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.

SimCity 102: Returning Students

So, if you've been playing SimCity since the original (also known as "Fun with Squares"), then there may be a few features that you haven't seen in any of the beta videos on YouTube and a few that you've noticed that are different. I've tried to compile a list of changes for this version of SimCity and hopefully as I get to play the game I'll update this list.

Firstly, the size of the playing area is slightly different. While each individual city space is smaller than a traditional game of SimCity, because there are sixteen different maps to play with within each region, the overall size of the game is larger in scale. The result is a game that focuses more on the relationships between each map and less on the success or failure of any one location. With careful planning, you can hedge bets by using the strengths of one area to cover the weaknesses of another area.

Next up is the missing game mechanics. Terraforming, agriculture, subways (replaced by streetcars), water pipes, and power lines are all features that have appeared in previous versions of the game but now have been removed for various reasons. The overall consensus is that these changes were done to remove some of the more boring micromanagement in favor of more systemic options that color in localized areas of the map to denote "coverage".

In the new game, you can upgrade individual buildings with unique modules -- additions that boost the stats of the original lot. For instance, you can build a police station and then add a helicopter pad or a detective wing (if you have enough room) to expand the police coverage and effectiveness.

The most notable and exciting feature of the new game is the re-imagined version of roadways. Not only are there different flavors of road that can accommodate varying levels of traffic, but you can build curved road systems and traffic circles that add character to your little town. The curved roads are tricky because most of the buildings that can be erected are square, so wanton disregard for convention could leave you with a lot of unused land. But visually, it adds a lot of depth to the game.

Finally, one last thing I'd like to mention is the disaster system -- which is tricky to say the least. Unlike in previous versions where you could turn off disasters to save yourself the hassle of being wiped out by a dinosaur, this version offers you no such respite. And because the save games are cloud based, there's no way to revert back to a previous version of the city should a tsunami obliterate your beachfront. It remains to be seen how devastating or rage-quit-inducing this feature is going to be, but I for one am looking forward to the challenge.

SimCity 101: Beginners Guide

So, if you've never played SimCity before, welcome. I played the original SimCity almost twenty years ago and then SimCity 2000 after that. Then, I stopped playing SimCity until January of this year. Now, I'm hardcore into the new SimCity 5 and I can't get enough.

The following is information that only pertains to you if you have never played before. If you have played before, this article will bore you to tears. With that warning in place and as per the theme of this blog, welcome to SimCity 101.

How the Game is Played

This is a simulation game where you play the roll of mayor for a fledgling city that you create by designing and laying out streets, zones, and standalone buildings (known as ploppables) in an attempt to build the greatest city possible given the limitations of the terrain.

What kind of limitations will you experience? Some levels have sheer cliffs, some are bordered by water, and some have rivers or valleys that cut right through the middle of them. There will be deposits of ore and oil that you can dig up to earn money from -- unless, of course, you accidentally pave over them first with houses.

Leaderboard

In this version of SimCity, there is a leaderboard system that decides -- based on population or trade dollars earned -- which cities are the best. This blog is dedicated to getting my readers to the top of that leaderboard.

Happiness and Money

The people who live in your city are individuals with their own quirks and metrics. However, as a group, they behave quite predictably. When you give them places to work, money to spend, and places to party, they will respond by becoming quite happy and -- by proxy -- give you large portions of their paychecks to make sure you can keep doing what you're doing.

When they are unhappy, however, your city will descend into an Alighierian hell the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend. You'll lose everything and your city will sink into the sands, dragged down by the weight of it's own sewage.

Specializations

New to this version of the game, your city can specialize in certain things. For instance, you can specialize your city in "education" -- which sets you on the path toward building a grand university at the center of your burgh. You can also specialize in "mining", which will allow you to build advanced mining rigs.

Layout and Space Management

SimCity is and has always been about maximizing space. In the original games, if you set up a 3x3 residential complex in a 4x3 square, you wasted those three extra 1x1 blocks. Over time, all the 1x1 blocks that you wasted combine together to reduce the maximum population you can achieve.

The same is true in this game, but the stakes are even higher. There are no predetermined 1x1 grid squares, so it's very difficult to determine which space is wasted and which is well developed. There are tricks to maximizing your population and I will be sharing these advanced strategies later on, but for right now it's enough to understand that roads to nowhere and open land without anything on it is the bane of anyone looking to rise to the top of the leaderboard.

Of course, if you don't care about leaderboards and you want to design a city that spells out your name in paved dirt roads, you can ignore everything I just said and go have a blast.

Downtown vs. Burbs

Developing a well balanced city with a concentrated downtown area (a "center city" business district) is an art. It's about making people happy and then manipulating land values and density balances to shift people to a particular section of land that then will develop skyscrapers in response to your restructuring of your citizen's demands.

The flip side, though, can be equally fun. If you build a little suburban community surrounding a massive university where people can learn and commute to their jobs in another town, that takes it's own set of skills and suave.

Neighbors

In this version of SimCity, your neighboring city sites are essential for developing not only your region but your own city to it's greatest potential. If your neighbors are lazy and allow their cities to be overrun with crime and garbage, your city will suffer. However, sixteen hardcore majors all working together to balance the demands of millions of citizens is a task that is both challenging and incredibly rewarding if you can pull together the right people for the job.

Of course, you can attempt to control all sixteen cities by yourself, but for your own personal mental health I would discourage you passionately.

Utilities and Upgrades

The people can take care of themselves up to a point. That point is where you come in. You must provide guidance and supply utilities to give Sims essentials like power and police protection.

Equally important, in order to maximize their effectiveness while minimizing the amount of land that these utilities use, you need to add modules that upgrade and improve their quality.

Steps to a Great City

Finally, having played a lot of games of SimCity, I can provide you with a tutorial of sorts that will guarantee you success with the minimum amount of headaches. This game at first glance may not seem formulaic, however if you follow these suggestions -- in order -- I guarantee that you will start the game well on your way to generating an amazing city:

1. Set the game speed to "cheetah" by clicking the arrows icon in the bottom right corner until all three arrows are lit up.
2. Lay down only medium-density streets or better.
3. Start with a small grid near the highway connection. Zone one block of residential, one block of commercial, and two blocks of industrial. Then, let it sit there.
4. Set up a wind power station and a water tower.
5. Spend time looking at the water table overlay and plan on putting industrial zones and dirty ploppables like sewage and garbage on areas that are the lightest color (aka, no water)
6. Lay down roads on the surface that trace the lines of your water table so you can visually see where the water isn't.
7. Zone all the industrial areas in the proper places -- again, not over water
8. Put down a sewage pump, not over water
9. Put down a garbage dump, not over water
10. Run medium-density roads from the corners of the map to your highway connection
11. Choose a location near the middle of the map for your first three service buildings
12. Put down a fire station
13. Put down a hospital across the street from the fire station
14. Put down a police station near the hospital/fire station
15. Now, add three new medium density roadways wherever you would like
16. Ring the industrial zones you already established with a thick buffer of commercial zones
17. Zone the remaining areas residential
18. Put down an elementary school in your residential neighborhood
19. Decide where you're going to put your train station (if applicable)
20. At this point, you will have a bustling city with which you can fool around and experiment. Go nuts!

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If you haven't played SimCity or your were just looking around to see if it was something you'd be interested in, I would encourage you to check out the other pages of this Web site to see screenshots and videos of in-game assets so that you can get a feel for how cool this game really is. And if you do buy the game, look me up (AngelikMayhem) in the Origin game server and I'll answer any questions you have and maybe play a game with you.

Enjoy the Web site. - AM