Guide SimCity BuildIt

Ten Tips for the Beginner SimCity Mayor

There are certain SimCity strategies that will make your life easier if you follow. Some are due to the way the game is designed, and others are work-arounds to bugs in the game.

1. Health Tip: Build residential areas upwind of polluters (industrial zones, trash dumps, coal/oil power plants, refineries, factories, mines, smelting plants, etc.).

2. Water Tip: Ensure a future supply of water. When you're able to afford it, build water pumps and sewer treatment plants adjacent to each other. Make sure you replace the default water pump with the filtration pumps to remove the ground pollution from the water though. You can see an example of this on the Traffic and RCI Tips page.

3. Education Tip: The key to keeping your sims healthy, happy, and preventing crime is Education, Education, Education. Once you have community colleges and Universities unlocked, demo the grade schools and high schools (and their bus stops). There is a bug that causes bused students to disappear, so you want to stay away from those types of schools. Plus, you don't need them. You can get by with just community colleges. If you want a higher tech level, go with a University. For more information on ways to increase tech level, read the Electronic Farming Guide.

4. Fire Tip: Once you can afford it, build one large fire station with only fire helicopters. Demo all the fire truck garages. For more on this, read the Fire Station Tips page.

5. Trade Ports and Trade Depots: The game has some bugs which cause trade trucks to occasionally disappear. This bug occurs less frequently when you have only one type of storage yard in each trade port/depot. You can also have one type of export, one type of import. Just don't have two or more types of imports or exports. When all else fails, demo the truck garages and rebuild them. That will start you off with the correct amount of trucks again. Read more about this in the Electronic Farming Guide.

6. Money: Stick to the standard 12%/11%/10% taxes on Low/Med/High wealth zones. Read more about this on the Ideal Tax Ratepage.

7. Tourism: When building a casino/tourism city don't build the municipal airport. Use airships or cruise ship terminals instead. Read more on the Mass Transit Guide, Casino and Tourism Guide and High Wealth Casino Guide.

8. Maximize your space and don't run out of money: Build slowly. Start with all dirt roads. Utilize the Road Spacing Guide to maximize your buildable area and plan your layout ahead of time.

9. Learn to use mods. Many of the mods improve the gameplay dramatically and are must haves for online or offline play. In particular: Skye's Regional Freeway mod, Multiplopper, Oil well service roads (read more about that one on the Trade Secrets page), and the Cam Mod are all must-haves. All of these are available for online game play. There's also many available for off-line games. These tend to be more for the advanced player as some of them are buggy or a bit strange to work with. To learn more about mods, read the Mod Installation Guide.

10. Youtube is a fantastic resource. There are many great videos out there to help you learn how to play SimCity. In particular everyone should watch Skyestorme's videos. If you're a beginner, make sure to watch his 60 second tips. I have a list of many of these earlier videos on the Skyestorme Video Library page. I eventually stopped updating that page though, so make sure to check out his website at Skyestorme.com for all of his latest stuff.

Cities of Tomorrow Building Guide

Megatowers (both types)

$505 x $505 dirt road

$550 x $550 if you want to start with dirt roads and eventually upgrade to avenues before building a megatower.

$2749 x $2749 in medium density avenue costs if starting with avenues.

The Academy

$460 x $460 dirt road for just the main Academy building

$1050 x $460 dirt road cost for fully upgraded Academy with 3

Mass Transit Guide

To answer that, I created a graphic summarizing who uses what form of transportation.

Mass Transit Options

Bus

Shuttle Bus: Provides a way for sims to travel within the city. Note: Bus stops lower land value, so be careful when placing in high wealth areas.
Regional Bus: Provides a way for sims to travel between other connected cities in the region that also have bus stops.
Park and Rides: Placing park and rides throughout your city will greatly increase the amount of Sims using your bus system. They're small and easy to fit into all the nooks and crannies of your city. Highly recommended when using buses. The park and ride can also double up as a parking garage to serve the train station, maglev, street car, shuttle bus, and ferry dock. The bus terminals contain their own garages and thus can be placed within a shopping center to best benefit the commercial zones.
The Double Decker Buses in the UK building set bundle have a slightly higher capacity than the normal buses (100 vs 80). This makes the UK bus terminal ideal for handling a large amount of low-mid wealth tourists.

