It has been established that the only "calculation" the server does inform other cities of your available resources in your unopened, frozen city. Additionally, it handles game saves. All city simulation is handled client side.
So to run an offline region you'd need to engineer a local save, and then figure out a way to determine the available resources in these locally saved cities. Something pretty advanced, like a 1kb CSV might be able to handle it.
Thanks for explaining this. So the real issue isn't that EA officials have lied about online-only, it is that EA misleads their customers on the level of difficulty. Saying the game is engineered from the ground up for online play suggests some complexity at the server level which simply doesn't exist.
People with well-examined opinions aren't upset that EA servers don't run the city-level simulation. They are upset at how simple it would be to give users region simulation on their local PC, a server app so users can run their own, or a play-by-email implementation.
I find it ironic that the DRM is pushing me to wait until the game is cracked and client-side regions are possible. I was actually happy to buy SimCity, but I want have my saves and run regions offline. Pretty hilarious.
