If you have a wide, empty freeway, cars will ignore it in favour of a one-lane dirt road, just because it's a shorter route to their destination – even if it's jammed with traffic. The simulation itself is flawed in a number of ways, most notably the traffic. These online headaches aren't the end of SimCity's problems. All decisions, and mistakes, are permanent, and there's no way to back your cities up. The days of triggering disasters just for the fun of it, then reloading to revert the damage, are over. The downside of this online infrastructure is that cities are stored on the cloud, not your hard drive, and there's no saving or loading. Building cities alongside friends is fun, and you can help them out by donating spare garbage trucks or selling them any excess power or water you generate, but this comes at a cost. You can join a public region with random players, or create a private one that's invite only. They're like self-contained servers that host multiple cities. Regions are part of why the game needs a constant internet connection. But if you're playing in a region with a lot of other people, chances are there won't be any more spaces to fill. If there are unclaimed plots of land in your region, you can build additional cities and share resources between them. Curved and circular roads are a welcome new feature, but when space is such a precious commodity, using them feels counterproductive. As their density increases, your cities all end up looking basically the same a perfect square of buildings sitting awkwardly in the middle of an empty expanse of countryside. Your ability to be creative is also limited. Your only options are to bulldoze existing buildings to make space for new ones, which will only generate more problems, or start a new city. Your citizens will cry out for more houses, more jobs, and more places to shop, but you won't have anywhere to build them.
#Simcity 5 release date series
These are the smallest cities in the series to date, and you'll hit the edge of your plot of land in just a few hours. Or you can forget about money altogether and pick your own goals: increasing your population, making your citizens happier, or reducing air pollution. Educated cities with a university can manufacture and sell high-tech goods. You can make your fortune by drilling for oil, or create a tourist trap that makes its money from gambling and sightseeing. There's an incredible amount of detail when you drop to street level, down to individual pedestrians. The GlassBox engine, developed especially for the game, cleverly mimics the effect of tilt-shift photography, and it looks beautiful.
Watching your city grow is fascinating, as leafy suburbs are replaced by luxury apartments, and enormous skyscrapers spring up in your commercial districts. The server issues seem to have cleared up, but now that we're finally able to build cities without worrying about being disconnected, we've discovered some other, more fundamental, problems with the game.Īt first it's fiendishly addictive. Players found themselves queueing for as long as 50 minutes, even to play solo, and in some cases had their cities deleted, losing hours of progress.
#Simcity 5 release date simulator
The city-building simulator – which requires an always-on internet connection to play – was crippled for days after its release by overloaded servers.