You've skimmed the SIMCITY 2000 (SC2) manual. You've built roads and pumped water and zoned houses and factories and office buildings. And you still don't quite know what the hell is going on. Here is an outline of things to look for.
First things first. Zones only develop if they're within three squares of a road. Any farther than that and you'll just have vacant lots. If you find you have zones that aren't developing, make sure that there is a road within that 3-square distance.
Here's a graphic way of looking at what develops and what won't:
R R R R R R R R R R R R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R R R R R R R R R R R R
R = road z = zone The bare spot in the middle is what's left.
(Actually I lied a little. Sims will develop within 3 squares or rail or subway too, but growth will be much slower. Roads are the best to start off with. When traffic and pollution become too nasty, then you want to consider ripping them out.)
Zones need roads to service them, and as the city develops, the roads may take on patterns. I call these grids. While most cities are going to have a number of different and irregular patterns, you may try to impose some order wherever you can find it. Here are some layout ideas.
A very efficient street grid would look something like this:
R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z
R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R
I call this a Stripe Grid. The advantage to this super-efficient layout (two straight roads and six rows of zone in between) is that no space is wasted, and you get a lot of zones serviced by relatively few roads. There are a few drawbacks from it. First, it doesn't look realistic because there are no cross-streets. Second, it doesn't allow for space for public buildings like police stations, hospitals, parks, and the like. But for dense zoning with a minimum of roads, pipes and power lines, this a great grid.
Here's what I call a Block Grid, which shows up in the city "Lakeland" in the SC2000 package:
R R R R R R R R R R R R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R z z z z z z z z z z R
R R R R R R R R R R R R
The Block Grid does not make as efficient a use of roads as the Stripe Grid because the cross-streets service zones that would have been serviced by other roads. However there are two immediate advantages to this grid-- first is that it looks more realistic, the second is that you end up with that big empty hole in the middle. There is also a lesser advantage of giving you more road area for traffic, which decreases traffic density and allows the sims to commute farther to work. On the other hand, it also increases the smog-area.
The hole lets you place important city buildings that don't need road- access. Schools, colleges, hospitals, fire, police departments, water pumps and towers, parks, museums, etc., don't need roads. And putting them next to roads just wastes the road's potential to develop zones. By using the block-grid, you can drop in necessary city buildings without necessary road-side space. If your city building isn't as large as the undeveloped hole, think about adding water or trees to make the city look nicer.
One fundamental difference between the original SIMCITY and SC2 is that now you can pick which zones to make dense and which to make light. Since SC2 is not a game and has no goal, there's no advice on what to use. Which to use will depend on what you want to do.
Light residential is like single-family tract homes, and dense residential is high-rise apartments and condos. Look at most cities and you'll find a mix of the two. Big, old cities like New York and San Francisco tend to be dense. Younger cities like Los Angeles (LA is old, but it's only turned into a big city within the last 70 years or so) tend to be light. An interesting way of building your city is to try this: zone light and let the city fill up. Then begin your expansion by zoning light in undeveloped areas. Then as the downtown area deteriorates, bulldoze it and rezone as dense. Keep working this as you expand your city borders outward from the hub. You end up with large tracts of young suburbs and an old, dense, inner-city downtown area. Commercial property can be dealt with the same way.
There are a number of differences between light and dense zoning, and their advantages and disadvantages have to be weighed against your goals and resources. Light zoning means you have fewer people over the same land, so 1) tax revenues will be lower, but 2) traffic, electrical, water, and other demands will be lower. If you want a real Southern California-style city that covers a lot of land but no buildings taller than the SEARS store, then low density is great. If you want a small, compact city and more tax revenue in a given area, then zone dense.
There are a number of different goals to Simcity, depending on what you want to do. But most of them involve city growth in one way or another. Unless you run an prefab city, you're going to have to start from scratch and grow it to whatever level you desire. If the city won't grow, then you have some serious problems on your hands. The fundamentals of manipulating the growth rate comes from understanding the indicators.
There are there three slide-bars that show the zone "demands." When the bars rise there is more demand for a particular zone. When they drop there is a less demand. When the bar drops down into the negative side the zones are downsized or abandoned.
