TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

My SimCity City

The closed beta test of the new SimCity is out, for those in on it. I am! There’s the city I built!

You can see and read about Tyler’s city, built in a different region to the beta, here.

It’s a very demo-y beta: you only get 1 hour before you have to start from scratch. My first one was a single long road, but I quickly discovered that having industrial stuff anywhere near your residential zones poisons everyone and, more importantly, reduces the land value.

So my second town was designed solely to keep industrial and residential stuff as far from each other as possible, to maximise land value. Land value is also higher near the coast, so I put all my first houses there, and put all my value-increasing buildings like town halls and schools a little way inland, to extend the area I could build houses in and still get the most tax out of them.

It seemed to work. I had more demand for new housing than I could ever keep up with, and if there’s any disadvantage to having your garbage and sewage facilities miles away from your homes I didn’t run into it. Since lots of people wanted to move here but couldn’t afford it, I had to intentionally build one housing district in a shittier area: you don’t get to choose house prices, so masses of ideal housing is no use to poor people. Here’s a guide:

It’s been a long time since I played a pure management game, and I wonder if I’ve lost the urge somehow. I built a fair bit more than this before my time ran out, but about 5 minutes before it did, I quit. I built my thing, my theories were right, it seemed to go fine. I’m sure it could be massively improved, but maintaining it and gradually expanding it to fill this arbitrary square wasn’t all that interesting to me.