01 Orientation
Orientation
This city journal is crafted in SimCity Build It (SCBI), a sim platform which may not be familiar to many Simtropolis viewers. Before I show you B-612, I will give you a glimpse of the game and how things work. There may be some snarky commentary included as well.
Gameplay is on tiny regions. The six regions combined may total one or two square kilometers. Everything is way smaller than SC4. Unless, of course, SCBI is like a Tardis and is bigger inside the game than outside.
And, if this is the case, then each region is comparable to a SC4 large tile. Or a continent.
You start with the Capital City region and have to reach population goals to unlock additional regions. The first few are not too hard to reach. But, to unlock the last region (in my case, the Cactus Canyon desert), you need a regional population of 10 million. This is only attainable if you have a monotonous grid of skyscrapers everywhere. I’m not even 20% of the way toward unlocking the last region. I don’t think I ever will; which is a shame, since I really wanted to pretty it up with Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote images. I have unlocked the Limestone Cliffs, Frosty Fjords, Sunny Isles, and Green Valley. The process for expanding cities is very time consuming. You have to accumulate a mass of expansion thingies to unlock a parcel of land barely larger than a football pitch.
Transportation is by car. The only options are building roads. Well, there is a streetcar you can upgrade to. And, you can use special simoleons to convert the streetcar line into a maglev line. That’s it. There is a rail line, but that runs outside the city if there is a mountain region you can build on.
The rail line is outside the city, in the adjacent mountain zone. You can build mountain-exclusive things in the mountains.
The mountain-exclusive stuff…
There’s also beach-exclusive stuff, also just outside the city.
The other transit is roads. All roads start as two lanes. You can get up to six lanes before they upgrade to avenues and boulevards. There are no highways. Traffic is very light, but they will complain about congestion. I think just so you upgrade roads. I don’t know why they complain; they don’t ever go anywhere.
Residential zones are like 90% of every town. It’s pretty much all you do. They have expanded the options in the last few months to include the Old Town zone (something Schulmania would definitely appreciate) and the Latin America zone. Zones are free to build, but then you have to craft supplies to earn the upgrades.
Residents have nowhere to go because there is virtually no business. There is a handful of factories and a tiny number of stores. In the six regions, the maximum of any store type is one. So, I guess everyone works from home and that’s why they don’t have anywhere to go or much to do.
Personally, I think the lack of commerce and industry is due to the fact that money magically appears above residential zones every day. Bronze turtle coins, silver llama coins (shown above), and gold cheetah coins just float above people’s homes. If I had these at my house, I’d stay at home and play Xbox all day too. Trixie would be proud to see her regal image on a giant silver coin floating about homes everywhere.
To keep the SCBI sims happy, they need services and such, just like in other SimCity games. The shocking part is how underpowered these services are for such a tiny area!
This is the service area for a basic fire station. Seriously?! Their service radius implies they fight fires with a long garden hose attached to the front wall of the fire station. And they want 12,000 simoleons for it!
The deluxe fire station has a bigger service radius, but it is still the equivalent of a bucket brigade in its reach. All for 46,000.
You can trade with other places, buying and selling the stuff you need to upgrade your residential zones.
This concludes our orientation of SCBI. It lives on the iPhone or the Android equivalent and is subject to the limitations of the small screen. But it is a handy quick sim game that’s easy to build with. And, they have added enough new features to let there be an element of custom look and feel to it. When you can’t park yourself in front of the PC and you need to get your SimCity on, SCBI is a good option. In the following chapters, I will show you what I have created on B-612.
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