Avian Gamers Network

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/s ... th-others/

This, barring a spore like meltdown, excites me. I would love to have an avian region!

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Cetera and I were talking about this a few days ago. I cannot WAIT to play this!

_________________
2 Locks, 2 Pally's, 1 Priest, 1 Warrior, 1 Hunter and 1 Mage walk into a bar...

I am looking forward to this game too. Can an Avian neighborhood be restricted to Avians (and perhaps invited friends) only? Just curious if we would need to fight for domain at launch.

Edit - I just saw DF's comment post in the link. Perhaps my question has no answer yet.

Would LOVE to get in on a beta for this.

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Someone posted this tidbit after my initial post (from the official website).

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

This is cool, would love to try it out.

I felt the older SimCities (2000, etc) were better than SimCity4. Not sure why I feel this way, just had way more fun back then than the later versions.

Cross posting my thoughts from another forum, after playing the closed-beta weekend. Only played 2 one hour sessions (and the second was cut short by a crash).

You can get a decent economy going fairly early, and once you have the basics and some undeveloped land zoned change the speed. It let me get away without various services and utilities for quite a bit which is huge for maintaining cash flow. I did use a bond in the first game, but not the second (but it wont be a problem to pay back).

My biggest issue was the snap-on nature of placement (sometimes I like to build roads after I drop a building. Upgrades to buildings, like the school and City Hall - If you don't place these correctly you can end up having to do some serious re-zoning and rerouting of roads later on.

The city areas feel small, which isn't bad for single player, they want you to specialize and share services within the region. For multiplayer regions I am curious how this will work.

Some interesting overlays etc... utilities within each of their build panels (I would rather have a overview screen for those). Budget screen doesn't seem as detailed as SC4, but it may be that city hall upgrades change that (I know one upgrade allows more control on Tax rates).

Your sims and advisors I think do a much better job this time around of letting you know what they want and need.

Finally figured out where the casino and other "cool" buildings were hiding in my second city! Woot!

Zoning
No longer costs money, placed along roads, roads must be placed first
interior is left as "green" space, however the houses will extend into it as they incease in densisty. This leaves me a wondering what the proper road placement distance is.

Utilities
Water, Sewage, Power are all connected via roads. Reduces some micromanaging, while I dislike the slid to a more casual friendly experiance I don't really mind it. Water was typically laid near road lines, sewage just magically worked, and power was never an issue unless you set up a farming community down the road from your city.

Mass Transport
Did I just miss the subway? I don't see it in the list (even as unavaliable), I think trolleys look fun!

Addon/Edit
I do think the add-on/edit system is cool, allowing you to upgrade buildings to increase capacity or function it will lead more organic feeling public/municipal buildings (stations, city hall, universities, hospitals, power plants).

Amazon has a $20 coupon if you order the limited edition (physical box).

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Subway is supposedly not in this one, I would imagine it would conflict with how they route utilities and such.

I played about 5 one hour sessions, had a hoot. Proper planning of your road grid is very important, as things develop organically over time, if your roads are too tight, you won't get any bigger housing units or commercial buildings. I had some really nice 10 story commercial stuff develop, and some pretty impressive apartment complexes get started. The city "size" will vary a little, with some zones being bigger I think.

I will miss the terrain editing, but I LOVE the game as it is. Very fun, and the "add on" ploppables are a great addition.

I have had my deluxe digital edition preordered since last year sometime, so I can't wait !

_________________
SW:TOR - Mantison Gunslinger, Ironmant Trooper, Manni Jedi Knight
WoW - Dalaran - Manni 85 Mage, Ironmant 83 Warrior, Mantison 80 Hunter
SWG - Chilastra Retired Mantison, Commando / TKA Master aka Trogdor !!!!

I played the beta on this game this past weekend, for maybe five hours. It was disappointing as hell, and actually made me cancel my pre-order. This game is not worth $60. When Steam has it on sale for Christmas this year for $20-30, definitely pick it up, but otherwise, I'd wait.

