhere.  Why do I have to exit the game for it to even save that number in a place that my other cities can see it updating?

german grand prix

German Grand Prix this weekend.

It's not normally that interesting a race.  The German actually alternates between two circuits and this year it's from nurburgring, but it's not the ring that you think of when you hear that - it's a custom built track that's basically alongside it (well - it might use a bit of the original).  It's certainly not the miles and miles of track version.

We also get to see what happens with the tyres.  As I understand it they've tweaked them so that they should be stronger and tougher, but they want to do more significant changes which aren't possible in the time available.

I have to confess I found the whole tyre blow out thing really quite scary.  In open-wheeled racing like this tyres are one of the big weak-points that remain.  Touching tyres often leads to the worst sorts of accidents, with cars flipping in the air.  A sudden puncture or deflation when you're in any car is a disaster, but when you're going nearly 200 miles an hour it is a very dangerous thing indeed.

I'll also be trying to watch lots of anime so I can get it on e-bay.  I may actually try to play some of the games I need to get through.  I've played quite a bit of SimCity these last few weekends, but I think I may have gone off it somewhat.

I'd mentioned I'd got some really good tips off of YouTube and they'd helped me play the game a lot better, but the problem was that therefore meant I got a lot further into the game.  What do I mean by that?

Well, basically up until recently I hadn't ever got to the stage of wanting to start a great work or being in a position to unlock the more interesting ones or have the resources to stand a chance to build them.  Instead I'd abandon the region and start a new one, hoping to make a city that was better at whatever.

However, with my most recent region I basically had some rocking cities that meant I had all research done and was pumping out the resources needed by the bucket-load.  I therefore decided to do the solar plant.  I started this in my electronics city and sent it all the processors.

I then thought I'd do the plastics, only to discover that my petroleum city didn't think the solar plant had been started.  Indeed, it even let me buy the solar plant again.

Oh dear.  Well, perhaps it was just a synching thing?  I came back the next day... and there was no change.  And my metals city couldn't see the Solar plant either and again let me buy it.

My tourism city could see it and I started a city I'd always been intending to use to do trade and that could see it from the get-go (I'd wondered if maybe it was a game calendar thing, but that put a kibosh on that).  What I therefore ended up doing was going to y petrol and ore cities and sending the required resources to by trade city where I could then send them on to the solar plant.  So my petrol city can't help build the plant, but I can send the resources to another city that can then send them to the plant.

Well I stuck with that process (man was it fucking tedious waiting for it all to happen) and eventually completed the solar plant.  And my other cities still couldn't see it.

A quick search of the interwebs confirmed this is a fairly common problem.  We're now on version 5 and something that is surely fundamental to the regional, multi-player gameplay that's supposed to be what the new SimCity is about still doesn't work.  And wasn't 5.0 meant to address the region play?

So I may play some other games.

week of whinging (or not)

So I've basically not blogged in about 3 weeks.

There are a number of reasons for this and I thought I'd come back with a week of whinging about some or all of these, but I'd also thought I'd write them over the weekend and I didn't do that.  Instead I basically spent all weekend playing SimCity, so I'm not sure I'm quite going to be doing the whinge week.

I discovered some people on YouTube who have been posting some hints and tips that are actually helpful and I've started to understand the mechanics of the game a bit better.  This means it's much more playable, but it also starts to make me think that it's misnamed.  It doesn't simulate any sort of city I've ever seen.

I'll give you a very basic example - education and jobs.  So you can place a grade school when the game starts and later unlock a high school.  Now the names are obviously American, but given those names would you not expect that a grade school educates your Sims to one level and then a high school to another.  And the grade school is for young Sims and the high school for older Sims.  There's also a university and a community college - these must be for even older / working age Sims, right?

That's not how it works.

The grade school and high school are identical in their function - they take in uneducated "kid" agents and turn them into educated agents.  They then take this education back to their homes and cause the homes to become educated, which eventually causes them to have less garbage and more recycling and have solar panels for less power use, etc.  So the high school is basically just an upgraded grade school and having both in your city is counter-productive.

Every day at 6AM the kids flop from being educated to uneducated.  Throughout the day they will leave their houses and be transported to the school by buses (this is for schools) - there's no need for them to all arrive at the start of the day.  This can perpetuate for eternity - there's no sense in them growing up or becoming workers.

The community college and university do the same job with a slight tweak - the kids (now called students) have to make their own way there.  This may be via car or whatever public transport.  But again, having education facilities of different types is actually counter-productive - your schools rob students from the college/uni.

This has a particular danger in that colleges and unis also have an additional function.  As your students attend they generate "tech level".  This is a sort of weird fluid that flows out from your college/uni (like water or power) and feeds the buildings that use it.  A college gives you tech level 2 and uni tech level 3.

The problem therefore is that fi your students aren't getting to uni/college then your buildings that need tech level will be starved.  This may make them, for example, stop working (high tech industry), become inefficient (electronics buildings) or cause a meltdown (nuclear power) - hence the danger.

