Want to know about the most recent updates to SimCity? Keep checking back for Patch Note updates!

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Update 4.0 is now live!

• New: SimCity Launch Park, an exclusive new park just for our dedicated fans who were early adopters. • New: Region: Edgewater Bay. Seven city sites in one cluster around a beautiful bay with one great work site. • New: Your current server will now be shown in the options menu. • New: More detailed rollover information on buildings telling player’s if their Sims received happiness from a park or from shopping. Previous to this fix, this information was generic. • Re-Enabled Feature: Global Market prices now dynamically change during gameplay. • Re-Enabled Feature: Leaderboards will be active on EU West 3, Pacific 1 and Pacific 2 at the release. We will enable them on additional servers throughout the day. • Re-Enabled Feature: Region filters are now enabled on all SimCity servers. Players will be able to search for open games by Map Name, Sandbox Mode, and Abandoned Cities. • Rain Clouds: Fixed an issue where some cities would not have rain clouds to replenish their water table. If you had a city with this issue, you will start seeing clouds again within a game day. • Fire: Improved response time of fire trucks to fires. Improved the time it takes for a fire signal to reach a fire station. • Mission updates: Tuned Metals HQ and Community College missions. These were appearing too early, making them difficult to complete. They now appear later in a city’s development. • Solar Farm Great Work: Reduced fire risk at the Solar Farm Great work. Local fire engines were spending too much time at the Solar Farm. • Messaging: Improved pre-requisite messaging for Trade Port, Casinos, Smelting Factory and Oil Refinery. It should be clearer on how to unlock these buildings. • Graphics: Fix for flickering low wealth buildings on NVIDIA graphics cards. • Education: Fix for an issue some cities experienced where commuting students did not return from a neighbor’s city. This was causing a problem where students would disappear from a city in some cases. • Tuning: Sims will lose a small amount of happiness if they don’t have a place to shop. Cities without places to shop will see complaints and feel the effect of unhappy Sims. This will emphasize the importance of commercial zones.

Note:

After patching, please make sure to fully exit the SimCity launcher once before starting the game.

Update 3.1 Notes

• Addresses a number of crashes reported via Answers HQ. • Fixes for camera control related issues

Update 3.0 Notes

• New: Added 24 new Hotel models to increase hotel variety. • Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter. • Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic. • Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won't move causing traffic to back up behind it. • Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic. • Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers. • Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources. • Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2. • School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor's city or arcology. • Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station. • Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman's Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley. • Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city. • Trading: Made gifting more reliable. • Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant. • RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home. • RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours. • RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present. • RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in. • Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution. • Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously. • Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations. • Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night. • Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them. • Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement. • Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets. • Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently. • Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage. • Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks. • Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers. • Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks. • Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.

PREVIOUS UPDATE NOTES BELOW:

Update 2.2





• Addresses a number of crashes reported via Answers HQ ( http://answers.ea.com/t5/SimCity/ct-p/SimCity ).

Update 2.1

City Processing: Fix for some issues that have caused cities not to process.

Update 2.0

• Mayors Mansion: Mayors will now drive their fancy cars to work. Mayors will take their helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.

• HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.

• Data map: Data maps show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)

Fixes and Updates

• Cities not Processing: Mitigates some of the issues that were causing cities not to process. We are continuing to work on and improve this issue.

• Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top

• Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.

• Tourism: Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.

- Cruise ships are now more effective at bringing medium and high wealth tourists in coastal cities.

- New tourists will now decide to come into a city once leaving tourists reach train stations, bus depots, or cruise ship docs instead of waiting for those tourists to go out to the region first.

- This change will reduce the downtime of tourist buildings.

• Casinos: Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.

- The larger casinos now invite more tourists into the city which helps keep them full.

- Note that existing casinos will need to be replaced to take advantage of this change.

• More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.

• Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.

• Education: Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.

• Education: Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.

• Education: Fix to more accurately track regional student population.

• Education: Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.

• Education: University wings now give the proper bonus.

• Recycling: Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.

• Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.

• Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.

• Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.

• Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.

• Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.

• Transit: Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.

• Transit: A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.

• Transit: A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.

- Transit vehicles should recover automatically after the update. If players want to force the recovery, turn off the stops that are having looping issues, wait a few game hours, then turn them back on.

• Transit: Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.

• Residential Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.

- Buildings are prevented from going up in density when they don’t have power or water.