The interface is extremely clunky. Moving camera angles is damn near impossible, and is impossible to do it smoothly and quickly. Because of that, you play too far zoomed out, and all the hype about building telling you what is going on is lost, 'cause the animations are too small. The textures have a "soft" look to them to, which I wasn't fond of, but that is a personal preference.

The overlays for data are nice, but rather than being able to click from one to another, you have to close the freaking one you're on first, and they put the X button to close it in a different spot than anything else in the game. Not game breaking, but definitely annoying.

Worse is the street layouts. It is nice that you can curve streets around to your heart's content now. Turns out, laying a straight road when you want to is now difficult. You also can't tell how much room to leave for anything when laying out streets. Many a time I wanted to expand a building, and couldn't, because there wasn't enough room to do so, even though it looked like that zone was placed correctly with the initial building plop. Even worse, since there are no power lines or pipes in this game, everything MUST be connected to a street of some kind. You can't put parks in nice little areas that might be centrally located, filling in a hole, or designing a nice pattern of parks and recreation stuff. Nope, the park has to be along a street, or you can't plot one down.

I hate the new zoning scheme. You no longer get to zone for a density you'd like. If there is room, and your population wants a bigger building, they will build one, right in the middle of your nice, small, suburban community, up will spring a 10 story apartment complex. On the other hand, if that is what you actually want to be built, good luck making that happen. There are a lot of factors that go into building types "growing", including desirability, property value, traffic, etc, but it seems very difficult to actually design things to be what you want them to be. Any residential area will build any kind of residential building it wants if it has the room and meets the factors.

However, the very, very worst part is the mandated always on internet connection to play. Not to play online, or sell stuff between cities, or play with friends, but just to launch the game. You cannot play on a laptop while traveling. You cannot play if you internet goes out, of it they have problems with their servers. All the "simulations" occur on the server side, and the results are passed along to your local client. If I'm going to spend $60 on a non-MMO game, I'm going to play it how I want, when I want, where I want. That is a complete deal breaker for me.

I'm sure EA has lots of DLC and microtransaction crap ready to go for the game as well. I'm not in the mood to keep paying for crap that should be in the base game, and be completely restricted in how I play it. The beta weekend seemed to be a huge marketing gimmick, and a server stress test, and that is all, and they had problems with the servers constantly. I'd had preordered this from Amazon the day it became available to pre-order, and this weekend killed my excitement for the game. I will get it, at some point. I'll enjoy it, and have fun with it. I won't be paying full price for it, and honestly, I think SimCity 4 may be the better game still.

Just my two cents, and as usual, thrown around like it is a fiver.

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

Not to link and run, data dump of some interesting bits.
SimCity beta tested against real world city planning models

Some of the devs have respondend to zoning / road laying issues, there is an older strategy video that I need to track down, but for now:
Zoning UI changes
https://twitter.com/oceanquigley

Regions:
http://i.imgur.com/hqBHL.jpg
http://www.reddit.com/r/Redditropolis/c ... ted_equal/

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

So did anyone actually play a bit of the beta this past weekend? Impressions?

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Yeah, 5 hours. I really enjoyed it.

However, I am nowhere NEAR as serious about the details as those other posts appear, so, simple toys for simple boys seems to sum up my time.

I thought it was a butt load of fun.

_________________
SW:TOR - Mantison Gunslinger, Ironmant Trooper, Manni Jedi Knight
WoW - Dalaran - Manni 85 Mage, Ironmant 83 Warrior, Mantison 80 Hunter
SWG - Chilastra Retired Mantison, Commando / TKA Master aka Trogdor !!!!

Played about 2 hours of the beta. I am with Manti. It is fun, they have made some changes to the game, most seem decent and the demo/beta left me wanting to try everything out some more. It has been 10 years since our last SimCity fix and I want to tinker and play with it.

