Sim City 4 Comments by Martin Taylor

Will you post a news item when you discover what it is about ?

Not sure it would warrant a news piece to be honest. Maybe I'll update the review once Maxis get the region play feature running, but as it stands the game is out in the US and they still haven't finished it.

Just played it for 15mins at lunch.

Fist impressions are that it is an awesome game. The level of detail is staggering. And on my p4 2.4 with 512 mb ram and 128mb geforce 4 it runs amazingly well (as you would expect !).

The game is full of loving detail, and character. Maxis have clearly put a lot of love into the creation of this game.

I would give it 90% on the basis of what I have seen in just 15mins.

Great post from the sc3000 forums -

Judging by the comments about SimCities past I'm getting the feeling that I'd be considered an old fart around here.
But I just got my copy last night and I have to say this is an incredible game. I understand some of the frustrations people seem to be having, however.

It seems to me like the old SCs followed a simplistic stimulus/response model. You zoned a bunch of land medium residential and, if conditions were right, people moved in quickly and you had apartments in no time. There was no point in playing on a slow speed since you'd just spend through your money and the whole point of the game was, "see an imbalance, correct the imbalance, watch the city grow."

SC4 is much more organic. You can't just plop down residential lots near a body of water, a police station, and a library and immediately have a country club community. It takes time to develop.

In real life, cities don't just happen because the schools are good and crime is low. They develop in a location with some sort of commercial, cultural, or religious significance. SC4 models this process more realistically by requiring the player to develop, over time, a compelling reason not just for people to move in, but for the city to even exist. This is challenging, but fun.

The second point I want to make is that I don't think this game is supposed to be played quickly. I found it kind of strange that there's no random terrain generator as well. But it's clear that the designers want players to craft every detail of their cities. (And as an aside, the idea that the terrain editor lacks features is ludicrous. Shaping the land in this game is almost more fun than actually building a city.)

As an analogy, SC is now more like gardening than assembling model trains. You can push, prod, and encourage, but the whole process takes time, and the results can be unexpected.

This is an amazing game. I think once people realize just how different it is from the SCs of the past, these complaints are just going to melt away.

And by the way, I ran my first city into the ground by failing to properly set education spending levels to match my school populations andmy hospital spending to match my patients -- so it's not liked I've got this all just figured out yet.

So they've turned it from a game of possible mass-appeal to a game for micro-managing bar twiddlers then?

Oh good!

thought i'd post my thoughts on this game, since nicking my housemate's copy last night.

my rig is a 1GHz athlon, .5GB memory & geforce 2 gts. i was running the game in 1024x768 with all effects on and high detail, and there were definitely times when the machine chuntered. this occurs mainly when you rotate or zoom, but to a lesser extent it was happening when overlaying the water systems and stuff too. when i set the detail levels down to medium the game told me i'd have to restart it to take effect, but i couldn't be bothered, and played it for quite some time as it was, so for me at least it's not really a problem, which is unsurprising as the game doesn't require constant fast reflexes so the occassional chunter is fine. i'll give an update when i've seen how the lower detail levels effect play. oh yeah, this was with nearly every single block on the map zoned or filled with something or other, so it was stressing the machine pretty hard, and it was playable.

as for the gameplay, i played the mayor tutorial for about 50 mins between buffy and scrubs on sky 1, then after scrubs (10.30pm) went on to royally screw up that city, and start the terraforming tutorial, and subsequently filled it with a city that is quickly becoming quite prosperous. then i noticed that it was 3am. and about 5-10 minutes later it was 4am, so i really had to go to bed to ensure i could get in for work. so that to me is the sign of a pretty gripping game, especially as most games i can only play for about 30 mins or so before doing something else.

all in all, its looking pretty good then.

"Then I noticed that it was 3am. And about 5-10 minutes later it was 4am."

LOL, I was like that last night. Unfortunately a cat pounces on me every 6am to be fed. So it wasn't quite as late/early as that.

I've noticed it's very easy to lose the balance of your finances. You constantly have to make sure you are in profit and building something for your sims isn't really viable until you have pockets as full as the sea.

I've noticed it's very easy to lose the balance of your finances. You constantly have to make sure you are in profit and building something for your sims isn't really viable until you have pockets as full as the sea.
i was like that for a bit, but i found with taxes round 8.5% and leaving the time gauge at full speed that my coffers started to fill up faster than i was spending. i still got the odd strike or fire to contend with but it definitely came under control.

