Cities can now save locally, auto-saving can be disabled and Save As is introduced, which should pleasing experimenting Mayors. Maxis have refreshed their Update 10 FAQ.
Offline play is finally here after a long development and testing phase. It may not address the many remaining issues but at least Mayors are no longer shackled to servers.
"Today at 6am PDT we will be releasing Update 10 with Offline play. This involves server down time and the game servers will be unavailable for a few hours," posted Maxis. The SimCity servers went offline today at 1.00 pm GMT. This forum thread contains all the updates to this Offline rollout of Update 10.
That actual Single-Player Mode FAQ has been updated with the latest information.
Update 10 changelog:
• New: SimCity Single-Player Mode.
o Enables Offline Play.
o Single-Player Mode includes multi-city play, regional interdependence, and city specialization. Regions are saved locally and there is no limit on number of save games.
o Autosave can be disabled in Single-Player Mode in order for players to experiment and load their regions at a previous save point.
o Save As a copy feature. Players can make copies of their regions at multiple save points.
o See FAQ on Single-Player Mode for full details.
• Performance: Optimizations in the simulator to improve performance of both Multiplayer and Single-Player Mode.
• Friends: Friends Search now uses the Origin friend search.
Some things remain unanswered for now like how do we fix problems with Great Works not registering correctly in offline regions? Can be just edit some files? Fortunately the modding community is likely to provide solutions if Maxis cannot, or will not. Still, Single-Player Mode is a victory, such as at is.
