SimCity Expansion 'Cities of Tomorrow' Coming November 12

Have they figured out how to build cities larger than a square kilometre in the future?

I don't remember being charged $39 to go 50 years into the future with SimCity 2000.

Welcome to the World of Tomorrooow!!

Be nice if they fixed the game and Origin first before selling an expansion. Oh, wait, this is EA we're on about isn't it?

Is that Morgan Freeman's voice in the video?

Looks like this one will be worth the £7.99

Which is why it'll be £29.99...

unless the city size is expanded sim city 5 will remain a joke. not enough room to build.

Dont waste your time with this junk.

Instead of fixing the issues with the glassbox 'fudge' engine, and increasing city size limits from village to town, they instead decide to....build taller buildings. :rolleyes:

EA are scum - don't support them.

Wait for Banished to come out - it'll wipe the flaw with EA and their failed attempt at SimCity.

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Have they figured out how to build cities larger than a square kilometre in the future?

It wont happen without a HUGE reduction in what the game engine can do - it was flawed from the drawing board and EA knew it.

Here's the issue. Everything runs as a glassbox entity. This is everything from every single vehicle, to every pedestrian, water, electricity, trash, poop, garbage, goods, raw materials, etc.

The issue is that even in a small city, you're at the limit of what a modern computer can handle. There's too many processes going on for it to keep up.

The plan was to offload this onto the servers, however that would cost MILLIONS a month to run - right now all EA's doing is running simple servers on Amazon EC2 instances in Ireland. Each of those is just sending and receiving a json array of your city data - no other processing happens, and they still struggle to keep up with the load.

So the only way the game can get bigger maps is to:

A) Recode glassbox from scratch (not gunnu happen - it's cost EA millions to make)
B) Remove items such as water, power, trash, etc so that they are either 'on' or 'off' - no 'pumping' around the city. This is the most plausible option and would only take a month or two to change, but would likely not be compatible with current cities.
C) Do nothing and piss off customers by insulting them with crappy DLC for a $70 game. This is what EA chose to do.

50 Years in the future my ass... Let them try to fix the game first. That will take them 50 years to begin with.. Damn wankers!

I'm enjoying the game, but I agree the city tiles are too small, and I miss subways.

Also, I think it's telling that EA is skimming 20% from donations to the Red Cross. It couldn't have cost them much to put that pack together-- it would have done great things for their tarnished image to funnel 100% to the Red Cross rather than showing their single minded focus on short term profit.