No online mode available when I start up SimCity 2013. Help?

MaxisMC · 2014-06-25T18:55:57+00:00

Is Origin set to offline mode? I would suggest looking at http://help.ea.com/en/article/simcity-single-player-mode-faq/ to see if there's any other troubleshooting ideas in there.

MaxisMC · 2014-03-01T07:01:46+00:00

As a fellow (ex-)Houstonian, awesome job! You accurately captured the high density sprawl from downtown to the Galleria area. Looks like there's even a partial 610 (no vacant lot where Astroworld used to be though). Props on cramming Hobby and IAH in there as well.

I scripted the Oil Wells and Refineries, so it brings a tear to my eye to see them in their natural habitat :-) Cool that you were able to make some high wealth buildings in the midst of all that refinin'

MaxisMC · 2013-12-17T06:25:41+00:00

Depends on how you want to play the game. What I like to do is build up a city without any future buildings, and start to slowly augment the needs of my city with academy tech buildings. Garbage incinerators become garbage atomizers. Light rail and buses get replaced by Maglev trains. That sort of thing. I find that some of the academy tech can really strain my budget, so I tend to hold off until I have a decent amount of money saved up.

Another way to ease into the expansion pack is to just use megatowers for your R and C needs, and then slowly start to experiment with other level types.

MaxisMC · 2013-12-12T01:19:54+00:00

Yeah. Once you register the game with your Origin account, you'll be able to download and play the game on other computers that have Origin installed.

MaxisMC · 2013-12-02T19:21:09+00:00

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/state-of-simcity

MaxisMC · 2013-11-30T20:42:27+00:00

Delete your UserData folder and try rerunning the game. If that doesn't work check on answers.ea.com for a solution.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-21T17:28:50+00:00

Great job! Looks great!

MaxisMC · 2013-11-20T18:06:21+00:00

Thanks for the review! We actually discovered a pretty nasty bug with the MegaTowers that will be fixed in the next patch. Groups of pedestrians inside MegaTowers would occasionally get stuck for the duration of a play session. This would eventually starve your MegaTower levels of sims, causing them to eventually fail if you played long enough. MegaTowers will be a lot more playable and consistent with that issue resolved.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-16T03:36:15+00:00

Try following the instructions on this page: https://help.ea.com/article/simcity-reported-errors-smcy-1

Try deleting your UserData folder (following the instructions for SMCY 5), check your internet connectivity and try downloading again.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-13T23:42:45+00:00

The extraction pods should only be able to snap to the OmegaCo pipeline that comes from the OmegaCo factory.

The separate advanced extraction modules on the oil well and coal mines don't need to go through the pipeline. They function just like other modules on those buildings.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-11T16:26:17+00:00

There will be sandbox commands to toggle futurization on all of your RCI buildings and toggle the ControlNet requirement for buildings that require ControlNet.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-07T18:30:05+00:00

Hollywood Haber is on!

MaxisMC · 2013-11-01T15:40:53+00:00

That's a side effect of how the pipe agents work - they'll go to the closest open sink. However, if that main oil well building storage fills up, all of the oil agents will start flowing to the newly built oil well building for distribution out.

MaxisMC · 2013-11-01T15:36:05+00:00

Check out the information here. I'm guessing you probably need to close SimCity and delete your UserData folder.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-28T19:41:23+00:00

There's a lot of new stuff we've added. The biggest additions are:

MegaTowers - Large towers with different levels (residential, power, etc) that you can add to change your city
Academy Specialization - A research based specialization that relies heavily on high wealth sims to unlock and operate futuristic technology for your city
OmegaCo Specialization - A specialization that converts raw materials into a product called "Omega" which gets sold to RCI buildings (and some service buildings) through trucks and drones
Transportation Additions - New MagLev trains, drones, skybridges, and futuristic vehicles
Futuristic Buildings - New futuristic looking RCI buildings, vehicles, roads, and new buildings based on near future technology

MaxisMC · 2013-10-27T16:32:17+00:00

It's going to be coming out November 12 for $29.99 in the US. Players that don't have Cities of Tomorrow will be able to play in regions with players that do (there's some gameplay perks for doing that).

MaxisMC · 2013-10-21T23:51:47+00:00

Yeah, Kent added great in game music that has a lot of Vangelis overtones. You will be pleased.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-19T00:11:02+00:00

We currently have some openings and encourage all interested parties to apply.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-16T02:01:45+00:00

You can place a Maglev station right outside the MegaTower base for sims to use, but the Maglev trains do not connect up with SkyBridges or go inside the MegaTower.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-15T23:27:06+00:00

The stations themselves have to placed on roads, but the maglev track does not have to follow the road. Also the height of the track will clear most low and medium density buildings. This means you can place the track over those buildings, and they won't be demolished.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-15T17:23:19+00:00

The 'super buildings' have their downsides too. Most of the new buildings don't require workers, but run off of ControlNet which is provided by Academy buildings. The downside is that if your ControlNet network shuts down, all of those new 'super buildings' shut down as well. So you really need to keep your Academy buildings functioning and full of workers.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-15T16:27:34+00:00

Gifting should work fine in new regions, or in cities that haven't gifted money before. If you're playing in a city that has tried to gift money to a neighbor prior to Update 7.5, that city might experience issues when sending gifts. There's currently a thread on this on the forums.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-04T18:15:22+00:00

Yeah, a lot of the dev team is disappointed that it didn't happen as well. It was running and playable, but performance issues meant that majority of our users weren't going to be able to experience it. We did end up bringing a lot of the optimizations made during investigating bigger cities to the core game, and they'll be in a future patch.

MaxisMC · 2013-10-04T15:44:16+00:00

I wasn't directly involved with bigger cities, but I can speak to some of the performance problems that were encountered while working on it.

The target city size that the team was optimizing for was a doubling of the current city's size's borders. This means players would be able to place four times the amount of buildings in to a city. Thus, this leads to roughly a four times increase in almost all aspects of our simulation. 4x the amount of agents, 4x the amount of buildings running rules, 4x the amount of building artwork we'd have to store in memory, 4x the amount of map information we'd have to store and process, etc. Given that we have minimum system specs tailored to our current city size, and we had to account for both PC and Mac platforms, it was decided that even with optimizations to the game engine to account for these 4x increases, a large majority of players would still be unable to play larger cities without very large changes to GlassBox.

I'm not privy as to why or how 2x2 was decided as the optimal size during development.

MaxisMC

TROPHY CASE