Simcity to receive eagerly awaited 2.0 Patch

The developers at Maxis have been working away at fixing up some of the plethora of problems with Simcity still present after their last round of patches brought the game version up to v1.8.

The new 2.0 patch will be released on April 22nd at 1pm PST. Maxis has stated that the servers will be down for a few hours while the patch is deployed.

The patch contains the following fixes and changes:

What’s New

• Mayors Mansion: Mayors will now drive their fancy cars to work. Mayors will take their helicopter, limo, or sports car if the modules are present.
• HUD: Now color-corrects when in a colorblind mode.
• Data map: Data maps show the filtered color when a color filter is enabled (unless in a colorblind mode)

Fixes and Updates

• Cities not Processing: Mitigates some of the issues that were causing cities not to process. We are continuing to work on and improve this issue.
• Region Filters: Now sorts regions with available cities to the top
• Invitations: Invitations to join a region should be sent and received more quickly.
• Tourism: Fixes for unexplained fluctuation of tourists. Tourists more smartly counted on transit.
- Cruise ships are now more effective at bringing medium and high wealth tourists in coastal cities.
- New tourists will now decide to come into a city once leaving tourists reach train stations, bus depots, or cruise ship docs instead of waiting for those tourists to go out to the region first.
- This change will reduce the downtime of tourist buildings.
• Casinos: Casinos tuned so that Gambling will be a more profitable specialty. Players can bulldoze and replace existing casinos to see effects of tuning.
- The larger casinos now invite more tourists into the city which helps keep them full.
- Note that existing casinos will need to be replaced to take advantage of this change.
• More Casinos: Raised module limit on Sci-Fi and Sleek Casinos to 6 modules.
• Region Play: Cash gifts can now be received in a bankrupt city.
• Education: Fixed school buses getting stuck at the high school. Existing Schools will fix themselves.
• Education: Fixed school buses picking up students at neighboring cities that didn’t have school bus stops.
• Education: Fix to more accurately track regional student population.
• Education: Fix where kids leaving the school bus stop would teleport to the nearest pedestrian path instead of walking directly into the school.
• Education: University wings now give the proper bonus.
• Recycling: Fix for the Recycling Center where it would sometimes stop working, recycling services will visit other cities.
• Air pollution: Fixed issue where air pollution would appear to come from nowhere. Fix issues where your regional air pollution would be reflected back into your box for a double penalty.
• Fire Service: Fire Trucks don’t clump, dispatch to fires more efficiently.
• Water: Water pumps are now capable of pumping water from rivers at a larger radius so they can take better advantage of the water table in a city.
• Disasters: Cooldown for random disasters: Some players were getting hit too frequently with random disasters, this introduces a cooldown where no random disasters will occur.
• Trade: Fix for trade ports that suddenly stop shipping.
• Transit: Street Cars and Buses go to high volume stops first.
• Transit: A city with residents and public transit will now provide the accurate amount of workers and shoppers to its neighbors.
• Transit: A transit vehicle stuck in a pick-up or drop off loop will now go back to a garage instead of trying to pick up more people.
- Transit vehicles should recover automatically after the update. If players want to force the recovery, turn off the stops that are having looping issues, wait a few game hours, then turn them back on.
• Transit: Neighbors buses will now come in lower numbers into the city and do a better job at picking up local passengers first.
• Residential Tuning: Residential-only cities have failure state.
- Buildings are prevented from going up in density when they don’t have power or water.
- The amount of happiness gained from low taxes, police, fire, and health outreach has been lowered.
- Fixed some cases where buildings would not go abandoned when they should have.
- Higher density residential buildings are no longer blocked from going abandoned due to not having enough money.
- Happiness from low taxes does not double up every time it is given.
- Losing happiness due to not having a job is more impactful.
• Budgets: Fixed bug that prevented systems like fire, abandonment, garbage, and sewage from turning on when they were supposed to.
• Audio: Fixes issue where audio will stop working after creating a large city or where phantom audio sounds play in a city.
• Demolish: Fixes issue that occurred when players demolished buildings that had service vehicles, delivery vehicles, or agents out in the city or region. Previously, the agents would be in a state of limbo and would not recover when new buildings of that type were placed. This will no longer happen.