Streetcars

Streetcar tracks can be placed in avenues or on their own. Pedestrians can also walk alongside the streetcar tracks, so you can use them for pedestrian shortcuts even if you don't have any streetcars.

Trains

Brings in tourists. Very useful for low and medium wealth casino/tourist cities. Place within walking distance of Lower and Medium Wealth Casinos.
Train tracks require roughly double the length of a road in order to construct bridges and tunnels. Likewise, I recommend to try and build your train tracks with 45 degree angles in mind.

Boats

Passenger Ferries: Brings in low and medium wealth commuters from other cities in the region that also have ferry terminals.
Cruise Ship Terminal: Brings in medium and high wealth tourists from outside the region. Very effective method for bringing in high wealth tourists. Place within walking distance of high wealth casinos.

Airport

Brings in tourists from outside the region. The number of tourists generated pales in comparison to the cruise ship terminal, airship terminal, and train station.

Blimps

Airship Terminal: Very effective method to bring in medium and high wealth tourists.
Commuter mooring: Brings in medium and high wealth commuters from other cities in the region that also have commuter moorings.

Maglev

Provides a way for all wealth classes to travel around a city
Maglev stations futurize roughly 2x2 blocks (around the $505 road tiling marking). The tracks don't.
Don't require a centralized network in order to function, meaning that you can have a variety of maglevs that go directly to specific points in a city without having all of your tracks connect together.
Conforms to the shape of roads and the terrain, but may be independently adjusted in height regardless of what the ground is like below them. However, these tracks can't create tunnels.

Miscellaneous Transit Items

Skybridges

Skybridges are classified as a "transit" option and thus allow all vehicle and utility agents to transfer through them. Thus, you can use a skybridge as the means to quickly move sims from one point in the city to another as long as you have the ControlNet and money pending.
School buses also travel along the sky bridges. I can't confirm if the commuter buses do as well.
Skybridges are built based on the height of the skybridge station and how the stations can connect to each other. This means that a skybridge can be as long as you want it, so long as you got the money.

University Dirt Paths

The University dirt path can be used to create pedestrian shortcuts. It doesn't need to be attached to the University, and will remain if you demolish the rest of the University

Land Value Impacts

All mass-transit options will lower adjacent land values. The bus stops, park and rides, bus terminals, ferry terminal, airship hangar, street car stops, train station, maglev stations, and streetcar station all have the same effect as a mid-tech factory in terms of how they lower land value (the very structure itself plus a very small radius around it). I often find that sims won't mind these things being built near them but not on top of them. However, this is easy to counter for you can use a variety of parks that will increase the desirability for the R and C zones.

The airport generates a massive kick-back in land value and almost nobody wants to live near it. Industrial zones, however, like the airport, and you can even use the airport as more means to ship freight for the factories.

An airship terminal, train station and regional bus station anchor my circular casino city.

SimCity Landmark Dimension Guide

Oftentimes, I start building a city in SimCity with an ultimate design in my head. I know where I want to place special landmarks, but I don't necessarily have the money to do so. I thought that it would be nice to be able to leave the space required for the landmark ahead of time. Using sandbox mode on a flat map, I found the dimensions (using dirt road cost) of each of the SimCity landmarks. Most of these dimensions are set up so that if you leave the required space, you will be able to place the landmark in multiple orientations. For the square landmarks you should be given 4 rotation options and the rectangular landmarks, two orientations. I've noted the instances where this is not the case.

Since all of these were determined through a trial and error process, leave a comment if you find one that doesn't work for you. I suspect that maps with more elevation change may need larger areas for each of these.

Attractions

Arc de Triomphe
$253 x $253