I find the trick to money is to work the demand for zones off through taxing. Instead of always building new areas when demand outstrips supply, just up the costs. You'll save on money in building, get an increased income and have a higher level of people moving into the area (damn I'm sounding like a capitalist :) ). Sure it does mean oure city won't grow, population wise, as fast, but then a steady increase with money in the bank is better than a rush and bankruptcy.

gah! Well I put the first part of my upgrade in place with a new video card, just need the new processor, motherboard and ram to complete the task now...

Peej

looks like I should grab a copy during my lunch break.
Any patches to worry about yet?

gah! Well I put the first part of my upgrade in place with a new video card, just need the new processor, motherboard and ram to complete the task now...

I'm thinking the same. At the moment I'd just be interested in upgrading my CPU and mobo, but I want to be able to still use my 512mb SDRAM. You working on a budget or just splashing out on top-of-the-line? If the former, you recommend any cheap places to check out?



Any patches to worry about yet?

Not that I'm aware of, but it has an auto-update feature.

ebuyer.co.uk were selling some mobo's that allowed use of both SD and DDR Ram. Try here

It won't even install it gets stuck on 100%.

Good old Maxis.

Cheers Sleep, but what are these boards like? Any good? Also, I don't suppose you know how I can check if my memory will work fine and dandy with it? I've heard that although technically everything might be fine you can still have problems.

i have a mobo that can take SD and DDR ram [edit: just noticed it's exactly the one that link goes to]. it's a bit pointless though, because you can only use one type of ram at a time.

as for the game, i bought it today and i thought i was doing well - my city was thriving and i had lots of middle class houses and stuff, then i noticed my spendings was way higher than my income. my city started to die. i couldn't save it. trustration set in.

they could have made it a tad easier. i mean - isn't the difficulty level for a game supposed to curve upwards? in this one it seems the first stages are the hardest.... i think the tutorial is pretty useless and should have been expanded. i skipped past sim city 3000 (played the first one and SC2000) so there's all these new features that are so annoying and niggly. i mean, setting budgets for individual schools, fire stations, police stations, etc? it's overly complex, IMO.

however, i've not played it that long (about 2 hours in total) and i hear it takes about 4 attempts before you can get a city that actually MAKES money...

Hiya peeps, considering getting Sim City 4 - sounds great, but what specs are playable? i know what the box says but only idiots listen to that so if anybody owns it can you tell us your specs and how it performed

Ta

Er, this is one case where it pays to listen to the box.

Mind you just to annoy a few regulars, it runs tickety boo on my crappy old PIII with GeForce II 64MB card and half a gig of ram. But then I do use Win 98 instead of XP (has anyone noticed how frickin' slow XP makes a lot of games!? BF1942 par example!)

Peej

1.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, GeForce 3.

Plays very well. No real problems with it apart when the map is crammed with buildings on the larger maps. Because it's a slow game you don't need to have an uber-computer.

as i said a bit further up, it gets hit by slowdown here and there when i zoom or rotate, but is okay most of the rest of the time on my 1ghz athlon, 512mb, geforce2gts, win2k. due to the nature of the game the slowdown when it does occur doesn't cause any real problems.

Mind you just to annoy a few regulars, it runs tickety boo on my crappy old PIII with GeForce II 64MB card and half a gig of ram. But then I do use Win 98 instead of XP (has anyone noticed how frickin' slow XP makes a lot of games!? BF1942 par example!)

That is extremely good news as I'm expecting a copy any day now and my PC is roughly the same spec as that.

otto, one of the plus sides to SC4 over previous versions in the performance areas is the region feature. What this means is that you can build those huge cities even on a poor machine because you simply build areas of the city one at a time as opposed to everything at once.

I just recieved this e-mail, which I thought may be of interest to those of you wondering about the "online" play aspect of Sim City 4.

http://simcity.ea.com/bbs/messages.php?&openItemID=item.261&threadID=3f6418e9db7e185cf44fdacc2873f409&directoryID=261&startRow=1

I refer you to the following thread at the simcity4 website, I hope this
information will help explain to users why there is no "Internet Play"
option at the time of the game's release, and moreover, maxis' evasive
manner in which they are handling the situation. You will need an
active account at this website to access the thread.

Thanks! I'm a big fan of your website.

zenbeer
[scott]

Twat.