It's not every day you get a proper new title in the SimCity series. In fact, it's been a bit over ten years since SimCity 4 last showed us what it was like to control the fate of a vast metropolis (Socities and Sim City Social notwithstanding). So it's fair to say that our expectations were high as we sat down with final release code for the new game, which launches in the US tomorrow. Even without access to the full global servers, which EA hasn't turned on yet, we were excited to try promised new features like undulating curved roads, government buildings with snap-on expansions, and a regional commodity system that lets you buy and sell excess resources.

After spending around a dozen hours each playing the game this weekend, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright (who considers himself a bit of a SimCity die-hard) and I (Gaming Editor Kyle Orland) were pretty disappointed with what we found. What follows are edited excerpts from the various conversations we had over instant messaging this weekend, discussing how we were finding our initial time with the game. We'll have a more detailed review later when we've had a chance to try out the final release, complete with all the globally connected, Internet-enabled features EA has been playing up, but just going by first impressions, maybe EA shouldn't have messed with its successful city building formula quite so much.

Curved roads and crippling size limits

Peter: You know, it's dumb. I have wanted curved roads for so long, but I’m only building grids, because space is so tight. Grids are more efficient. Kyle: I build curvy roads. They make the city look more natural, and I'm not that concerned about just min-maxing. Peter: Well the thing is, I want clean, well-educated cities, and that is expensive. Kyle: That said, I have 35,000 residents and I’m almost out of space, so they are really inefficient. Then again, I also have a ton of ridges and plateaus that use up my limited space, and I don’t see any way to flatten them. For my second city I built a grid core with parallel curves coming out, like a rainbow pattern. It looks great and is pretty efficient. Peter: I love curvy roads in theory. If I had a SimCity 4-size city I would use curvy roads. There simply isn't enough space to have fancy curvy roads. I find it super frustrating. I have the tools to build the kind of city I would like, but I'm so pushed for space I just can't afford to. I'm so pushed for space already. Kyle: Yeah, the space limits are way too tight. You reach the limit much too quickly. It always felt like it took longer when I use to play SimCity 2000. Maybe I was just younger. Peter: SC2000 was way bigger. I'm honestly finding the size crippling. The small size means I can't regenerate one area funded by other areas, because anything short of a full city leaves me cash deprived. Kyle: It makes very little sense, too. I mean they are already modeling the area outside that dotted white line that’s your square city limits. I can see that empty, lightly forested land. Just let me build on it! I'm guessing it’d be too hard for them to do that detailed, low-level modeling of every citizen and bus and fire truck and such, computationally, if they allowed for bigger cities. Peter: That's my assumption. Kyle: But even then, they could let me build a separate suburb that’s immediately adjacent and continue my city by connecting them together with a road. That'd be better than this “regional” crap that separates cities by miles of emptiness, never to be developed. Kyle: (Later) I've reached a functional limit around 200,000 people. I have no more space. Peter: Yep. Basically as soon as I hit 200K it starts going to shit. Which is weird, because SC2000 maxed out around 20 million, I think. SimCity 4 could have 8 million in a perfectly tuned city. Kyle: Also, would it kill them to have subways? Streetcars are nice, but... Peter: Or anything that allows transport without taking up gobs of space on the surface. Kyle: Yeah, next time I am building no streets, because avenues are just tons better. Peter: Yep. I find it very disappointing. Kyle: No mixed use zoning, either. Peter: Not enough transport options. No mixed zoning. Curved roads that I end up not using because I don't have space. Kyle: I managed to have curved roads and 200K people. So I think you're being too stringent on that. Peter: Well, I want to hit 290K, to max out my town hall. Kyle: I want to EXPAND CITY LIMITS. Sigh.