And of course this isn't how you would expect it all to work; but what makes it confusing and annoying in the game is that the messaging reflects how you might expect it to work (your universities turn your kids into workers or your workers into educated workers, perhaps?).  So you'll get a message to the effect of "not enough educated workers", but what it actually means is that not enough students are going to uni and your tech level "fluence" is not enough to fill up all the buildings, like your water might not be enough to fill up all the buildings.

simcity 3.0

The saga of SimCity continues.

They’ve now issued patch 3.0.  I was hoping that 2.0 represented a significant fix, but it was still pretty messed up after that.  And 3.0 now seems to have actually broken the game - it freezes my entire system.

I really don’t understand what’s going on with the patches, tbh, because the stuff they patch generally hasn’t been an issue for me until they patch it.

I’ll give you a very good example - disasters.  Before patch 2.0 I don’t think I’d seen a disaster, yet everyone else was complaining about disasters happening every two minutes.  So they patched it and suddenly I’m getting disaster after disaster.

It’s like I somehow got the final version of the game and every time they patch it I step back a version.

It’s incredibly frustrating, because if the game would just work better I think I’d probably enjoy it, but then they patched it again and when I played it, it froze my entire machine 4 times in a row and I've started to wonder why I bought the game in the first place.

It’s particularly frustrating because it’s not freezing for the same reason - I was doing completely different things and the game was at a different stage (several hours in and only about 15 minutes in).  It’s also annoying that it’s freezing the entire machine so I have to use the reset button, I can’t just hit ctrl+alt+del and kill it via the task manager.

What’ weird with it is that when I then reload I’ve only lost a minute or two of play.  I’m actually wondering if it’s the game saves that are killing it, but because of how it does it I have no idea if it’s saving related or not.

I actually remember there was big problem with Anno1404, which had a horrible that would cause saves to corrupt so you'd play for hours and lose all of it because the saves had no information in them.  It also had a memory inflation issue that meant you couldn't really play giant maps.  Those took them months to resolve so I’m starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t just put the game on hold and pick it up again in 6 months when hopefully it will be properly patched.

I understand yet another patch has been issued recently, so perhaps that will solve it?

version two point oh

So yesterday they launched the version 2.0 patch for SimCity.

I haven't tried it out yet - they took the servers down for quite a while to do it - but also I try not to play during the week too much.  Plus I figure that a lot of people will have played in order to see if the new patch has really helped to fix things or not, so I'm guessing it would have been quite busy.

I don't think it will fix everything that needs fixing.  Indeed, I don't think some of the things that should be fixed ever will be.  Or at least, in order to be fixed, they would need some serious redesigning of the game engine/mechanics.

Having played a fair bit and sat down and studied what's going on in places I think traffic in particular is quite badly broken.

There are two big problems - the rules they've set for how vehicles drive on the roads and the "behaviour" of the Sims that driving is a function of.  The first would require a total change of the engine.  The second would also require some major changes but I think they may be able to "tune" the game around it or the bits that need changing might be changeable.

In the first the problem is that vehicles are very much "on rails".  When you drive a car on a normal road there is nothing that stops you from changing lanes (going into the side of the road oncoming traffic uses).  Well, I mean apart from the oncoming traffic itself and solid white lines - what I mean is, if someone stops in the road you can move into the oncoming lane in order to overtake them.  This doesn't happen in SimCity - all vehicles are on rails.

But in SimCity they do not do this - if a fire engine stops to put out a fire then all vehicles stop behind it, causing a huge traffic blockage.  And conversely, if an emergency vehicle gets stuck behind something it won't go in the oncoming lane to overtake.  Now also there are (unrealistically, given the permitted density of roads and types of junctions allowed) so many vehicles on the roads in SimCity there wouldn't be that much opportunity to overtake, but that's not the point - it's unrealistic behaviour that leads to clogged streets.

There's other stuff as well, but that's the best example.  There is a solution - you can upgrade the roads to multi-lane jobs and vehicles will overtake, but building density is linked to road density, so you then get buildings upgrading (there's no way to stop this) and so there are more cars, leading to clogged streets again!

The other issue is behaviour - no Sim has a fixed abode or fixed job, they all just go to the nearest free house/free factory/empty school/etc.  This is simple to code and I'm sure minimises memory requirements, but it means that all Sims head off to the same destinations all the time - they all try to go to the nearest job, leading to huge jams.

And only once they reach the warehouse and the jobs fill up do they all suddenly then decide to go to the next job.  This basically applies to everything they do, which is why you get huge lines of buses all following each other about and why vehicles perform a staggering number of U-turns (which is also another reflection of the previous issue - they can only perform a U-turn at a proper junction, rather than randomly, which also clogs up the roads!).

Now as I say, this second one is the sort of issue that I think they may be able to tweak the algorithms to give a bit more realistic behaviour, or even perhaps replace the algorithm for that sort of behaviour without needing to fundamentally rebuild everything.  So I'm hoping this is what v2.0 helps to fix.

