I learned several ways to not make a city.
Same here
I got my beta key quite late so I had only 4 hours to play. With my crappy ISP time outs, that gave 3 full 1 hour long sessions. I'm absolutely ecstatic. When SimCity started for the 1st time, I screamed in front of my screen, stupid right?
I find the game is really very good. There are a few kinks to iron here and there until release (or more probably shortly after). But I was really impressed, and the more I played, the more I was impressed in fact. There are loads of layers of data and it feels pretty deep and complex, which is very good for a simulation game. But it's never too much either. Well, I just can't wait SimCity is released, and I'll happily skip TS3 University for this game. I've been waiting this day for 7 years!
Does anyone know how heavy the game is on lower end computers? Did you have to have a pretty good PC to play it?
So my old PC qualifies as benchmark for this (short specs = old 2 cores @2,4gh CPU from 2007 / 4gb or RAM / nvidia GT240). The gameplay was quite smooth in fact, but my "city" always remained rather smallish too. I suspect that I won't be able to play very dense ones nor huge regions maybe. The graphics were less then stellar, but my GPU is more than crappy too, so no miracle here! I didn't spend any time tweaking the settings either, but I think I could have improved the look of my game if I had had a bit more time. The color filters seam to be helpful for this.
My only real problem was regular disconnect from internet during the 1st hour of play. After everything was fine for the 3 next hours. I don't really know if the problem was on my side or on the server's side. But I fear that the main annoyance will be those time outs and disconnections. The joy of the always on