Simulation/Interface issues

Peter: My industry is complaining that it has nowhere to send goods, and I have no idea why. I have a depot that should let it sell freight to the region, but it doesn't seem to be filling up. Kyle: I am getting constant complaints about not enough medium-income residents to fill jobs. No matter how much residential I zone in medium-cost areas, it never seems to be enough. Peter: They seem hypersensitive about crime, even though I have practically a cop car on every block. Kyle: Yes! One crime per week, and I’m still getting constant alerts that “crime has the upper hand.” Peter: Zero crimes committed per day = "Crime has the upper hand." I don’t get it. Peter: I'm being destroyed by traffic even with street cars and buses, and there's nowhere to go from the streetcar avenue. I want to build a tunneled highway or something, but there are no real transport options. Also, I'd like to extend the freeway right into my city, have a highway backbone so that industry can easily get goods out of the city. Kyle: I had the game complaining at one point that I should connect to the highway. I was like, "Um, I already did that at the start in the only point I'm allowed to." Peter: It’d also be nice to have multiple connections instead of one train track and one highway. Kyle: Yeah, why can't I build more highways through town? Plenty of cities have highways in the middle of them, not just friendly avenues. Peter: I didn't realize the importance of sticking big wide roads on the highway connection. Kyle: There seems like very little reason to use small roads at all, except very early. Peter: Because upgrading is so destructive. if you have to tear down a street to build an avenue, you lose the buildings on both sides. Kyle: Yeah, paid buildings should stay if you’re just upgrading a road, that's a bit silly. Peter: I want to be able to hide buildings when laying things out, like streets and zoning. Kyle: I didn't find it that bad. It tells you when there's gonna be overlap, and looking from overhead makes it easy to see where things go. Peter: It's for plopping down things like police stations. I want to be able to easily see where I have them. Kyle: Go to the crime map. You'll see the police stations. Peter: No, I know, but there's so much clutter, because you also get an icon for every police car that's out on patrol, so I get a huge mess of icons. Kyle: The stationary ones with the big icons are the stations... I didn't find it to be confusing. Peter: Maybe I have more police cars. I must have 40 driving around, if not more. Kyle: I don't have that many yet.

Peter: So it's complaining that some buildings don't have water, even though I have an excess. It just doesn't seem to notice that I fixed my water shortage. Kyle: Yeah, the game seems pretty slow to respond to fixes to problems sometimes. Peter: I just don't get it. I have 66 kgal/hr excess water, but half my city is still complaining of shortages. Kyle: Also, I have a sewage plant that periodically warns me that it’s full, then it gets fixed without my intervention seconds later. Is it a problem or not, game? Make up your mind.

Peter: Fuck. People are abandoning my city. I got hit by a meteor. It burned down a ton of buildings. Now it's all fucked. Game over man. Game over.

WTF, a zombie attack. How the fuck do I solve that? My population just got halved by a fucking zombie attack.

And because there's no save games, I can't go back in time to try a different route. There's no freedom to experiment. Because you suffer permadeath.

Peter: I really don't know about this game. Older SimCities, I always felt that there was something I could be doing. Tuning traffic, urban renewal, reducing pollution. This one I'm just not sure.

I'm having wild and crippling fluctuations in income. I can't determine the cause. From a net gain of 7K an hour it'll drop over the space of an hour or two to a loss of 5K an hour, so I'm spending all my time just trying to cope with that. It's stopping me from building up any serious cash reserves. Kyle: It seems to bounce up and down a lot. Because pretty much anything you build besides roads comes with a regular per-hour cost. And the benefits come a little later, through higher land values and such. Peter: Right, but what I don't get is why the fluctuations are happening. In the old SimCity, I could bring up a graph of income and expenses over time so I could at least easily tell if it's income going down or expenses going up. As far as I can tell, there are no graphs at all, except the population graph (if you click on the population number). Kyle: It seems like the income bounces around a lot as businesses/residences go out of business and/or upgrade to bigger buildings. While they are constructing those new buildings, no taxes come in. Peter: Yeah, but I don't know why they're doing it so periodically. Kyle: One big building doing that renewal cycle has a huge temporary effect. They could smooth that out. I’m pretty sure the construction companies could pay taxes on the land, for instance.