If it doesn't then I've been playing about with some workarounds.  One in particular that seems to help is to construct your entire city as one big loop.  It can be quite fun working this out, but boy does it lead to some unrealistic cities.

Another thing that helps traffic is to think of things as mini cities, so each small bit of residential has easy/close access to commercial and industrial, so they don't do too much long-distance driving (they don't care what the commercial/industrial is, remember, so they don't need go further than their nearest job).  Again, horribly unrealistic cities, but at least your entire city doesn't grind to a halt!

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.

simcity thoughts

So I've been playing SimCity quite a lot and enjoying it a great deal, but also mentioned before finding it a bit frustrating.

My main frustrations have centred on how I'm meant to achieve stuff.  I've basically focused on two city types, trying to use and unlock all the bits relating to the mining and drilling specialisations.  I've done this in several different maps but I've found it all a bit confusing.

If this were another type of game people would complain about the difficulty of the learning curve.  However, "learning curve" implies that you have a path to learn that they've created.  For the new SimCity it's more like a learning orienteering adventure.

By that I mean there's probably a basic set of points that you have to find in order to learn, but you're simply given end-points and kinda expected to find your own way there.  I mean, there's in-game information stuff and challenges that I think are meant to push you in the right direction but the information is often generic and therefore often unhelpful.  The challenges get you pointed in the right direction, but often without any clues how you're supposed to get there.  And your advisors just bleat on about the same stuff.

So, for example, it will challenge you to unlock the next level of the mining HQ (you're merrily drilling for ore and coal) and you're told you need to make so much in daily profit.  It will then shade this bar in as a percentage of how far you are away.

Well that's all well and good, but how do I increase the profit?  Open more pits?  What if I'm already mining all my coal and ore seams with the maximum number of pits?  Is there a way to make things more efficient?  I generally add in the maximum number of delivery trucks so stuff doesn't build up at the trade depot.  But is this the best way to maximise profit?

I've actually found the mining one not too bad - it doesn't seem to take too many pits to make the required amount.  However, drilling is a different matter.  You seem to have to open up at least 3 (and usually 4) oil extraction places in order to make the required amount of money.  This makes it much harder to achieve your goals.  And it's not clear to me if you should open a single field with lots of derricks or lots of separate fields.  It will tell me a field is producing x barrels a day, but I've no idea how this works or what it really means.

However, I'm also doing all this with the game partially disabled.  All the global market stuff seems to still be disabled and I've no idea whether there will be a tendency for the price to go above the level it currently is or below.  If it will tend to be much higher than that will make these elements easier to achieve, but if it goes lower I can imagine it would make the game rather frustrating.

The game also lacks cheetah speed still, which again makes it rather frustrating.  SimCity has always been one of those games where you have to sit and wait a bit for your new budget to arrive so you can buy that extra thing you need.  Yes you can take out bonds, but only so many at low value and of course you have to pay them back with interest.

Also you might want to whack it in cheetah speed to wait until your city develops - until all those big apartment blocks have finished building and your revenue settles down.  Or just to watch things unfold, but not take all day about it.

My other real frustration is that the game is still very buggy.  I won't go into all the details as you can search online (YouTube in particular) and I personally haven't had too many annoying issues (I think partly because what I've been trying to achieve doesn't rely too much on the areas where the worst bugs are) but I find some stuff in my cities bizarre.

In particular the guy winging on about zoning is quite tedious and the whole RCI system is either broken by accident or they've designed it such that you can never achieve perfect balance.  If it is intended, then presumably it's so the game is "never finished", but with such tiny cities you can easily fill them and it's still moaning about you to provide RCI for everything (how can there be huge demand for all residential types, all commercial types and industrial - it makes no sense).

It's also quite frustrating when the police advisor is moaning about "crime having the upper hand" and people are protesting city hall about all the crime, but when you go to edit the police coverage you see there's actually only 1 criminal in your entire city.  1 criminal = crime has the upper hand?  What?

But then it's difficult to know what things are bugs, what is simply down to poor tuning or bad design and what is deliberate.

Roads in particular are very frustrating.  You lay down all these roads and they just seem to fill up for no apparent reason.  The whole logic system seems horribly simple.  I think this is because it's simulating Sims in an incredibly simple way and everything rushes about going to the next "event", irrespective of it that makes sense or not.  And if that changes while they're on route then they all decide to go to the next most important event at the same time.

You can really see this with the buses.  You lay down buses and set stops for them, trying to get the best coverage (it shows green).  You instinctively think this means lots of stops with stops on both sides of the road and lots of buses to service them all.

In reality what happens is all the buses set off at exactly the same time and go to the exact same stops in the exact same order.  And because they're going in some sort of priority about number of people waiting they wander all over the map in a great chain of buses, making ridiculous U-turns and going up and down the same street over and over, clogging up the traffic.

