After spending all day yesterday trying to get onto the servers I finally got on, but it was well after midnight, EST. Having finally gotten in some actual, you know, playtime, the Review in Progress may continue.
I picked up where I left off on Land of Bud, and was immediately stumped as to what I was doing when I last got on. That’s the trouble with a game like this; if you don’t play regular it’s easy to log back in and have little to no idea where you left off.
I wanted to toy with two features today – building multiple cities in a region and specializing city. First off, I attempted to make Land of Bud into a trade town with a trade center, only to find that I had nothing to trade. I attempted to fix this with the founding of Greaseland.
Greaseland was designed to be an industrial city built around an oil well. The biggest problem with this plan was that there wasn’t a road connecting Land of Bud to Greaseland, meaning that I couldn’t gather the excess oil in my trade capital to sell. Feeling rather defeated I returned to Land of Bud. When I attempted to build a gambling area in Land of Bud to rival Las Vegas, one of SimCity’s smaller details bit me in the butt.
Do you see the issue? If you do, you’re a step ahead of me. I didn’t notice that I’d placed my gambling house along this “Vegas Strip” road I built in such a manner that visitors had to all the way trek up the road, turn around, and then finally arrive at my cheap casino. This made the gambling house really inefficient, to the point that I eventually just shut it down to save about 2, 000 simoleons an hour.
Another problem I found, one that I’m not sure about whether it’s a bug or an error on my part, arrived in the form of a riddle: How many fire trucks does it take to respond to a single fire call?
Apparently the answer is five. This was my entire city’s supply of firefighting power, two stations worth of trucks, travelling like a pack around town, fighting one fire at a time. Not the best use of the resources I had given them.
We’ll continue SimCity, RIP soon enough.
