racofer said:
Angthoron said:
Well at least Cities XL 2011 is actually a pretty good successor to Sim City games. Been quite enjoying it, especially with a mod or two from the community.
Is that so? I had a bad impression of this game after its first installment. I shall give it another try then.
Care to specify which mods you're using and why?
Well, since I started playing it only "recently", there were a few mechanics (water, food etc supplies) that were kinda sorta confusing, so I have an economy rebalancer mod (makes trading with OmniCorp more viable, as in, you can actually trade at a decent profit), a "Utopian Environmental Agency" that I used until I figured out how pollution works in this game (it's different from SC series in a way) and a magic supply depot that gives "infinite" water, electricity and waste processing supply (which is
really a must for a beginner, I was rather raging with the amount of electricity and water consumption, and the way that you could only plop down water towers at a huge distance from each other). Ah yes, and a mod that doubles the housing capacities for a more compact, but more populated city. I think in the hindsight that one was unnecessary but eh, it has its pros and cons anyway so whatever, and the tax rate incomes actually make some sort of sense that way.
There's some other mods that might be helpful to improving the game, I just didn't want to go all-out modding spree-whee on this. Also, if you're getting a "demo" version of 2011, it might be a good idea to get it updated to the latest version and look up for a community group fix that removes the lagging of the game menus (they will still lag a little, but not quite as much).
http://forum.citiesxl.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=644 contains most of the game's mods, though some are only in German and some links are now dead.
And yeah, I was also somewhat "ehhhhh" when I started playing it, got fucked over with the Sim City line of thinking of the RCI demand and with a somewhat lousy interface re: roads (hint: you can lay 4-lane avenues at the beginning of the game, just click on the "more" icon in the roads menu for MOAR options), but then it kinda grew on me and I'm actually starting to get the logic in supply/demand and the likes. In a way, I would actually say that Cities XL 11 actually does a better city sim experience than SC games as you can't, say, get away with spamming commercial buildings fuck-knows-where and hope they'll influence the citizen happiness, you actually have to put 'em shops near houses and shit.
Also, road intersections actually influence the heavy traffic values so you have to think how to place the roads, as making two intersections too close to one another can make for some epic congestion even though you'll have the best 4-lane road; you can also totally fuck up a highway by having it intersect with a small country road. Sadly, public transport is a little obscure and I'm just now getting the hang of it, and the more stations per line you're trying to put down, the more the interface will lag until you're done. Laying metro lines can be quite a godless experience, and so far, I've not managed to make a single line that is used at even 50% of its capacity, and that's not to forget that executives and elites won't ever (or almost ever) use it anyway, so you have to design the city with THAT in mind as well. Makes sense though.
As for Cities XL vs Cities XL 2011 thing, from what I read, 2011 is much improved as XL is made with MMO mentality in mind, and once it was converted to single-player, it never fully worked out. 2011 is made by a different team based on many of the XL designs, but it's a single-player game by design, so, it
should be better, though as I've not yet played the original XL, I don't have a valid point of reference.
Bottomline is, it's not exactly Sim City, but it is the closest that we can get in the foreseeable future, and it does have its charms and good sides. I'd say to give it a try if you find it with a good price (Steam sale in 3 days, might be there), or try a "demo" of it. If you have any questions about this or that obscure mechanic, I can try to explain those, as some of the mechanics really
are somewhat obscure, and abovementioned mods at least fix them by temporarily making them go away. Overall, it's a very enjoyable Sim City 2000 clone if you can get into it.
And yeah, it's more of a 2K clone than 3K/4 copy in my opinion. Can't explain why, just feels that way.
And yeah, the night-time city in this game looks positively awesome in motion.
P.S: When playing too long (3 hours and upward), the game begins to produce a massive memory leak, so it's a good idea to occasionally save and restart the game when you feel it's getting choppy.
