Does this mean you also can't exchange cities? What sort of foolish design decision is that?

sadly, EA is ruining what looks like an otherwise very promising game with DRM and DLC

I don't think they're ruining it. Some people don't care about DRM / DLC with gaming (like myself). I just want the best possible gaming experience.

Yeah, until they shutdown the server shortly after the next Sim City is released, making your old game unless. EA has a habit of doing things like that.

That's a good point, but by then I probably won't still be playing the game.

The last two sentences you wrote are incompatible.

I usually play Sim City by finding the unlimited money cheat and getting a large amount of money before I start. I can then build whatever I want. I enjoy the city design part of the game, not the economic part.

I doubt that this way of playing will be possible in the new Sim City.

I was worried about DRM, but the beta convinced me it was worth it. Server-side simulation processing makes the game run lightning fast.

The simulation was a huge resource drain in SC4. So I can see how offloading it would be a speed up. That said, if it's such a drain on today's insanely powerful desktop computers, they must have an insane backing server infrastructure in place to support it. I've got 50W worth of processing power available for the sim engine (investing half of my CPUs; still far more power than I had for SC4), are they going to put up 50W of processing power while I'm playing?

I can't imagine they've really got that. Either GlassBox is simplified, or made more efficient, or important parts of it are run locally. Either way, using it as a reason to have it online-only is a sham. It's just DRM, the same kind as Assassins Creed's online-only protection.

I'll buy it anyway. I wouldn't even care about the DRM, it's everything else that I'm hearing that scares me.

I don't know the details about which parts of the simulation are run locally and server-side, but the fact that your cities are "always on" (i.e. other players' cities can trade and visit your city even if you're not playing) tells me that a good portion of the resources/traffic simulation is run on Maxis servers.

It may be not be a valid reason for you, but Sim City ran significantly faster than Civilization V on my machine. To me, they both perform a massive number of simultaneous simulations, and Sim City's performance is near instantaneous.

That said, there's one huge factor none of the beta players can take into account when judging Sim City's performance: no one has been able to build massive, multiple-city metropolises, as play time was limited to hour-long sessions.

The game can actually go on for a few minutes when you lose connection. So I don't think there is much of the simulation happening server-side.

Yep, one of the developers mentioned that everything is verified server side, but the temporary offline mode indicates that its not that important.

I'm just curious, why are you using Watt as a unit here? Is that like, half the TDP of your CPU or something?

Something like that, yes. Watts seemed like the most universal unit to use. The point being that even if they're really efficient, they'd still be using 25W x the number of concurrent clients in power, which is just absurd especially since they're not charging monthly. They're not doing any kind of complicated simulation on the server side.

So it's fine to save your game into /dev/null as long as the game is lighting fast? How does that justify DRM?

If I recall correctly, this is only the case for the beta version of the game so that people can become familiar with the gameplay but won't be the case for the retail version.

It is the case for the retail version as well, always on connection is EA's mantra.

I was referring more toward not being able to save/load but as I read this awhile ago, the case may have changed.

I don't think that's an option when you have neighboring cities that are played by other people.

I believe your city will impact theirs and vice-versa.

Wait, so what happens if I build lots of nuclear plants then let them all melt down? Does that affect neighboring cities that other people are actually playing?

I believe it is designed to affect neighboring cities, yes. And this is basically what happens in real life... and then war.

Any idea how they are going to handle griefers then? I can't imagine they are just going to ban people who habitually don't take care of nuclear plants placed on the map's edge.

Ah EA, creating a 'market' of open source clones, like CorsixTH and surely one of Sim City. This time we're being pushed to the clone before the original is dead.

Is there a city simulation open source game of reasonable complexity?

There are multiple open source options. The Lincity wikipedia link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincity, cross references many of them.

Has either of these been 100% confirmed or are they just rumored?

Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sim-city-5/1224978p1.html

    [...] As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures
    of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the 
    consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate 
    your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes, 
    tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine 
    condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip 
    Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its 
    Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No." 
    The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved 
    games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your 
    region.

Maybe it's not such a bad thing.

Spreading around saved game files and using tools to mess with the games memory to cheat is something that has prevented a true Ranking system and online play in almost all games.

These server-side requirements would mean that the $ is stored server side and it will be harder to cheat.

It was pretty much either have always on connectivity or require punkbuster and disable many online cooperative features.

Fine EA. I'll accept it.

How does "ranking" work for a sandbox game? The concept wakes no sense. Simcity doesn't have kill/death ratios or something. You can't have a global leaderboard, because there's no winning. It's not clear that "cheating" is even a problem. If you want to play online with your friends with unlimited money, go ahead! Why the hell not?

Maybe they are trying to teach kids things like debt to income , budget management, loan basics, and concepts like "there is no redo in real life" rather than basing everything on a kill/death ratio.

You can easily develop a way to rank how productive, profitable, clean, and happy cities in a game like SimCity are. If you weigh these factors and provide a number then you have a ranking. Maybe global leaderboard was a bad example but there are numerous other features that might require this kind of online only gameplay that we haven't experienced yet.

I say don't knock it until you try it. Not the beta, not the videos of others playing, the real game.

If the new strategy really kills the game then I'm sure someone will create a fake server patch or method of playing offline.

> "there is no redo in real life"

Psychologically speaking, failure is not a good teaching tool. Learning is much more effective through experimentation and success.

That's completely the opposite of why games exist. If I didn't want a chance at forgiveness, I would just play real life.

There a lot of great, fun games with no redo. The entire concept of a roguelike is based on death being permanent and having to start over. FTL, Spellunky, The Binding of Isaac and Dungeons of Dredmor are all recent examples of games that embrace this unforgiving play-style.

However, I think forcing this into Sim City is just a bad idea, and contrary to my expectations from such a game.

Different games exist for different purposes. Not every game allows infinite saves and redos.

> Not every game allows infinite saves and redos.

I would argue that every single-player game is forced to allow infinite saves and redos, by the fact that virtualization with memory snapshotting exists. (For a networked game like this one, you must just first reimplement a "private server" for the client to talk to, and then run that within the same virtualized container, so that a snapshot tracks their combined state.)

You would be the mayor/god of multiple cities? How?

I agree with your sentiment, but one approach to 'winning' SimCity: http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...

Personally speaking, I value being able to have more fun over having worldwide rankings. Does every game need to be competitive?