Have not pre-ordered yet but will likely take Amazon's $20 credit offer.


Agree on the textures - they have a soft, cartoonish look. I didn't have any camera issues.


Best way to control this is through road type, use low density roads for suburbs and medium/high for areas you want to develop more. I think this actually makes a lot of sense in practice.

Don't place zones along a medium density piece of road when you connect your low density roads to your "main street," place them on the sides facing the low density and their backyard should cover the medium density road. Devs have discussed what to do with the backyard space that is not used while homes slowly develop, so I am not sure if we will see some changes.

Based on Reddit's tearing apart of the region issues, one thing that stuck out and annoyed me was that the Great works (Regional Airport, NASA etc..) only benefit the cities four cities connected to it. It may be a dev misspoke and intended to mean any city with water, rail or road connections benefit... But the way the dev spoke it came out as, yes you are in a region of 16, but really you only interact with 4-6 people.

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

With a $20 credit via Amazon for a pre-order, the game becomes much more a worthwhile proposition for me. I think there are some issues with the game, but I enjoyed playing. I definitely don't feel it is worth $60, at least not for my opportunity costs with that $60.

That .gif showing how much room to allocate for zone growth is nice, and I hope that gets implemented. I did zone lower capacity zones to try and keep things "neighborhoody" but then everyone started bitching about traffic congestion. I upgrade the roads, and buildings start growing, causing a positive feedback loop and still ruining the neighborhood look.

One thing I didn't mess with that I really wish I had was the display filters to change colors, like the sepia for old-timey photos, etc. Did anyone play around with that?

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

I didn't have this problem, I was using Medium density for the most part and an avenue for my Main Street. I wonder if using medium density for N/S roads and light for E-W would help the congestion? or boarder the area with completely medium density? Or maybe bus stops?

It will be interesting trying to balance that, but I found that to be a problem in SC4 as well (everything being congested in residential zones).

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

apparently they did another beta event this past weekend, I didn't get an invite (or it got spam filtered), in any case I had already uninstalled the beta client.

Have not seen any new reviews or anything to make me change my pre-ordered status yet, just the typical MMO style server issues and complaints about online activation and drm. I will keep an eye out, because I am curious what changes they made to roads and zoning this time around.

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

so did anyone else recieve their beta codes from amazon today, 2 days after the event?

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

not me

Sounds like pretty standard FUBAR online release. add me RyricKrael on origin.

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Mantison79 on Origin

_________________
SW:TOR - Mantison Gunslinger, Ironmant Trooper, Manni Jedi Knight
WoW - Dalaran - Manni 85 Mage, Ironmant 83 Warrior, Mantison 80 Hunter
SWG - Chilastra Retired Mantison, Commando / TKA Master aka Trogdor !!!!

Jkrysa on Origin.

Hopefully yesterday's clusterF is gone.

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Are the maps still as small as they were in Beta?

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

Not sure exactly, but they are generally small. Some variations in region type and size.

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Likely based on what I have read. More appropriate title for the game would be SimTown.

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

It is fun but you run into a space wall within an hour or so. On the one hand it makes you specialize, on the other it hampers your freedom to explore prior to specializing.

The layout of ore, oil and coal really compromise city design as well if you want to mine those.

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

From the limited time I have actually spent in game (stupid servers), you definitely need to plan out your region and have each city specialize in only a thing or two. City sizes are no where near big enough to do everything on their own.

I read The design decision to graphically have each Sim in your city graphically represented is what causes city sizes to be do small. They found it was too system intensive to chug more data. IMO, bad decision. I don't need to follow each and every Sim around. The data maps to more than a good enough job to show you what's going on.

It's kinda like they thought "hey, people love The Sims. People also love SimCity. Lets just mash the two together."

Still fun, but a different kind of fun compared to say SimCity 4.

