SimCity 4 (PC)
Full Strategy Guide
Document written by PyroFalkon (pyrofalkon@hotmail.com)
Latest Update: 1 November 2003
Current version: 1.2a
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||LATEST UPDATE||
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v1.2a (1 November 2003)
It's been nearly a year, but unfortunately my site is down for the count.
Luckily, IGN has decided to host my FAQs too, so it's all good. A new copyright
notice is the only change.
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||TABLE OF CONTENTS||
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PART 1: INTRO
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1. Intro
2. Changes from SimCity 3000
3. Claiming Your Land
PART 2: MAYOR MODE BASICS
=========================
4. What Do These Buttons Do?
a. Landscaping
b. Zones
c. Transportation
d. Utilities
e. Civic Buildings
f. Bulldozer
g. Dispatch
h. Everything Else
5. Getting Started
a. Infrastructure
b. Recon
c. Expanding
6. Small Towns
7. Medium Cities
8. Metropolises and Beyond
9. The Peanut Butter Point
a. What To Do About It
b. An Alternate Method
10. My Sim Mode
PART 3: REFERENCE
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11. Power Plants
12. Ordinances
PART 4: STRATEGY
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13. Zones
a. Residential Zones
b. Commercial Zones
c. Industrial Zones
d. General Zoning Advice
14. Education
15. Transportation
a. Streets and Roads
b. Highways
c. Mass Transit
d. Bridges and Tunnels
e. Seaports and Airports
16. You Are Not Alone
17. Reader Strategies
PART 5: GOD MODE
================
18. God Mode Tools
a. Landscaping
b. Winds and Global Changes
c. Reconcile Edges
d. Disasters
e. Day/Night Cycle
19. God Mode Strategies and Effects
PART 6: FAQ STUFF
=================
20. Contributors
21. Version History
22. Copyright Info
23. Contact Info
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|                    PART 1: INTRO                   |
======================================================
This part of the FAQ introduces itself, along with a few of the changes to the
SimCity universe.
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||1. INTRO||
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Welcome one and all to my FAQ on Maxis's latest and greatest city building sim,
SimCity 4!
You've come to this FAQ because you want info and/or strategies. Maybe you want
to submit your own, which I hastily accept! For those of you familiar to my
FAQs, you'll know that that's exactly what I provide. I won't go into history
lessons on the franchise or company. I won't repeat the manual. I won't tell
you how to click the mouse.
What I will do is provide thorough, tested, reliable information. I will
provide humor here and there so this isn't a boring read. I will do my hardest
to please not only you on an informational standpoint, but an entertainment
standpoint. As my motto says, games are supposed to be fun, so why should the
FAQ be as well?
This first part, the intro, will be short. Although I do like providing humor,
I agree that too much fluff makes people irritated at the author. I strive to
strike the balance; feel free to write me and report on how well I did.
Finally, if you have ANYTHING to contribute or correct, please e-mail me. Even
if I misspelled the word "the" as "teh" in my 158th paragraph, feel free to
write me. I won't be offended, as long as you're civil.
All right, let's get this sim party started!
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||2. CHANGES FROM SIMCITY 3000||
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SimCity vets need to take a look at this. I stress NEED. There's a lot of stuff
that's been changed, and the more info you have going into situations, the
better. SimCity rookies can just ignore this section entirely.
By the way, I'm ignoring the simple stuff like graphics and audio and other
ambient effects that always go with sequels.
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|Change 1: Neighbors|
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I believe that the biggest change of all is the difference in the way
neighboring cities are handled. No longer do you start your city with four
surrounding cities. This time, YOU HAVE TO BUILD THEM ALL. This has major
impact in strategy. No longer can you rely on a quick influx of cash by
building a huge landfill and getting garbage from neighbors. You'd have to
start one city, save it, exit to the main screen, start a new city on one of
the original's borders, and go from there.
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|Change 2: Budget|
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Your budget is now calculated MONTHLY, not yearly. That seriously changes a
bunch of strategies. I used to splurge and wipe my bank clean in the first
year, letting the sudden influx of people and such get me a large income for
the next year. That's no longer possible.
This also helps speed the game up. You won't be waiting for 10 or more minutes
for a year change just so you get enough scratch to build a darned bus stop.
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|Change 3: Neighbor Deals|
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You can now initiate a neighbor deal. It's less ceremonial than it used to be;
it's now a simple option from the budget screen. More on that later.
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|Change 4: Tile Radii|
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In SimCity 3000, zones would grow if they were within three tiles of a road.
Now, residential and commercial sections have to be directly next to roads.
Industrial zones, on the other hand, can be up to EIGHT tiles away from a road
and still develop, provided that SOME part of the industrial zone is directly
touching a road. That is, you can build one section of road, then make a 1x8
section of industrial zone, and have it all grow.