Hopefully this will quell the large amount of disquiet surrounding the game's less than perfect state of release, lets just hope that this is a fully fledged effort to get the game working right, and not just an assemblage of fixes that merely tinker around the edges of a fairly broken game.

Simcity Social to be shut down June 14

Playfish, the developer behind most of EA's facebook titles, such as The Sims Social, Pet Society, and JetSet Secrets, has announced that SimCity Social will be shut down on June 14, 2013.

The other aforemention titles will also be getting the axe, along with EA Sports titles NFL Madden Superstars, and NHL Superstars. The explanation offered by community representative, Bevypoo, is "so we can reallocate development resources to other titles that we hope you’ll have just as much fun playing"

Playfish has also reminded players to spend their virtual currency before the end date, as it will disappear along with the game. And no, you cant get a refund.

It is sad to see Simcity Social shut down after barely a year of life. It possessed a great variety in buildings and quality artwork, for a facebook game, and although the game mechanics were quite simple, and there wasnt a huge amount of depth in the gameplay, it was updated regularly with new challenges and content. Despite that, it doesn't seem to have rung true with users. The monthly active user figures (MAU) have plummeted from a high of 15.3 million MAU in August 2012, to a relatively paltry 1.6 million MAU in March 2013. While 1.6 million MAU would be a figure that some smaller facebook developers could only dream of obtaining, for a gaming powerhouse like EA, it is probably well below their targets, and so instead of trying to salvage it, they're pulling the plug.

With Zynga's shutdown of titles in their stables in the last few months, perhaps this is signalling a change in the casual gaming market? Now that the novelty factor has worn off of this sort of gaming, perhaps we're seeing people less willing to spend time, and money, on these games? Time will tell.

Spotlight: Banished

Banished is a new game in development by indie studio Shining Rock Software. Its being created by just one guy, on his own. Its a big task to create any game of this scope and with a depth and complexity to keep seasoned sim-ers back for more, and yet have enough charm and a not too steep lurning curve too turn away the more casual gamer. So far, this game is looking like its right on the ball.

The game involves building a small agrarian community, and building it up towards a large, bustling medieval town. Residents can be assigned jobs, such as a farmer, woodcutter, blacksmith or stonecutter. You must support your population through hunting, gathering, fishing, agriculture, and barter, and most activities make you consider balancing getting enough resources versus sustainable practices. Do your woodcutters cut down forests and possibly destroy the habitats of animals you need to hunt, or do you use foresters to sustainably manage forestry, by cutting down and replanting trees? Do your miners forage for ore on the surface, or dig deep into the earth and build a mine, rendering that land unable to be used for anything else? It looks like it is adaptable to a variety of play styles and scenarios.

We'll be following the development progress of this game in future updates, but make sure you check out the developer's blog at:

http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/

It contains quite in depth posts about various facets of development and gives you an insight into the kind of issues and challenges presented by building a game of this type. Its fascinatingly candid and an excellent read. Be sure to check out the videos below too.

Check out the trailer based on the Alpha build:

And there is also a short explanation of the gameplay:

Simcity for Mac gets a release date

EA has announced that the Mac version of Simcity will be released on June 12, 2013. People who have purchased the PC version are automatically entitled to the Mac version through their origin account. It also seems that Mac and PC players can mix in the same region, and that cities created in the PC version can be opened in the Mac version.

Lets hope that the launch issues that plagued the PC version dont appear again when the Mac version launches, and that it doesnt introduce more problems for the existing PC playerbase as well with the extra Mac users coming into the game and presumably playing on the same servers.

Link: Simcity MAC release date and FAQ