While you might initially not even notice the Train Station in SimCity Social (it's in the bottom of your original city square, in case you haven't checked), there's a great reason to send out trains early and often as you work to grow your small city: cheap Materials! Materials are the goods you use to purchase and upgrade buildings for your city, so the more you have the better. The Train Station allows you to choose from six products, each with a different time limit and purchase price, which will activate trains that will bring back hundreds of even thousands of Materials to your city over the span of a few (or quite a few) hours.
The Train Station can be used at Level 1 to operate six trains, but if you upgrade the Train Station, these stats can change. Here's a look at what you'll be dealing with until you upgrade (which is an entirely voluntary process).
Concrete Costs: 120 coinsReturns in: 4 HoursBrings: 125 Materials
Lumber Costs: 480 coinsReturns in: 12 HoursBrings: 625 Materials
Textiles Costs: 640 coinsReturns in: 24 HoursBrings: 1350 Materials
Steel Costs: 360 coinsReturns in: 8 HoursBrings: 400 Materials
Coal Costs: 720 coinsReturns in: 18 HoursBrings: 1000 Materials
Oil Costs: 1200 coinsReturns in: 36 HoursBrings: 2550 Materials
To upgrade your Train Station to Level 2, you'll need to collect three Community, two Goodwill and two Fury. These items are similar to those in The Sims Social on Facebook, as you can earn them by interacting with items in your own city or in your friends' cities. For instance, Goodwill is earned by completing nice actions when visiting neighbors, while Community items are earned by adding homes in your own city. We'll make sure to update this guide as we learn more about the stats of routes on Levels 2 and 3 of the Train Station in your city. Stay tuned!
Did you notice that there was a Train Station in your town in SimCity Social, or did you overlook it during the tutorial? Sound off in the comments!
Tags: ea, facebook games, maxis, playfish, simcity, SimCity Social, simcity social cheats, simcity social facebook, simcity social materials, simcity social tips, simcity social train station, simcity social tricksI’m looking at a press service …
GamesPress makes it available to even more news outlets but for free and it is up to them to pick up on it or not,
GamesPress is fine. It’s also one (very important though) where gamerelease sends its message.
why choose your service where I myself have not even heard of half the sites it gets sent to?
You might be referring to the email list. The listed sites are picked from subscriber domains, which are sometimes blurry. For example, there are journalists who use gmail account as their main account. So, the news won’t reach gmail department, but guys who have those emails.
Also, there’s now the twitter “followers” list for @gamerelease which lists some more subscribers.
The more active subscribers there are the better.
Is there a guarantee they will pick it up? Cause as an indie the budget for this stuff is very small and you want max exposure for every cent
No.
How good stories you can create is up to you, and that is also the key factor determining whether your news is going to be picked up. Alongside with timing and other factors. For example, I sent press release about my Dead Wake game which got its way to PC Gamer since these folks had just been preparing a special “zombie coverage” in their magazine. Timing was right, news was worthy of covering and it got in.
Had I sent it a month later (or if I had not have newsworthy zombie story to tell), I think chances of coverage would have been slimmer.
All email subscribers have working email address (receivers with bounced emails are deleted from the list). RSS subscribers I don’t have control over, and now there’s more new subscribers through the game release twitter account.
does it make sense as an iOS developer to press release to your sites?
My personal opinion is that platform is irrelevant, the story is what counts.
If you feel that putting couple of hundred (or something) to promote game feels much, then I really think you shouldn’t subscribe. If on the other hand you feel that investing the money can save some of your time from hunting down press members then it might be worth considering to join.
But like I said, I feel that the story is more important than the technology.
And then some links:
TERMS & CONDITIONS: Please notice that gamerelease PR system is meant for indies promoting their own games.
If you have any other questions, throw ‘em here.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 at 8:16 am and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
You can still go about changing your avatar by clicking on the small chef icon in the bottom menu, and you'll still have the option of changing your avatar's clothing and facial features one by one, with eye color, hair style, and more being available as options. The most noteworthy feature here though is the fact that these clothing items are now free. That's right - you won't have to pay thousands of coins to outfit your avatar in some new fashions, as every clothing item currently in the store (as of this writing) is free.
On top of that, the game's performance finally seems to be making a turn in the right direction in terms of speed. With the release of the new Cookbook, and perhaps helped by these new, slightly smaller avatars, you should slowly start to see your cafe's speed increase, in terms of how quickly the cookbook appears after clicking on an empty stove, how long it takes to scroll through pages in your Gift Box, and so on.
While it's great that we see an increase in performance finally occurring in the game, things are definitely far from perfect. In fact, while I'm appreciative of the new avatars, a much more important issue has yet to be addressed (but is definitely being called for more by the fans) - that being a mission select screen, which is still nowhere to be found. Will we ever see one added to the game? That much is still up in the air, but it looks like finally the game is making steps in the right direction, so we haven't given up hope just yet. C'mon Zynga - do the right thing. We'll love you all the more for it.
Have you noticed an increase in speed in your Cafe's performance? What do you think of these new avatars? Let us know in the comments.
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Today, social games analytics tool provider Kontagent releases its Real-Time Social Application Monitoring System for tracking actions and metrics such as installs, invites sent, notification email clicks, and revenue. Animated graphs in the tool update as frequently as every ten seconds, allowing developers to immediately recognize a breakdown of code for a viral channel, an error in their servers, or the success of a new virtual good.
The real-time data will allow developers who use the tool to take more risks and deploy code faster without doing as much testing, since problems can be identified before their opportunity costs get too high.
The Real-Time Social Applications Monitoring Systems, or Real-Time SAMS, tracks over 10,000 events per second, and developers can choose to see their stats update every ten seconds, one minute, or five minutes. They can quickly determine the impact of a new landing page, altered flow, new game mechanic, or virtual good price change on a variety of metrics. If they see a certain count drop to zero, they know something is broken and can attempt to fix the bug before more users are affected.
Developers can design their own dashboards, selecting from many standard metrics, or create their own custom formulas such as revenue per paying user in the last seven days. Without the tool, developers would have to rely on their potentially slower, internal server monitors to notice operation problems. They would also have to painstakingly test edge cases that are difficult to predict — unless they have built similar tools themselves, or found other third-party options — but with Kontagent they can push code live and respond to issues on the fly.
Larger developers spend millions and years to create these types of tools. By offering them as a service, Kontagent is trying to level the playing field, allowing smaller developers to gain the same deep, instant insights that the giants of the industry have. While we haven’t tested it first hand, the granularity of the data available through Real-Time SAMS should help application developers iterate more quickly.