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|Change 5: Resident Wealth|
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It used to be that the denser the building for any zone, the more you got out
of that building in terms of population and taxes. Not so anymore. A large
building could house several hundred people, but they all work dead-end low
jobs.
People and businesses are now classified into four categories: poor,
middle-class, and wealthy. Generally speaking, the most wealthy buildings will
house the most people or jobs, but that's not a set-in-stone rule.
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|Change 6: Taxes|
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You now have much greater control of taxes, especially since the new class
system has been implemented. You can now independently set taxes for poor
residents, middle-class residents, and wealthy residents; poor businesses,
middle-class businesses, and wealthy businesses; and poor industries,
middle-class industries, and wealthy industries. In addition, taxes can now be
set to the tenth of a percent. This lets you fine-tune taxes and give much
subtler changes in the economy.
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|Change 7: Shared Demand|
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Another big change is the fact that adjacent cities share the RCI meter demand.
If a city is a bustling metropolis, there may be high farm demand. You can make
a neighboring city nothing but a farm town, then connect the two via a highway
or road. The big city's people will be happy with the number of farms, and the
little town will be happy with the bigger city attractions.
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|Change 8: Additional Structures|
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New power plants and other city structures became available only after so much
time had passed. That's been done away with in favor of a prerequisite system.
For example, a new town is not going to be able to build a nuclear power plant.
Almost all of the new structures have their requirements shown, but I'll list
them in the FAQ anyway so you have the info at your fingertips.
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|Change 9: Hyperlinks|
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Your advising staff is still around, but now they're way more helpful. They'll
report on individual buildings that are causing problems, and in their report
will be Internet-esque hyperlinks. For example, I commonly build too many bus
stations, and often my transportation advisor will say, "This bus stop is just
not making a profit," with the word "This" linked. Clicking "This" centers the
screen directly on the offending building, where I can take action to do
something with it.
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|Change 10: Local Funding|
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You are no longer forced to change the funding of all the buildings of one
type. If one school is in a remote part of town, you can individually adjust
its funding to accommodate its reduced enrollment.
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|Change 11: Game Start|
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All cities start with $100,000 on the year 2000. You do not select your city
size the same way either, but more on that later as well.
There are many more changes to SimCity 4, but none are as important, in my
opinion. I'll get to the specifics as needed.
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||3. CLAIMING YOUR LAND||
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Hail, O young mayor! I see that you have that look in your eyes... you want to
construct a fantastic city, one that is the envy of all the world! Of course,
whether you want to build in order to mother it or destroy it is up to you. But
either way, all cities start the same way: grabbing a hunk of earth.
The game has no formal title screen. Instead, you're thrown to the region
screen. This is SimNation, a big huge plot of land that represents not one
city, but a county, or state, or country, whatever you want it to be. See all
those gray borders? Every single box is one place where a city can go. Yeah,
regions are that big.
You could spend your entire SimCity career without touching the land, and
that's fine. I was itching to get in the driver's seat and start building
skyscrapers, so I ignored God Mode and such entirely for awhile. Assuming you
think like that, I'm touching on Mayor Mode first. That's where you'll be
spending most of your time anyway.
In the very top-left corner is a compass. Notice that north is to your
upper-right, but it's not at a perfect 45-degree angle. This gives you a rather
unique view, one you may curse at until you get used to it.
There are four buttons at the top. The one on the left is the Region View
options. Here you can turn the grid lines on and off, as well as show or not
show the city names. You can also create a new region from here, load an
existing one, or nuke your present one off your hard drive.
The second button is only useful if you're on the Net at the same time. It's a
shortcut to connect you to the official SimCity website, or to a site where you
can exchange regions and cities.
The third button is your quit button. You're not ready to finish already, are
you?
The fourth button is your options button, where you set the more mundane things
like graphics details and audio volume, along with a few game assists.
In the bottom-left corner is the name of the region that's loaded, along with
its mass population.
All right, now that you've got all that down, it's time to get your grass. I
personally recommend that you make a new region (set it to grass), so you have
a clean slate to work with. Your first town (and any other experimental towns
or testing towns) you make should be on paper-flat land with no water. That
gives you the most room to work and gives your sims far fewer problems from the
outset. Also, by making a region and giving it your own name, it customizes and
personalizes your playing experience. I'm big on stuff like that.
Once you have a new region or choose to stick with what's loaded, take a look
at the borders. Notice all the different sizes you can choose. Like a lot of
spam e-mail makes you believe, size does matter. However, unlike that same spam
e-mail states, bigger is not always better. A huge plot of land can get eaten
up pretty quickly, and it's quite easy to get carried away in this game. The
smallest plots don't provide much room, especially to learn the game, so go
with the second-smallest plot for now.
Once you click a plot, you're given a few options. If you had clicked an
existing town, it would give a population, service, and job count, along with
the town name and city funds. You can also remove it permanently from memory.
