The Basics
You place residence units and upgrade them by using resources that can be created at your factories or stores. Each item has an amount of time it takes to get ready. When you upgrade a residence, you earn XP, Simoleons (see below) and population.
Your screen contain information like level, population, warehouse current and maximum capacity and approval rate. This is all in the top left corner.
Below this you have the social and preferences buttons.
In your top right corner, you have your currencies information (see below).
You the right middle-bottom side, you have the building options: streets, residences, commercials, factories and specializations. The red exclamation mark on the street or specialization icon means that something is wrong, like some of your street has heavy traffic and needs to be upgraded, or something basic infrastructure is failing (i.e. lack of water).
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The 2 ways street is free and I recommend making a layout like a street, then space for 2 rows of houses and another street. The main reason is that you will enable bigger buildings later on that will not fit if you go for street, house, street. Believe me, street, house, house, street is better. Only make sure to have some cross streets in order to avoid heavy traffic.
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Currencies
Simoleons: ingame money which can be used to buy stores, upgrade your factories, buy infrastructure buildings, etc. It can be earned by upgrading buildings, selling goods at the Global Trade HQ, doing Naval missions, collecting taxes or spending Simcash.
Simcash: special and limited cash that can be used to speed up production, increase store slots, open warehouse or expansion slots, etc. You start with a small ammount and you can get more by getting Achievements or spending real money.
IMPORTANT: do not spend Simcash on anything other than increasing store slots. It's really not worth it spending it in other things unless you're willing to pay real money.
Golden Keys: these can be obtained by completing Naval missions or by reconstructing your buildings after using Doctor Vu's disasters. These keys can be used to build Specialization buildings like Education, Transportation, Leisure, Gaming and Monuments.
Collectibles
You will notice some balloons over some buildings. This is usually a comment from your citizens about something from your city. Clicking on them have a chance of rewarding you with a collectible.
My recommendation is that you never sell Land or Vu's collectibles, and start selling Warehouse ones after you reach 110 to 120 capacity. The main reason behind this is because at that point, you will need 9 to 10 items of each. This would reduce drastically the quantity of productive goods that you can store in your warehouse since around 20+ items will be about Warehouse collectibles. /
There are 9 kinds of collectible, for 3 different uses:
Warehouse Maximum Capacity Increase: to increase you warehouse's cap by 10 slots, you need Cameras, Locks and Grates. You need at first one of each to upgrade, and it increments by 1 for each time you upgrade it (2 of each for the second upgrade, 3 of each for the third, etc).
Land Expansion: for that, you need tractor's Exhaust Pipe, Wheel and Shovel. Each extra land has a specific cost, which can vary from 1 of each to 10 of each.
Doctor Vu's Items: to release a disaster, you will need to give Doctor Vu a Lightning Glove, Battery and Remote Controller. The cost of each disaster is random. It can be 2 Gloves and a Battery, or 4 Remote Controllers, or one of each.
Walkthrough
It looks like you start with a lot of Simoleons, however try not to spend it too fast. You will run out of it quite fast. Some infrastructure buildings will unlock at certain levels. Once they unlock, your citizens will start complaining about not having that specific things (i.e.Sewer Treatment, Garbage Management, Police, etc) and they will abandon your city if you don't give them what they want.
My tip here is: DON'T WORRY. You'll NEVER have enough money to do everything on time if you don't spend REAL money. So you'll have to go one step at a time.
Having bad approval rate and abandoned buildings for a while is not too bad, since this will only reduce a little of your tax income, which only comes every 24h (or spread during a day if you access the game often).
I suggest stop placing new residences when you unlock something new that will make your citizen leave. Start focusing on saving money until you are able to buy the best option for that category.
You can find below a table with the cost x benefit of each category. This is a sacrifice at the beginning but you will save money in the long run as you will not need to spend money with this kind of stuff all the time.
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After the basic infrastructure stuff are enabled (the last one to enable is Health), you can focus on finishing providing everything that is missing and then start expanding your city horizontally, placing new residences.
I do recommend that you find a way to fit the Port and Doctor's Vu tower in this process. The Specialization buildings are the ones that will make your city really grow in terms of population.
In terms of Specialization, this is what I suggest you to do:
1 - Place the Department of Education (40K Simoleons);
2 - Farm Golden Keys until you have 47 of them so you can place the Library, High School, College and University. This will cover your whole city with Education and will unlock the Fusion Plant (which you'll need later on);
3 - Farm money to place the Department of Transportation (50k Simoleons);
4 - Farm 30 to 34 Golden Keys so you can place the Heliport and the Bus Station or Balloon Park;
5 - Farm 60k Simoleons to place the Leisure HQ;
6 - Farm 38+ Golden Keys to place 2 Leisure buildings, one of them being the Giant Wheel;
7 - Farm 70k Simoleons to place the Gaming HQ;
8 - Farm 22 Golden Keys to place both Luxury Cassinos;
9 - Lastly, farm 80k for the Department of Culture;
10 - Get 60 Golden Keys for the Washington Momument and the Empire State Building.
With this, get prepared to turn your city into a metropolis!
Offerings
Sometimes balloons with coins will appear over buildings. This means some NPC company or organization wants to buy something for you. They will show you which product they want, the quantity they want, the quantity you have in stock and the price they are paying for all products.
In some occasions, it may happen that they will offer you much more than the market value. In this case, I recommend clicking outside the popup (DON'T CLICK ON ANY BUTTON) so you can maintain the offer active. Start producing that product and sell it when you have the necessary quantity.
This will improve your economy in a very interesting way.
Doctor Vu
It works quite simply: give Vu the items he requires for the disaster. Some buildings (1-5) will be destroyed. The game will ask you for requirements to rebuild it, very similar to an upgrade. However instead of money, XP and population, you earn 1 to 3 golden keys. After all buildings are rebuilt you can call upon another disaster.
Some people question if it's really worth to unlock/use it. the answer is that using his disasters is mandatory if you want to have a city with high population and specializations. the ship only gives you one key with an interval of at least 6 hours. The disasters can give you 1 to 12 keys and you can get them in less than 6 hours
I've farmed around 150 keys with Vu and this helped me cover my whole city with all specializations but landmarks. I'm still missing those.
However it may happen in very rare cases that one of the buildings that you will need to rebuild needs ridiculous requirements. I'll mention 2 bad cases and a nearly bad one:
- Warehouse is at 110 storage: game asks for 48 nails and 48 wood (96 items)
- Warehouse at 180: games asks for 156
- Warehouse at 140: game asks for 64
- Impossible requests: use ingame support feature and EA will fix the disaster.
What to do in such a situation? The first and last cases from the list above are mine. I'll now explain how you can solve this problem.
- Focus on finishing all upgrades that you started
- Don't start new ones
- Stop production
- Farm the HQ Global Tarde for expansion items in order to upgrade your storage and land. This way you will get rid of these items hence saving space
- Sell anything you don't need
- Ask your friends to hold some stuff for you. Basically you sell something to you friend and you buy it back after your rebuild is done.
These are only a few way. There should be others too.
Money Making
Money Analysis
AllYourBlocks Video