I mean, why can't I just set the bus routes?  If the AI is going to be dumb, let me control it.  Bus stops can simply be waypoints - something that's been in games for donkey's years.  I can buy a new bus route and it lets me put down 10 stops and the AI simply path finds to them in the order I put them down.  If I've done something dumb then it's my fault.

The solution to bus spam is therefore contradictory - you need fewer buses with stops a good distance apart and that are all on the same side of the street if they're on the same road.  Of course your public transport claims to carry less people, but that way at least your buildings don't all die because all your Sims are sat in their cars while 50 buses undertake millions of U-turns.

The region stuff is even worse - all the buses from all other regions turn up at the exact same time and try to go to the exact same stops in the exact stuff.  Then add in the police cars, ambulance, fire trucks, garbage and recycling trucks and it's like your neighbours are trying to cripple your city, even though they point is they're meant to be helping.

Wow - longest blog post ever!

a course of course

I mentioned yesterday that I spent Sunday and Monday basically playing SimCity and this wasn’t a particularly great idea.

The problem was that SimCity's the sort of game where you sink hours on end into it, and I had a lot of stuff to catch up on, plus I stayed up incredibly late to play.  Unfortunately I also picked up a cold - where from I’m not sure.  No-one on the stag had one that I could remember but then they could have been carrying it.  But also my landlord had a cold and when I got back to work some people there did too so it could have been caught any time.

It turned out to be a wimpy cold - I’m basically already over it - but as I say, I’d not really slept after a heavy weekend, so Tuesday I was like some sort of sniffling zombie.  Of course, rather than just go to bed when I got home I played more SimCity... (More on the game tomorrow probably.)

Wednesday and Thursday I went on a course for work.  It was really good and I learned a lot, but it was also very frustrating.  It pretty much confirmed a lot of the stuff I’ve been worried about at work.  However, there’s some stuff I think I can implement without too much fuss.

Friday I was back in the office.  It was a very bity day, but I also discussed the course with a few people at work.  It was interesting and also confirmed many of my frustrations.

This last weekend was really weird.  I had a bunch of domestics to do but I also had to clean up all the clubs and stuff from the stag.  And I woke on Saturday to find it snowing...

It wasn’t forecast for here and it wasn’t deep, and on Sunday it pretty much cleared up, but I mean seriously - it’s nearly April, how comes it’s snowing and settling at all?  It’s Easter next weekend!

It feels like summer hasn't really happened for about 4 years and I have to confess it's getting a bit boring.  I'm not much of a one for hot weather, but a bit of it is good each year - it makes me appreciate the times when it's more to my liking.  Plus if you have a hot summer then it tends to mean autumn is more pleasant and to my liking too.

never bloody here!

Well, as mentioned earlier this week I am away tomorrow and next Monday.

Next week I am also attending a training course on Wednesday and Thursday.  I'm not sure if I will blog on the Tuesday and Friday.  I expect I will have stuff for a post or two, but whether I sit down and write that up next week or the week after I'm not sure.

The timing of this stag isn't the best if I'm honest.

Friday is actually comic relief.  I have no idea if we'll encounter it or not, but it could be a bit of a pain.  The Saturday there's a big rugby match on (it's the 6 nations, but I don't care so I haven't a clue what match it is).

It's also the first race of the new Grand Prix season.  Now that's sort of okay in that I'll be coming back on the Sunday so should be back in time to watch it on the BBC, except the race is in Australia so will actually be run very early on Sunday morning.  Normally I might therefore be able to avoid it (or record the Radio commentary and listen to that as soon as I get up) but I'm guessing I will be told or hear it on the radio or something.

Anyway, point is this is the last post of the week and I'm not sure I will post at all next week.  The week after is the one leading up to Easter so is only 4 days as well - it's a really weird month for me actually.

SimCity turned up on Tuesday and I've lost two evenings to it already, so I must be enjoying it.  However, I'm also finding it a bit frustrating.

I think I'll blog about it later - I'm actually kinda wondering if the stuff they've disabled due to the server issues (no cheetah speed and a lot of region stuff is essentially disabled) isn't part of the issue.  I suspect it's magnifying some of the bugs or making some things that are meant to cover the "asynchronous" region play seem like bugs.

piss poor timing

So SimCity didn't turn up at all over the weekend.

I'd taken Monday off and was hoping that the game would have arrived, but no sign of it.  This was a little mystifying I have to admit, since it was posted last Thursday and something that was posted last Friday did turn up on Monday.

To be totally fair their free delivery thing is within a 5 day window so it's not late or anything, just a bit puzzling that something sent afterwards has arrived first.  And I wouldn't want you to think I took the day off just to play the game - I was owed the day as time in lieu and I wanted to take it as soon as practical.  The alignment with SimCity's release was just a coincidence.

It would be nice if I was able to say that I'd "done loads" with my extra day off, but it didn't really work like that.  I mean, I did some stuff, but I wouldn't really say it was massively productive.  Most of the time was spent doing nothing in particular - I did a lot of lazing about with a bit of telly watching thrown in for good measure.