For a new town, you have the option of importing a town you downloaded, or just
starting from scratch. Obviously, we're starting from scratch here, so hit that
play button.
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|            PART 2: MAYOR MODE BASICS               |
======================================================
I debated with myself about whether to start out talking about God Mode or
Mayor Mode first. I decided that if you're here, you MIGHT want help with God
Mode, but you WILL want help on Mayor Mode. Considering that you could ignore
God Mode entirely and be all right, it made my decision easier.
I write the rest of this document with the SimCity rookie in mind. If you're a
SimCity 3000 vet, you could skip a bunch of this, but it really would be best
to read it, or at least skim it. I'm a SimCity 3000 vet myself, and I sure
could have used this info back when I started.
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||4. WHAT DO THESE BUTTONS DO?||
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As I said before, I debated with myself and decided to pretend that God Mode
doesn't exist for now. Initially, once you claim land, you can alter it to any
way you see fit. For now, though, just click the second button in the big
three, the one with the top hat and rolled-up paper. It will prompt you for a
city name and mayor name, along with a warning that you can't alter the land
anymore beyond small (and expensive) changes. That's fine for now. Fill out the
required info, then hit OK. Just to note, your Mayor Name will stick. Any city
you make in the same region hereafter will have the same Mayor name as a
default. It's still changeable, of course.
Okay, you're in the game now. Fireworks light the sky, marking the debut of
your term in office! Where to start, where to start?
On the left side of the screen are the mayor's tools. These five huge and two
tiny buttons together mark everything you can build and zone. I'll go over them
in detail, but I will not give details to the individual buildings... that
comes in a later section.
I won't go over the finer points of things... this is just button and tool
explanations. We'll get into the strategies soon.
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|4a. Landscaping|
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The first big button of the group of five is the landscaping tool. Though you
have left God Mode, you can still raise and lower the land as you see fit.
However, it's pretty expensive, and completely unnecessary for your first town.
Something that does have value though is the tree planter. Throw down a few
trees here and there to suck up pollution and generally make your city a
prettier place to live. Of course, that too costs money, so don't go nuts.
+---------+
|4b. Zones|
+---------+
The bread and butter of the city, zones are areas that you designate to contain
certain buildings. The zones are divided into three major categories:
residential, commercial, and industrial. Residential zones are where homes are,
where your happy little sims eat, sleep, and poop on a daily basis. Commercial
zones are places of business or office space. Industrial zones are where things
are made or manufactured.
Zones are further divided by densities. Generally speaking, the higher the
density, the wealthier the citizens or businesses that move in, which attract
more taxes. However, that's not a hard and fast rule, and you'll kill yourself
if you try building high-density things from the outset. Besides, you can
always re-zone later without destroying existing buildings.
Light residential zones are places for tiny homes, such as trailer parks or
shabby apartment buildings. The taxes you generate from here are smaller than
other places, but the sims will be pretty undemanding, so you can stick them in
high-crime areas without losing too much business. Medium residential zones are
where most of you probably live, in middle-class homes. These typically have
nice gardens and other accommodations, although you pay for it by having to
provide schools and other essential services. The high-density residential
zones hold buildings that kiss the sky, whether that means they're skyscraping
hotels, or mansions that people like Bill Gates live in.
Light commercial zones are for local businesses. These include things like
local donut shops, auto stores, ice cream parlors, fast food joints, and the
like. Medium commercial zones contain small corporate shops, such as Wal-Mart,
K-Mart, Radio Shack, or Best Buy. They also house small office buildings. Dense
commercial zones hold malls and offices that touch the clouds.
Industrial zones are a little different. The first zone type is agricultural
zones. Unlike the other industrial zones, this can be as big as you want it to
be. Agricultural zones are nothing but farms that employ few people. They give
off no pollution, but they also pay NO TAXES. Do not build farms if you're
looking for money.
Medium-density industrial zones are mostly dirty industries. There are horribly
polluting industries like resource gatherers, toxic waste dumps, and other
nasty places. They pay a bit in taxes, but you'll be spending a lot of that
money on ways to combat the crime and pollution that come with it.
Manufacturing industries, like car shops, exist in some medium-density zones as
well. These pollute, but not nearly as bad, and they pay more. The most dense
zones accommodate high-tech industries. These don't pollute but do produce vast
amounts of money for your coffers. Maxis, EA, Microsoft, and such would be in
high-tech zones.
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|4c. Transportation|
+------------------+
People hate walking, and so do sims. We're in the year 2001 and beyond for
SimCity 4, so gone are the days of dirt roads and horses. Instead, we've got
cars and subways!
The top button of the transportation tier is asphalt options. You can build
roads, bus stops, and--new to the SimCity series--streets.
