SimCity Buildit Guide 

Sims still have the same real-world wants and desires, and this affects property prices and your tax take. If you dump your houses next to a polluting factory, few people will want to live there. The easy answer of spacing out your city, however, causes other problems. Homes and businesses want easy access to public services like fire stations, hospitals and schools.Finding the right layout to keep everyone happy, and thereby boost your population and income, isn't easy.You start out with a couple of residential zones, which are where your sim population make their homes. You don't have to pay for these, or for roads, but you can't place more until you've earned them by levelling up. Industrial plots follow soon after. And rather than mere workplaces for your populace, these ones actually make stuff. You can allocate each to make a mixture of iron, wood, and plastic. There are also shops you can strew about your burgeoning metropolis.

These generate things like more tools and raw materials. As your city grows, you'll need more and more of these items to upgrade plots to the next level. When the level increases, you can get more tax to buy more items, and so on ad infinitum. This simplistic model would be a poor basis for an interesting game, but it does suit mobile pretty well. It's easier to pick up and drop city blocks on a touchscreen than to paint areas. And by stopping you from expanding explosively, it causes you to focus on your city in bite-sized pieces.

You start off the game easily, with a few pieces of land where you need to place a city, and then you start expanding the small town into a large metropolis by adding things such as resource generation buildings, residential areas as well as industrial ones.Once you create the city however, you need to manage it, and this is where the game shines. In this Android game, you have the opportunity to upgrade your buildings and purchase utilities, city services as well as factories that will make the city safer and, in the end, more complete.Just like in real life, the people that live in your city will need resources and lots of things such as garbage disposal, electricity and plumbing. These necessities need to be provided as fast as possible, otherwise parts of the city will shut down. This is one of the things we liked a lot in SimCity BuildIt, and that is the ability to make decisions which influences your city and runs it in a certain direction. As you progress through the game, its difficulty increases gradually. While at first it can be easy to get the necessary resources for buildings and upgrades, the reality is that after a certain point you need to wait for a lot of time in order to get the funds from your residential areas.

Alongside that, a larger city will also need lots of amenities and funding, so you will have to enter the game once a day to see if there were any problems and figure out your next step. While this is a good idea that makes you spend more time with the game, requiring to enter that often can also be frustrating, since you don’t really feel that you are in control sometimes. Farming resources from factories and other locations isn’t fun unfortunately.There are also shops you can strew about your burgeoning metropolis. These generate things like more tools and raw materials.As your city grows, you'll need more and more of these items to upgrade plots to the next level. When the level increases, you can get more tax to buy more items, and so on ad infinitum.This simplistic model would be a poor basis for an interesting game, but it does suit mobile pretty well. It's easier to pick up and drop city blocks on a touchscreen than to paint areas.And by stopping you from expanding explosively, it causes you to focus on your city in bite-sized pieces.

You'll have guessed by now that timers abound. Not where you might expect them in the construction of buildings, but in the production of goods. They seem tailor-made to be as irritating as possible - too long to ignore, too short to go away and play something else. The real killer, though, are new buildings. While zones and roads are free, service builds are not. Even a humble park costs thousands of in-game currency. And the earning curve looks to have been designed to ensure your daily income is slightly less than needed to make one essential building. That's one essential building, for free, each day. At that rate, the game ought to have been called SimVillage rather than SimCity. You can, of course, pay to make all these problems go away. Which would be fine if there was some end in sight. But there is none - the more you pay to progress into the game, the more you'll pay to progress further.

While BuildIt’s gameplay obviously centers around the crafting mechanic, there are lots of nods to classic SimCity fare that make appearances. Fire and police coverage become essentials the further you advance, while placement of those departments become an exercise in strategic zoning to try and get the most bang out of your buck for each building placed. I really enjoy the fact that there are actual (albeit simple) strategic decisions you can make regarding building placement. The same goes for parks, cultural landmarks, and specialty buildings such as transportation and education departments. Power, water and sewage also become important facets as keeping them up to date allow you to build more residences and expand your city. Sure, in the great scheme of things all of the above essentially amounts to coin sinks, but BuildIt does a great job of hiding the obviousness behind the SimCity sheen. Speaking of coin sinks, the biggest question I’m sure folks will have is how fair the game’s freemium elements work.

As you progress through the game, its difficulty increases gradually. While at first it can be easy to get the necessary resources for buildings and upgrades, the reality is that after a certain point you need to wait for a lot of time in order to get the funds from your residential areas. Alongside that, a larger city will also need lots of amenities and funding, so you will have to enter the game once a day to see if there were any problems and figure out your next step. While this is a good idea that makes you spend more time with the game, requiring to enter that often can also be frustrating, since you don’t really feel that you are in control sometimes. Farming resources from factories and other locations isn’t fun unfortunately. For the most part, I’ll say that they are pretty fair for the type of game it is. Timers are pretty reasonable and there aren’t any hard pay walls that I can see. Coin shortage is a constant problem but BuildIt throws a few avenues your way towards earning more, such as selling crafting materials to the AI (not worth it), selling materials to other players (pretty cool) and, of course, saving them to upgrade residences and earning coins that way. The random nature of acquiring special items for inventory and land expansion is a bit frustrating but again, you can always purchase them from other players if the RNG doesn’t treat you well. My biggest complaint has to do with the game’s decision to limit some of the cooler buildings to premium currency buys.