WEBnME2

CitiesXL 2012 Review

Webnme2 — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:54:01 +0000

Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Cities XL 2012 Review

More than a decade ago Maxis churned out the last version of Sim City. As time passed and technology progressed, the game gradually slipped from sight, but enthusiasts for city simulations remained hungry for something new and hopefully better. In 2009 Monte Cristo entered the stage with its own city simulation game, CitiesXL. The initial development of such a complex game in a couple of years was pretty impressive to say the least. Since then Focus Home Entertainment has acquired the franchise and trotted out two versions. And a supportive modding community has developed a number of game modifications that are pretty awesome.

A few months ago a friend showed me a screenshot from CitiesXL 2011 and that got me interested as an old Sim City player. I learned that CitiesXL 2012 had been released and snagged a copy to play after checking out the game trailer (below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDEggLuDlpw

Perhaps the best part of the game is the artwork. The game’s graphics are pretty spectacular and there is a huge amount of attention to detail adding to realism. And with the recent version of CitiesXL, the number of buildings has increased so that there is sufficient diversity of structures to give an impression of a real city. That said there are some problems with scale with the graphics. For example, trucks tend to be twice as wide as cars, not all structures have the same height per story, and dump trucks in the recycling area are positively huge compared to the street lanes.

The game also includes some fun features like the ability to click on a vehicle and follow it through the city giving you the ability to spot traffic problems up close and to get the feel of a drive through. The game also allows you to switch from an overhead planning view to an in-city camera view that allows you to see the city from various perspectives and enjoy the artwork.

It comes with an impressive array of data map overlays that can help a city planner assess how well the city is developing, where weaknesses are, whether citizens are happy, whether business is thriving, and how the environment is doing. With these tools it is easy to spot problems and figure out corrective actions to improve the city.

Everyone’s learning curve is different, but for me I thought that the learning curve was a tad on the long side because the tutorial really didn’t have the depth needed to teach the game and tended to get sluggishly slow then fail completely when I got ahead of it. The game manual was not even linked to the interface and was instead buried in installed files, so I missed it. Without an active help area in the game, it became necessary to learn either from trial and error or to go seek out information from fan web sites.

The user-interface has a number of problems that are annoying. Serious city simulation gamers will want to have a look at the user-interface mod developed by XL Nation as a replacement for the one provided with the game.

The game itself has several areas that need improvement, which are addressed in the Quibble-Critique section of this review. Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming is that the game becomes progressively more sluggish the longer it is played requiring the player to have to exit and restart the game after an hour or two to regain the ease of use that makes it enjoyable to play. Hopefully these and other issues in the game will be addressed in a future release. It will be interesting to see whether CitiesXl can go head-to-head with the next release of Sim City, which is likely to be in 2013.

Despite the shortcomings, I did find that it was a lot of fun to use the game to build cities. (Those cities are documented in the links above and below the article) After some practice and false starts, I was able to build working cities that ended up being pretty enjoyable.

After that I started looking around and found a lot more information about the game on the web including some terrific fan sites that are listed in the Reference section of this article. In particular the mods available for this game are fantastic and the community of players who have posted helpful information in forums and wikis is outstanding. Without the modding community, the game probably would only be of average quality. The mods available ratchet it up a notch and give it that extra boost that really makes it worthwhile.

CitiesXL 2012

CitiesXL 2012 Basics

Webnme2 — Tue, 08 May 2012 04:45:27 +0000

Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Cities XL 2012 Basics

This section of my review is intended to provide you with some basic information about what the various screens in the game do. Please click on an image to see the full sized version.

If you would like to read a beginner’s guide to the game, I highly recommend the Cities XL Wiki Beginner’s Guide.

Opening Screen

Opening screen

Picking a City

This screen allows you to pick an existing city or create a new city. It is faster to click the yellowed-in button at the top to select a city to edit than to try to spin the globe and find a city. You can use the map filters to find a level of difficulty and resources that match the city you would like to build.

City Screen

This image is an attempt to label all the different screen parts by what they do for you. Below is an image with some addition notations on controls:

Supply and Demand Button

Transportation Management Button

Main Menu Example – Toggle Control for Individual Buildings/Zones

Data Map Examples

Individual Building Data

CitiesXL 2012

CitiesXL 2012 Game Play

Webnme2 — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:53:41 +0000

Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Cities XL 2012 Game Play

For those that have been playing the various versions of Cities XL for the past few years, this is old news; but for new players be aware that this game operates with a different focus and a different set of assumptions than the Sim City series.