Roads are your basic to-and-from route. These are two-lane roads and can handle
a fair amount of traffic. Streets are a much weaker version of roads, but
that's not necessarily a bad thing. The pavement just outside your house is
probably a street, one that cars don't travel on too much. There may not even
be a line painted down the center of it. Streets are good to get isolated
neighborhoods to the main streets. However, the speed limit is less here, along
with its capacity, so don't use streets to link major places. Don't be afraid
to make streets, however; you can always upgrade them to roads later by
painting over them with the road tool.
Bus stops are where your sims BOARD busses to go to other parts of towns.
Notice I said BOARD... your sims can get off busses anywhere they darn well
please. You do NOT need to put a bus stop at a destination. Buses cut down
traffic, so unless you put them along busy roads and intersections, they won't
do too much.
The second button of the transportation tier allows the construction of
highways. These beefy boys are six-lane elevated roads designed to get sims
from point A to point B with optimal speed and minimal stops. You need to
connect highways to roads, and to do that requires one of the two available
on-ramps. Highways can also be linked to each other via a cloverleaf. Highways
need their own section, and it's much later in the document.
The third button lets you ride the rails. You can place down double-wide
tracks, but trains won't run without train stations. Stations, it goes without
saying, must be directly next to tracks to work. Unlike bus stops, you have to
build train stations everywhere you want the train to stop, so you'll have to
do some planning to get it to work. You can also build freight train stations,
which carry goods to and from the city, but that's an advanced strategy that we
don't need to deal with at the moment.
The fourth button allows you to build subways. These as you may know are
passenger-only trains. They're underground, so they won't take up valuable
land. They are quite expensive however, especially considering that you need a
stop at every place you want the sims to go. Small cities don't even need to
consider them.
The fifth button allows you to build an airport. Airports bring massive demand
to your city because of the tourists and/or businessmen aboard. Again, it's not
necessary to worry about it for a small city. Airports are a fixed size, unlike
they were in SimCity 3000.
The sixth and last button lets you build a seaport. Again, seaports help
commercial and industrial demands. They need water to work, so if you took my
advice and started a new region without water, you won't be using them for now.
Like airports, they're a fixed size, and they're pretty darn expensive.
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|4d. Utilities|
+-------------+
This ain't the stone age. People want TVs and computers, and they need some
place to power those computers.
The first button lets you build a large variety of power plants, along with
power lines to link the plant to your zones. Most of the power plants are
grayed out for now because they have prerequisites that go with them, and
obviously as a young city you don't have much going for you. Explanations of
the plants come later.
The second button lets you build water structures. There's not much there, and
we'll go into more details when water becomes important. Until then, your sims
can suck water out of the ground after it rains.
The third button is for garbage disposal. The quick and dirty (literally) way
to deal with trash is to zone for landfills the same way you zone for other
things. You can also build incinerators to burn trash, though that gets
expensive and stinky. You could also get a waste-to-energy converter to make
trash into electricity. Finally, you can plop down a couple recycling centers
around the city and hope your sims save a tree.
+-------------------+
|4e. Civic Buildings|
+-------------------+
Civic buildings are generally administrative. They have specific sizes and
uses, and require some planning to be used effectively.
The first button lets you slap down a few police stations and jails (sorry, no
donut shops). You can go with small stations at first, but soon the crime will
be a little too large and will need a bigger place to deal with things. All
stations have small internal jails, but those will quickly fill up, so you need
to build jails eventually to keep criminals behind bars and off the streets.
The second button is your fire department. Again, you can make a little station
that serves a neighborhood or two, but large cities need large stations.
The third button is your educational department. Schools come in three major
varieties: elementary schools for the kids, high schools for the adolescents,
and city colleges for the young adults. Education is pretty expensive, so make
sure your other needs are suited to first. You can also build libraries and
museums here, which assist adults and senior citizens from getting stupider
than rocks.
The fourth button of the civic buildings tier is for the city's health. You can
build tiny clinics, or decent hospitals. You'll also eventually be able to
build a disease research center, which assists your other health buildings in
extending your sims' lives.
The fifth button is real-world landmarks that help attract tourists and
businesses to the town. Unlike in SimCity 3000, these cost, and some are
astronomical in price. You can only have one of each per town.
The sixth button gives you access to rewards... once you meet the requirements,
anyway. You can also build business-deal buildings such as casinos and malls,
although those aren't listed initially.
The seventh and final button is where you can build recreational buildings and
sites. Green cities make the environmentalists happy, especially because they
cut down the pollution poisoning the city.
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|4f. Bulldozer|
+-------------+
The first of the smaller buttons is the bulldozer. This is your destruction
tool, used for taking out trees, buildings, pipes, power lines, and everything
else in your way. This does NOT remove zones. To do that, go into any tool that
lets you BUILD zones, and you'll get a tool called De-Zone.
