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Today we are comparing various quality settings and hardware configurations using Cities XL 2011. In doing so we hope to try and help gamers determine what kind of settings they can adjust to maximize their performance and what possible hardware upgrades they could make if necessary to improve performance...
While I do enjoy a good first person shooter when I am trying to relax or a session playing real-time strategy games, I have forever been a big fan of city building games. Countless hours were spent playing the Sim City series when I probably should have been doing homework. Sadly Sim City 4, which in my opinion was an unreal city building game, would be the last of the series despite its success.
For city building fans Cities XL appeared to be the next big thing when it was released on October 8th 2009. Developed by Monte Cristo, the game allowed players to play online and interact with others on massive persistent planets, and to work together by trading resources or building blueprints in order to satisfy the needs of city inhabitants. Sadly, on March 8, 2010 the online service was closed and the game became single-player only. Cities XL was far from the perfect city building game, but despite the ups and downs it was overall a fun game to play. Cities XL 2011 promised to be everything Cities XL wasn’t and the development was taken over by Focus Home Interactive. This version focuses on single-player only and was released on October 14, 2010. Cities XL 2011 allows the player to create numerous cities of all types and sizes that cover the planet. From a several million citizens megalopolis to a hyped seaside resort, to an industrial city, everything is allowed in Cities XL 2011. The game features an incredible collection of more than 700 buildings and structures, and 47 different types of maps featuring realistic environments.
As a virtual mayor, find the right balance between economic development of your cities, attractiveness, transportation (road traffic, bus, metro…), pollution, social services, taxes and even leisure activities. Connect every city that you build in a trade network, specialize some of them so that they can provide for others, thus creating a large-scale economy balance. The game certainly sounds impressive, but how well does it play and what kind of hardware will you need to enjoy it? Typically city building games are very taxing on both the GPU and CPU. Therefore we are going to test a range of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, along with a wide range of AMD and Intel processors. |
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Shooter |
Posted on: 10/19/2010 12:02 PM
wow single core only... ultimate suckage. I have never heard of this series but since you tested it I decided to take a look. I am really only into makes where you shoot things but this does look interesting apart from the fact that is plays poorly on monster rigs. |
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simestr |
Posted on: 10/20/2010 01:00 PM
I found this while looking through Google for Cities XL 2011 save games  Cool article thanks, looks like my puter should run it well. |
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SimGuy |
Posted on: 10/22/2010 01:52 AM
Here's to hoping they release some sort of patch for this title, because it's fun as hell to play when its NOT stuttering. |
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Simguy |
Posted on: 11/10/2010 11:00 AM
Everything just lags after the city is a considerable size.. and changing graphic settings didn't help at all.. Hope there's a patch that will fix this problem, because right now the lagging is unbearable.. |
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Elliot |
Posted on: 08/17/2011 10:30 PM
Very good, and accurate article. Even with the recent patches XL 2011 lags horribly. It is very disappointing, because it is enjoyable until you reach almost 100k population. The menus lag AWFUL. So you're building a road, then you click to switch to residential... wait 3-5 seconds... lay a square. Switch to industrial... wait 3-5 seconds... switch back to roads... wait 3-5 seconds. Suddenly the game is no fun any more. Actually it's quite miserable. I hope in 2012 they have fixed these issues. Not sure I'm willing to spend the money again on it until I read the reviews. My advice.. save your money from xl 2011. It's just not playable, even on amazing gaming computers. |
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campdude |
Posted on: 09/10/2011 11:24 PM
Just detered my purchase. Cities XL 2012 is coming soon so hopefully they find that one to be multi-core optimized. SO far in city building the alternative is still SimCity 4... which is only single threaded but 7 years old. lol |
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Eduardo |
Posted on: 12/03/2011 10:19 PM
CXL 2012 is out! but basicaly is a DLC for the 2011 version(more buildings and maps) that means it has the SAME BUGS and is still sigle-core Focus said already that there no plan of re-write the whole game engine to make it multi-core optimized. |
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Wallis |
Posted on: 08/05/2013 11:51 PM
Thank you for this article. I'm looking to update my pc and i have bought Cities xl hoping to play it on a pc that can run it well. This has helped me immensely. Thank you. |