A few questions

A few questions:

1)  What does the Epic Projects building do?  There's a bit of backstory to this question, so bear with me.

I've been very conscientious about not expanding beyond my means before I'm ready.  Two of my most immediate goals are to open up all of the city expansions so I never have to think about them again, and expand my storage as much as possible.  To that end, I spent the last couple of months at Level 14, doing nothing but getting keys from cargo ships, buying expansion items and selling other stuff on the marketplace.  I decided to hold off until I had a million simoleons before I would start levelling up again.  I would have been there sooner, but I could drop quite a bit of money on expansion items when the marketplace worked.

I'd had the game on my old phone but it died, so this was a great chance to start over.  I'd been working everything out.  I wasn't even going to open the beach until I was done or close to done with city expansions.  I simply don't want to deal with all these different items that can't be used.  My old game didn't have mountain expansions, so I don't know if there are 'mountain items' but if there are, that's way down on the priority list.  The Vu Tower is much lower than that, and it'll be a long time before I even consider opening up the Airport.

So a few days ago, I passed a million simoleons, and started levelling up.  And boy did I blow through those.  I currently have 419,699, just because I was able to buy everything I needed on the spot.  Buildings, road upgrades, marketplace, I already have an extra Big Hospital/Fire Station/Police Station for when I start expanding again.  And I had a ton of golden keys saved up, since I could do 2-3 cargo ships per day.  The beach opened automatically, so I could buy several of the most population-increasing items.  Entertainment opened up, I bought a couple Ferris Wheels.  My population has gone from 150,000 to 371,000 in less than three days, and I'm most of the way through Level 22.  I've opened up half of the beach, although unfortunately I still have over a dozen city expansions left.  This evening I had one of those wonderful moments where you can expand the beach, the city, and the storage in fairly short order.

So my point is, what does the Epic Projects Building do?  Some of the new buildings look cool, but I don't think I'd enjoy the game any more by having them, and I really don't want anything to come along that complicates my overall plans for the game.  My overall goal is to increase the population, but it's not an overriding concern.  The Tokyo/Paris houses would do that and I'm not remotely interested.  But I'm also sick of seeing the little icon telling me that the Epic Projects Building is ready.  If I can build it, stick it off in the corner and never bother with it again, fine.  I just haven't found any real explanation of what Epic Projects are or how they enhance the game.  If it's like the Vu Tower or the Airport, I'd rather have nothing to do with it.  I won't consider opening the Vu Tower until the city and the beach are completely open, and the Airport will only be if I'm looking for a new twist to the game.

So that's my first question.

2)  Is there some trick to the Facebook login?  My old game was logged in with Facebook, and when I try with the new game, all it does is give me the option to restore my old game.  Obviously I don't want to lose the new game.  If I could log in to my old game, log out, and then log in with the new game, that would be fine, but I'd rather not take the chance.  I'm not the most technologically-literate person in the world.

3)  Is it just me, or is the marketplace working better lately?  It still sucks that you can't search for the items you actually need/want - and I am becoming convinced that the game itself won't give you, for example, spices if those are needed for a building upgrade or cargo ship - but all of a sudden it's become much easier to buy the items you select, instead of waiting to travel to another town only to find that the item has already been sold.  That's happened to me very rarely over the last couple days, and as I say, I've bought several hundred thousand simoleons worth of stuff on the marketplace lately.

The system isn't ideal, but if this is a genuine improvement on EA's part, then kudos to them.

[And, just my speculation, I don't think it can be ideal.  I'm a supporter of the free market, and I don't think EA's servers could track all the individual decisions made by every buyer and seller and adjust to overall patterns if they tried to move to that method.  There's also a distancing effect on us, because it really is just a game.  I charge maximum prices for whatever I sell and don't even look at the prices for stuff I buy.  It would be interesting if some people became suppliers, crafting items at lower prices and making their money in volume.  And then consider that there are some people willing to pay real money for this game.  And then consider that some people playing this game don't support free markets in the first place.  There isn't a way to please all their customers.  Although I do think that a search mechanism for the items we actually need/want would improve the gameplay immensely and not put much more strain on the computers.]

Anyway, thanks for reading and, hopefully, answering my questions.