A bit of a nit-pick regarding the difficulty curve...

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that this game has a difficulty curve that can be described as "backwards"?

I found balancing my budget early on to be the hardest part of the game, while once the city reaches a certain point my profits skyrocket and in general everything seems to stay stable. Has anyone else noticed this?

[matthew]

I do feel that starting out is a problem, it took me several attempts to get a working city.

[hal451]

Yeah for sure. I'm at about 45k and I keep lowering my taxes, bc I'm bringing in so much profit. Seems to be a lot of small balancing issues.

[matthew]

lets hope after a lot of feedback and balancing, issues like this will beaddressed, but these are early days, I'm sure this will be fixed in time.

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

yeah weird huh, the game gets easier as you go along - not because you understand the game better, but because of the strange and unusual restrictions placed upon you at the beginning

[hal451]

Indeed! I'm still really enjoying it, but it definitely feels unbalanced. For example: I've only got 2 small police buildings and have practically no crime, but I must have 25 incinerators and landfills and sims still complain about garbage.

[Fen]

To get around that... you could go with the unlock everything mod that came with the game. The whole point of progression is that a new town (in real life) wouldn't get all the state of the art facilities. The town wouldn't have the money to support it. Albiet, it is relatively easy to make money, they're trying to reflect real life situations.

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

Originally posted by Lord of War:

Indeed! I'm still really enjoying it, but it definitely feels unbalanced. For example: I've only got 2 small police buildings and have practically no crime, but I must have 25 incinerators and landfills and sims still complain about garbage.

yeah and if you don't already have a city full of rotting dead people you will soon

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

Originally posted by dunsjohn:

To get around that... you could go with the unlock everything mod that came with the game. The whole point of progression is that a new town (in real life) wouldn't get all the state of the art facilities. The town wouldn't have the money to support it. Albiet, it is relatively easy to make money, they're trying to reflect real life situations.

well yes it would, there are plenty of examples of this.

the latest would probably be cities in China - the government builds them, not just a few random people off the street, so of course they get funding for state of the art facilities.
that's the whole point of city planning, to plan them out from the very beginning with the best possible technology at the time

[fastica]

To be fair it's a pretty commom issue with city builders. It was the same with SC4 when it came out. The hardest part was the beggining due to the lack of margin to error. A couple of months on the red at first tend to be much more problematic than when you have a big city with millions of credits to spare.

[Fen]

Traveling to China yearly, several of the cities are absent of people. China is trying to expand to reduce it's person per km^2, spread the people out and all that. However, businesses need to first purchase the factories lying in wait. Many businesses already own factories which don't do anything, waiting for joint ventures due to China's heavy import restrictions. So... bad example there. China's just expanding for the future, not the now.

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

Originally posted by dunsjohn:

Traveling to China yearly, several of the cities are absent of people. China is trying to expand to reduce it's person per km^2, spread the people out and all that. However, businesses need to first purchase the factories lying in wait. Many businesses already own factories which don't do anything, waiting for joint ventures due to China's heavy import restrictions. So... bad example there. China's just expanding for the future, not the now.

im fully aware of the ghost cities. the point is they are built with large sums of money right from the very beginning, as is the case with any cities planned now... as you would expect... i'm not sure why you'd argue the cities start from scratch with about $30,000 to their name and arbitrary restrictions placed on technology like in this game

[Fen]

Then, use the infinite money and unlock everything, and be your own China. That would work. China is a horrible example. They're currently the second or third fastest growing economy (forgot which), and they are the largest economy. They're money is going through a transition to be based off of hard currency (gold). Without that arbitrary number, you'd default have everything unlocked and have infinite money. The number is there to give a sense of challenge.

[m]

Originally posted by Inquisitor Warth (Vested):

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that this game has a difficulty curve that can be described as "backwards"?

I found balancing my budget early on to be the hardest part of the game, while once the city reaches a certain point my profits skyrocket and in general everything seems to stay stable. Has anyone else noticed this?

The main challenge in this game lies in traffic, not in budgeting. Seems counter-intuitive since games have told us for ages that budget is supposed to be the most important aspect.
I think it's ok to have different priorities, but I agree that budgeting could use a little balancing towards being more challenging.

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

I'm not here to argue whether China is right in building ghost cities all over the country.

The point is John, you said it's realistic for cities to start with very small amounts of funds and essentially start from the stone age. That's not true and you know it Duns.

[Fen]

Governments don't pour tons of money into cities, and you know that (exception being China). Let's look at Europe and America (the main markets for this game). They have to decide on a budge for the city, and that budget then is the funds used to build the city. Cities then expand on their own via their local governments (usually counties in America).

Your facts for the day, weeeee.