It isn't quite just a matter of zoning a ton of space of whatever the sims ask for--if you do the indicators will drive you crazy as they bounce back and forth. Here's a basic idea of how it works.
Say you start the game by zoning 24 residential squares. The zones fill up to the saturation point--the point where they're obviously not going to get any more growth. The residential growth indicator is at it's highest point--the sims are just dying to move in. So you go overboard and zone 100 new residential squares. You'll see growth for a short while, but you'll also notice a lot of abandoned buildings in the original zone. And there's a good chance that before the new zones are filled up, the residential zone indicator dipped into the negative area and now you've got abandoned buildings in the new zone. What gives?
Two things--space and unemployment. Whenever you zone a substantial new area, you're (probably) going to see abandoned buildings turn up in the old areas. That's because when new areas show up some of the sims are going to relocate. The abandoned buildings are a temporary problem if the demand indicator stays up, since immigrant sims will simply take over the abandoned buildings.
But in the case of the residential area above, there's unemployment to consider. When there's big demand for residential zones, it means that there's a tight job market and there's room for more workers. But if you zone a big new residential area, sims rush in and suddenly there's a glut on the labor market. Some of the sims who moved in may get jobs (depends on whether the industrial/commercial zones are saturated), but the rest will emigrate because there is no work. And they'll continue to emigrate until the job market tightens up.
The same thing can and does happen with the other sectors. It's especially apparent with commercial zones in low populations. There is a very small demand for commercial zones and it's very easy to over-zone them. You zone 20 commercial squares and they fill, and then suddenly the indicator drops negative and you end up with maybe 8 squares filled and the other 12 or abandoned or vacant.
If you don't care about abandoned buildings, then overzoning isn't much of a problem. What happens is that the zones all have saturation points, and when one zone reaches a saturation point, it affects the growth of the others.
Say, for instance, that you have 100 residential squares zoned, and every one of them is developed, and you can see by the graphs that the population level won't go any higher--your residential zones are saturated. They aren't going to get any denser. This will affect the industrial and commercial demands. Factories and stores need residents as labor and customers, and there's only so much a particular population can support. If too much space is devoted to industrial zones, for instance, then industry isn't going to move in until more residents show up. Same with commercial space. Once you zone more residential area and let more sims move in, then the industrial and commercial zones will up.
Following this example, say you zoned another 100 residential squares. The industrial squares develop as the labor force rises, but then the industrial zones saturate. All of a sudden you get the reverse of the situation above--too many sims and not enough jobs. If you want the residential zones you added to fill in, you'll have to add industrial zones.
It's a balancing act, especially in the early stages when small changes have big effects. If you want to keep your demand indicators high and your abandoned buildings at a minimum, then make your zone additions in small increments. Start off by zoning a few residential zones and a few industrial zones and let things stabilize. Once they do, figure out what needs to be added and do so--but just a few at a time. Working this way lets you build your city steadily, instead of in booms and busts.
Looking at the indicators and your zone-usage can tell you what's wrong with your city. If you see your industrial bar plunge, then there's a shortage of labor-force. Look at your residential zones. Are there big expanses of undeveloped or abandoned buildings? If so, then sims should be immigrating and business will build back up as people arrive. If your residential zones are saturated however, then you need to add some residentials. Same thing with the residential demand. If the residential demand drops, look at your industrial zones. Are all the zones developed or are some vacant or abandoned?
(This is all assuming that you're treating your zones right--they've all got access to roads (see above), power and water. If you aren't powering your zones or giving them road service, then they aren't going to develop no matter what you do.)
There are exceptions to this. At times you may notice that All the indicators drop at the same time. This means that there's a problem that faces all the sectors--look at the newspapers or the message indicator that tells you what the citizens want. A good example is when the sims want an airport--the demand indicators will fall off and the newspapers will scream for an airport. Once you build the airport the indicators will revive.
Taxes can do the same thing. If you're too greedy all the indicators will drop--unless demand is so acute that the tax rate doesn't matter. If your tax rate is around 9% or over, you should see depressed demand rates. 7%- 8% will give you better growth demands.
