Simcity

[Wiglaf]

I don't think it has. SC4 generated freight trucks from industry regardless of whether anyone worked there at all. It was extremely crude, and about as emergent as my ten year old testicle ballsack.

[Guynemer]

In other news:

Maxis employee claims servers are NOT necessary to run game, offline mode would be easy to institute

[Wiglaf]

No kidding?

[MRT144]

So it turns out that once you get to high density low wealth buildings, the game starts adding phantom sims to pad your population count. In other words, when you see your population at 400, all of those agents appear as sims in the game and drive around and jerk off and all that, but when you get skyscrapers, it starts fudging the numbers and adding sims. Presumably this is to avoid having a ton of skyscrapers but only 8,000 sims, but this has some strange effects to be aware of:

1) Your population will boom suddenly as your city develops, without a corresponding increase in traffic congrestion;
2) [unconfirmed] Your number of required workers will increase, even though the number of agents looking for jobs will not. This means it would be possible to have a city with 100,000 low wealth sims and 80,000 low wealth jobs, but a worker shortage.

That is odd.

[Wiglaf]

SC5 with private dedicated servers would be awesome though.

[regexcellent]

In other news:

Maxis employee claims servers are NOT necessary to run game, offline mode would be easy to institute

This does not surprise me at all. The only online component I see, besides the whole multiplayer region thing (which could be done on a private server), is the global price of commodities. And I've never seen that fluctuate by more than about 1 part in 1000, so simply fixing that as a constant would not have a measurable impact on gameplay.

Speaking of trading, the only decent way I've come up with for unlocking rail and sea transportation of commodities, is to build truck depots and set them to buy those commodities all at once, then wait for them to fill up, then at midnight when they're full set them all to sell all at once. If you can make more than a certain amount selling in a given day then you unlock the next level upgrade for the trading HQ which allows you to sell a commodity by rail or sea. But this doesn't take into account how much you paid to buy those commodities you sold if you bought them on a different day. Therefore unlocking more trade HQ levels is as simple as buying TVs one day and selling them the next for the same price, as they are the most expensive commodity.

[Guynemer]

It seems my bull**** detector is still finely calibrated.

[Wiglaf]

The global market was disabled. It's supposed to (when it's working) prevent certain specializations from becoming dominant.

http://eaassets-a.akamaihd.net/www.simcity.com/sites/default/files/Global-Markets.gif

[Guynemer]

Hmmm. So the things that would require always-online... aren't working?

So why is there no off-line option?

[Wiglaf]

DRM, obviously. We've been over this. I no longer care about it. I find the game enjoyable, and it will be moreso when the leaderboards and challenges come back online. Right now it is trivial to have a minimally profitable city humming along forever. But trying to beat other people on the server, and their regions, promises to be a new and interesting challenge, although it's one that I do not think I will be up to, based on Baghdad..

Very cool that you can visit anyone's city on the server, to learn how the top scorers do it.

[Wiglaf]

Speaking of Baghdad, someone really needs to save it from oblivion ASAP.

[Wiglaf]

Tourists at the monument overlooking the region, who flew in by air, became agents looking for the tourist spots, then looked for lodging, didn't find any, then left:

[regexcellent]

Jesus ****ing christ a zombie outbreak?

edit: Alright! Pripyat PD saves the day with its four helicopters and 40 police cars.

[Wiglaf]

Zombies can destroy half the ****ing city. They come from crowded clinics. Your police force is pretty elite.

[regexcellent]

In a city of 90k I got away with just 4 deaths from the zombies. I attribute this to the fact that I have a really large reserve police force that I can activate on deficit spending when needed. I have the same for medical and fire coverage.

My university is 19 students from upgrading. This is infuriating. I WANT A GODDAMN MED SCHOOL!