The Startup of Sim City, Part 1

Sigh... I've really done it this time, I ranted about the game Sim City too hard in some certain areas. The storm has settled and truth be told, It's enjoyable, but the servers were horrible at release but they've cooled down now days after.

I must be honest and say: Why didn't they put up more servers in the first place? 
They started with only 2-3 servers for each continent, from US east/west to EU east/west. Did they really not think about how many people who would log in at the release date and start playing? C'mon we're gamers and we all love the Sim City series, well besides from Sim City 4 and Society...

Let's get this started on how my first impression were:

MAKING A NEW CITY:

Making a new game is quite simple, you can join or create one yourself. By creating a game you got 8 maps (or Regions as they like to call it) from 2 cities to 16.

Different regions have their own set of Raw materials, from Coal to wind power, so choose your city specialisation from what part of the region you're in.

SETUP REGION:

On the Setup region you can name your Region, set up private (invite only) or public, which is an open game and everyone can join.

'Sandbox' mode is pretty much building your city with no limits at all and no disasters can strike your city!

CLAIM CITY:

This is where you start claiming your city. 

When you're playing with friends I'd recommend you to pay attention to the road and railroad connection, because this is how your friends can help you with trading, burning houses, police backup and even workers (there is more they can help you with). The Roads are marked with a white line and the Railroad are yellow. When you start a new game with friends or just by yourself a Road is the safest way to get tourists/employees/new citizens or selling freight and goods. Later in the game you could try to get up a railroad station or even an airfield for carrying resources or people.

Alot of coal on this site.

How to claim a city?

just click on the cyan looking squares on the map and check the information about the site for how you're going to build yours. The white circles on the map are "Great work sites" which needs the following cities to team up to meet the requirements of the building they want. (more on that in next post!)

As you can see "triton valley" got loads of Coal and two bars of water and a full bar of wind power. This would be a nice place for a coal City, mining the resources would bring a lot of money to this city as you can trade with others or even make more advance resources you can sell for more money.

Claimed a City!

PLAY:

There we go! now we've claimed a site for our city and the industrial empire can grow!

Other players can now join your game after you've claimed your city (Pay attention if the game is private, you'll need to invite your friends to the game!)

To summarise:

I loved the whole part of actually playing with friends, but the lack of actually trying to survive on your own by just making one city in a "singleplayer game" is troublesome.

You have issues with having enough citizens to work or buy from the local stores, or even tourists to come to your city to make an actual income. 

This game works best with friends, and so bad at singleplayer it's not even funny.

It's nice that they've pushed the limit on the Sim City world so others can play together, but the small size on the cities makes it nearly impossible to enjoy it later in the game. They have spoken about adding an expansion pack to increase the size but then again... why pay for something like that when it should have already been in the game? I smell the works of EA here... 

Since of this blog post became a "tutorial" on how to start up a game, I'll make a new post tomorrow about the actual gameplay, since it's too big to put in one blog and it will be a huge massive wall of text and pictures.