1. oldbrokenlink

   9

   i own and play just about every city sims/builders that is out there
   
   this is great game, loads of fun, runs great, have played it for hundreds of hours.
   
   if you go to xlnation.net you will find hundreds of mods for it, everything imaginable and a very active community over 40,000 members!
   
   there is no serious memory leak or programming issue like some people are posting. what issue that people are having is that the game allows you to build huge i mean huge cities, ive seen some with population over 90M and basically they do not set limits other than the hardware you have. so as you add more and more builds and roads and the cities get larger and more complex sure its going to use more and more memory until you run out of memory and until your cpu/gpu cant handle the size of the cities and complexity you are building. It's hard to put in words just large and complex your cities can get, they can look so real that you can't distinguish screenshots from real world images of some of the worlds largest cities. in fact i cant think of a real world single city that has a population of over 90M. so what you have a people with low end hardware trying to build cities they can't support. and since its a 32-bit application, like most games, the cities can only get so large and complex before you hit the 2-3gb limit that windows imposes. the trick is to balance city size and complexity and not try to build cities that don't make sense and would not be practical even in real life.
   
   so yes the game is a 32-bit game with the game logic running in a single thread, but most other games out there have the same limitations. the only difference between those games and this game is that this game does not impose limits on you like simcity or tropico or anno does. also this games lets u pack the density of the cities to real world levels and beyond. in this way its more a city builder than a sim i would say.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 0 users said Yes.
2. ghaaa

   8

   It is all true that cities Xl have memory leaks and only use a single core. However, I have to disagree with negative opinions posted here. Despite the problems the game has almost cult-like following and there are many reasons for that. Pros:
   - Vibrant online community (XlNation.net) provides hundreds of add-ons, mods and fixes
   - Memory leak issue is simply circumvented by periodic restarts of the game (go back to the menu and load the city again)
   - I have built cities of up to 2.5 million using this simple trick.
   - While it only uses a single core, my Athlon II X4 635, 4gb RAM, HD 7750, which is an economy rig handles it just fine with medium-high details.
   - nice and complex simulation of traffic, quality of life and transport
   - you can build truly beautiful stuff:
   http://xlnation.net/content/new-coast-city
   http://xlnation.net/content/tayra
   http://xlnation.net/content/seaside-city
   http://xlnation.net/content/scalabis
   
   Here is an example of a city with 15,000,000 inhabitants built despite the memory leak issue:
   http://xlnation.net/content/empire-jet-city
   
   Cons:
   - memory leak
   - uses a single core
   - no feature of filling a zone with single type of a building… Collapse

   • Helpful? 3 of 5 users said Yes.
3. Zardoz998

   5

   Graphically excellent. Easy to learn. Manual is appalling for a game where you need to understand what's going on inside the system to do well. Game soon becomes repetitive and limited. The problem is that the internal systems are fairly basic. This is NOT Sim City. If Sim City is champagne, this is beer in a pretty package. Fun for an evening or two, but no more than that.… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 1 users said Yes.
4. i_like_games

   0

   I am brand new to the Cities XL franchise. I was interested in the prior iterations but had seen there were some kinks, but when I saw this on Steam I was quite interested and figured that this new version must be a good update.
   This game has SOOOO much potential, but it is broken. i know people have "work arounds" but they don't always help. Sometimes the building descriptions are just a code, often times special buildings don't do anything. And it lags up super bad (probably the notorious memory leak). It appears that the new revisions are essentially expansion packs on the old game (i.e. new buildings). To sum it up: great idea, missed potential, broken game.… Expand

   • Helpful? 5 of 5 users said Yes.

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