The Startup of Sim City, Part 3: City Specialization

All right! welcome back to the Startup "blogpost" or whatever you want to call it, today/this weekend (or whatnot) It's all about City Specialization.
What is City Specialization?
Well my good sir/Ma'am! It's all about how you're going to contribute to the others in the region with workforce, work, tourism, plastic, TVs, processors etc. the list goes on.

Let's get it started!

CITY SPECIALIZATION

City Specialization is all about money, where and how!

You have 5 different specializations to choose from, This depends on your city Site, you can't make a coal city if you have no coal to mine! get it?

"HEY! You're forgetting 1! n00b!", yes and no, i'm not counting the Trading Specialization since you need to earn Money to actually make something good out of it. Sure you could import all kinds of resources to make a different one that sells for more, but to do so you need the money for it.

Mining

Want to be an industrial City with all those awesome chimneys popping up all around the City site? Then this is the one for you!

Mining is the most efficient and easiest way to earn Money in this game.  
You can mine Coal for your Coal plant or making Alloy. Raw ore to sell or to make Metal and earn even more money from it.

Drilling

How are y'all? ...right, drilling is all about Oil and making Plastic and fuel that is om nom nom Money!

Fuel is hard cash for the ones who wants to sell it, but it takes time to make.

It's also needed for the Great Works sooner or later. Don't forget you can fuel up your city with the oil power plant!

Trading

Now this is a MUST for any city that wants to Mine, drill or make Electronics in their city, Without it you're nothing, NOTHING I TELL YOU!

The Trading Specialization goes hand in hand with Drilling, mining and Electronics because of the selling and buying you can do with it.

Electronics

Now then! remember the thing i said about Mining? I LIED! Electronics have the far highest profit by far when you get the hang of it.
You can make processors and TVs, bear in mind that this requires plastic, metal and alloy to do so. 
which is a pain at times if you cant get it all.

Culture
Culture is all about tourism and making your city the most attractive.

You can host events  so Sims from around the region would like to visit your beautiful city and spend their simoleons (Sims currency) in your shops! Beware the traffic!


Gambling
"18, Hit me, 20, Hit me, 21.... hit me.... 32, A DAMN IT I LOST! how much do I get for my kidney?"

Gambling goes almost hand in hand with Culture, it's tourism and it's money! ...and criminals... and... arsonists and... murderers. oh well still earning some money!

Coal City!

All right! we're back to Triton valley, where I started my city couple of days ago in my earlier posts. As you can see, I've just made some industrial area and wanting to plop a Coal mine around that area.

By clicking on the City specialization in the bottom left corner and choosing Mining, I can now look where I have my coal on the map. The darkest spot is where there is the most coal. My mine will mine the total of 358.8 tons, but adding more mine shafts, it will increase the total and the daily gathering.

 Here I'm adding mine shafts so we can mine more coal for our city, as you can see by the cyan dot we need to "click" it on the mine to actually add an extra mineshaft, this goes for the raw ore mine too.

Trading

 We need a trade Depot to sell our coal, and maybe import some raw ore later on to smelt it into metal or alloy and earning more money. so I've popped this Trade depot close to the Mine so the trucks don't need to spend so long time on the road. But as you can see, I don't have a storage area for the coal!



Let's add some coal Storage lot on this Depot so I can store our coal! I'll just put down some trucks as well, so they can go out and sell the coal on the global market.






Here you can choose to:

Use Locally, Import and export.

Using it locally will make the selected resource stay in your city and used in the factories who needs it.


Importing means that you will buy the resource for a price and keep it in your city. they will buy until the Storage is full or when you turn it off.

By exporting you will sell the selected resources to the Global market, which I want to do right now. Something you need to pay attention to when it comes to Trading is when you get your trade port (the biggest storage house if you want) that there is a certain timer on the trading when it comes to trading by train. Sure nothing scary could happen, but you know, it's nice to be aware of things!

And this is part 3 of Startup of Sim City!
Next time we will go over Density and how to actually make more Sims move in as the Site is pretty small from the other Sim City Series!
Thanks for reading and don't forget to share!

The Startup of Sim City, Part 2

Allright! Part 2! YEAH!
Let's do this! I've been playing this game more and more and get lost almost everytime because of the "worker shortage" or whatnot. So let's just go for the startup of a city!

STARTING UP A CITY

All right, first of all we need to connect the city to the main road so we can get people to move in and get to work here. let's start by taking the low density street, so we don't waste all our money on the road.

There we go! now we've made our self places to put up the zones, as you can see I've already done that. The green zones are residential and the blue ones are commercial, yellow are industrial, but I haven't put up any yet because I want them further away from the neighbourhood since it's lowering the land value

CITY NEEDS

Now our City wants the basic needs as Water, Sewage pump and power. This is an easy thing to do as I'll just show you where to put the water as it is a graphical picture on where you got the most water.

As you can see the darkest overlay is where you have the most water and will bring the water tower max water.

HAPPINESS

We finally got our Town Hall and as we can see the happiness on our Sims goes up as we plopped the building down, In this building you can get upgrades for better water/sewage pump and alike.





LAND VALUE

Now this is one of the important thing to look after, you got alot of graphical map to look for, but the Land Value is in my opinion the most important one to look after since it increases the income for residental and commercial areas.

 As you can see on this graphical map, the only place with land value is where the faint blue circle is. And if you look at the window to the top right, it gives us the information on what kind of colours gives certain buildings and happiness. Let's try to improve a neighbourhood and maybe there will be more "high valued" citizens in our city.

How to do so? well just plop a Park down and keep on connecting them by clicking on the edit button in the Simple Walkway Window. Notice the Simdollar Icons right next to the park name, there is three of them and they will give you a high value aera where people can "upgrade" themselves to be high value Citizens or shops.





You have a wide Variety on what kind of parks you want, Some times they fit right in but at times you actually need to think before you're playing them down. 
The shame is: it's a grid building and you can't freely build the park as you want. Which then again is going to force you to spend more time on making the parks look beautiful in your city rather than if you had the free build mode in my opinion. 

Now then! after plopping down 2-3 connections to the park, you can see the land value has increased drasticly, but bear in mind, the expensive parks also have expensive upkeep, so make sure you can pay for it.

There we go! As you can see, there is already high valued resident and some of the commercial areas are upgrading aswell.

Be Aware that you need certain valued residences in your city to employ the different Industrial and commercial buildings.





And this concludes today's "intro" on starting up a City in Sim City, To be honest, the City zone is faaar to small, and they are even talking about adding an expansion pack for improving the zie. GG EA, GG!
Sigh... oh well even how much i hate this game I also love it at the same time. 


I'll come back to the part Where you Specialize your city into a Gambling, Mining, Oil or Tourism City!