- The amount of happiness gained from low taxes, police, fire, and health outreach has been lowered.

- Fixed some cases where buildings would not go abandoned when they should have.

- Higher density residential buildings are no longer blocked from going abandoned due to not having enough money.

- Happiness from low taxes does not double up every time it is given.

- Losing happiness due to not having a job is more impactful.

• Budgets: Fixed bug that prevented systems like fire, abandonment, garbage, and sewage from turning on when they were supposed to.

• Audio: Fixes issue where audio will stop working after creating a large city or where phantom audio sounds play in a city.

• Demolish: Fixes issue that occurred when players demolished buildings that had service vehicles, delivery vehicles, or agents out in the city or region. Previously, the agents would be in a state of limbo and would not recover when new buildings of that type were placed. This will no longer happen.

Because this is our first significant Update, we wanted to inform you in advance that we’ll be taking down all servers for a few hours while changes are being issued. Choosing a time to issue a major Update is never easy, but after looking our peak player time, we’ve concluded 1pm PST is the best window for us to make these improvements. As you can see from the list above, the wait will be worth it.

Thanks, Mayors!

Update 1.8:

General • Police station can no longer hold more prisoners than the capacity. • Added missing roof texture for certain commercial building. • Added completion moment cinematic for Great Works. • Visiting police cars have avatar of neighbor above them. • Arcology Population reflects the population of the Arcology, not the city. • Fixed a clog in the pipes where sewage would sometimes get backed up and act jittery. • Region Wall will pop up when a new chat message has been received. Road Improvements • Improvements to cases when connecting a new road to an existing road that goes over uneven terrain. • Tuned some of the road snapping priorities to address some edge cases where it wasn’t behaving as desired • Fixed a case where a new road would sometimes cause an existing road to change its shape drastically. • Made Upgrade Roads mini-tutorial appear at appropriate time. • Fix to four lane bridge to improve divider line placement. Text Improvements • Clarified alerts about residents not moving in because of high taxes to state if it is residents, commercial businesses, or Industry that won't move in because of high taxes. • Improved text and icons on cities in region view. • Updated text for "Become a Suburban City" mission to improve clarity. • Updated requirements text for HazMat garage for clarity.

Update 1.7:

• Traffic Improvements: Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues.

• Traffic improvements: Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections.

• Traffic improvements: Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage.

• All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool.

• Performance improvements for low spec systems.

• New Server: Asia 2 will be released Tuesday afternoon (PDT)!

Update 1.6.1:

General • Turned regional Achievements back on! • We are now prioritizing games with available slots in the “Join Game” menu in the front end • Update so players will go through the Getting Started Scenario only once. They will see the Play menus when they switch servers • Fix for a gameplay crash • UI improvement: Increased time showing system alerts for readability • Graphics: shader change to improve look of walls and parking lots • It’s now easier to place airport runways • Budget transaction optimization to increase performance • Update of Buffers on buildings to save memory • Performance improvement for lower end machines Servers: • DB performance upgrades to increase response times.

Update 1.5:

General • This patch fixes an issue that was causing the game to crash. Server Improvements: • Optimizations to improve latency. Region wall and city to city trading will be more responsive. • Database optimizations that will improve the success rate for connections. • Fixed an issue with rollbacks. Higher chance of success and less chance of getting in a rollback loop.



Update 1.4: Fixes going live with this update:

General: • Update to the “select a server” dialog in the game launcher. This will now indicate which servers you have active cities on • Fix issue where selection shard did not display when previously selected server is down • We've fixed a problem where some players were getting stuck when switching shards in the server select menu • Opened 1 new server, Antarctica



Update: 03/09/2013: Update: 1.3: This update to SimCity contains the following updates and fixes:





General • Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles. • Traffic was optimized for complex road sections. • Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state. • Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city. • Rapidly clicking or accidentally double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions. • We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends' regions by going to their friends' profile pages. Servers • Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers • We added 8 new servers!



Update 1.2





• Fix for crash caused most commonly occurring on servers experiencing lag. This crash would happen most often when claiming a new city when playing in a region. • Fix for server select dialog not appearing on start-up if the server the player was last on is not available. • Disabled Cheetah speed. Cheetah speed is is now the same as llama speed. • Crash fix for finding closest points. • Crash fixes in transport and pedestrian code. • A fix cities having processing problems associated with helicopters.