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Yeah, that is what I was worried about. I'm glad I cancelled my pre-order. I'll still pick it up once the price drops. If I can get it for under $30, I'll jump in, unless they load it up with a bunch of DLC and microtransactions. If they do that, I'll probably never get it.

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

So who wants to get an Avian region going? I see Manni has one going on the Euro East 1 server but unfortunately that server appears to readily be full and not accepting new cities. I'm generally playing on US West 2 or 3 and have little connection issues. Shall I just start one and fire off invites?

I've got Manni, Ryric, and Sinister on my friends list. Missing anyone?

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

I am usually on US East 3 (I wish they made server switching easier!). But not totally attached to any of my cities.

Start up a region on whatever server works and we can bang our heads against a wall together :-p

_________________
Ryric Krael
Former Vice President AGN
Former Director, Section 6
Former Head of Department of the Treasury
-------
Ask not what your PA can do for you, but what you can do for your PA
"Gone Section Five"

Just created Avian Region #1 on NA West 2. I'll send invites to y'all once you start a different game on that server (the invite/server/friends system really blows).

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Amazon is now selling SimCity for $40. That didn't take long.

I've been playing some SC4 with a lot of mods, and really enjoying it again. I'm going to try and work and see if I can recreate some real-life city layouts, and see what I think.

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

Well this seals it, I'll never be buying SimCity:
http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/2/4176018 ... issan-leaf

Know we know the real reason, besides DRM, that it was online only.

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

I haven't loaded the game in a week or so, so cannot comment on this Nissan ploppable. The fact that it exists, and likely others to follow, does not bother me. Completely an optional download.

I am still waiting for many of the horrible bugs to be rectified before putting in any significant amount of time into the game. Working RCI and Region play being top of that list.

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"

Well, the problems is multi-fold:

There is no reason for the game to be online-only, except for DRM and now advertising. That's annoying, but it isn't necessarily a showstopper.

Their big claim about the leaderboards, cooperative and competetive play, challenges, etc, is now completely undermined. This "free" Nissan ad campaign magically spews out happiness in your city, costing no power, affecting nothing, except giving out "free" happiness. Now if you don't have it, the leaderboards are completely and totally inaccurate. Everyone must have it in order to "win" or "compete" on the multiplayer crap they've tried to sell the game as. It completely undermines their position there.

The RCI stuff is fundamentally broken, and sounds completely unfixable. Industry has no requirements with R and C, and R and C have no requirements with I. They couldn't get the simulation to balance, so they flubbed it. They faked it. They couldn't even make a simulation of a simulation in their simulation game, they just left that part out and lied to you and hoped you wouldn't notice. R and C demands still interact well, but I is completely left out. It doesn't sound like they have any plans to fix this, ever.

There are lots of other bugs in the game too, but those will obviously take a back burner to putting out advertising content that breaks what little simulation in the game there is.

If I bought the game at this point, I could "pretend" the game functioned differently, and carefully keep a reign on myself and my strategies to make it all "work" like it should. But now not only do I have to pretend that the game works and is actually simulating something, I have to either drop the pretense and compete online and kill the immersion, or I have to ignore more content and pretend even harder to make my city work, all the while dealing with bugs that aren't being fixed.

I can do less "pretending" and more actual playing and enjoying a simulation with SimCity 4.

To illustrate how badly this whole fiasco has been handled by EA, they've ruined my interest in even pirating the game to play offline if someone ever gets that accomplished. Why bother? It is an inferior product in every way that I can't see wasting my time with.

_________________
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

Until the bugs are fixed, I am resigned to think of it this way: I bought Need for Speed: Most Wanted (free game I chose from their launch fiasco offer) and got to play a SimCity beta.

NFSMW is amazing btw. LOVE how you can see your buddy's race times and even radar trap clocking speeds right as you drive by them. I've spun around a few times now to go back and rip through speed traps trying to beat buds. That reminds me, DF, you might want to get back in game

_________________
"I built me a bomb and dropped it on every MFer who got in my way!"