At some point not too far into the game, the sims are going to demand a hospital and a school. DON'T fund them at 100 percent, because it's just pouring your money down a sinkhole. Instead, fund them each at 25 percent the first year. Then click on their micro-managers and look at their "grades." Both the schools and the hospitals are graded, where "A+" is highest and "F" is worst. You can cut the funding down to around 25 percent and still maintain an "A" rating on both. As your population grows and the schools and hospital get more use, you can then adjust your funding accordingly. When you get to the 100-percent funding level and the grades begin dropping off, then it's time to think about building another school or hospital.
If you have the DISASTERS turned off, then forget about building fire departments since they're wasted if you don't have DISASTERS to deal with. Build one fire department to get the sims off your back when they demand it, but that's it. However, once you get brave and turn the DISASTERS on, then you want the fire departments at your disposal. Every fire department gives you another unit to dispatch in times of emergency.
The SC2 manual has a section on power plants, and in it there's a chart that compares each power plant with its cost and its efficiency--cost per Mw generated. However, the section neglects to mention one important thing. All of the power plants explode after a 50 year lifespan and have to be rebuilt--all but the hydro and wind plants. They don't have to be rebuilt. And because they don't have to be rebuilt every 50 years, over time you save the cost of replacing them.
Here's an example: you want 200 Mw of power to run your city this year. You can buy one coal plant for $4,000. Or you can pay $4,000 for ten hydro plants. Either way you get the same amount of power for the same price. BUT, say this goes on for a century. After 50 years you had to lay out another $4,000 for the coal factory, but the hydro plants did not require replacement. Over a century's time you still got 200 Mw of power, but you paid $8,000 for coal power, but only $4,000 for hydro power.
After the century-mark the cost-per-Mw-year stabilizes for all replaceable power plants, but it drops off steadily for the non-replaceables.
Cost of 1 Mw per
Type Cost Mw year century 2 cent's 4 cent's
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Coal $4,000 200 $20 $.40 $.40 $.40
Hydro 400 20 20 .20 .10 .05
Oil 6,600 30 30 .60 .60 .60
Gas 2,000 50 40 .80 .80 .80
Nuclear 15,000 500 30 .60 .60 .60
Wind 100 4 25 .25 .125 .0625
Solar 1,300 50 26 .52 .52 .52
Micro 28,000 1,600 17.5 .35 .35 .35
Fusion 40,000 2,500 16 .32 .32 .32
As you can see, Hydro is the big winner. Hydro has a couple of other advantages as well. First, because it sits on waterfall tiles it can be placed on tiles that are normally of no use to you. Wind power requires a flat square that could be used for other things. Also, unlike solar and wind, the hydro plants are unaffected by weather. And if that isn't enough, they aren't prone to disasters (like meltdowns).
Maxis (the company that makes Simcity) is based in California, and they've given Simworld the California water situation--perpetual thirst. At first the water system seems exceedingly simple--just place a few water pumps and make sure all the grids are connected by pipes, and the water's taken care of--just like the power.
It's not quite as simple as power, though. First, the water supply runs in gluts and droughts. And second, you can vary the efficiency of your water sources by placing them properly.
The best way (in my opinion) to get comfortable with the water system is to do this--load a city that's fairly well grown (either one you've made or one that came with the SC2 package) and switch to the underground view. Start the simulation going and use your query tool to see what's going on.
If you look at the little bar that tells the weather, you'll find that the water supply varies with the climate. When it's snowing, raining, and cold, there's a glut situation and you have all the water you need. If you pause the simulation and query your water pumps, you'll find they pump more water during bad weather than they do when it's sunny and hot.
Now look underground. Any place where the pipes are blue is getting water. Any place where the pipes are black is dry. If the entire city is blue, then things are okay. But wait for a little while and see if anything goes black during a drought. What happens is that the drought cuts down water pump levels to the point where there isn't enough to supply the entire city.
The first thing you should notice is that the perimeter of the city starts going black first. The water-resources board figures out how much water their is and allocates it to the center of town, and radiates outward. The father you are from the center of town, the more likely you are to get your water shut off.
It's important to note this because it's real easy to think that the perimeter of the city needs water pumps. It doesn't. You can put water pumps right next to the outskirts of the town and the water will still be allocated to the center of town first.