+------------+
|4g. Dispatch|
+------------+
In games, "dispatch" normally means "to kill." Here though, it means to send
your police and firemen out to combat crimes and fires. Whenever there's an
emergency, used the options in that to send your boys in blue and yellow to
their targets. In SimCity 3000, there was an emergency siren here as well, used
to warn the city when a tornado or alien attack threatened their lives. It's
been removed, so you don't have to stress about hitting a warning button the
instant disaster looms.
+-------------------+
|4h. Everything Else|
+-------------------+
The buttons under the tools won't be messed with too much, but I'll explain
anyway.
The button on the left re-enters God Mode. However, it's a VERY limited
version. You can start disasters, reconcile the city edges (talked about in the
God Mode section), or nuke the city. If you decide to nuke your city, it's a
PERMANENT decision, so be really careful with that command. You can also enable
or disable the day/night cycle the graphics go through. If you have a dark
monitor, you may want to force the world to stay in the day the whole time so
you can see what you're doing. Doing so will not change the internal clock that
your sims live by.
The middle button takes you to Mayor Mode, with the tools. The third button
takes you to My Sim Mode, which I'll get into later.
Below that is a question mark. That's your query tool. Click that, then click a
building to get some REALLY valuable information about it.
In the very bottom-left corner is a mini-map. There are arrows where you can
rotate it, or zoom in and out. There are also speed settings near there, in
case you want time to fly.
Finally, you have your options button. You can save the city, exit to the
region, exit to Windows, or alter your options.
+--------------------+
|+------------------+|
||5. GETTING STARTED||
|+------------------+|
+--------------------+
Okay, now you know how to at least throw down buildings, so let's start zoning
stuff!
+------------------+
|5a. Infrastructure|
+------------------+
The first thing you need is a power plant, so click the Utilities tool, then
the Electricity button.
As a new city, you have access to only the most basic plants: wind, coal,
natural gas, and oil. This is your first big decision: what are you most
interested in? If you want a clean city, stick with wind or natural gas. If you
just want to get a high population quickly, go for coal.
Whatever you choose, find a nice corner of the map and plop it down. City edges
are absolute, and pollution that spills off your map does NOT enter adjacent
cities. This way you can remove almost half of the building's pollution from
the start. If you chose windmill plants, you'll need several, but if you chose
anything else, one will do.
Now that you've got some power, you'll need to zone land so your sims know what
to build where. Sims, like real humans, have the NIMBY opinion when it comes to
power plants: Not In My BackYard. Do you want to live next to a stinky coal
plant? Neither do sims.
Go a fair distance away from the plant and build your first industrial zone. I
always start with dirty industrial zones to get a solid foundation of the city,
then expand outward. Your industrial zone or zones should be large enough to
support a decent influx of people, but they shouldn't be so large that your
town is flooded with smoke. I normally go with two 8x8 zones that are fully
enclosed with roads (not streets).
Those will go up, but they have no place to give their finished goods. You need
to build some commercial zones, but right now you'll have nothing but tiny
local businesses. Go some more away from the industrial zone in the direction
opposite the power plant, and build a few commercial zones of light density.
Let the computer build streets as it needs to; you can take finer control of
that aspect later, once you get more accustomed to the way things work.
Once that's ready, both the industrial zones and commercial zones need workers.
Build a large number of medium residential zones as close to the commercial
zones as possible on the side opposite the industries. That way, your people
won't be smelling like smoke TOO badly, if at all. Again, let the computer
build streets as it needs to. However, make sure you build roads that connect
all the zones to each other. You'll also need one road that links the power
plant with the rest of the city.
Within a month or three, you should be getting your first people and
businesses! Woo hoo! Let your city run awhile, because you'll have to wait for
things to happen before you can take additional steps. If you're impatient,
speed the game until you have a few hundred or few thousand people.
+---------+
|5b. Recon|
+---------+
A mayor is only as good as his or her information. You need to be provided with
detailed maps and such of situations, and luckily, it's all there for you!
With Mayor Mode active, check out the stuff to the right of the buttons (on the
bottom edge of the screen). You're presented with several things: your mayor
rating, the city's cash, the city's population, the RCI meter, six status bars,
and five tabs that provide information.
Your mayor rating is based on a scale from -100 to +100 that rates your overall
general performance. The six status bars to the right are heavily weighed for
your mayor rating, but it's not that simple of a calculation.
The money and population counts are self explanatory, but the RCI meter is not.
The RCI meter provides you with a GENERAL opinion of the situation of the city.
The taller the bar, the more that zone is in demand. The lower the bar, the
less it's demanded. Bear in mind that no other situation is taken into account:
even if you fill up every square inch of your city's boundaries with something,
the RCI meter will still be active. You can click the RCI meter to get even
more detail about what's hot and what's not, but don't get too dependent on the
details. For example, if nothing but farms are being asked for in the industry
zones, but you don't want farms, just ignore the demands. The sims will have to
deal.
