Cities XL Plantinum

So, I was itching for a good city sim and saw this on sale at Steam last week for $10.

I didn't start this thread to brag, but is this game too easy?

It's just a directed hand holding session. Build a road, city hall and utilities and then just build housing and jobs for skilled and unskilled workers en mass. Rinse and repeat until you get to a 5,000 population, where a few more buildings become unlocked.

With $500K to spend, it's almost impossible to fail. And because the "big" buildings stay locked until you reach population (and income) milestones, there is no opportunity to over extend yourself.

Kind of like playing on a swing with a helmet and knee pads.

There's no humor in the game (except for a silly tutorial), and it feels lifeless.

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I always preferred setting myself goals and limitations in city sims. There's no good reason after all to play the vanilla game if you don't want to. Play it however you prefer. And if you haven't tried them yet, take a look at all the mods that add to its complexity.

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Borg999

Join Date 02/2006

+59

Quoting Glazunov1,

reply 1

Thanks Glazunov1, I'll try the mods.

Just wondering. How complex are the underlying mechanics?

For example, I built a factory right next to a farm, yet the farm suffered no ill-effects, and intermingled commercial, residential and industrial zones as well as put skilled and unskilled worker housing right next to each other and the only warning message I got was workers were have a hard time moving into the city.

In Simcity, doing those kind of things would make people move out of the city.

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I find the mechanics you mention lack that great degree of detail of oldtime, non-online SimCity, but the game does have some substitutes that are pretty decent. (One of the mods, as I recall, Crime and Leisure, adds and ramps up crime for underfunded areas, and there's a NEXL mod that supplies quadbikes, pedipaths, waterways, trams, and ferries.) It's in any case better than any of the current city sim opposition out there, but again: the key lies in the mods. The game's bland and vanilla without them.

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