Water pump placement is important. If you place a pump next to fresh water it will pump twice as much water as a pump placed in the middle of dry land (a well). Pumps placed next to salt water will not gain any performance. ALWAYS CHECK THE WATER SOURCE BEFORE YOU PLACE THE PUMP. Simcity has a habit of providing salt-water lakes. Don't automatically put a bunch of pumps around a lake, figuring you're getting a big supply boost. If the lake turns out to be saltwater, then it's all wasted. Zone the coastlines for housing, where you can get better land values out of the deal.
If you don't have much in the way of fresh water, consider using the "place water" tool. It costs $100 to make a one-square lake, but the pumps get the water benefit. Also, if you have a freshwater lake, consider raising islands in the middle of it, place pumps on the islands, and then pipe the water output over to your city. Your sims can have the coast and you still get the water benefit.
Towers are used for getting through the droughts. The idea is that the tanks get charged up during the gluts and dispense the water during the dry spells. The advantage is that you don't have to have so many pumps going at the same time--if you place enough pumps to water your city during the dry spells, then some of them are wasted during the gluts. Towers help stabilize the water situation, especially during periods of high growth.
It takes a lot of experimentation to determine how many pumps and wells you need to build to run your city. Look at the underground map for a few years and watch how it reacts during the different climates. If the entire city is okay during the gluts, but dries out during the heat waves, then you want to add some wells. Keep adding wells until you get the point where the city stays blue during the droughts.
You can click on the tanks and find out their water levels. Each tank holds 40,000 gallons, but the query will tell you how many gallons are currently in it. You can tell the same thing on the underground grid. Each tank has four sets of pipes. Each set of pipes represents 10,000 gallons. If all four are blue, then the well has 40,000 gallons. If one set is black, then you're down to 30,000 gallons. If two are black, then you've only got 20,000 gallons. If all four are black, your tank is dry.
It's a bit of a balancing act to get the wells and pumps at their optimum levels. If your city is going dry during the droughts, you need more tanks. But your tanks need to be recharged during the glut periods. If you start into your drought periods and your tanks are not filled, then you need more pumps. When you get to where your tanks fill up during the gluts and the town stays wet during droughts, then you've adequately watered your city.
Water treatment plants are used to reduce smog. According to a message I read on Usenet, only one treatment plant is needed. One treatment plant will reduce smog, but additional plants won't continue to reduce the smog. Just use one plant.
The desalinization plants are a debatable expense. At $1,000 each they put out "approximately" four-times as much as a single water pump next to a river. So you figure that for same amount of water that a pump (next to a river) puts out, you pay $250. For $1,000 you can buy 10 water pumps and get the equivalent of more than 2 desals in water output.
Desals may be worthwhile if you have an abundance of salt water and a scarcity of fresh water, which is why desal plants are prominent in Saudi Arabia and not in the US. Check your water situation and plan accordingly.
1. Bonds - Here is my word of advice on buying bonds. Don't do it. Not unless you can afford to pay them off. Nothing can turn a prosperous city into a loser faster than a bond can.
It's real simple. Bonds come in $10,000 increments, and they carry an annual interest payment that has to be paid. The interest payment is a percentage based on the current fed-rate and your city's credit rating.
It's easy enough to figure how much the annual payment is going to be. Multiply the percentage you'll be charged by $100. If you want to take out a bond at 7% interest, then you have to pay $700 each year while the bond is outstanding. If the bond is 4%, then you have to pay $400 each year.
Now take that interest payment and compare it to your budget. If the bond is going to hit you for $500 a year, are you already making $500 a year in profit? If you're making less, then next year you're going to be in a deficit-spending situation. Plus you'll still owe that $10,000.
I came real close to ruining my favorite city this way. I took out a $10, 000 bond at 7%, without really thinking things through, and suddenly I was losing $400 a year. I saved the game and replayed it about a dozen times until I came up with a combination of budget cuts, tax hikes, and zone expansions that got me back into the profit column. And then it was a real long, hard pull to make up that $10,000 so I could pay off that bond. The city had to run at what would have been an $800 per year profit just to net $100. I didn't have the nerve to calculate how much money I spent on interest payments to get that $10,000.
