Be Excellent To Each Other

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

Hi there, RL friend of "AtrocityExhibition"... yeh, there's at least one of us... Could I get an invite to this zone so I can belch pollution all his city

"Teuta-Illyrian" on Origin.

The subtle art of getting off to a bad BEEX start there, old chap.

Heh. It's up there with "I like stabbing kittens".

"I'm going to be your new step-dad".

Sorry about all the crims, Trooper. I'll re-route all my police to you.

Totally agree about the zone sizes - they're far too small.

Christ almighty, I waited 60 minutes for it to let me log in, and then as soon as I got to the title screen it told me the servers were down.

GET THE PITCHFORKS.

Ahh yes, what I actually meant was loose acquaintance and colleague. Close enough to kill him, distant enough to avoid being on the initial list of suspects.

And back to a 60 minute queue again.

Marvellous.

Perhaps I will play something else today.

Heh, don't worry about it, my highly educated town is full of goody two shoes, so I can cover the dastardly outsiders...

Wotcha folks. Had a top night out last night and one of the bestest curries I've ever had, cooked up by a friend. So I see there's server troubles again? B'oh! Here's hoping that I can get in shortly.

On the subject of not-enough-space-for-everything, you're quite right. There isn't. But you're not meant to have everything, you're supposed to go down certain routes and craft your city for a certain style. If you try to fund and maintain everything you go broke. You'll have to make more cities elsewhere to use other types.

Woah, some awesome cities you guys have made! Mine is still a starter town - I'm painfully slow!

Yes, but tourism for example, there isn't enough space just to concentrate on tourism attractions alone...

Well guess I'll find out myself soon.

Edit:

Or maybe not. Got twenty minutes in and saw Grim... visit, before the servers went down again. Gngh. Still had time to build a police station and watch my first medium density residential go up.

A tip. Apparently you get priority queuing if you have created a region on a server. Might be worth all of us creating a region of our own on the server, even if we never use it.
Once the servers are back up of course

Hmm, a 57 minute countdown to play again. Cheers EA. Reckon I might dabble with a different server for that time.

Aw, screw this. I'm off to the cafe, get me some scrambled eggs and crispy bacon with maple syrup. Yum.

I'm not convinced - my city is only 100,000 people big but I'd to clear all the bins I'd need five refuse tips, all full up with extra trucks. And that's just bins - I need fire, police and hospital cover, sewage, water and electricity.

I won't be that surprised if they patch larger regions into it later.

But I think the mistake we're making is that we're not planning to work together. For instance, I should use my massive refuse collection numbers (48 trucks available for the region!) to get all of Troopers rubbish, and he should take care of my sewage, I'll provide him with electricity, and he provides me with water, etc.

Yes that makes sense but I think there's a bit of a 'no one really knows what they're doing' thing going on at the moment.

I'd suggest that for BEEXVILLE 2 - THE BEEXENING, we go in from the start with far more of a plan.

There's no reason we can't have a go at modifying our existing cities to achieve what you're suggesting either though, of course.

Well, apart from the fact that the servers are fucked. That's a reason.

Hmmm yes, I have to concur, they really are.

There are some good guides appearing out there:

http://www.shacknews.com/article/77553/ ... ul-simcity

http://www.videogamer.com/pc/simcity/fe ... mcity.html

http://uk.ign.com/wikis/simcity

I think service specialisation might be a good idea. I think AE maxing out his Crime-Fighting unit might be a good thing, as he's a Casino City, and his guys can help the rest of us out. Being a mining city I'm vulnerable to Fires so I'm going to max my fire-station. If someone else does trash, Trooper can keep on doing Education... this might be the way!

I'll update the region post shortly, once you've all chosen a service speciality.

Oh, and good list of patch upgrade features here - worth keeping an eye on:

https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-patch-notes

I need to do that anyway, thanks to all the fucking robbers and arsonists who are 'visiting' from Grim...'s hellish metropolis

Cheers for the links there Pete, I'll have a read through them all.

Assuming we've all got a decent amount of cash in the bank, simply levelling large areas of our cities and re-provisioning them is a viable option.

I'm happy to max out on police and see what happens.

I'm now buying power from Grim... and am sending out more fire volunteers to those who need it. I see from the region map that someone needs to buy coal, so looking forward to making some dirty money!

Yeah, I'm gotten coal off of you. Iron Ore aplenty here that's all being exported. I might get enough to buy a Smelter, but space is becoming a luxury now. City's so small and restrictive, especially when you have to constantly factor in the expansion of civic buildings.

Also a clump of arsonists have moved in from Grim...'s city. Thanks Grim... Thim....

I will power up the Dizzyville 50.

Actually, because it's a hive of villany, I will bulldoze a good chunk of Dizzyland or whatever the Hell I called it and turn it into a recepticle for all your bad stuff - send your shit and rubbish to me, and I'll swap it for filthy electricity!

I'm out the next few nights, so I expect to come back to a fully built arcology...

Sending cack to Grim...!

I'd love to know why my Avatar isn't showing ont map.

I'd kill for a subway. My streets are clogged.

Tell me about it. People wanting to get to my university is a nightmare. Even some one way settings would help.

Vertical wind turbines for all!

People seem pretty happy, coal diminishing a little now, but I've got an emergency reserve out there under where my garbage dump and poop-treatment plant is. Oops.

