Having to do the a Sim City for Future City was really time consuming and confusing. There were so many things you had to keep track of, people to please, pollution to reduce, and money to be balanced. It consisted of many trials and errors, and more countless saves, including some anger.

I’ve learned a lot of stuff from this game and there is what I would suggest:

Firstly, if you haven’t played this game at all, DO NOT try to get the city right the first time. The first time is to experiment with the game and understand its many tools and how annoying your advisors can be. You can try to create a city and balance your budget. I know for Future City, you have to have a balanced budget for you to earn points on the grade. Also, learn about the QUERY tool, which helps you allocate

Secondly, don’t build schools, fire departments, police, water UNTIL you can afford it. There is no worries about them until you have a stable income and hope to bring high tech to the city. High Tech is awesome and I wish you could start out with them. However, they only come when conditions are met, leaving you to deal with dirty industry, a huge polluter. Fire departments should not be built until you have your first fire.

For me I love agriculture at the beginning, I zone the whole block of land with agriculture and slowly rezone to other types of zones. Sure they have tons of pollution, but after you rezone, the pollution just disappears. Also, if you could add a water treatment plant to reduce the water pollution in its radius.

Energy is the most important thing about Sim City. Without energy, citizens will not move into your city and industry will not populate the zones. My suggestions is to first create a natural gas plant and put it on the edge of the city, minimizing the pollution. Also, use your query tool to allocate less money into the power plant, because if there more energy than needed, it is just wasted. Later on, you’ll want to allocate more money as dirty industry moves in. Even later on, I suggest you move to solar power plants.

Education is one major part on making the High-Tech industry move to your plot of land, making the city less polluted. At first, when you have a big enough net profit, build a school, and quickly, using your query tool, to allocated enough money for students, but not too much.

Zoning is essential to making the city… a city. I have learned that it is best to start out with Low Density commercial and residential, slowly moving up to high-density.

I hope you learned something…

Have Fun!