Unable to create your city at this time. Please claim a city again later

TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.  You had MONTHS to get this right.  You impose an Internet connection, which is the WRONG WAY TO GO in the first place, then you can't even properly build the infrastructure to support your STUPID IDEA.  Who's to blame?  Your Systems Engineers?  Is this an infrastructure issue, even though you had plenty of time to prepare for the thousands of users you KNEW would be logging in on DAY ONE?  Or is it the developers?  Can they not write stable and scalable code?  Whoever is to blame, fire them!  And while you're at it, fire whoever is to blame for coming up with the idea of requiring an Internet connection WHEN NONE IS NEEDED.

I should be able to create a city in "private mode" or whatever the F you want to call it, ANYTIME I WANT regardless of if I have an active Internet connection.  Take away achievements, the ability to play with others, or whatever other stupid perk you can think of-- but don't restrict me from doing the core of what I PAID FOR:  BUILDING A CITY.  I PAID FOR THIS.  WE PAID FOR THIS.  GIVE US THIS FUNCTIONALITY NOW.  

LISTEN UP, PEOPLE.  MAKE EA PAY FOR THEIR MISTAKES.  LET THEM KNOW HOW YOU FEEL AND SPREAD THE WORD.  THEY NEED TO FEEL IT OR ELSE THEY WON'T CHANGE A **bleep** THING.  THIS IS THEFT, PLAIN AND SIMPLE.

Just to echo everyone else, this is simply ridiculous. You'd figure that after a Beta that swamped your servers, you would know how many servers you'll need to let everyone play on launch day. Being a Network/System Admin, hardware is cheap nowadays and with virtualization you can easily ramp up and down servers as needed. Clearly EA didn't get that memo.

So to sum it up, I paid $60 to basically stand in line and wait for servers to come available. Awesomeness.

Well, luckily Civ 5 works perfectly fine, on to conquer the world there.

same problem, this is stupid

Same issues

Side Rant:

So EA, is this the future of gaming? Lowering our standards to the point where we thinks not being able to play the game when we buy, to not expect much out of you? Is it too much? I know you don't care, but I'd love to play my game, because Maxis actually built a game I'd like to play, that somehow came out of your mediocre publishing company. Thank you. 

I guess I'll try again in a month when people start losing interest in the game...

Nicely done EA.  I'll be pirating your games from now on, offline.

I feel it is necessary to throw in my 5 cents on this sh!tshow launch. My buddy and I have been unsuccessfully trying to play together for the past hour. After skipping to the Europe servers to avoid the hideous server waits (do you even get in after 20 minutes or is it just a *chance* to get in?!), we had to spam the city creation button 20-50 times to get a city. My experience was as follows:

• My first one bugged completely because I didn't hit play immediately (clicked on the friend icon in the upper right). I could not hit play, but when I clicked on it, it was a "new" plot. So I tried to recreate my city and it said it was already taken. Lovely. 
• Second try at a new region, spam the creation button til you get a city, this time immediately hit play and load in. Okay good, I'm in. But I cannot invite my friend, nor can I see him in my friends list. I mistakenly exit out of the game to try to invite him. When I click on "resume game", oh, look, you're not playing any games. I must have dreamt that. 
• I exit out to try a different european server and get stuck in my current quandry - the infinite tutorial loop. For whatever reason, my first 5-10 launches of the game tonight did not prompt me to play any tutorials (indeed I was none the wiser). But now that the game insists I play the tutorial, I have no choice every time but to load into a "tutorial" that has every single button grayed out, no instructions, and nothing happening. The city roads are even disconnected! Now it's time to hunt the forums for yet another workaround... 
• EA, my hat is off to you. I just paid $60 to get tea bagged in the face for an hour. Welp, time to dive back in... 

Hey all, I had the same problem. Try restarting the game and checking what server the game has you connected to. Mine was defaulted to the Aussie server instead of a U.S. server. As soon as I switched it, the tutorial city loaded right up. Haven't tried claming a city yet, but I hope this helps!

Really hope it will be fixed soon.....

For forcing a player to play online is bad enough .... cannot play single game out of server is another thumbs down. !!!

What is killing me right now is that I am on a website called "answers.ea.com" yet there are no answers. Just frustrated customers who are not being given what we paid for. If a small business was to do this to people they would be sued into bankruptcy. I understand launch day problems but it is always something. Everytime a new game is released it is always something. The response is slow unless of course it is a game they feel was going to be a hit. If this was BF3 we would have had answers by now. 

yeah there are no answers here NONE. only questions....like WHY EA WHY?