Warning About Cities XL/Simcity

[Pelen]

Don't buy either of them. Cities XL is has just been copied and pasted for the bast few years, and the new Simcity is a complete disappointment. If you really wanna play a good city builder, buy Simcity 4, Anno 2070, or Tropico 4 (my favorite is Simcity 4).

[Ryu_Sheng]

Cities XL is a fun game, i've gotten my monies worth out of it and still do have a lot of fun with it from time to time, bugs included. Deffo agree though that SC4 and Anno are better games, though Tropico isnt a city builder

[Wolfnightrunner]

Anno 2070 is very different from Cities Xl and SimCity. There is more to it than just building the city. I like the trading concept and how a player can pick the side they want to play for. The graphics are awesome and the missions that you can complete are cool.

[Mc.Sug4r]

I wouldn't say ANNO it's different. It just focus on some different things a bit more and makes them more complex. But in the core, it's the same genre imo.

[Ryu_Sheng]

They're different in that the focus is different. Cities XL is a pure city builder, where as Anno is more ecconomics, and pollution control. But they're both city builders, just anno is more involved

[Ruzan]

Messaggio originale di Lifell:

I wanna know, why is the new Simcity a big disappointment?

It isn't. Unless OP can show that he has beta access and has played it for any length of time, I'll chock his complaint up to "It looks different, therefore it sucks".

[Kleaver]

The sad thing is, Simcity 4 is still a damn good game, albeit a bit dated in its interface. In all these years there has not been a city builder as refined as this game.

[Pelen]

Messaggio originale di Ruzan:

Messaggio originale di Lifell:

I wanna know, why is the new Simcity a big disappointment?

It isn't. Unless OP can show that he has beta access and has played it for any length of time, I'll chock his complaint up to "It looks different, therefore it sucks".

I don't need beta access to see that the game is dumbed down and more casual than ever. The cities are tiny and have huge empty spaces between them, there are no farms, no subways, no terraforming, no planning water pipes/power lines, the fact that you can't directly control zone densities, etc.

[The doctor is in]

yes if you own cities xl 2012 cities xl platinum is a very small change, some small fixes and 50 new buildings, mostly houses, but its just $4.5 not the price of a new game but the price of a small dlc it basically is

if you own cities xl 2011 its a much better deal for just $4.5 you get some bug fixes, around 350 new builds and 15 new maps.

if you dont down cities xl at all if its 75% off its a good deal and load of fun to play, just wait for a 75% off sale

other than that simcity 4 and tropico 4 complete collection are both great other city builders/sim and amazing deals when 75% off.

simcity 4 has old style (dated) user interface, but is still very popular

tropico is gamey, funny, light hearted, but watch out for your military.

and cities xl has nicest interface and is loads of fun and runs great.

anno 2070 is just too different for me. plus its too expensive. has not yet been 75% off

finally simcity 5 is in still being developed, is not quite simcity 4 and is very expensive. well for me.

[Zednyx]

Lol the new sim city is a disapointment? Have you played it? lol

[Mc.Sug4r]

Messaggio originale di AppleJacks:

yes if you own cities xl 2012 cities xl platinum is a very small change, some small fixes and 50 new buildings, mostly houses, but its just $4.5 not the price of a new game but the price of a small dlc it basically is

if you own cities xl 2011 its a much better deal for just $4.5 you get some bug fixes, around 350 new builds and 15 new maps.

if you dont down cities xl at all if its 75% off its a good deal and load of fun to play, just wait for a 75% off sale

other than that simcity 4 and tropico 4 complete collection are both great other city builders/sim and amazing deals when 75% off.

simcity 4 has old style (dated) user interface, but is still very popular

tropico is gamey, funny, light hearted, but watch out for your military.

and cities xl has nicest interface and is loads of fun and runs great.

anno 2070 is just too different for me. plus its too expensive. has not yet been 75% off

finally simcity 5 is in still being developed, is not quite simcity 4 and is very expensive. well for me.

Tropico and SC are worth even without the discout, but that may be subjective.

But that "CXl runs great" part sounds crazy. We all know that's not true. Maybe you are an exception, but it's clear that at least 95% of all CXL players suffer from slow-downs. This game does not run well.

[The doctor is in]

yes they are i agree. but i always try to get stuff 75% off. ok perhaps not the tropico 4 dlcs at full price they are expensive

tripco 4 just released a complete collection which is in itselve highly discounted even w/o discount

and then there is summer/winter and seaonal sales where i load up on games

also, when u buy on steam its not buy its a subscription to it. so be warned. i guess this is why i get it 75% off since its not a buy.

[TrompeL'Oeil]

I bought Cities XL Platinum, even if I already owned Cities XL 2012. I payed $4.50 and played 10 hours so far. For half the price of a soft drink and a popcorn at the movies, that wasn't such a bad move. The game has performed well so far, but I only have about 50K population, so it is too early to talk about the infamous memory leak.

Yes, I know. 50K population after 10 hours is not much, but I am a casual gamer with a capital "C"... and it's really just a farming community...

... And I agree that the Anno series are superior games (invested hundreds of hours in those).

[The doctor is in]

re: slowdowns

if your city grows it will slow down.

same when im working on map in udk as it gets more complex i add more stuff ect it slows down too

ive already spent day looking into it with developers tools and made proposal to them to replace lua w luajit. that will help with the slowdown. it takes time to run all the interpretted lua code. remember its not even compiled to bytecode its in source code in the pak files. also as you add more and more stuff memory usage starts to grow since all the stuff in pak files has to be loaded into memory to be accessible. that quickly eats up space. plus in memory it has to have all the lua byte code (that got created when it compiled the source code) since its not cached to disk, ouch. even when you delete something its in memory since lua is not game and it caches classes once a class exists it exists until lua is terminated, when that application is terminated. this is the same for other oo languages like java and .net bases languages. so your memory usage grows. plus if you have large city all the stuff is lua. yes each and everything has xml def or graphics, sound, ect binrary and lua code behind it so if you have map making lots of edits think of all the call to lua for all the objects. you have an object 100 times it going to call lua 100 times and if you have 6000 objects and it has to to make 4 call for that object its 24000 calls each and every time it has to do the calls. you can see why its going to be slow and that main game loop thread peaked. then again lot of games are like this. they use lua or unreal script and using interpreted scripting languages while nice and easy for developers comes at a very high cost. they are not created to run 24000 calls 60 times a second. its an interpreter for god sake. this is why focus should switch to using luajit the hit is 20-30x faster at running the same code. without them having to make any change other than change the library they link with.

[ﾚﾌﾄ]

Oh boy, Here we go again. Apple, you should summerize more, every post I've seen from you is a wall of text.

[TrompeL'Oeil]

Oh AppleJacks... How I wish I could understand what it is you are trying to say. It might be because English is not my main language but I cannot understand what you are saying. I do not want to be rude, but please use proper punctuation, capital letters, paragraphs,... Certainly my English is far from perfect, but I do try not to butcher the language too much...

I think "luajit" is better than "lua" but that still doesn't mean anything to me. I suppose my lack of computer knowledge is also at fault.