One thing I did do was go to the Sports Direct in Farnborough and buy some golf-related stuff.  I used to play Golf quite a bit but since starting my current job (where no-one has ever been a golfer) it has kinda withered on the vine.  Part of the problem was that the only cheap public course nearby has terrible drainage problems and I once played a bit of a round that basically destroyed half my gear.

I wasn't going to buy quite as much stuff as I did but they had a sale on that was really good value - everything I bought was 50% off so I got loads of bits including new golf shoes and a bag and it was less than £80!

So why am I buying this stuff now?

Well, obviously because I'm going to be playing golf next week.  The game is part of a stag weekend for an old friend of mine.  The golf game is on Friday (weather forecast up until now was that it would be bone-chillingly cold, but now is that it will piss down - hurrah!).  I'm sure there will be drinking that evening, and then we're going clay pigeon shooting on Saturday and more drinking that evening before heading home on Sunday.

As per usual I'm a bit trepidatious - I'm nervous and quiet around new people and there will be a lot of new people there (loads of his other friends I've never met before).  Hopefully it will be okay and at worst it's two days.

I'm not sure how I will be on Sunday but I've taken Monday off as well, just in case.

launch day

I've made a bit of an error when it comes to my plan to play SimCity all weekend.

I ordered it through amazon, but I always use the free delivery by default and I've forgotten to change it to first class for the SimCity order.  Since I almost always order a bunch of stuff all at the same time I would have had to order SimCity separately and didn't.

Bit of a blow, but then given a lot of people still seem to be having huge problems with accessing and playing the game, perhaps it's not too bad if I have to wait a while before I start.  I understand there's a bunch of patches being applied to the servers so hopefully that will help.

The game also seems quite buggy.

The slightly odd thing about some of the bugs is that they were identified back in the first beta over a month ago.  Terrain and roads seems to have quite a few issues and you'd think that, even if they couldn't change the game code for launch (production and shipping issues) then that would be one of the first things it patches.

Games of course are generally like all forms of entertainment for me in that I have huge stacks of them sat waiting for me to play.  Occasionally I do of course and I remember one time I launched a game that had been quite big and popular at release and the first thing it did was download a gigantic patch that was bigger than the game code itself.

This of course was months after it had been released so it was a combination of all the patches most people had gotten over a long period of time, but it shocked me just how much had clearly been broken in the game when it was shipped.  Apparently this is quite a normal thing nowadays.  Games cost so much to make they want to get them out as quickly as they can so things like proper, in-depth play-testing and bug fixing fall by the wayside.

You can kinda see the logic and it's actually a consequence of the ever-improving complexity and capability of computers and technology.  A good few years ago if you did an FPS people didn't expect it to be utterly gorgeous to look at, but now they do and that sort of thing is quite costly to do, even though it doesn't impact he game itself.

Of course there are potential shortcuts in that you can use some else's game engine, but that's never really going to be possible with a game like SimCity, so I image a lot of the money had to go on making the fundamental engine (glassbox) work right, rather than fix some visual clipping bugs to do with terrain and roads.

There might be a side-advantage of not getting the game until next week.  Since I've got the Monday off I might be able to use that time to clear up some other stuff I need to do.  This is going to be a horribly busy month for me (I'll write a blog about it next week hopefully) and it might be useful to tick a few of the more tedious boxes this Monday.

oh dear

So SimCity launched in the US yesterday... and appears to have been a bit of a disaster.

The problem, as feared, is that thousands (or hundreds of thousands? millions?) of gamers have all obviously been trying to download and play it all at the same time.  Now if there'd been some way to stagger them (they've staggered countries) or otherwise spread the load in a sensible way they might have had a chance, but as I understand it the game is the best part of 20gb.

Even if 1,000 people are trying at the same time that's 20 terabytes of data to download so you can image the amounts of data if there's more like 100,000 people.  Apparently there have been huge wait times to even get to the start of downloading, let alone downloading or even playing it.

I'm also guessing that a lot of people had to install origin as well so that will also have added to the load.

I recall personally experiencing a very similar issue with Half Life 2 - I tried to install on day one and basically failed as there were just too many people trying to do the same thing.  However when I tried the next morning it was as easy as pie.

You can kinda see the issue - the only times the loads are going to be this sever are at launch.  So if you put in loads of capacity then when you're into the steady-state phase you're probably way over-supplied with capacity so you either need to strip some of it away later, which in itself will likely cause some problems, or planning for the steady-state and simply taking the initial problems on the chin.

Of course that doesn't stop it being any less frustrating for the individuals who, rightly, feel they have bought something they can't actually use.  And that's a particular issue for something like SimCity where it's always been a single-player, off-line game and a game that could still, even in this iteration, work that way.

