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Comment by ry0ohki | Hacker News Reader

Can someone confirm that the online mode offers nothing but DRM? The fact that they had to disable Cheetah speed makes me think they really are offloading some of the game simulations to the servers. It certainly feels like a much speedier game then SimCity 4 (when it works).

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Parts of the game logic are run on the server.

I don't expect more game companies to stay away from this; I expect them to do this a lot more for PC gaming. Probably not explicitly, but as much as people in /r/technology insists piracy doesn't matter, the companies continue to care. With online games, the need to worry about that largely evaporates.

Instead, I expect companies to put in proper rate limiting, fallbacks, and plan for the ability to spin up extra servers in case of high demand.

"Parts of the game logic are run on the server." By which they mean: storage of save-games, and resource trading with your city-neighbors.

That is ALL.

You are right.

People have managed to play trough server crashes without noticing. Only after they quit to region, it disconnects.

City is managed locally. Only region management save files are server side.

If I remember SimCity correctly, saved games are pretty important. One can only get so far without saving...

They are, but leaving the description at "parts of the game logic" could be taken to mean the servers are being used to offload compute-intensive tasks. Centralization for the sake of performance is understandable, but not allowing offline saves sounds more like centralization for the sake of centralization.

I think that the regional city interactions and global market count as 'parts of the logic'. I agree it's not compute intensive, but it is fairly central to the design of the new SimCity. No reason the region couldn't be locally simulated IMO, however.

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