The focus of the game is primarily on economics. In the end, it is all about production, employment, and resources (and their use/trading). Like it or not, you’ll find that you have to keep a constant eye on the trade panel and adjust your trades frequently to maximize the profitability of your city’s commodities.

Illustration of the CitiesXL 2012 Trade Panel

There seem to be some core assumptions that rule the game. After playing for many days and building several cities, I would have to guess that these assumptions (below) must be in operation. There may have been other or different assumptions in reality, but these are what appear to be ruling the game at least in my limited experience:

City growth should be slow, balanced, and careful — it is very difficult to layout a transportation network and zoning in advance even if you have developed a small city and banked a lot of cash reserves because your operating costs will likely result in a negative cash flow and prevent you from trading with other cities until that is corrected
Cities are rarely self-sufficient and so trade is necessary — if you plan on creating a huge city this is even more essential because there will always be some resource in short supply unless you make your own maps
Cities need to be developed in parallel with each other and develop trade relationships as soon as possible — you can trade with Omnicorp, but your income will be less than trading with other cities
Players will only play for an hour or two at a time — the game simply becomes sluggish and non-responsive if you play longer, so you will need to stop and restart for longer sessions
The player community will make mods to correct problems — it seems that the basic game is pretty rough around the edges and the only way to get things running nicely is to install mods to improve things like the user interface, add additional transportation capabilities, improve the selection of highways, and so on. (I recommend a look at the mods at XL Nation starting with the User Interface Mod for anyone who is serious about making super-sized cities)

CitiesXL 2012

CitiesXL 2012 Tips and Thoughts

Webnme2 — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:50:13 +0000

Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Cities XL 2012 Tips and Thoughts

The game is fairly complex and there are whole wikis and forums devoted to the details of the game. The possibilities of what you can do are pretty limitless and so is the advice on how to do it. So with that in mind, the following are some general tips for the new player. For more tips and how to details, please by all means search the web and hit the forums and wikis where a lot of great information is available.

Commodity Specialization and Production Boosters

If you specialize your city to produce a specific commodity like manufacturing, heavy industry, electricity, food, etc. you will start to make profits faster that will allow you to unlock and use two or three very important production booster buildings – storage, education, & research. You can nearly double production after adding these buildings to your map and increase profits dramatically.

Dead Zone

The closer you get to the center of the map the more difficult it will be to sustain freight or passenger routes to support commodities like offices, factories, etc. Anything that needs to be sustained by trade or which needs a connection to the rest of the world will work better closer to the edge of the map than at the center. You may find that the center of the map works fine initially, but as your traffic builds, your roads will become congested and may not provide adequate passenger and freight service to the center of the map. You may overcome this with expressways and freeways, but those are expensive to use.

Electricity

This is the one commodity that does not consume passenger or freight resources although it does pollute city-wide. If you have limited freight and passenger connections available to your city, this may be a commodity to build to maximum production to increase revenue. Like other commodities you can progress through better capabilities, add the related commercial building, the eduction building and the research building to increase production and profit.

Farms

In one word – cheat. The profitability of farms is tied to proximity to silos and fertilizer facilities. If you use the ratio provided in the game you won’t have enough to service all of your farms and so many of them will fail. The solution is to use the expert mode/unlock all buildings to place extra silos and fertilizer plants so that they can service all of your farms.

Unlike Sim City where highways were a no-no, these farms require adequate freight services that in turn require at least small or large avenues. And they have to have extra labor in close proximity. So you have to have a road network that will support freight and population running through your farms.

Fuel

Fuel, road connections, and water have to be built in areas highlighted a different color on the map. Stop the game using the speed and stop control before placing your fuel farms. This will allow you to place several of them close together. Otherwise you will only be able to place a few on the map because with each placement while the game is running the area available for a new fuel farm decreases markedly.

Leisure Buildings and Services

Depending on your goal for your city, the use of leisure services may not be necessary at all. My city of Hanse with a population of over 2 million has none and still supports all classes of citizens, offices, high tech, and has reasonable citizen satisfaction.

