SimCity/Basic Concepts

Obviously, by the game name, you should have guessed this has something to building cities. There are many, many different things to do.

Gameplay is controlled by the mouse, and the graphics are pre-rendered on an isometric grid that can be zoomed in and out.

Basic Introduction to real-life Urban Planning

Urban, city, or town planning, deals with design of the built environment from the municipal and metropolitan perspective. Other professions deal in more detail with a smaller scale of development, namely architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a less detailed level. The Greek Hippodamus is often considered the father of city planning, for his design of Miletus, though examples of planned cities permeate antiquity. Muslims are thought to have originated the idea of formal zoning (see haram and hima and the more general notion of khalifa, or "stewardship" from which they arise), although modern usage in the West largely dates from the ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.

The Indus Valley civilization is recognized as having been the first to develop urban planning. By 2600 BC some pre-Harappan settlements grew into cities containing thousands of people who were not primarily engaged in agriculture, creating a unified culture whose sudden appearance appears to have been the result of planned, deliberate effort. Some settlements appear to have been deliberately rearranged to conform to a conscious, well-developed plan. For this reason, the Indus Valley civilization is recognized as having first developed urban planning.

In ancient times, Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for military defense and civil convenience. Effectively, many European towns still preserve the essence of these schemes, as in Turin. The basic plan is a central plaza with city services, surrounded by a compact grid of streets and wrapped in a wall for defense. To reduce travel times, two diagonal streets cross the square grid corner-to-corner, passing through the central square. A river usually flows through the city, to provide water and transport, and carry away sewage, even in sieges.

Modern city planning embraces the organization, or conscious influencing, of land-use distribution in an area already built-up or intended to become built-up. Many of the concepts of real-life Urban and City planning have been incorporated into the SimCity games.

Objectives

The objective of SimCity, as the name of the game suggests, is to build and design a city, without specific goals to achieve (except in the scenarios, which typically require the player to achieve a certain population or bank balance in a given period of time). The player can mark land as being zoned as commercial, industrial, or residential, add buildings, change the tax rate, build a power grid, build transportation systems and many other actions, in order to enhance the city. Also, the player can face disasters: flooding, tornadoes, fires, riots, earthquakes, etc. Later disasters included lightning strikes, volcanoes, meteors and attack by extra-terrestrial craft. In the Nintendo and later versions one can also build rewards when they are given to them, like the mayor's mansion and the casino for gambling Sims.

Basic SimCity concepts

In SimCity, there are various concepts to learn.

1. Population: How many Sims are in a city
2. Simoleans: Your money. You spend this whenever you do something.
3. Taxes: Simoleans taken from your Sims on a yearly basis to replenish your City's Simoleans
4. Ordinances: Various laws that can be enacted/repealed at anytime. Some give you money ("Legalized Gambling" allows gambling, however, all casinos have to pay you), others take money. They also have different effects on your population, and will make some happy and others mad.
5. Tile: The basic unit of measure in SimCity. Also refers to the isometric "squares" in the game.
6. Zone: This is where Sims will build. The three main types are Residential, Commercial, and Industrial. Each Zone has different effects: placing Dense Industrial next to a Light Residential will probably get some Sims angry about the intense dust.
7. Transportation: A tile that allows Sims to get from one place to another. They are obviously connected to each other. People will only build a certain amount of Tiles from a transportation tile.