City-building Game Catch All

D-Man777 wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

Ohhhh, thanks for this thread. Love city builders (Zeus being my fave).

You know these are almost exclusively NOT space cities, right?

I guess you could use yer 'magination.

Seriously, though, I'm a little surprised and immensely happy that you're participating in this thread. You're certainly one of the more passionate gamers on the site.

Aaww, thanks man. Games are indeed a passion of mine, and I do love them city builders. This reminds me actually that I need to play Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. I'm told that's BETTER than Zeus, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Hm, Project Aura and Clockwork Empires are both looking really good to me. Had to resist the urge to impulse buy them right now.

I'm thinking Veloxi views them as the prequel to the space-y bits.

"If I build a great city, then it'll build great spaceships". I'm thinking Zeus might have been slightly disappointing in that regard.

Took the plunge on Cities XXL because of the discount, let's see how that goes

davet010 wrote:

Took the plunge on Cities XXL because of the discount, let's see how that goes

Please share your early impressions once you've had some time with it. I realize that will be after the promotion ends, but I'd still like to know how it stacks up against its predecessor.

davet010 wrote:

I'm thinking Veloxi views them as the prequel to the space-y bits.

"If I build a great city, then it'll build great spaceships". I'm thinking Zeus might have been slightly disappointing in that regard.

Took the plunge on Cities XXL because of the discount, let's see how that goes

Sucker.

Since the 50% to previous owners of the series is not supposed to expire i do not see any reason to preorder XXL. It truly appears to be the same game with a few additional tweaks. Given the lack of growth and development inherent in the way Cities' zones are implemented, the game becomes a static canvas on which to paint a city. I prefer the old SimCity model where a city grows and develops based on the parameters you set.

davet010 wrote:

Took the plunge on Cities XXL because of the discount, let's see how that goes

So, I was wondering if you have any early impressions of Cities XXL. Looking on Steam, it's reviewing as 'very negative'. Most of the comments are confirming that it's more of the same, including some of the bugs, with a slightly altered interface.

Pity if this is true. While they've not been the best to their customers, I'm always up for a good city-building game.

I'll wait until the fervor dies down. They were really only promising a new UI and game engine. The BS about new buildings is something they've been lying about from the beginning as they use fuzzy math for it.

garion333 wrote:

I'll wait until the fervor dies down. They were really only promising a new UI and game engine. The BS about new buildings is something they've been lying about from the beginning as they use fuzzy math for it.

The UI is the same old UI. The color is different.

The game engine appears to finally allow for multi-core support. There may be rail lines you can build now. By all accounts, that encompasses the majority of the changes.

Granath wrote:
garion333 wrote:

I'll wait until the fervor dies down. They were really only promising a new UI and game engine. The BS about new buildings is something they've been lying about from the beginning as they use fuzzy math for it.

The UI is the same old UI. The color is different.

The game engine appears to finally allow for multi-core support. There may be rail lines you can build now. By all accounts, that encompasses the majority of the changes.

Truly, the game deserves the extra X in the title. /s

I toyed around with XXL yesterday a bit and it is the same, but for me that is fine. I pretty much liked most of the mechanics of the original except that without multicore support and the memory leakage problem after a city gets to a medium size it slowed down to be unplayable. I didn't get the city up to where it would have slowed down before (small farming town), but if you wanted to actually play the original then they may have fixed it. I got 2011 and 2012 at steam sales for (I think) $2.99 each so trying this at half off was still a bargain in my mind.

I wish there were more space colony games, macro scale ones like the old Outpost game.

Quill18 has some...criticisms of the game.

"The executable for the game is still just 'citiesxl.'"

...

BadKen wrote:

"The executable for the game is still just 'citiesxl.'"

...

Well, imagine how many lines of code they'd have to rework if they changed it to "citiesxxl". I'm sure it's a lot and doing a find/replace probably is tougher than it sounds.

I'm really not trying to be an apologist for this series because Focus has been screwing consumers over for years with this game, promising high and delivering low.

It's funny that the executable is the same, but it doesn't really say too much considering they did get multi core support. Crap multi core support, apparently, but it is there, I guess.

Plus citiesxl.exe is an 8.3 filename. They would have ruined DOS compatibility with citiesxxl.exe.

BadKen wrote:

Plus citiesxl.exe is an 8.3 filename. They would have ruined DOS compatibility with citiesxxl.exe.

BadKen wrote:

Plus citiesxl.exe is an 8.3 filename. They would have ruined DOS compatibility with citiesxxl.exe.

So much LOL.

Wow, I've avoided all the Cities games despite my love of the genre. Looks like that was the right call. Yeeesh.

BadKen wrote:

Plus citiesxl.exe is an 8.3 filename. They would have ruined DOS compatibility with citiesxxl.exe.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha, nice

D-Man777 wrote:

Quill18 has some...criticisms of the game.

I see that, even though this new release is technically using multiple CPU cores, the same performance issues that have plagued the series for years are still not fixed. Judging by quil's video, I'd say that the issues are even worse, based on my experience with the series.

Ignoring this and waiting for Cities: Skylines is definitely the right call.

Cities: Skylines Releases March 10, 2015!

EDIT: Standard Edition $29.99, Deluxe Edition $39.99

Maahhaaahaan. I rarely, if ever pre-order games....yet they might have gotten me with Cities: Skylines.

What the hell double post?

Just say no to preorders. The game will still be there on release day.

I have run into some crash bugs in XXL but everything else has been working "fine". The frame rate drops when building roads like the video says, but it does not cause an issue as the frame rate can be low when doing that(my rig does have more RAM). One other issue I ran into was there is a bug where sometimes you just can't build a road, but the road stays green.

Overall there is a lot of deserved hate for this but I'm enjoying it enough, when it gets down under $5 in a steam sale it may be better for people to try. I also liked this game when I originally bought it (for something like $2 on a steam sale), besides the trading I like having the variety of different industrial areas and the need for different "classes" of people needed for each. You can also legitimately build a city without industry altogether (by trading away workers).

So yea, a sub-par game with some excellent ideas (and some bad ones) with a lot of bugs. I do enjoy it much more than the last Simcity though, even after I got it working it was just not a well executed and dumb game.

I'm anticipating Skylines more, but it also seems there is a lot of hope based on the videos but we'll see. Something about this genre causes everyone to mess it up.

Hey y'all, apparently you can use this voucher on GMG:

KPMN32-6VRM69-6INRND

On the pre-order price of Cities: Skylines

http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/us/e...

Bringing it down to around $24. I'm really tempted.

The first independent gameplay video for Cities: Skylines that I've seen. NSFW--language. I'm not sure how this guy got an early look at the game (he seems rather unprofessional, IMO) but he implies there may be more to follow. Man, it's smooth like butta'. Granted, not much city yet.

I'm hopeful this is an indication that others may be getting an early look and sharing their LP's too.

Ugh, I tried watching that and could only stomach about five minutes of that guy's voice. I hope someone else gets to do some Let's Plays before release.

BadKen wrote:

Ugh, I tried watching that and could only stomach about five minutes of that guy's voice. I hope someone else gets to do some Let's Plays before release.

God, I got maybe 10 seconds. Please someone tell me my voice sounds better than that.

D-Man777 wrote:

I'm not sure how this guy got an early look at the game (he seems rather unprofessional, IMO) but he implies there may be more to follow.

Likely because he's part of the Yogscast crew and has 1.8 million YouTube subscribers. You're absolutely right, though. He's most definitely not a professional reviewer.