It’s time to wrap up SimCity, Review in Progress and produce a full review either today or tomorrow. For now though, I want to sum up a few more details here first.

Land of Bud has stalled at 60k residents due to a lack of space and some bad design decisions by me. This is inspiring to a degree, in that it makes me want to start again and try to do better but it’s also frustrating to look at all of that land over my borders that I can’t touch. The small city sizes are a really frustrating element to the game. I’ve run out of places to place the 2.6 million garbage dumps and sewage plants that the city needs, being forced to bulldoze a profit-making building to make way for waste.

I would like to be able to talk to you about disasters, but I haven’t seen any yet. I’ve made a bunch of towns, even naming one Doomsday to try and attract the right sort of attention but I’ve seen no monsters, no tornadoes, no nothing. Even the buttons on the dash to use them are locked out, presumably until you’ve experienced them naturally during the course of play. The worst “disaster” I’ve seen is a pyromaniac named HazMat, running around setting my whole town on fire while my police politely ignore him.

SimCity

I was almost a year into running Land of Bud before I noticed I had a rail line running through my zone. I placed a rail station near my gambling house, reopened the gambling house, and now watch $24k roll in daily. I eventually built an airport in a then-empty stretch of land, in preparation for building my expo center. Once the center was up and connected via large avenues to the airport, town proper and the train station, I decided to hold a sporting event. It cost me $30k to start, but quickly built to a $60k profit before I had power outage.

SimCity

The damned expo center drew too much power for my two wind turbine fields to manage, so by the time I got around to trying again, I had another huge turbine field nearby as well as an upgraded solar power plant just for the expo center. I wasn’t about to have that happen again, and now I’m producing about 100 MW more power than I need. Overkill? Maybe, but that $160k+ profit from the sporting event made up for it.

With the game’s servers seeming to have stabilized somewhat, I hope to render a full verdict soon.

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