Leisure buildings can increase citizen satisfaction and accelerate the growth of population. So, if you want to use them you can.

They are expensive and so I would advise placing them only where you need them to support an area of the city. Their effect is primarily at the neighborhood level with a small radius of effect. (The radius is a little large if placed on larger roads) The effect can be magnified by adding more leisure services of different types to an area. Having multiple instances of the same leisure service right next to each other will not add any value and should be avoided unless you simply want the aesthetic effect.

Money and Cash Flow

Build slowly at the beginning and wait until you have a nice cash flow before starting any major improvements, adding major roads, adding utilities, and so on. Once you get a nice amount of say 50,000 to 100,000 income; let the game run without doing anything else for awhile. This will allow you to accumulate a lot of cash reserves that you can use to pay for improvements, for terra-forming, and for your pet projects.

Having a lot of cash on hand (over 500,000,000) will assure that if you get into a pinch with cash flow going negative that you have enough resources to build more of any commodity or zone type that you want, improve your transportation, re-arrange areas of your city that are a problem and so on. If you can make improvements fast enough that improve profits, you can escape the negative cash flow and still have funds available for big projects.

Trades with other cities are less expensive than producing a commodity and far less expensive than buying from Omnicorp. So the sooner you can trade with other cities the better your profit margin will be.

Pollution

Don’t worry to much about the ambient pollution across the map unless you have a huge amount of heavy industry and manufacturing. The city can accept a small amount of this pollution without too much impact. If it gets to be too much, however, you may find that the quality of life has degraded to the point where the city no longer supports offices, high tech, or the elite class of citizens. This suggests that you should have a supporting city for any major pollution generator that is geared toward lower classes of citizens and which purchases commodities like offices, high tech, and the like from other cities.

Noise pollution can be a factor as well. The wooded parks help reduce noise pollution from traffic. However there is not much you can do with noise pollution from airports, wind power generation, and other noise polluters so you will want to locate them in areas away from any commodity or population group where quality of life is important. I like to put them in a corner with waste recycling and industrial zones where the impact is minimal.

Road Connections

Start out with only a minimum number of road connections and build a starter city some distance in from the edge. Plan on wiping this area out later when you have sufficient capital to really build. Once you do, delete the road connections that you have, wait for the purple areas to show up again, and then stop the game using the speed and stop control at the top. Now you can build as many road connections as you would like around the edge of your map. The reason for doing this later and with the map stopped is that if the gaming is running each time you open a connection the purple area will diminish around your connection resulting in fewer places to locate a road connection. In the stopped state, you can put connections as close to each other as you please.

Taxes

You can adjust the tax rate on population and commodities as you wish. The game starts with population being taxed at 15% and commodities being taxed at 25%.

While you are building you can increase the tax on commodities like heavy industry and manufacturing a little, but be careful or you will stifle growth. Unskilled citizens seem to not react much to tax increases and will continue to come even with a tax rate of 28%. Tax rates become more important to whether citizens will come to your city the higher the class level of the citizen, so the game dictates a tax structure that has the poorest paying the highest rate.

It is easier to throttle taxes back as the city grows and has a lot of revenue than to raise taxes when you are in a pinch.

Terraforming

You can get some minor free terraforming by placing roads next to each other and by using wooded parks to flatten areas near roads. This is not adequate for large terrain problems but can help in small areas.

Terraforming should be done before you lay subways. Subways are glitched in that if a line is broken, it cannot be fixed. You have to take out the subway and do it over.

Transportation Networks

Plan ahead as you build. It is okay to start with a small city to build up resources and later wipe it out to build a more desirable and better planned city, but this may not suit your tastes. If you want to progress without having to go back and bulldoze your way to freedom, make sure to allow room for larger expressways and highways later in the development of your city.

Traffic congestion around offices and residential areas is far less when you use the paved road with lights. This is used only by local traffic and not as a through-way. Surround your building areas with these roads and use them to connect to larger roads to minimize congestion.

Intersections cause traffic congestion. So when you build expressways, it may help to have feeder roads along the expressway that handle the smaller roads going into office, tech, and residential areas. This will allow traffic on your high volume roads to move faster and get to their destinations easier as well as assuring that you have adequate passenger and freight capacity.

You may also want to have parallel one-way roads of up to four lanes each to manage traffic.

