From a total SImCity newb, so these should be good for new people:
- After power, water, and sewage build a Fire station first. You don't want to run out of money and watch your city go up in flames in the first 30mins(Don't ask how I know...)
- Don't be overly proactive at solving potential crisis or you'll stagnant your income.
- Repeat from above post, industry and sewage downwind of everything else is a must.
- Add bus stops throughout your city, and your first school can serve your entire city for quite some time.
- To create homes for specific classes of citizens, build the appropriate lvl garden/park in the middle of that residential district.
- Build roads far enough from the edge of the map that the eventual high density/tech buildings can fit. The game gives you like a "warning track" line, but depending on road type you'll want to build slightly further to the inside of it.
- The space needed for high density/tech buildings means you should unfortunately use curves and circles sparingly or not at all when it comes to shops and industry. But my residentials will have curves damn it, darn the consequences!
- Buildings that you specifically place and are upgradable can eventually take up much more space with said upgrades. Keep this in mind before putting your eventual highest grossing businesses right next to them only to bulldoze them....
- If playing a solo game, you might want to start all the cities in your region close to the same time to prevent large discrepancies between the cities. It's weird having one city in the space age, and one approaching the industrial revolution. You can also specialize your cities much more with other cities picking up the slack in other areas. People taking one city plot and focusing all there attention on it and ignoring the other region cities is not how this game is intended to be played, imo(for solo or multiplayer).
This gathered from my only two SimCity games ever. In general, my only real gripe is that the game gives you a poor indicator of your needs for future spacing between buildings. Something that can only be learned through experience.
Other lesser gripes, that make things difficult:
- The road circle option would be cool, except making concentric circles is impossible, driving ocd people everywhere insane(yes....I'm one of them ). You can almost do it if you lay two crossing perpendicular roads down first and then connect each fourth using basic "curve" roads with the "Shift" button held down aswell(but still not perfect to no avail ) Basically laying down a grid of dirt roads before you start placing your real roads is the best option for the truely ocd...lol. Bulldoze the dirt roads when your done, and you're left with almost concentric circles. Pentagonal, hexagonal, octagonal, etc. patterns are even harder to pull off with near perfect symmetry than circles. A discussion for another day perhaps...(Creating any sort of symmetry in this game is like a mini-game within itself. Not sure if the challenge is part of the fun or just infuriating at this point.)
- It also needs a cul-de-sac option for roads(unless I missed it), as roads just abruptly end(you can create a small circle but it looks dumb. Just a small cul-de-sac that you can easily zone around.