If you did click the RCI meter, then you'll notice that the fifth tab became
active. I'll talk more about it in a sec. For now, click the second tab, the
one with a person. This is your advisor screen. They give frequent reports
about everything in their departments. If their picture is on a green
background, they're happy about things. If the background is red, they're none
too pleased. If it's blue, they don't care one iota either way.
Click on any one of their pictures to get a list of their reports. As a new
mayor, their first reports are just introductory resumes, where they tell you
what they do and what they watch for. As time goes on, they'll make real
reports about different things as they need to.
The third tab of that section takes you to your budget. You're given a simple
chart of your current money, your monthly expenses, your monthly income, and
your projected total after the month ends. Obviously, you want your income to
be higher than your expenses, but young cities will struggle in doing so.
You can get a more detailed look at your budget by clicking the small report.
The screen will expand and show your expenses and incomes, and you can further
go into detail. I'll worry about that later as well. For now, just click the
fourth tab in that group.
This is your data view, or map. You can see various aspects of your city
through this to hunt down problems or see successes. As an example, click the
traffic option. You'll see which roads and streets are more traveled than
others. Red routes mean the path should be upgraded, whether that means
changing a street to a road, or adding bus stops, or something else.
The last tab takes you to a bunch of charts and grafts. This is where you can
get a general breakdown of people or services. Wanna know how your crime rate
compared to five years ago? You can do that here.
Use this information as much as you need to. There's plenty of trouble that can
happen, and the sooner and more you know about it, the better. Don't use it
just to figure out what's wrong, though. See what's right, and make sure you
don't ticker with what's working.
+-------------+
|5c. Expanding|
+-------------+
With the city doing its thing, it's time to start planning for improvements.
Services such as police protection are still not needed, but the time is coming
short. For now, just look to see what can be expanded. Plan out new
neighborhoods, new industrial zones, and new business sectors. Zone them once
you can see them in your head. Don't bother zoning for new places if the ones
you already haven't aren't full. My experience tells me that residential zones
will fill up fastest, so you'll have to be zoning for more houses first.
The only thing aside from zones you'll want to build at this second is a
landfill. Garbage becomes a problem fairly early, so you'll need to take of
that one as quickly as possible. Build a sizeable landfill (one worth about
$1000) near the power plant. Make sure to give it road access as well.
+----------------+
|+--------------+|
||6. SMALL TOWNS||
|+--------------+|
+----------------+
Once your population hits around 500 people, your people will give you a
mayor's house, and will start grumbling about cops and firemen. Not one to be
heartless (especially after the neat gift they gave to you), you need to take
your sims' lives out of your hands and put them in someone else's. Education
isn't much of an issue at the moment, but your sims' safety is. After all, if
they get murdered, who's going to be around to pay taxes?
The first thing you need to build is a police station. Click the appropriate
buttons, then select a small police station. Take a look at it as you drag it
around the landscape. See the big circle around it? That's the range the police
station has access to. It's scalable, so a crime committed two doors away will
have a better chance of being stopped than a crime on the fringe of the radius.
Place the police station in such a way where you can cover the whole town
(aside from the power plant) if you can. The worst crime is probably in the
industrial zone.
I'm sure you have a large amount of money left, so build a fire department now.
Get a small one and place it so it too covers the whole city if possible. Favor
the residential zones if you have to; losing a business won't cut much into
your economy, but losing people will. You may also want to put a second small
fire department next to your power plant. That prevents your plant from
catching flames and exploding, which would result in the loss of power, which
is absolutely devastating this early.
That second fire department does not need to cover its full radius if it's
right next to the plant, so I'll teach you how to make it a little more
efficient. Click the query tool (the question mark near the mini-map), then
click the station. There's a bar that lists its local funding, which is
currently $125 per month. That's way too expensive for a station that has only
one objective, so let's fix that. Click and drag the little box to the left to
lower the building's funding. Notice that the radius shrinks as you do so.
Don't lower it too much, or else the people will go on strike.
By now, your people should be going along smoothly, and your people are ready
for new challenges. You don't have much for kids to do, so build a few parks or
plazas around the town. Unlike previous SimCity games, each rec area costs
monthly, so don't go nuts. About five small parks will do for now.
Kids can't just play, of course. It's time to address the education issue, and
this is where most new cities go down. Build an elementary school, and make
sure you place it so it only covers residential areas. Commercial and
industrial zones don't breed little sim kids, so it would be a waste to put a
school too close to those places.
Once the school is placed, grab your query tool and examine the building. The
radius is determined by the bus fund, and lowering it any will catch up with
you in the end unless you monitor it VERY carefully. The main funding affects
how many students it can hold. For now, lower the funding so the school
accommodates only 10% of your population. That's still probably high, but you
can lower it later.