You can build a huge city without the most expensive highways. If you have a large number of well planned avenues and expressways, you can do fairly well. It seems to me that the primary utility to the freeways is to open a larger amount of trade with neighboring cities, but that comes at a high cost and it can be avoided by having more expressway connections.

Water Resources

Just like road connections, you will do better to stop the game and build as many water pumps as you want. With the game stopped you can plop down several right next to each other and really boost water production. Otherwise if the game is running you may only be able to place a very few of them before the water source area disappears. Each pump creates a water token, so this is good for trade as well as assuring you have sufficient water resources for your city.

As you add water towers (pumps) you will unlock water storage and then as you place water storage, you will be able to unlock water purification, both of which will boost production. After this you can unlock the water commercial building, the education building, and the research facility to really boost production.

CitiesXL 2012

CItiesXL 2012 Quibbles – Critique

Webnme2 — Tue, 08 May 2012 02:51:41 +0000

Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012 Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Cities XL 2012 Quibbles – Critique

Awards

Award notices are outrageously large and annoying – a small notification screen would be fine, but full screen at the top is silly.
Award notices appear under open control panels such that you have to quickly cancel what you were doing to see them or learn to ignore them.

Back Button

The back button takes you out of your game. If your game has become sluggish, using this button can result in a game freeze where it becomes necessary to alt-tab out and then use Task Manager to kill the process.

Blueprints/Mega-structures

Some of the mega-structures are not to the same scale and look pretty ridiculous.
Some mega-structures will glitch and refuse to build completely.
Takes a ridiculous amount of time to complete a mega-structure.
Resources required are pretty ridiculous too. They don’t appear to be very realistic; e.g. 80 office tokens (requires a small city dedicated to the project) to start a building that in reality was designed in a small workshop.

Alcatraz - Game says it is complete, but it always shows an unfinished under construction state.

Example of a megastructure that is really glitched - the screen for building the megastructure is out of range to use and the structure could not be completed

Buildings

Some buildings will pop-up in the Executive zone and others that display an icon that indicates that the building isn’t connected to a road. This happens despite using the zoning tool that automatically attaches lots to a road.

Example of a building that refuses to connect to a road. Note that it is surrounded on all four sides with a road.

Bus and Metro HQ

Both the bus and metro headquarters use a separate budget. If you move the buildings several times as your city is built, they will run out of money no matter how much money your city has and you will get an error notice stating that there isn’t enough money for the buildings. This can basically kill all of your bus and subway lines. You can get a fix via a mod, but this is a glaring fault with the basic game.

Economy

Economy may be more realistic with multiple factors, but there are too many dependency chains for the game to be truly enjoyable. At first you can experience growth and profit, but as a city grows, it becomes overwhelming complex to micro-manage and the AI will cause you to lose money if you respond to all of the cues to add services.
For those who just want to make a nice looking city for artistic purposes, the economy can definitely be a hindrance.
It seems to me that the only way to create a large city without taking an unholy amount of time is to build up a lot of cash reserves and take losses while population grows and productivity catches-up. It may be fun to build one city the slow way, but after that it is tedium when what you want to do is get to a city that looks a particular way.

Game Manual

Unless you go looking to see what files were installed by the game, you won’t know that the install included a game manual. There isn’t any link to it within the game itself.
It probably would have been better to have had an online manual linked from within the game that is constantly updated.

Game Saves

As soon as you bring up a city, the game immediately does an auto-save. This ought to be completely unnecessary and certainly is an annoyance that delays you getting down to business.
The planet view always shows the opposite side of the globe from your cities.
Once you select a city, the game will start where you left off. You can’t pick which save to use as a starting point. The assumption that you will always want to start from the same point is flawed. There should be an ability to pick the save you are going to use.
Problems with going back to an earlier save. Trade data is unchanged so what you get is not what you saved.
Also going back to an earlier save screws up the loading screen so that you no longer see your city’s development on a map and instead just get a
boring picture of a Japanese city.

General

No grid overlay lines to help with laying out straight roads and zoning
Bulldozing doesn’t always work. Sometimes it is necessary to quit and restart to get it going
Planning a city is difficult because you can’t really see terrain unless you are in terraforming mode – there is no overlay to use when laying highways and subways

Missing

No railroads
No radio, television, or internet for city as part of entertainment/leisure activity
No boats or ships show up on water areas with the installation of marinas and docs
No churches other than landmarks, which are limited in number

Sluggish Performance

After an hour or more of playing the game often becomes sluggish and eventually non-responsive.
Game requires frequent stops and restarts to be able to do anything useful.
Fly-through doesn’t work when there is any complexity – becomes extremely slow and eventually non-responsive.

