In targeting big maps and high number of population, C:S also had to pay its price, and that is progressively being discovered. Some of these controversial issues are:
- Most important: if one cim isn’t able to reach his workplace, it happens nothing! That’s is not fair for a simulation. The cims have a job, they don’t get there, but they remain with that job and happy…
- I’ve noticed that if you try to build some industrial area far apart, no matter that you build some houses near them, it won’t make the citizens prefer nearer jobs… There is no concept of locality… I guess that you want to live near where you work, if possible.
- In order to avoid traffic jams, some vehicles just disappear (easy solution, but not fair)
- There are strange cycles (kind of alpha bugs): suddenly always the same building starts to being robbed once and again, or some other buildings, always the same ones, burn to ashes even when you place a fire station door to door.
- Some of the tabs of the information windows just disappear (for instance, in the education window, “high school” and “university”) at random, and reappears where the program sees fit.
- Some unforgivable details: how on earth can I delete a wrong metro line? In buses, that is far from ideal: I have to look for a bus belonging to the line, click on it, then on its line, and a DELETE button appears, not very intuitive… But you can’t click on metro trains because they are underground…
- Metro lines cannot go up and down nor link with train lines whatsoever.
- You can’t make tunnels or underpasses with roads!
There are also some unforgivable simple things in TF: for example, a warning if you are trying to overwrite a game… and some serious lacks: overtaking a very prominent one, not only for road, but also for tracks…, timetables…
The way everything can be modified and rebuilt is marvellous in C:S and a serious nightmare in TF (and because of this, a challenge some may say). The dreaded “Vehicle in in the way” message… even for building signals!
All in all, I don’t see TF such a bad game, nor I see C:S a an infinite source of honey and milk. Let’s see what happens to C:S after the initial boom and if the game is able to keep the popularity in the long term.