This is the latest official patch for Tilted Mill's SimCity: Societies.
New Features:
- Scenarios – Six scenarios have been added. In a scenario, you’re asked to meet the needs of a particular city. There, buildings might work slightly differently than you’re used to, certain events might be more or less rare, and it’s possible for you to lose your job as mayor. Scenarios range from relaxing, like A Land Apart (build a cosmopolitan, refined city where artists rub elbows with wealthy patrons) and Simplify, Simplify (with modest resources, create a refuge from hurry and waste) to very challenging, like Futurology (build a massive city to serve as the nerve center of a globe-spanning corporation). You can find them from the “Play SimCity Societies” screen by clicking the button with the red, orange, and blue arrows. The data files for these scenarios (in the Data/XMLDb/Scenarios folder) are highly commented to encourage modification, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with.
- Policies (Creative & Strategic modes) – At any one time, you can enact up to three special rules for your city, such as World Market Investment (your treasury fluctuates with the stock market), Universal Healthcare (your healthcare buildings are open to more visitors), or Indoctrination (your educational facilities keep Sims’ moods in line). The full list of Policies, and the requirements to enact them, are on the City Management Screen (press ‘I’, or click the little city to the left of the mini-map). Policies often work best with certain buildings or in certain societies.
- New Maintenance system (Strategic modes) – Buildings have a wider variety of maintenance costs. The new costs are more appropriate to the type of society you’re building, and present more strategic options. We’ve also grouped buildings into four maintenance categories (Government, Infrastructure, Social Services, and General), and you can control the budget for each category individually, weighing the risk of those buildings falling into disrepair against the cost of maintaining them. The sliders to control maintenance are on the City Management Screen.
- New Budget Graph (Creative & Strategic modes) – To help track your Simoleons, a larger and more detailed budget screen is available.
- New City Management Screen to help you organize all of the above in one location. Terrain leveling tool – you can now flatten terrain when a slope prevents you from building. Hover over the Bulldozer tool to reveal it.
- There’s a special reward for you if you can earn the Jack of all Trades trophy in Nightmare mode (check for ‘Monument of Mastery’ in your Decorations menu if you’ve already earned the trophy).
Gameplay Changes:
- Income has been rebalanced for both modes of play, further emphasizing the different ways in which different types of societies generate income. Buildings costs have been rebalanced as well.
- The effects of strategic game modes have been re-balanced to provide a better overall progression from one mode to the next.
- The Eyesore effect now exists on small buildings in a small radius for buildings like the Dive Bar, or Slum Apartments.
- Improved feedback for the Eyesore system.
- Increased diversity of UI changes based on city profile.
- Power plants can function when damaged (at reduced efficiency). This should prevent your city from shutting down due to a single maintenance failure.
Plus Improved Stability and Performance, and Other Fixes, Including:
- A limit of 1500 buildings per city, added to help prevent out-of-memory errors. This is enough to earn all the trophies and win all the scenarios, and most players never build a city that large. We don’t recommend doing so, but if you’d like to experiment with larger cities than that, and you don’t mind living on the edge, you can adjust this limit in DataXMLDbConstantsConstants.xml; search for ‘MaxLimit’ under the Building Constants heading.
- Fixed an infinite loop of social energy adjustments that could occur with certain uses of the Free Press ability.
- Added workarounds for some stability issues with newer ATI drivers.
- The follow cam now will track the correct Sim after a fight.
- Performance improvements to texture streaming.
- Additional help and tooltips added throughout the game.
- Fix for buildings under the influence of multiple effects not always updating properly when a building causing one of the effects is demolished.
- Fix for a crash if you have settings that are invalid for your current video card (because you had played the game with a different card and have swapped them without changing your settings).
- In that long fraction of a second between the intro movies and the main menu where there was nothing to do before, you can now admire a pretty loading screen.
- The building variant hotkey wasn’t playing nice with the Housing Project. Now it does.
- Fix for a circumstance in which deleting a save game would delete two instead.
- Fix for some stability issues with repeated settings changes.
- Fix for some situations where icons could hang out above deleted buildings indefinitely.
Known Issues:
- Game Crash: if user changes Graphics Quality from high to low during a Killer Storm on a vista machine with a Radeon HD3870 video card.
- Previously modded buildings lack the new maintenance functionality. These mods will need to be updated in order for the building maintenance to function properly. Two new files need to modified for proper maintenance: Maintenance Categories and Maintenance Groups.
- Please be sure you have all the latest Windows Updates and Service Packs, particularly if you’re running Vista. Microsoft has issued several fixes for bugs in Vista that can lead to excessive memory use or instability when running SimCity Societies.
- Some players with Radeon Crossfire video cards may experience flickering in the animations. Disabling “crossfire” when possible or running a single card corrects the issue.
