Are you a fan of SimCity? In this post, you can learn 25 SimCity advanced tips that every serious player should know. SimCity is one of the most popular city-simulator games in the world.
Even after 7 years of its official release, gamers all around the world are playing this game constantly.
So, if you are playing SimCity frequently, or if you are just starting out, this post is for you. Because here, we are going to share 25 SimCity advanced tips with you that will for sure up your game and turn you into a power gamer.
So, without further ado, let’s begin…
25 SimCity Advanced Tips for Serious Gamers
#1 Education is Vital
Like real life, education is very important in SimCity. So, you should not compromise there. There are many perks of educating your Sims. For instance, educated Sims will make your city technologically advanced.
On the opposite, they will also stop getting sick frequently and will not cause fires. Keep in mind that your Sims will need to go from one city to another for education. So, you should plan your cities according to that for the best result.
#2 Add Trade Depot
Your city could do great from having trade-depots available. You will only be able to add ‘Trade Depot’ once you meet the target of the minimum population.
With ‘Trade Depot’ buildings, you can buy, sell, and store various resources like oil and coal.
The best thing about these buildings is that they don’t need power/water for functioning. Additionally, this type of buildings can also be used for freight shipments.
#3 Keep Your City Clean and Tidy
If your city has abandoned buildings, you should demolish them. Otherwise, there will be no space for new buildings. And your city will not thrive. Interestingly, to keep your city clean off any abandoned buildings, you can use the bulldozer.
You will be automatically notified about such unnecessary building occasionally.
So look for that and whenever you have time to rebuild any area, you should use the bulldozer.
For the record, you can also convert areas. For instance, you can change a commercial area to a residential one. However, you will have to destroy all the abandoned buildings in those particular areas to apply the new changes.
#4 Space is Important
Space is very important in SimCity. If you want your city to grow and expand, you will have to give room for that. As a result, you should keep empty spaces between buildings.
That way your city’s citizens will be able to expand their shops, homes, and factories, once the city has improved. This is very easy to do. However, most new players tend to put more buildings in a small place.
#5 Public Transport is Vital
The citizen of your city will need transport for getting around the city. Now, generally, most inhabitants will use their own cars for traveling. But that is an issue. As it can pollute the environment.
And it will also increase the rate of traffic jams in your city. The solution is to add public transport systems to your city. There are various public transport systems available in the game. For example…
- Bus: This is one of the most common and inexpensive ways to add public transport system to your city. To do that, you should build bus stations all around the city. This will also increase the happiness of your citizens. Make sure, you are adding more buses in each station before the citizens start to complain about being overcrowded.
- Ferry: A ferry can be a great addition to your city. However, it is not compulsory while you are still improving your city.
- Train: You can build train stations for commuters and tourists. However, train stations are not a viable option as these cost more and need more space.
- Airport: If you can afford it, you can build a local airport in your city. Then again, this is not that easy to do. Thus, we will recommend against it.
#6 Keep the City Green
The best and cheapest way of keeping your citizens happy is to create a nice environment for them. So, you should fill your city with greeneries, parks, playgrounds, and places for outdoor activities. That way the people of your city will be happy and satisfied.
Another awesome SimCity advanced tip is to place parks near any residential area that is closer to the industrial area. Typically, people will not be happy, if you place them near an industrial area.
But even if you have done it, you should place a park next to them. And, you will see the result immediately.
#7 Keep the Industrial Area Far
Even in real life, we don’t want to be next to a factory. Similar to that, your citizens on SimCity also don’t like to be near an industrial zone. So, you should not mix the industrial and residential areas.
Added to that, it is also recommended that you should not distribute various industries all around the city randomly. Rather, it is a good idea to put the industries in a separate land far away from the residential area.
#8 Public Facilities are Important
One of the main things you can do to keep your city prosperous is to build public facilities like fire stations, police stations, educational institutions, hospitals, etc. Otherwise, your city people will not be happy with you.
Additionally, you should also keep an eye on the current situation of these places. Whenever necessary, you should upgrade or expand the facilities.
#9 Start Building from Middle or Corner
A good city planning will always pay you in the long run. On the other hand, if you don’t plan ahead while building your city from the ground up, you will have a hard time expanding it in the future.
One great tip is to start placing roads or buildings at the center or at a corner of the land. That way, you will be able to expand it effortlessly in the future without facing any limitations.
#10 Collaborating With Other Cities
When starting, the best way to make some extra income is to collaborate. You can share your own land with other cities. Or, you can use resources or buildings from other cities. That way, you can save a lot of money.
And chances are you might not even have to build factories on your land initially. So, collaborating with your neighboring cities can be a great option.
#11 Transfer Funds
Another great option in SimCity is the option to transfer funds between cities. Many of the newcomers don’t even know about this option.
However, to transfer the fund, you will need a city with large enough funds. That way, you can build a new city faster with donations from your big cities.
#12 The City Budget
Every city will have a budget in SimCity. You should always manage the budget of your city wisely. Otherwise, you might not expand or improve your city.
Consequently, your citizens will not be happy and might leave your city as well. So, you cannot build unlimited buildings as you have a limited budget. But, with greater prosperity, your city budget will also increase.
#13 Take Loan
Most players know about ‘Bond’ in SimCity. This is like taking a loan in real life. We know that it is better not to take a loan in real life. However, it is different in SimCity. Here, if you are just starting out, you should borrow to take care of your city.
