ive sat through almost all their youtube videos now, (3 services & policies, 4/6 simulation and 4 infrastructure) and im really impressed. I'd still like to see bigger maps, but keeping the expansion aspect as it is. Each plot seems about 3/4 the size of SimCity, so 9 of those is a huge improvement... but it doesnt feel huge as such, 'sufficient' is probably fair.
I also wish that when it came to agriculture the tiles were much bigger, its fine having these 3 block deep plots for housing, but offices should be slightly bigger (4), industrial considerably bigger (5-6) and farming should be huge. Its understandable to a degree, but feels wrong. It wouldnt be so bad if it was like the forestry areas, with tree plots (ratio of trees to sawmills needs improving too) so you had lots of crop field plots for each farmhouse. A degree of 'clumping' would help, so it put a bunch of crop tiles together, animal pens together, orchards, forests etc. If its a small area then maybe it makes sense to diversify, but larger areas should seek to be together IMO.
One thing i did like from SC was the production lines, mining resources and then processing them into something. Ive not seen this yet, it seems like a more simplified solution of mine>produce>sell, with 'goods' being the output. I kinda liked the specialisations. Hopefully they add similar with district policies, so it adds things like a high-tech area.
Similar story for 'specialisations', the landmarks, casinos, colleges... i enjoyed those, it added challenges into the city to get the best out of them, unlock something new etc.
I havent seen any kind of planned feature list for it yet, is there any online aspect? CIM2 had multiplayer, you could work together to build transport networks, and work as rival companies iirc (only did coop). I'd love to do something similar here, multiplayer plots, and coop plots.
Also, is this intended to be EA, or a proper release (est dates?). Looks like it'd be a lot of fun already.
