SimCity 110: City Specializations

So, in SimCity 5, the region map is a shotgun blast of sixteen different maps all working together in symbiosis to send and receive goods and citizens. Each municipality then makes up for something that other cities lack. As a result, the idea is to work with others to specialize your area to compliment the rest of the metropolis.

Official Specializations

SimCity has a specific section where you can specialize your city with six different options.

• Mining
  Your focus is to work on resource generation to help the surrounding areas build.
• Drilling
  Your focus is sucking oil out of the ground to sell or use for power.
• Trading
  Your focus is to develop waterfront property or airport land for import and export of goods.
• Electronics
  Your focus is to generate advanced technologies and products.
• Gambling
  Your focus is on a Las Vegas style casino mecca that caters to every debauched whim.
• Culture
  Your focus is on museums and aquariums as well as sports venues and other such pursuits.

Other Options

In a game like this, coordinating the resource management for up to sixteen different zones can be a huge hassle. Even though they are not officially part of the game, I want to introduce you to a few other options that you should consider that will help you and your friends achieve greatness.

• Commercialism
  Your focus is on the "downtown" area where people go to work in high-rise buildings.
• Education/Tech
  Your focus is to construct a network of schools and a major university to develop smart sims who then specialize your zones into tech-related industries.
• Crap
  Your focus is to import and store all the waste of all the surrounding areas so that the citizens in those sites can live in peace.
• Politics
  Every city should have a town hall -- or maybe even a city hall. But only one city in the region needs to add all the bonus modules to his or her city hall. If you designate a portion of your land for full expansion of your city hall, you become the de facto seat of government and grant bonuses to all surrounding city sites.
• Power
  Becoming a power company isn't glamorous, but it can be crazy lucrative. If you're blessed with a great deal of wind, coal, or oil, you can make serious cash generating power for the other city sites in your neighborhood.
• Swank
  Sometimes, rich people need to get away from the riffraff. Stretch parks as far as the eye can see and zone residential around a central hub of trains and planes. You won't achieve top population, but you'll rake in some serious cash.

In a game like SimCity, anything you can sell you can specialize in.

Guide Me

For most of the options listed above, when you click on the corresponding HUD for that discipline (for instance, the education HUD), you'll see a little button next to your adviser that says, "Guide Me". That button triggers the game to start giving you specific -- let's call them missions -- that will drive you closer and closer to specializing in that discipline.

So for instance, let's say you did select the "Guide Me" button on the education panel. You would begin to receive prompts from your Sims asking for high schools, libraries, colleges, and then eventually a university. All the while, you would get dare quests where you had to pick up X number of school students in 24 hours or get X number of people to use the library. That sort of thing.

The "Guide Me" button is a great aid as long as you remember to check in on your Sims.

NOTE: Just clicking on the "Guide Me" button will earn you an achievement. Any time you click on any Guide Me button, you are not obligated to commit solely to that specialization. You can change your mind or click on other Guide Me buttons at any time.