The game isn’t so bad for me that I stopped playing, however it is below my expectations.
Issues that you cant lay roads over tracks or cant upgrade a station doesn’t really bother me. At a new game I make a minimap and plan my network for the entire map before even start building. So most of the time, I don’t need to upgrade a station and the same for roads. I already did it early in the game before the trains start running.
However the time limit thing is more annoying. A large map is no fun because you end with city to city traffic just as a small map. No-one is willing to ride your train from one end of the map to the other. Even it’s a big city with lots of leisure facilities. For commuters it’s good, but in the real world you will take the train to go to that soccer match or concert even it’s hours away from your home. They need to fix that.
Even more of a shame is that travelling is only dependant on fking time and traffic jams aren’t even calculated. In RL the reasons to consider public transport are:
– It is cheaper (except holland :)).
– It is faster because of numerous traffic jams in and around the city. Which make buses and trams faster because of there ‘private’ roads
Since this is nowhere in the code it is impossible to compete with cars. Public transport always take you to a place you don’t want to be on a time you don’t want to. Luckily half of the town is not connected with each other by roads. If there were highways al over the place, no way you’d make any dollar with public transport.
For cargo it’s even more nonsense. First problem is again the 20 minutes rule in my opinion. If that’s true the middle east would still be riding on camels and they still be slaughtering each other with sticks and stones instead of tanks and AK 47’s. No one would buy there oil. Unfortunately it’s one of the few places where you are surrounded by oil. In train fever however every city has there own oil fields, wood factory’s and coal mines. The only reason to use trains for goods transport is because it’s nice to see them rolling trough the fields. The distances are too short to make a train more effective than trucks.
Raw material’s are also converted to goods. I always thougth there are more kinds of goods. A carpentry needs wood and a power plant needs oil. There’s is again no need to use more than 3 or 4 factorys to suplly all of your cities. It’s the one thing SimCity 5 did really good. Because every city had it own resources you could make a very nice economy in the region. Also the only good thing at SimCity 5 :). Only the main cities have cargo suplly to help them grow faster and attract more people.
My suggestions (besides from building roads over tracks)
– Cargo time undependant
– One or two raw material spawn points. Same for factory’s
– Public transport also dependant on price and traffic jams
– No time limit for leisure and shopping traffic. This should be dependant on the attractivity of the city.
However I still play the game. You have much more freedom than in CIM2 and the mod support combined with excellent graphics keeps me playing. However if the economy and transit system isn’t gonna be improved, I dont think I’ll still be playing it over a couple of months.
@ Tattoo
If there was a manual should you use it? I do always skip the tutorial aka manual. If you need to know anything there’s google and fora. Let them focus on more important things and please stop whining about that they didn’t keep their word because there isn’t a fucking manual. The fanboys here are frustrating indeed, the same for haters.