2. Bailing Out of Bankruptcy - so you've decided to be New York in 1975, and you're in debt up to your eyeballs. What now? There are basically three things to do: 1) raise revenues, 2) cut spending, and 3) grow the economy.
Raising revenues is the simplest--just raise your taxes. Try raising your tax rates up a notch and see how the demand bars indicators react. If you see the demand fall off to zero (or worse), then lower the taxes. But as long as you've got growth, then your citizens aren't taxed to their full burden. For my city (mentioned above) I found that 9% worked out nicely. It generated substantial revenue without driving people out of the city in disgust. But it did slow growth considerably. Also be sure to check the Ordinances to click on all four of the money-makers--income tax, sales tax, gambling and parking fines.
Cutting spending is a necessary ingredient too. First go in and knock out all the ordinances. Leave in the energy conservation one if you have to, but the rest can all go. The people will put up with the smog and the crime (unless both are nearly unbearable to begin with) and the lack of free clinics. Deal with those problems later, after you're out of your budget crisis.
Next, see if you can refinance your bonds. If you bought a bond at 7% and the fed-rate dropped to let you buy one at 4%, by all means buy the 4% bond and pay off the 7% bond with the new loan. A one-percent refi can save you $100 a year in interest payments.
Turn off the disasters and drop your funding for the fire department to 0%. You won't need them if there are no disasters.
Cut the schools and hospital funding as far as you dare.
DON'T cut the transportation. If you have a lot of wasted train tracks or roads, bulldoze them to save on the maintenance fees, but don't cut off funding. Cutting off the funding will make the roads and rails quickly go bad, and you'll pay more to fix them than you'll save in maintenance fees. Also, broken roads and rails disrupts commerce, which can result in business and residents moving away. That shrinks your revenues, which just makes the problem even worse.
Growing the economy means spending money to make money. What you do is lure more people into town, hoping that with more people you'll get more revenue. But it requires money to do it. You need to analyze your demand indicators and zones to see what's needed. If you have a lot of people but there's high unemployment and the existing industrial zones are full, then zone in more industry and get people working. If the job market is too tight and the residential zones are full, zone in more. A good trick is to turn your light zone areas into dense zone areas (that way you don't have to shell out for roads, pipes, and power lines). As you get more people immigrating to your town, you get more taxpayers and more revenue.
Most computer games (well, all of the ones I can think of) require almost constant input from the player. But Simcity 2000 doesn't really work that way. Because of money problems you'll probably find yourself running out of funds far more quickly than your budget replenishes them.
For myself, I found the best thing to do was to go through substantial hands-off periods, where I simply let the city stabilize and the run itself while the treasury slowly rebuilt. Once the treasury reached a certain level I would begin another era of expansion or change. When I ran out of money I quit and let things stabilize again.
The important thing to realize is that, barring disasters, the city will run itself even if you do nothing. Once you provide the bare necessities (power, zones, and roads) the sims will do the rest. The city won't create new zones or powerplants or lay roads, but they'll exist in the world you built for them. You don't have to worry about waking up the next day to find out that everyone's moved and left you mayor of a ghost town. Simcity 2000 doesn't work that way. One of the zones is going to reach a saturation point and the others will settle into balance. And the city will just continue on like that until you (or disasters) disrupt the balance.
It can be hard to sit back and watch the sims battle traffic snarls and smog while you do nothing (I find it hard, anyway. I don't have the soul of a congressman), but the program just runs too slowly on my 386/25 system to allow constant expansion and editing. For me--and I recommend this for other people who find themselves chronically out of money--I find it best to have growth and rest periods. I leave a minimum treasury (say $1,000) for emergencies and tinkering, but otherwise just let the city run itself until I have some money to play with. Then I create that new subdivision or expand the airport or make Alcatraz Island or whatever I plan to do. Then I rest and just make sure the city has power and water.
Zen helps. Take the attitude that the city exists and it's going to run the way it runs no matter what. It's a living thing on the screen--turn on the underground view and watch it breathe. Or look at the road system and you can see the pulse. Just let it be for awhile, sit back and enjoy your handiwork.
This review is Copyright (C) 1994 by J.A. Ollinger for Game Bytes Magazine. All rights reserved.