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It’s Good to be Da Mayor
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Tips and Tricks
If you want your Sims to be healthy and happy and your new city to last a long time, make sure you read these tips and tricks.  Disasters are a fun way to demolish sections of your city that are more trouble than they’re worth, but make sure you consider the rebuilding costs, as well as the possibility that the giant space robot will also take out areas that you wanted to keep. Sometimes it’s cheaper and easier to simply bulldoze those areas.
You might think 100,000 simoleons are a lot to start the game with, but they’re not. It’s very easy to put your fledgling city in a deep budget hole by overspending on things you don’t need right away, like an airport, or by allocating too much money to services that don’t require high levels of funding yet. You can cut back on education spending, for example, early in the game when your population is low.
Don’t build police and fire stations and schools right away. They’re expensive to maintain on a monthly basis, so wait until your Sims start asking for them and save your money in the meantime.
Remember that you can use the information cursor (the question mark) to click on an individual school, fire station, etc. and view its funding level. If you find, for example, that a particular school is funded to support 150 students but only 30 are attending, drop the amount of simoleons allocated to it and raise it back up when your population requires it.
Create parks and city ordinances as a cost-effective way to keep your Sims happy and willing to stay in your city.
While it’s not necessary to import any Sims, having a few of them in the city will help you keep abreast of what the average Sim thinks of you. Your advisors are useful, but your Sims give you that “man on the street” perspective.
Keep all your tax rates below 10%, but note that you can tax industry more heavily than residential or commercial. Your commercial tax rates should be the lowest because those zones are actually the hardest to fill. The higher your tax rates, the less likely developers are to move in and start building.
When you run a water pipe through an area, it feeds 6 squares on either side, so keep 12 squares between the pipes so that you don’t waste water.
Your industrial zones should be as far away from the residential ones as possible, of course, but you should also place them at the edge of the map. When you’re asked if you want to make a connection to other regions, indicate that you do. This will allow you to export services to other cities on the map and increase that particular’s city’s income.
If you don’t want streets to appear while creating zones, hold down the Shift key. You may prefer to map out the streets themselves.
Before you build another fire or police station, check the existing stations’ budgets. It may be cheaper to increase their funding, which expands their coverage, than to build a new station.
Industrial areas are more susceptible to fires than residential zones.
If you build a cemetery, watch it every October. Some of the dead may rise and shamble around. And when you put in a drive-in theater, you may catch a short sci-fi flick.
The edges of the different territories in the region may not match up after you terraform them, so the game will ask you if you want to reconcile their borders when you open one. For example, one city may be on a plateau at the edge of a territory that borders a low plain in another territory. If you reconcile it, though, the side of that plateau will plummet to match up with the low plain on the other side, destroying all the structures located there. In a situation like that, cancel the border reconciliation.
When you reach certain goals, you’re offered special buildings as a reward (the mayor’s mansion is one of the earliest of these). Maxis notes that you can accept the reward twice, once through the reward screen and again by clicking on the announcement in the news ticker box. They say that it’s a bonus for those who figure it out (or who read this article all the way through).
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 Smokin’. You never know when a volcano will pop up downtown.  Macro View. Take a look at all your cities in the main menu.  Unsafe At Any Speed. Watch where you place your zones or they won’t be accessible by car.  Home Sweet Home. Check out where each Sim lives and follow his progress as he starts a new life in your ’burg. |
System Requirements
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