Start-up Sequence

Poor quality cinematic presentation
Terrible music that is annoying – no option to turn off music when starting game other than muting speakers before starting to play.

Subway/Metro

Once a subway line is laid, there is no way to extend it by adding more stations or to fill in the line with new stations. You must kill the line and start over.
Subways apparently have to be linear and not a loop. Even on terra-formed flat land with gentle curves, I couldn’t create a loop.
Subways are tediously difficult to build – it can take an hour or so to lay a line during which progress is constantly interrupted by needless automatic game saves.
The shift key is used for elevation, but there is no way for you to see how the elevation is working or whether you have an up or down slope unless you make a huge slope that isn’t useful.
Building subways on irregular terrain is exceedingly painful and slow. It is very hard to plan a subway line when you can’t link it to stations that you already have built due to hills.
If you have decorated land, you can’t put in a station without destroying the decorated area; e.g. wooded park. This makes it hard to maintain a nice looking city with parks for better quality of life and forces you to put in stations ahead of time without knowing if the location will work.
Subways do not seem to work well if the road network is even marginally decent. Most of the time they are an added expense without much benefit.

Example of subway system that is for the most part always empty - it should have relieved traffic, but was only an added expense.

Terraforming

Limited to existing land mass – no way to alter ratio of water to land or to create more/less water area.

Trade

Use of tokens instead of cash makes it hard to understand trades — you shouldn’t have to do a web search to find a conversion table on a Wiki site. This should be clear in the game. Better yet, the trades should be in cash and not an intermediate medium.
Not all trades result in income. You would think that if you sell items, you should get something back. However, selling some items will prompt a message that it costs x tokens to sell and that your trade of y has been reduced by z tokens. That is simply strange and makes trading a pain.
The trading board may have been created as it was for good reason, but it is often confusing to use. A balance sheet would be easier to understand.
The way plus and minus signs are used sometimes seems to be backwards.
If you make a mistake and go over your allocation of tokens in a trade, the board will automatically cancel another trade that you have made instead of warning or prompting you that you don’t have enough tokens, which cause a lot of time to be wasted trying to put things right.
Trades with other cities are made difficult and unreliable because the AI will change what is available to trade, even if you do nothing except sit back and watch your city after it is a point where the population is stable and the income is stable. The AI will then give a confusing message that only one token is available instead of saying your are short a token. When you look at the board, you’ll find the trade was cancelled and the partner city is now short whatever commodity was involved and your city has lost income. It would be better for game play to simply reduce the trade by one token instead of cancelling 25, 50, or 100 tokens at a time. This makes it impossible to sell all of an excess commodity unless you want to spend all of your time managing trades instead of building the city.
It also causes problems with trying to eliminate warning icons and fix problems. WIth holidays, you will get a warning icon if not all of the holidays are sold out. So you go trade and get your city down to zero surplus. Boom, the game says you have only one token even if you have a stable city and were just watching it without changing any resources. The city that depended on the trade is now short maybe 25, 50 or 100 as the rest of the trade is cancelled. Now you get more warnings than you had when you started. In short this is not fun. Ruins the game experience in my opinion.

Tutorial

The tutorials are sluggish and poor performers. This ought to be snappy, but it isn’t.
Uses linear logic and as a result the tutorial will fail if you get ahead of what is asking you to do. I gave up on the tutorial.
Tutorial wastes time with a lot of idiotic and annoying dialog. Maybe it was supposed to be cute, but in reality it is a detractor from game enjoyment.

User Interface

Can’t turn off icons on building statuses – this is important if you already have your F11 key assigned to a screen capture program and can’t use the in game screen-capture without a conflict.
Text names for items in your construction menu are too small to read with a high resolution monitor.
Descriptions of many items are truncated so that you can only see a few words – there is no way to see the rest of the text. This makes many descriptions in the game completely useless.
Controls require double-clicking to exit out of one thing to start another. If you click on a new action and haven’t cleared the previous action, nothing will change.

CitiesXL 2012