Speaking of which, there's nothing more to do for now. Let your city run itself
for awhile. Hope for a profit, but know that your large treasury will hold out
for awhile as long as you didn't go crazy with building things earlier. After
about two months, query the school again. You'll get a count of its current
students. Adjust the funding so you can accommodate all the students and about
50 more. If you put in more funding than that, you're just wasting it, and at
this stage, every simoleon counts... especially with schools, where the costs
are so bloody high that you wonder why you bother with it in the first place.
Trust me, though, that education will pay off... you just won't see it in the
short-term.
Sim the game for awhile until you get roughly 1000-1500 people. (If your
population deadlocks before that, you probably have too few residential zones).
Once you hit that milestone, your sims' throats will feel a little too parched.
Fix that by giving up some cash to build a water tower. Water pumps offer more
water, but cost way too much for tiny cities. Choose a site far away from
pollution, or else black liquid will come out of faucets, and I'm not talking
oil.
Once the tower is placed, use water pipes to connect your tower to the rest of
the city. Water pipes have a six-tile radius, so you don't have to cover every
square inch of your land. An old strategy that I used to subscribe to is to
line your roads with water pipes; that way, you can guarantee that every
building is watered. However, since you have a monthly fee for every section of
pipe that is laid in the city, you can't do that anymore, at least not starting
out.
Sometime during this part, you'll probably be offered to build a church and/or
graveyard. They take up valuable land and don't pay taxes, but they improve
your people's morale. As everything, it's up to you; personally, I always build
them.
All right, your sims now have police protection, fire protection, health care,
educational facilities, garbage disposal, and water. Everything is in place to
make your city run... but there's probably one major problem you've got, and it
plagues all young towns no matter how well experienced the mayor is: money.
+------------------+
|+----------------+|
||7. MEDIUM CITIES||
|+----------------+|
+------------------+
With the services in place, you need to start being able to fund those
services. Money is probably a serious issue at the moment, so you need to start
looking for a way to fix it.
For the first step, I'll teach you about a really, really nice tool. Click the
Data View tab (the fourth one in the batch of five), then click the
Desirability category. Here you can see which class of people want which plots
of land. Generally, the low class will be happy anywhere, and the rich class
will only be happy with places provided with services.
If you built your police station, fire department, school, and clinic
relatively close to each other, the land value for the radii is astronomical.
High land values attract richer people, but you can't soak their cash from
their rich little fingers if they have nowhere to live. Spend any remaining
money you have on upgrading your zones. Get any medium-density residential zone
to its high-density cousin by selecting the high-density zone tool and painting
over the residential zones that already exist. You do NOT have to destroy the
current buildings to do this.
Once you've upgraded the residential zones, upgrade your commercial zones as
well. Be aware that you'll need more commercial zones also; your city gets more
and more commercial as the years go by, especially in the early days. Reasons
are explained later. With all that expansion, you cannot neglect your
industrial zones. Expand, expand, expand.
Your city is gaining physical size pretty quickly, so consider upgrading your
fire department and police station to their larger cousins. One large police
station or fire department covers almost an entire city built in the smallest
city size. If you took my advice and are playing on the second-smallest plot, a
large station effectively covers a quarter of the map. Feel free to upgrade
your police station and primary fire department, but you may want to leave your
small fire station that is guarding your power plant. Of course, if you CAN
eliminate it through intelligent fire coverage, feel free. Unlike zones, you'll
have to destroy the original building to replace it with a bigger version.
Avoid upgrading your hospital and school for now. It will just eat up your
money. However, you SHOULD increase their funding if they're running at or over
capacity.
+----------------------------+
|+--------------------------+|
||8. METROPOLISES AND BEYOND||
|+--------------------------+|
+----------------------------+
For better or for worse, the rest of the game is reactionary. I've found that
generally the more you try to make things happen (the Peanut Butter Point
excepted), the worse they get. Don't force the issue; if you're impatient, just
speed up the sim time for awhile.
The goal of the game is whatever you want it to be. Assuming you want a
friggin' large city, then you'll have go slow and steady. From your medium city
that you've got running, expand outward. Try to fully envelop the radii of your
services before seeking out new places to conquer. Keep those land values up,
the rate of expansion down, and you'll have success!
After you get done upgrading your services, you may still find yourself in the
red. Rest assured that it's normal and easy to recover from if you're smart.
Take out a loan, then prioritize zoning or building money-making ventures. The
easiest way to gain cash is through taxes, so keep those zones filled at all
times. Only stop zoning if you're short on cash or there are still empty zones
for you.
Keep tabs on the population by listening to your advisors. They really do know
what they're talking about, although catering to everyone's wishes will leave
you broke. Pick and choose what you believe will be the most effective
strategy, whether that means blitzing for cash, or blitzing for people, or
whatever.