I've just built a ferry but no ferries seem to turn up. Do other cities need to build them for mine to be used? If so, please build a ferry terminal everyone. My population now is around 15,000 and I'm raking in +2500 simoleons outside of my coal exports. Got my first little skyscraper and a whole lot of red brick apartments. Next step is to build a big shiny firestation I reckon, and maybe a railway station. Traffic seems in hand, too! Glee.

God, I'm really loving this game! Still got a quarter of the map to build on too.

You need two ferry terminals, or people won't be able to go anywhere.

Damn. I assumed the ferries would go city to city like the trains do. I'll demolish mine then.

I think they do go from city to city, you just need two for them to start working.

My city is gathering pace, I'm sure you've all visited it, but here's a wee update anyway:

A little further on and my city has hit 22,000 people and I'm making 2,500 simoleons before coal exports, which adds a fair bit more. I'm going to speed coal production up a bit and get a nice big piggy bank, as I've just built a Mining HQ. I feel my city is fairly sustainable at the moment, so I'm not fearing the switch away from coal. The ground polution is going to take a hell of a lot of cleaning up though.



A view of the high-wealth bay. Two ferry terminals move my sims in and out of town, but the queues are incredibly long.



This prime chunk of beachside real estate has been claimed by a bum who I consider to be Big Lebowski. Despite local ammenieties, good transport connections and medium density road he is yet to upgrade his trailer. Will it forever be the first thing a visiting yachtsman sees?



Another scenic view of the bay. Note the many water-towers; mining sure is thirsty work! My smoggy industrial zone can be seen in the distance.

My fire department seem pretty good at tackling fires. I've only lost three buildings so far. Go team! I'm tempted to go for the big spangly fire HQ later. Commerce demand is pretty low in Vlautin Sound, but residential is quite in demand. Here's hoping the wind doesn't shift anymore westerly though, as that'll bring a ton of smog to my main residential district!

Here is Dizzyland, or, rather, the queue to get in:


Much like Pete, I've also got residents clinging onto their little plots while massive high-rises tower around them:

Jealous. Wish I had time to play

Hmmm would it run on my works laptop....

*ponders*

Think I'll wait for the first bolt on to come out first. Although I so want to play.

Ferries wise, I only have one port and people use it. It did take a long while for people to start though, which seems to be the case for a lot of things, the response to plopping something isn't immediate.

My town is fair old raking in the cash at the moment, with my expo arena and positive taxes i'm taking in around $200k per day. However I have a constant clamouring for more industrial and more residential to feed it, which doesn't really sit with my educated commercial tourism ideal.

I have three options as I see it at this point.
1) Carry on as I am, tinkering around and slowly growing.
2) Stop tinkering and build up the cash to start a great work.
3) Build up a cash buffer and then do some serious re-development.

I'm thinking option 3 would be the most fun, but the most risky to the region. Worst case I have to wipe everything and start again from nothing, which wouldn't be the end of the world
My plans.

Get rid of my rubbish dump and let grim... handle that.
Destroy around half my industrial and replace with a huge arena, fed with streetcar avenues with multiple entry points off the highway. (I, like most of us, have a serious traffic problem.)
Keep my school system and build the university up to epic proportions.
Then see what happens to my budget!

Do you automatically share stuff with the other cities in the region?

I had a bit of a sewage problem yesterday but as quickly as I added new sewage capabilities it was being overwhelmed, I also had the same issue with water at one point as well, the growth in usage was massively outstripping the growth in my city.

My city's a fucking disaster zone anyway, I might raze the entire thing to the ground and start again once I've got some decent cash reserves built up.

One of my casinos is losing massive amounts of cash and I'm not really sure why.

I do think the cities are too small though, it's effectively impossible to keep all the shitty stuff (literally and metaphorically) out of the way of the nice stuff.

Thinking back to the huge play areas of Sim City 3000/4, I can't help but feel it's a bit of a backwards step, however much they're trying to focus on multiplayer.

If I've got the ability to deal with more sewage (say) than my town needs, you can buy that excess off me. You have to click where it says "x amount available in the region". or something. However, my stuff will always be prioritised, so if I suddenly have a load of sewage from my town to deal with, then your stuff is going to get second place.

Is there any in-game chat yet?

I'm not entirely sure how it works.
I know you can buy some services (power, water, etc...) if others in the region have spare, but I don't think they actually get the money from that.
I know that you can volunteer fire trucks etc... yet I still get people coming in to help every so often if nobody has volunteered anything.

It all seems a bit disjointed and not really connected together that well.

Top left button lets you post messages to the region for anyone to read, but it doesn't tell you if there are new messages, as far as I can see.

That's my feeling, that it's kind of doing some stuff randomly and/or as it sees fit, rather than explicitly based on what the players in the region are actually doing.

I'd like to see what calculations it's doing behind the scenes.

I think casinos may be bugged, I just had a poke about and a Maxis developer says they're working on a fix. As it stands they're hard to make money from. I think its a priority fix though, so hold on in there!

Tourists seemed to be the key for my Casino's. A Tourism Board on my City Hall and a Bus Terminal with lots of extra coaches, with that my Casino's went from -5k to +50k. Before I logged off last night I added a Casino HQ so I'll see what difference that makes.

EA FeEx.

I'm making a fortune from mine

Ahhhh so that's where all the arsonist and robbing deadbeats are coming from.