For me personally I'm obviously just going to have to suck-it-and see.  I should have the game for the weekend and I have the Monday off so hopefully if I'm persistent and I pick my times well I should be able to get it working.  But it's a very popular series in Europe and they've lumped all of us in together, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar problems to the US.

a week until simcity

About the only up-side of the horrendous work-load I've had to take on this last month is that I've asked for a day in lieu and I'm taking that day on Monday the 11th.

Monday the 11th is significant because it's the Monday after simcity comes out.  Well, comes out in the UK.  I'm not quite sure why we in the UK are getting the game 3 days after the US.  Well, I say I don't understand.  Given the online nature of the game I'm guessing it would increase the chances of it crashing if everyone got it at the same time.

Saying that, though, there are apparently going to be multiple servers so you should think the load could be shared, but then I've no idea how those play servers mesh in the Origin.  Origin is EA's version of steam and that's where you download the game from - perhaps the issue is more to do with the load on origin.

To be fair, to some extent it's a good thing we get it on the 8th because then I won't get sucked into playing it on the first few weeknights.  Or trying to play it - if there are horrible delays in downloads or anything then there's always the risk that I spend a weeknight trying to download it and failing, which I've had before and it's not conducive to a good night's sleep.

I'm so looking forward to the new game - it looks great.  They've been doing lots of preview stuff and really giving it the hard sell.  In particular this week they've been running a website http://letsallbemayor.com where they've been streaming 4 hour sessions each day where they work on cities with different themes and stuff.

The commentators can grate a bit - they were a bit annoying on the first day in particular - but last night was great as they had a senior guy on and asked him lots of questions about the game and how it works.

Of course the downside of this month has been how horribly tired I am.  There were 20 working days in February, and I've recorded 24.25 hours' worth of working days.  I'm getting 1 day in lieu and today I've worked a bit less than a normal day, but I've still basically worked 3 days.

And that's 3 days for nothing - no overtime, no double time, we don't do flexi.  It stinks, to be frank.  Particularly when you factor in a big reason for me having to do that has been because of pathetic levels of support from others in the office.

I might write a rant about it over the weekend to post next week.

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.

new beta

There's a second beta for SimCity this weekend.

I think I'm getting a little obsessed with the game actually as I've been checking the website and searching for news just about every day.  I guess part of it is that it's been donkey's years since I last played SimCity (even longer if you set aside the abomination that was societies), but also I finished (well, ish) Anno 1404, which is to say I built a world with both cathedral and mosque and the maximum number of citizens.  I then started Anno 2070 and I have to say it put me off a little.

There was no big reason for that, it was a combination of tiny things, but where I first played Anno 1404 and loved it I played 2070 and felt a bit lost somehow.  I dunno, I only really played it for a little while and haven't been back to it yet so I may like it more when I play it properly.

Anyway, the new SimCity beta is apparently designed to test the servers.  I'm guessing they want to avoid something like the Diablo III fiasco as much as they can.  They've said that the game actually runs on the EA servers and you're almost just logging into it when you play.  I've no idea quite how true this is but it suggests that in the first few weeks of play there's going to be a lot of demand on the servers as everyone starts new games all at the same time.

I believe the launch date is actually staggered around the world so I'm guessing they're hoping that will alleviate it a bit, but also they're intending this beta to be a stress test.

As such I'm guessing lots of people will get passes and the beta is compressed into 24 hours to ensure everyone is playing at the same time.  No idea if I'll get one, though - I was surprised I got in the last time and have certainly seen that some people didn't get in so it wasn't quite just a big demo.

It will, apparently, be a different build of the game.  I moaned quite a bit last time that some of the stuff wasn't intuitive on nice to use.  Roads and zoning were a bit frustrating in particular.  What was most weird about those was actually that they've posted a couple of "how to play" videos on YouTube and it looked far better to use zoning and road layouts on that video.

I'm hoping that the beta was actually a very early version of the game and that they'd actually worked on it quite a lot since that version and used the newer version for the video.  Whether this new beta will be the final version or what I'm not sure, but I hope it's closer - and I get on it, obviously!

All that remains now is to decide what version to buy.  There's a digital deluxe version which is download only and has several European building sets, but I've always steered clear of digital-only versions as I prefer to have the DVD.  There's also going to be an in-game store system.  This seems to have caused much ire, but I don't know why - I don't mind that sort of thing at all, so I guess there's the possibility you may be able to buy the European building sets online anyway.

more beta

In terms of gameplay it worked okay.  Thing were pretty much there from previous incarnations, although there seemed to be less need for micro management, and what micromanagement you had to do was made a lot easier by the data layers, which were generally clear and obvious what they were trying to show you.

I did have some frustrations with the controls, though.

In particular, they seem to have flipped the standard movement controls backwards.  So when you want to scroll up the screen you hold the button and drag your mouse down.  You can also do edge scrolling, but it's horribly slow.

Also, the bulldozer only allows you to destroy individual buildings.  You can destroy roads in sections, but even here it tries too hard to be interpretive and will suddenly flip around to destroy an entire section of road were you just wanted to destroy a bit.  And I couldn't work out how to cancel the destruction - once you start you have to at least destroy the bit you've started on: clicking the right mouse button doesn't "cancel" it, which was annoying; particularly since it can then behave a bit weirdly when you try to fill in that bit of road.