When you are having issues with the city budget, you might think of raising taxes or turning off any services. But, doing so, your citizens will not be happy.
So, before you do those, you should take a small loan and expand your city and build new buildings. That way people will live happily in your city.
#14 Block or Grid Structure is the Way to Go
It might be tempting to make city plans with unusual shapes. But if you are not experienced, you will have a hard time expanding the city later. As a result, you should start using grid structure as your city planning inspiration.
Also, you can create a main large avenue. And, other narrower or smaller roads can meet up to the main avenue. That way, it will be very easy to expand the roads and the entire city whenever you need to.
#15 Pre-planning is the Key
While you are starting out, you should plan your city structure. Many new players tend to build roads and buildings without any planning. And, most of the time, they don’t keep any space between the buildings and roads.
As a result, later, they need to demolish buildings when it is time to construct intersections. And, you know that way your city’s population will decrease. Gradually, your income will also get lower.
#16 Balancing RCI
On the bottom corner of the screen, you will find the RCI meter. Here, RCI stands for ‘Residential, Commercial, and Industry’ and it acts as a guide on what your city needs to be balanced.
Now, you can always follow this guide and make a well-balanced city. However, it is also possible to build a city without following the RCI meter. This is also a great way to experiment with the game.
#17 Overlapping Buildings
There are many types of buildings available in SimCity. You can build as many buildings as possible or your budgets allows. However, you don’t need similar types of multiple buildings.
For example, a grade school and a university serve the same purpose in-game. So, even though these are very important in the game, you don’t need them to be in operation at the same time.
In this case, you can easily power off the grade school. Just keeping the university will do. Due to that, you should look for any overlapping buildings or services. If you find any of those, just turn the lower level ones off. It will save a lot of money in the long run.
#18 How To Increase the Land Value
There are many ways you can raise the value of the land on your city in SimCity. Here are some tips…
- If you want to increase the land value fast and cheap, you should start placing parks and plazas in your city
- Another great method is to build multiple plazas or parks by overlapping their radius zone with each other. This way, the land value seems to increase to a greater extent
- You can also add a specialization to your city. For instance, if your city specializes in Casinos, then it will help increase the value of other commercial buildings around it
- It also helps to build public facilities like school, police stations, transport system, hospitals, etc. to increase the land value of an area
- Keeping your city and street clean is also another way to increase its value
- You should also demolish any abandoned buildings. Otherwise, it will bring the price down of other buildings around it
#19 Go for the Expensive options
At first, you will not have much money to go for building expensive services for the Sims. However, when you have the money, you should always go for the expensive one.
Because over time, the requirements of your citizens will increase. So, if you are looking for value for money, you should aim for the most expensive options while building your city.
#20 Upgrade Roads
We have already told you that you should add the public transport facilities in your city. Now, with time, you will see that your roads are getting overcrowded.
That means you will have to upgrade the roads. Now, our suggestion would be to upgrade the roads while they are at the ‘Moderate’ or ‘Yellow’ stage.
#21 Its Better to Build in an Order
You can start building your city the way you want to. However, there’s always a better way. You can follow the order below for the best result.
- Construct roads or avenues
- Place residential, industrial, and commercial areas
- Next, build a power station
- And, build a water tower
- Place a sewage treatment plant
- Of course, build a town hall
- Then, build firehouse, dumps, police stations, hospitals, etc.
- Lastly, you can proceed on building other services
#22 Cover Your City
Every public service building has a limited range and a response time. There is no use of a firehouse in the southern part of your city if a fire truck from that can’t reach the northern part of the city in time. So, you should place an adequate amount of public service buildings to cover the entire city.
#23 Protect the Environment
If an area of your city is polluted, the Sims will start to complain and it will cause germs. At the same time, the value of the land will go down. So, you should keep in mind that before filling out the city with industrial buddings.
Typically, pollution will decrease over time automatically, if you keep your city clean. However, tress can come in handy to bring the rate of pollution down.
#24 Vu Tower
With ‘Vu Tower’, you can earn golden keys from Dr. Vu. Now, golden keys are important for unlocking specialized buildings. So, if you play SimCity regularly, you can get the ‘Vu Tower’.
However, if you are not a regular player, you should not opt for the ‘Vu Tower’. Because it takes a lot of money to upgrade it. Also, there are 3 more ways to earn golden keys without having the ‘Vu Tower’. Those are…
- Daily chests
- Random item drops
- Through Cargo boat shipments
#25 You Can’t Make Everyone Happy
The main target of you as a mayor would be to keep your citizens happy. The happier they are the better. Typically, they will complain about any issues to you from time to time.
Those requests or complaints would appear as small missions in-game. And, completing the missions brings reward.
But, you know that in reality, you can’t keep everyone happy all the time. There could come a time when it won’t be a viable option to expand or upgrade a building upon request from the citizens.
In those cases, you should use your brain to sort out the situation. If you want to make every citizen happy, your city will not thrive.
Summing it up:
So, we have just shared 25 advanced tips for getting the best out of SimCity. Now it is very likely that you are already familiar with some of the tips as this game is a very old one. Also, these tips will not work on all the game modes in SimCity.
However, on most game modes, these SimCity advanced tips will come in very handy. Admittedly, some of these are not that advanced, yet these tips can be very useful to take your city to the top.
If you have liked this post, you can also give a read to the post on facts about Facebook on our blog.
And, if you have any more tips and tricks about SimCity that you think we should have included here, you can leave them in the comments below!
