I'm mixed on this. I really dislike online DRM, but one of the greatest weaknesses of SimCity 4 was that the average home computer had no hope of simulating a large city.

This is still true today - while most computers could handle the graphics engine behind it, the simulation engine would still eat your machine for lunch.

Moving the city simulation server-side certainly has its justifications - it opens up the field to more players with weaker machines.

That being said, it's hard to imagine that, given the ginormous increase in CPU performance between SimCity 4 and now, that they couldn't have made a simulation engine fast enough (and optimized enough) to run offline.

That's a smokescreen, there's no way they are offloading any significant amount of processing to remote servers, compared to the local CPU power. The economics just can't work.

Indeed. It is definitely not possible that they are offloading a home PC worth of compute power per user on the server side. The idea is just laughable, at least at this stage. The problem is that EA keeps producing games, and people keep buying them. Until everyone just says screw EA and stops buying any of their games it won't matter.

Plus, if that was truly the case then the economical thing to do would be to ship a SimCity server so that players could run their own regions at their own cost. It neatly answers some of the "how can I play this in 10 years" questions and yet allows for the supposed benefits of server-side simulation.

Just like everybody else who replied to your comment I do not believe for a second that any processing is done on the server side.

I think you have been fooled by EA's marketing.

Is this actually the case? I've seen a lot of people say it, but then I've also seen some people say that they were able to keep playing for considerable periods of time even while the servers were offline. It sounds like one of those things where marketing-speak got misinterpreted as a technical design that isn't actually how it's built, but I really haven't investigated besides reading comments.

It's tricky because of the lack of concrete information. IMO the claim is substantiated by the fact that they turned off the highest simulation speed in an effort to increase server capacity - so clearly the server is tied into the basic simulation to some degree. How deep the ties go is hard to tell. If this was purely a DRM maneuver I highly doubt server capacity would be in any way tied to game speed.

My theory is that the game speed was reduced because at regular intervals your PC needs to check in with the server to: a) transfer resources between cities in a region, b) update leader boards, c) save your city.

The slower the game, the less often they have these hits to their servers.

That sounds to me like they're doing regular checkins (DRM-related, or stats, or autosaves, or something) whose frequency depend on the game speed. I just saw a review[1] which indicated that the game ran fastest when it couldn't talk to the servers.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-kluwes-simcity-5-review...

I think it's very hard to say how much of the simulation is happening online. When I was playing last night I repeatedly got messages saying I'd been disconnected and then a few minutes later that I was reconnected. The game played fine between those messages. That said, I did notice some weirdness. For example, sewage and electricity and water would be perfectly fine one moment and then the next they would be way overloaded. I could interpret this as meaning the that part of the sim was happening online, or I could chalk it up to just being how the game goes.

I also ran into what many others have seen in the first few days. I built up a large city over a few hours and then quit. When I started back up, nothing was there. The city was claimed but it was a clean slate. You might see this from any number of things. Maybe the sim is all on the computer. Maybe the saves are just borked. Maybe the saves are fine on one node but haven't been replicated to whatever node I my request got load balanced to when i reconnected.