With the roads they've introduced several ways for you to lay them down and, in particular, tried to let you do curved roads, which is something people always complained about before.  I didn't find this to be particularly good - you sort of drag the road around and it goes where it wants to go, rather than where you've directed it.  Imagine painting with a paintbrush in MS paint and the line goes all over the place, only vaguely following your pointer.  I'm sure this is so it maintains sensible crossing junctions and follows the height contour, but it was quite frustrating to actually use.

It also seemed to produce parcels of land than then weren't settled after being zoned.  I don't know if this was because they were too small or because there wasn't demand for the housing.

There was also some weirdness with it letting you place roads - oftentimes it would complain about a junction you were trying to create being "too close to another junction" but you were actually trying to make a cross-roads out of a T-junction, if you see what I mean.  This was particularly odd because if you then tried to create the same road from a different direction it would work fine.

And of course the mechanics that allow you to do curvy roads also do away with the rigid grid structure.  This is okay, but it also makes it difficult to know how things work in terms of sizes of buildings.  I kept seeing bits when I was applying zoning where it wasn't going quite up to a junction, but I had no idea if they actual buildings would compensate for this or if I should try to move the road.  Also I didn't have any feel for how big I should create each parcel of land.  It had what looked like guidelines for a grid, but these seemed somewhat flexible.

The impression I got was that you had to be quite clear where you wanted roads and zones to be.  Now, it's not like you are fixed once you've placed something - you can destroy and rebuild, obviously - but some of the municipal building in particular are very expensive, so if you have to demolish them then it could easily cost you a fortune.

My particular concern was that if I create a big square and fell it with industry am I then wasting space?  Or are there different varieties and types of building that would suit the space available?  In previous SimCity's with a grid it was clear (and, indeed, part of the rules) that if a zone was more than, say, 5 squares from a road then it wouldn't get filled.  Here you didn't assign any depth to the zone, you just applied it to the edge, and it wasn't clear to me how it worked.

And I was a bit puzzled over the mechanics of civic buildings here too.  In previous games something like the police would have a zone of effect, but here the police seem to cover the whole region and instead you "build up" the police building, adding more slots for cars and things like that.  However, that obviously means you need to leave room around them, or you're going to be bulldozing and rezone all the time.

The other thing I think they've gotten wrong is upgrading the roads.  I've no issue with that as a fundamental idea, it's just that you only seemed to be able to upgrade small strips of road at a time, so if you want to do a whole long road, you've got to do each little bit of it.  It would have been better if you could just "draw over the top" with the new road.  That would also allow you more flexibility in that you could upgrade , say, half of a long stretch of unused road (e.g. one going out to your rubbish plant) so you can add zoning just to that half.

I'm coming across as quite negative, I know.  I did enjoy the three goes I had, and felt that each time I learned something new about the mechanics and how to set up cities to achieve particular effects.  However, I was struck that each time I was effectively restarting I was kinda happy to have another go and not make the same mistakes.  Afterwards I found that a little worrying as it implied you either need to come up with quite a clear plan when you start or you're going to be doing all sorts of restructuring that may make you want to start all over again.

simcity beta

So this weekend I played quite a few games on the simcity open beta.

Well, they called it a beta - I think actually it was a bit of a half-way house between a beta and a demo.  I've no idea if all those who applied got to have a go - you had to register and they sent you a code so you could get the demo.  I guess if everyone who registered got a code, it was more like a demo, but I got one so I don't really care either way.

I'd actually wondered if I would - I've been tracking the simcity site, reading the news and blogs and stuff, and registered for the beta ages ago.  However, when they made an announcement as to when the beta would happen, it gave the impression that only those who registered after that would get to play, and I missed that window.  But it seems I still got "on the list".

Anyway, the point of a beta is to bug fix and so much of the game was disabled you were really only testing out the basics - basic roads and zoning and a few amenities, that sort of thing.

However, worrying the game did crash twice.  the first was right at the beginning, after I'd installed original and tried to launch the beta.  That was the most worrying crash as I was worried it meant the game just wasn't going to work, but I immediately fired it up again and it loaded/installed fine.

The game requires an always on connection.  They've said this is because your game actually runs on their servers and effectively you're controlling it remotely.  I've no real idea if this is true.  I'm sure the whole "defeating piracy" thing is a part of it too.  I have to say my experiences with always on games hasn't been great - Anno 1404 had an always on side to it and it was horribly frustrating to find their server was down so I couldn't continue my game.  and recently they somehow managed to delete my online account so I had to create a new one.

Anyway - simcity.  The "update" took ages - well, it took ages to download what it called "updates" but I've no idea if these updates were actually the content proper.  Certainly the other installation seemed remarkably short.

