SimCity 5

Bjorn de Haas · Mar 9, 2013

Guys i have created a racedepartment region here were we can play multiplayer
The invite system does not work properly yet so the server will open to anyone.

Server::Europa west 2
Name: Racedepartment
Cities possible: 16
Projects: 4

Bram Hengeveld · Mar 9, 2013

I hope to join in soon

Morten Wernersen · Mar 9, 2013

I've setup a city there
I have oil, hehe

Bjorn de Haas · Mar 9, 2013

i will focus on money and casinos

Craig Stevenson · Mar 9, 2013

They never learn, this is just the type of crap that drives people to use Warez, can you imagine paying £64 for the Deluxe version and then not being able to play it. I have no objection to EA doing a DRM check or whatever, it's pretty much the norm these days but at least with Steam you can still play Offline.

Graham Laing · Mar 9, 2013

I finally got into the server I was originally in, West Europe 4, and my city was there at least

Graham Laing · Mar 9, 2013

Update 2.0 - 22 April 2012

Hello Mayors!

We have an update for you, Mayors. An update about our next Update, in fact – this Monday, April 22 starting at 1pm PDT we’ll be releasing Update 2.0, which contains a number of top-requested bug fixes and improvements. Here’s the full list of changes included in the Update:

What’s New

Mayors Mansion: Mayors will now drive their fancy cars to work. Mayors will take their helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.
HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.
Data map: Data maps show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)

Fixes and Updates

Cities not Processing: Mitigates some of the issues that were causing cities not to process. We are continuing to work on and improve this issue.
Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top
Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.
Tourism:
- Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.
- Cruise ships are now more effective at bringing medium and high wealth tourists in coastal cities.
- New tourists will now decide to come into a city once leaving tourists reach train stations, bus depots, or cruise ship docs instead of waiting for those tourists to go out to the region first.
- This change will reduce the downtime of tourist buildings.
Casinos:
- Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.
- The larger casinos now invite more tourists into the city which helps keep them full.
- Note that existing casinos will need to be replaced to take advantage of this change.
More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.
Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.
Education:
- Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.
- Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.
- Fix to more accurately track regional student population.
- Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.
- University wings now give the proper bonus.
- Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.
Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.
Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.
Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.
Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.
Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.
Transit:
- Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.
- A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.
- A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.
  - Transit vehicles should recover automatically after the update. If players want to force the recovery, turn off the stops that are having looping issues, wait a few game hours, then turn them back on.
- Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.
Residential Tuning:Residential-only cities have failure state.
- Buildings are prevented from going up in density when they don’t have power or water.
- The amount of happiness gained from low taxes, police, fire, and health outreach has been lowered.
- Fixed some cases where buildings would not go abandoned when they should have.
- Higher density residential buildings are no longer blocked from going abandoned due to not having enough money.
- Happiness from low taxes does not double up every time it is given.
- Losing happiness due to not having a job is more impactful.
Budgets: Fixed bug that prevented systems like fire, abandonment, garbage, and sewage from turning on when they were supposed to.
Audio: Fixes issue where audio will stop working after creating a large city or where phantom audio sounds play in a city.
Demolish: Fixes issue that occurred when players demolished buildings that had service vehicles, delivery vehicles, or agents out in the city or region. Previously, the agents would be in a state of limbo and would not recover when new buildings of that type were placed. This will no longer happen.

Because this is our first significant Update, we wanted to inform you in advance that we’ll be taking down all servers for approximately two hours while changes are being issued. Choosing a time to issue a major Update is never easy, but after looking our peak player time, we’ve concluded 1pm PST is the best window for us to make these improvements. As you can see from the list above, the wait will be worth it.

Update 3/22/2013 - Update 1.8

General

Police station can no longer hold more prisoners than the capacity.
Added missing roof texture for certain commercial building.
Added completion moment cinematic for Great Works.
Visiting police cars have avatar of neighbor above them.
Arcology Population reflects the population of the Arcology, not the city.
Fixed a clog in the pipes where sewage would sometimes get backed up and act jittery.
Region Wall will pop up when a new chat message has been received.

