Re: SimCity 2013 - Bugs fixed?

edit - TLDR: (and boy, did I ever make this too long!) No updates since the patches to v10. It's an older obsolete game with no new fixes being issued, and there are some  problems that will never go away, mainly the way the worker, shopper and student agents are programmed. I hadn't played it since 2014, and coming back I have really enjoyed getting to know the game more completely and I really enjoy the challenges. If you still own it, might as well give it a try and see how you feel about it now. Hope you find it fun!

No updates since the patches to v10 (adding offline/single player game mode). The old forum posts were migrated to this forum, none of the old links works, but the search will bring them up most of the time.

I've never had problems with the hospital not working, they work fine for me. MegaTowers are challenging; I'm still not sure if I would call them bugged, or just a lack of understanding of how they work. You can get levels next to each other claiming "no work" and "no workers", but in many cases it's more about placement/elapsed time/traffic, etc. 

Most of the time, the challenges (bugs) that do still exist have workarounds or fixes, and some of the time that's just flat out annoying.

I would say the biggest challenges that still remain (that I've seen):

• Agents get stuck or disappear into the region, never to return. This causes the most issues in a city once it hits 10 Sim-years old and older. Very frustrating. The best way I've found to deal with this is to install the Extended Worker Data Mod by MaxisGuillaume This mod is great, lets you see how many jobs available by wealth class in each building, how many out of total residential and commercial Sims are in the buildings. MaxisGuillaume is a SimCity dev who built some great mods to help with some of the biggest issues in the game.
• Trade depots will sometimes just lose their trucks, or the trucks will just stop working. When you notice this, demolish the truck garages and rebuild them
• Regional traffic issues - this isn't technically a bug, but more of a challenge built into the game that wasn't completely thought through. Other cities can affect your city's performance by creating huge traffic jams in the region, thereby stalling your city's ability to get and send resources. Great Works can flood the regional highways with commuters and block your city. You really need to manage city entrances and traffic religiously, and optimize ALL cities in the region. There will inevitably be a lot of traffic on regional highways regardless, but it is "technically" part of the game. Just not very well-done imo.
• Regional cooperation has never really worked well. By this I mean, you will find it impossible to have a dedicated University city to educate the entire region. It just doesn't work, but it all stems back to the agents getting stuck and disappearing. It's the base code - agents are not coded to go back to a particular city or residence or job. They just go to whatever house or school or job is closest and available, and when they leave, they go back to the nearest house. So a student in your city leaves the city to commute to the university city, it becomes commuting student in that city, and then leaves and enters the region - then disappears, or goes into very next city on the regional highway and wanders around trying to find a residence.

Due to several issues at launch, probably budget, pressure to release, etc, some things just never got built into the base code and other things were changed to try to do a "simpler" approach - I don't really know everything, just various bits I've read - but the bottom line is the agent "problem" is now an integral part of the game. If you use the mod I mentioned above, and watch interactions, you can see what's happening pretty easily and therefore work around it. For instance, I have no patience for waiting Sim-months for changes to a MegaTower level to even out. I'll most likely just demolish the levels that are complaining and rebuild to "reset" it. Or turn it off for a while - there is a bug that keeps giving you the income from a MegaTower when it's been turned off. 

Bottom line, if you are the type of person that likes to manage variables, don't mind trying different things and seeing how they affect the gameplay, and enjoy tinkering, you can have a great time playing this game. If you're the type of person that wants to plop a bunch of stuff, make a ton of money really fast and move on to the next city - you can have a great time playing this game, too. If you're the type of person that wants to solve every issue that the game says you have, and you want to build cities without getting too deep into interactions or how the underlying code is working - maybe not a good one for you.

It's an older obsolete game with no new fixes being issued, and there are some  problems that will never go away. I hadn't played it since 2014, and coming back I have really enjoyed getting to know the game more completely and I really enjoy the challenges. If you still own it, might as well give it a try and see how you feel about it now. Hope you find it fun!