The second crash was during the tutorial.  Basically once you had the game running you played a little tutorial that showed you how to do stuff and then you got to play in a small (well, it seemed small - I understand this new simcity is somewhat scaled down compared to previous iterations, so it may actually have been medium or large for all I know) town.  The tutorial crashed right after a bit where I had to buy water from a neighbouring city and it dropped me right out of the game, rather than back to the menu or something.

However, I fired it up again and played right through the tutorial and had three goes at the city without it crashing again.  There was some graphical weirdness, though.  The most distracting of these was around the edge of the city, where the graphics flickered.  I've had a similar annoying affect in a couple of games and suspect it is some feature of how my graphics card works.

The other graphical weirdness's mainly revolved around the roads - you would lay down a road and it would appear broken, even though cars were travelling along it just fine.  Or, in particular, some of the bolt-on bits you added to building seem to interact weirdly with the roads.  It was like they were meant to cast a light and instead it just caused the road to look broken.

I'll continue tomorrow with some thoughts about the game.

lazy days

I had a pretty lazy weekend last weekend.

I've discussed before that I put together a to do list for the weekend so that I don't forget anything.  Well occasionally (not for a while) I go off-piste and this was one of those weekends.

I didn't do any washing, even though I had thought to myself that I would in order to get ahead  (I have the Friday at the end of the month off and am trying to avoid the temptation to just leave everything until then).

I didn't hoover - being a bedsit and with the areas I live in having lots of trees I need to hoover every week.

I didn't catch up with my e-mails & the blogs that I follow: heck, I hardly even opened a browser window all weekend.

I didn't put on any e-bay auctions.  To be fair while I've a bit of a pile of stuff I want to get rid of I don't need the cash (the pay rise seems to be bringing a bit of relief on that front).

I didn't compile my new anime to torrent (I still do these, even though I've not watched an anime in months!)

I didn't even do that much in the way of catching up with TV.  And obviously the GP wasn't really shown - certainly not at sensible times.

I did watch my rental Blu-Ray, so that's something I guess.

But what I basically did was play a computer game.

Now I had suspected that I might do this, as the new Call of Duty Game is out (Black Ops 2); however, I was possessed by more of a creative bug earlier in the week.  This was brought on by the relative imminence of the SimCity and me reading some of the blog posts - I had a bug to create something.

As such I loaded up Anno1404 (I have the new game - 2070, but have not yet played it and I wanted to just crack on and build a world, rather than work out how to play the game).  I must have totalled about 12 hours across the weekend.

I therefore feel a bit guilty that I basically "wasted" a big chunk of the weekend, but also happy I did something fun and a bit pointless with my weekend.

One thing I will say, though, is that it definitely beats working at the weekend.

simcity moving closer

So the new version of SimCity is moving closer.

Current release date appears to still be February 2013.  I'd wondered if it might slip or perhaps if it was tied in to something (only thing I can think of in February is Valentine's Day).  You'd think they might try to hit an important date or get it out for Christmas, but I guess the date they've given is based on realism and not rushing it out.  Hopefully, anyway - I wouldn't mind if it slipped so long as it means a better product at the end.

Anyway, it's looking good from what they've shown on the website and various places.  In particular my big concern about SimCity 4000 I expressed before was that it was full of horrible micro-management.  Not meaning micro-management is horrible, but that the way you had to go about the micromanagement was horrible.

In the new game engine they've developed there's a lot more in the way of clever graphics to show you the numbers.  Now sometimes this can be quite a token effort, but here they appear to have done it in a really sensible and easy to use way - at least, that's what it looks like from the gameplay footage.

I have to say it doesn't look massively different to SimCity Societies (or SimCity 4000 for that matter) but then those games looked pretty good.

One thing they do appear to have developed is the idea that your city sits in a region - you can either control all cities in the region or other people can control other cities.  I'm pretty sure this was in SimCity 4000, but there was a thing on the site where people were asking questions and the implication was that this was new.

My guess is I'm miss-remembering quite how it worked in 4000 - perhaps although multiple people could control cities they interaction between them was minimal?  Certainly in the new game it appears to be going more for a specialisation idea.  So one city might be industrial, another residential and a third all about education.  In a sense then this means that the region kinda operates like a single big city, or a network of interconnected towns.

It sounds interesting either way - interactions sound like they might be quite complex and multi-faceted.  Although only if you want them to be seemed to be the implication - you could have them all isolated.

There seem to be some changes, though.  You can no longer terraform.  The way they explained it was that it gives it more of a puzzle element, which makes some sense.  I never used to be that big into terraforming anyway.

However, a slightly odd change is the lack of subways.  They appear to have trains, buses, boats and even trams, but apparently subways have gone.  I'm not quite sure why - subways could presumably be represented in some fairly simple ways.  Perhaps they're saving it for an extension or as downloadable content?

I mean, it's not a big loss, just a bit unusual.

Still, it's looking good.  And hopefully it will be a game I will play properly, rather than sitting on my shelf like all the others!