One thing that I've noticed make people more happy than anything is education.
I detail education and its entire role in your city in a later section.
+----------------------------+
|+--------------------------+|
||9. THE PEANUT BUTTER POINT||
|+--------------------------+|
+----------------------------+
In all four SimCity games, there's always been one problem that stumps most
rookies and many vets alike (myself included). Unless you've got a tiny city or
are ridiculously lucky, you will come to a point where the city will simply
stop growing. Your education levels will level out, your hospitials will be
exactly where you want them, all zones will be filled but no more will be asked
for, and you'll be getting a steady income with average-or-less complaints
about tax rates. The city becomes stagnant as far as growth goes; it becomes a
sticky trap, where everyone comes in, no one leaves, but everyone reproduces to
keep everything running like a machine. The stickiness is what I call the
"Peanut Butter Point." Get the pun? Ha ha ha!
A-hem. Anyway, the Peanut Butter Point is deadly, because you may think your
game is over. It seems that if you try to make any additional zones or other
things, no one wants them. If you take stuff away, then you're defeating the
purpose. What's the point of continuing? Of course, you can always start a new
city, but I don't like doing that until every single tile within city limits
has a purpose.
Okay, let's say you've got a good-sized city going. Even if it seems no one is
moving in, you may not have hit your Peanut Butter Point yet. Here's a
checklist...
-Are ALL your schools funded enough to avoid overcrowding?
-Are ALL your hospitals funded enough to avoid over crowding?
-Are ALL your libraries and museums funded enough to give the people what they
want?
-Do you have enough police stations and fire stations to cover your whole city?
-Do you have enough jails so they have room to accomodate more prisoners?
-Is your trash amount under your capacity?
-Are you getting few (if any) complaints on the tax rate?
-Are all zones and buildings powered and watered?
...Those problems are easy to fix. Of course, if you answered yes to those
questions, here's the second (shorter) list...
-Are ALL your zones set to maximum density? (assuming you want maximum density;
farms can't be in areas that dense, of course)
-Do you have an airport complimenting your commercial sector?
-Do you have a seaport complimenting your industrial sector? (assuming you've
got water access)
...If the answer to those questions are "yes" also, then you've hit your Peanut
Butter Point.
+-----------------------+
|9a. What To Do About It|
+-----------------------+
The Peanut Butter Point is not the end of your game; in fact, it's the start of
a whole new set of challenges.
The first thing you need to do when hitting that point is not to panic. In my
rookie days, I used to think that the reason people weren't coming in was
because there was something wrong with my policies. So, I lowered tax rates,
issued more ordinances, built tons of parks, and generally threw in a whole
bunch of stuff to make everyone happy... or so I thought. Between the lowered
tax and new ordinances, though, my money well quickly ran dry.
The question you're asking by now is, how can you make your city overcome that
Peanut Butter Point. A common phrase in comedy and the entertainment industry
in general is "Leave your audience wanting more."
Concentrate on what is RIGHT in your town. There is very, VERY seldom the
perfect city. If you've hit the Peanut Butter Point, it's not because the city
is too  bad, nor is it that your city is too good; it's because there's too
much of a balance between what you have right and what you have wrong. I hate
saying this, but for the sims' own good, the best way to make your city get out
of its sticky trap is to piss everyone off.
Before starting, make sure you have plenty of cash. This method can get a bit
expensive.
Find the best part of town. Just check the map and look for whatever place has
the highest land value and highest city aura. If you have multiple spots, pick
an area that is pretty big, but not the biggest. Call this place "Ground Zero."
Find out why the land value is so high; it's usually high education and low
crime. Grab the keys to your trusty bulldozer, start that MF'er up, and give
the kiddies a permanent vacation from school--break open the jails too, while
you're at it.
I know it sounds crazy, but trust me. Let the city be confused for awhile.
They'll complain and yell about how crappy the town is, but believe it or not,
that's what you want temporarily. Take some money (in your coffers, if you can,
NOT a loan), and go to a new section of town. Start a "new city" over in that
corner. Pretend you're starting a new game, just with an inflated bank account.
Build a new, cheap power plant. Build some zones of all three flavors, use
streets instead of roads, avoid any police or fire coverage, and refuse to give
them any education. Meanwhile, head back to Ground Zero and take out a few
dozen parks or so... Do NOT re-zone or destroy any existing RCI buildings.
After a few months, the city aura and value in Ground Zero will just absolutely
plummet. However, your sims try to move across town before across the nation.
They'll see that new little area you've got developing in the corner of the
map, and they'll take interest. While they're thinking of the good ol' days,
cut off their water.
Back at the new colony, start giving the BASIC services: one elementary school,
one clinic, one small police station, and no fire stations... well, maybe a
small one, if you feel sorry for 'em. You MIGHT already have a few people
coming in, but still not enough to make you get out of your trap.