Comment Re:Wrong lesson. (Score 4, Informative) 569
I played for the couple of hours I could, last night. Even if you control all the cities in a region yourself, there is still a global market that is being interacted with. When the server was having connection problems (but would still let you play), the oil that I was exporting would no longer export and sit in the stockpile until I was alerted it was full. This was affecting my overall economy, because as an oil town, a lot of my economy was dependent on that global export. The market prices are determined by overall supply/demand on the particular server you're connected to (each server being a sim globe as it were). As others have pointed out, this is of course something that didn't have to be multiplayer, but does add an additional interesting variable to the game. Here's a screenshot of the market graph.