The final version of SimCity is out now, and as expected, it continues to be exceedingly fun. My housemate Amber probably put it best when she said that it is essentially Cory's Interests: The Game. This is more true than I'd like to let on, and the good news is unlike the time-limited betas, it's possible for me to take my eyes away from it, but there are a lot more elements now that make it more fun and challenging. Not all is well in Sim-Land, however, as Maxis/EA battles with extraordinarily high server loads.
The first thing I noticed that I either overlooked or wasn't available in the beta is that there are regions of a lot of different sizes and shapes available. This is great because I've found some bigger regions that I'll be able to collaborate on with a few friends. It also helps the city specialization functionality make a lot more sense, and over time, I can see how it'll be easy to build a few different cities with specializations that feed into one-another. As it stands, one of my cities has a school and the other does not, for example, and one of my cities has already developed some better utilities.
Not being time limited, I've been enjoying switching back and forth between my two cities so far, and just waiting for them to build up some money while intermittently upgrading utilities and streets to encourage and facilitate density growth. I even managed to play with different road configurations in each one, because the region I chose had some different configurations of geography, road, and rails available.
With the release of the final game, another feature that has become available to me is the various expansion and content packs that Maxis/EA is offering. I purchased the Digital Deluxe version of the game, so I've got content from various major cities (London, Paris, Berlin, etc.) and the "Heroes and Villains" pack. This provides a few interesting game mechanics on its own, including some of the starting quests I've gotten in both of my cities so far, which put MaxisMan and Dr. Vu against one another. I've plopped MaxisMan's stuff in one of my cities, but I subsequently turned it off.
Turning stuff off is this SimCity's version of budgeting below 100% in old SimCity games. It works fairly well when you think of it, but I'll admit I'm a little bit sad when I have to turn something off. Maybe it is just what happens when you're trying to do as much for your sims as I tend to try to do. More on this in just a bit.
One really negative aspect of the game is that it is more or less completely dependent on not only having a good network connection, but the load of the server you're trying to connect to. The first day or so, I experienced a wait time of about 20 minutes on the server North America West 1 so my housemate Amber suggested that we move to a less populated server. The one I selected was Europe East 2 and sure enough, that server is now so busy I have a queue time of more than three hours. Naturally, NA West 1 is also unavailable at the moment, so I'm stuck between the rock of not being able to play the game at all, and the hard place of having to join another realm and re-do not only the tutorial, but either join an existing region or start my own on this new server. EA sorely needs to work out mechanisms to start on a new server without playing the tutorial again, and ways to transfer information from server to server. Ideally, your SimCity client would connect to the server it determines will provide the best performance (either in throughput or response time, or both) and those all connect back to a centralized group of servers which all have the same data. Unfortunately, we can't have everything, I suppose.
The city I ended up creating on the second server has been unofficially nicknamed Oilville. I may officially name it as such once I can get back into the game. The reason for this is the plot of land I selected happened to have a little bit of oil underneath it. Because of the odd geography, it was more or less unsuitable for anything else, so I went ahead and made a note of where the oil was and laid down some basic infrastructure. Instead of growing my city to a huge number of citizens or even building that much commercial and industrial land, I went ahead and left that area blank for my future oil rigs.
Unfortunately, something about this town just didn't quite click and the whole thing has been a crimewave disaster. The oil field is turning out to be less fruitious than I thought, and the only way I can run the town at any kind of profit is to completely disable the police department, and the town hall, and the library, and the parks. Then, what I end up with is a city where among the 900 or so residents, at least 200 are criminals of some sort. Most of those orange houses that light up are abandoned because of the high crime rate, or because everybody inside was murdered.
My plan for the city is to continue my best efforts to extract the oil, combined with keeping up with the abandoned houses and either deploying the police in full force once I have a whole bunch of cash piled up, or plopping the Vu Tower, so that my eventually oil-starved city can flourish as the true home of criminals in my overall region, Verdana Veranda. With luck, I can make peak oil and peak supervillain collide.