I've been really on the fence about this game, Teddy can you give us a breakdown of it? Does it work, and is it filled with bugs/glitches?
Sure!
Like with any game your experience may vary from mine. It's just the nature of the beast that is video gaming. Just something to keep in mind.
Lets take it from the top. I ended up buying the game on a Saturday. Well after the launch of the game on Tuesday. So everything ran smoothly. I downloaded the game off of Origin in about 3 hours. The download was split into two. An Origin download of about 355mb which opened a dashboard launcher specific to SimCity which downloaded the rest of the game (It appeared to be about 4 or 5gb). Origin told me 12gb's of space, but the game never exceeded 7gb. It might be a caching allocation or something, but I haven't seen anything yet. Then I proceeded to open the game.
This is were I ran into my first issue and it was that it couldn't find the tutorial map when I hit the Getting Started button. A quick restart of the game solved the issue and I was on my way. If you have ever played any of The Sims games then the music and some of the styling will be familiar. Mainly the music style, the language all the tiny little sims speak and the currency (Simoleans?). The tutorial does a good job of explaining the basic mechanics of the game, but the game should be familiar to anyone who has played the previous games. Build roads, adjust taxes, make sure your city doesn't explode. But with SimCity the amount of depth and detail has been greatly expanded. This is also most likely the reason that city areas are smaller then previous game. Smaller area, but a lot more going on in the city to manage. Sewers, electric, traffic, water, ground pollution, air pollution, happiness, crime, fires, injury, death, etc. This is just some of the thing that need to be managed. Everything has its own graph to display where things can go wrong and a lot of things interact with each other which leads to some interesting situations.
As an example from before. I chose to start in an area that had coal and ore deposits that would be ripe for a mining town. I built up the town and was given the option to "specialize" my city in a few things. Specializations allow your city to be really good at something and gives you some specialized buildings to go with it. In my case I had the option of being a mining town. Which unlocked the Coal Mine and the Ore Mine. I dropped down the Coal mine and got it going. My city was booming and everyone was reasonable happy. Resident and Industry zones were in high demand and I was happy to provide. Then the fires started. I thought it was just a couple of random fires, but they kept growing in frequency. I was starting to get suspicious of my citizens and began to investigate. Then It struck me when I clicked on the education overlay for the city. My city was filled of people who had no education. There was no one in my town who could read or add 2 + 2. Apparently due to their lack of an education they lacked the ability to handle stoves and electricity correctly. Resulting in the many fires I was starting to see. And that's what I will be doing tonight is plopping down a couple of schools so my citizens can learn not to leave the stove on. Dumbasses.
A new feature of the series (or I think it is) is the ability to customize certain buildings like the school, garbage dump, coal mine (in my case) and a bunch of other buildings. This allows to expand current buildings too address demand instead of putting up another one. There is a bunch of options. Like my coal mine had the customization options to add in more hoppers for greater output and more garages for delivery trucks (plus a couple of other things) to take it down to my trading post so I can sell it other city's in my region or on the global market. This is where the region comes in.
Regions are pre-defined maps that have a set amount of city's and great projects. You manage city's one at a time, but you can control multiple (if not all) city's in a region. So for example you could have a city that is mainly focused on tourist attractions and another city that is an industrial city. Your citizens will travel to each of the other city's in the region if they need something. You can also setup trade agreements with other city's. Like you can buy coal from my industrial city to power your coal plant in your tourist city. I don't know much about the region stuff, but that is why I am here trying to recruit some people to do a region. I believe the largest region size is 16 city's if we really wanted to get big.
Anyways. Back to my little mining town. Cities also have advisers, like the previous games in the series, that will tell you what is needed. Citizens will also voice they opinion and some will give you objectives to complete that will net you a small amount of money, if you want to. The little objectives are fun and sometimes can help you unlock things you may have not noticed. One of the things that one of my advisers brought up was that there wasn't any trash collection in my city. I quickly acted and plopped down a garbage dump and proceeded on my way. Then I noticed my dump had no power. Odd I thought since it sits right next to the power plant. I zoomed in on it and this is when I had my second issue. I had to extend a street by the power plant to accommodate the dump, but when I extended my street it ended up creating a new street instead of just extending the one I had. I ended up having to bulldoze the new street and one section of the old street before it would understand I wanted to extend it. It might of been an issue with the slight dip in the terrain or something when attempting to join the streets together. It was fixed and my city could stop sleeping in piles of its own filth.
That's my quick run down of my game play so far. I really haven't tried any of other specializations or larger city sizes as my town is still a town. If your interested I could always do a live stream of me playing some. If you want to add me on Origin my name is ATeddieBear. Make sure to tell me your from the forums.