Road Improvements

Improvements to cases when connecting a new road to an existing road that goes over uneven terrain.
Tuned some of the road snapping priorities to address some edge cases where it wasn’t behaving as desired
Fixed a case where a new road would sometimes cause an existing road to change its shape drastically.
Made Upgrade Roads mini-tutorial appear at appropriate time.
Fix to four lane bridge to improve divider line placement.

Text Improvements

Clarified alerts about residents not moving in because of high taxes to state if it is residents, commercial businesses, or Industry that won't move in because of high taxes.
Improved text and icons on cities in region view.
Updated text for "Become a Suburban City" mission to improve clarity.
Updated requirements text for HazMat garage for clarity.

Update 3/18/2013 - Update 1.7

General:

All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool.
Performance improvements for low spec systems.

Traffic Improvements:

Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues.
Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections.
Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage.

Server:

New Server will be added this afternoon (PDT): Asia 2!

Update 3/16/2013 - Patch 1.6

General:

Turned regional Achievements back on!
Update so new players will go through the Getting Started Scenario only once. Those playing before the update must go through the Getting Starting Scenario once before they will see the Play menus when switching servers.
Fix for a gameplay crash
UI improvement: We increased the length of time that system alerts are displayed to enhance readability
Graphics: shader change to improve look of walls and parking lots
It’s now easier to place airport runways
Budget transaction optimization to increase performance
Update of buffers on buildings to save memory
Performance improvement for lower end machines

Update 3/12/2013 - Patch 1.5:

General

This patch fixes an issue that was causing the game to crash.

Servers:

Optimizations to improve latency. The Region wall and city to city trading will be more responsive.
Database optimizations that will improve the success rate for connections.
Fixed an issue with rollbacks. Higher chance of success and less chance of getting in a rollback loop.

Update 3/10/2013 - Patch 1.4:Fixes going live with this update:

General

Update to the “Select a Server” dialog in the game launcher. This will now indicate which servers you have active cities on
Fix for an issue where selection shard did not display when the previously selected server is down
We've fixed a problem where some players were getting stuck when switching shards in the server select menu
We've opened 1 new server: Antarctica

Update: 03/09/2013 - This update to SimCity contains the following updates and fixes:

General

Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles.
Traffic was optimized for complex road sections.
Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state.
Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city.
Rapidly clicking or accidently double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions.
We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends' regions by going to their friends' profile pages.

Servers

Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers
We added 8 additional servers!

Update: 03/07/2013

This update to SimCity contains the following updates and fixes:

Fix for a crash that occurred when claiming a city in a new region on a server that was experiencing lag
Fix for an issue where server select would not display the last server played on if that server was currently unavailable
Cheetah speed has been disabled, selecting it will not cause your SimCity to run any faster than at Llama speed.
Implemented a fix for crashes related to the road system finding the closest point on a road
Fixed crashes caused by transport and pedestrian code
Identified and resolved a processing problem for cities with helicopters

Source: EA Patch notes

Craig Stevenson · Mar 10, 2013

OK I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, it does sound like they are trying to fix it, not really sure what they mean by

played in ways we never saw in the beta.

Graham Laing · Mar 10, 2013

People staying on the server all day perhaps, rather than a few hours ....

Senad Subasic · Mar 10, 2013

EA Not Banning Consumers Wanting Refunds for SimCity
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Refund-Origin-SimCity-PC-Gaming-Digital-Download,21438.html

Schadenfreude galore

Graham Laing · Mar 10, 2013

It's kind of ironic that they say there is no refunds in digital downloads, when in this case, for this game, you are locked into the 24/7 DRM world. It cannot be played without being online.

This MUST make it the ideal candidate to be the exception to the rule. They remove it from your Origin account ....... and you can't play .... simple!

Even if you make copies of the files, you still can't play it.

Now the servers HAVE improved, I am quite enjoying the game. I just want a much bigger city area, it feels a bit constricted. I know that I can have multiple cities, but would prefer just one or two mega-cities

I do quite like the idea of buying services from another city though. At the moment I am pumping all my **** (sewage) to my 1st city. Being in Glasgow myself, I think I would pump it to London or Edinburgh

Graham Laing · Mar 10, 2013

Added new 1.4 patch notes to the summary above ...

Bjorn de Haas · Mar 10, 2013

all the problems are almost solved and server system works very good now.
Morten and i are working on a city and we can use some help. its at server west europe 2 and its called racedepartment