Game PC Sim-City 2000 User Manual
™
THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
USER’S
MANUAL
USER MANUAL
ª
THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
by Michael Bremer
On the whole I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
– W.C. Fields (1879-1946)
Credits
The Program
Designed By: Fred Haslam and Will Wright
IBM Programming: Jon Ross, Daniel Browning, James Turner
Windows Programming: James Turner, Jon Ross
Producer: Don Walters
Art Director: Jenny Martin
Computer Art: Suzie Greene (Lead Artist), Bonnie Borucki, Kelli Pearson, Eben Sorkin
Music: Sue Kasper, Brian Conrad, Justin McCormick
Sound Driver: Halestorm, Inc.
Sound Effects: Maxis Sample Heds, Halestorm, Inc.
Technical Director: Brian Conrad
Newspaper Articles: Debra Larson, Chris Weiss
Special Technical Assistance: Bruce Joffe (GIS Consultant), Craig Christenson (National
Renewable Energy Laboratory), Ray Gatchalian (Oakland Fire Department), Diane L. Zahm
(Florida Department of Law Enforcement)
The Manual
Written By: Michael Bremer
Copy Editors: Debra Larson, Tom Bentley
Documentation Design: Vera Jaye, Kristine Brogno
Documentation Layout: David Caggiano
Contributions To Documentation: Fred Haslam, Will Wright, Don Walters, Kathleen Robinson
Special Artistic Contributions: John “Bean” Hastings, Richard E. Bartlett, AIA, Margo Lockwood,
Larry Wilson, David Caggiano, Tom Bentley, Barbara Pollak, Emily Friedman, Keith Ferrell,
James Hewes, Joey Holliday, William Holliday
The Package
Package Design: Jamie Davison Design, Inc.
Package Illustration: David Schleinkofer
The Maxis Support Team
Lead Testers: Chris Weiss, Alan Barton
QA: Alan Barton (Supervisor), Manny Granillo, Chris Weiss, Roger Johnsen, Don Horat
Tech Support: Carter Lipscomb (Manager), Kevin O’Hare, Peter Alau, Chris Blackwell, Kirk Lesser
Beta Testing: Robert McNamara, Steve Perrin, and all of Maxis
Product Manager: Larry Lee
Public Relations: Lois Tilles and Sally Vandershaf
Manufacturing: Val Garcia, Kim Vincent, Gina Martinez
Thanks To
Jeff Braun, Joe Scirica, Jim Siefert, Bob Derber, Sam Poole, Robin Harper, Michael Perry, Cassidy,
Joell Jones, all the rest of the Maxoids who made this possible, and ‘The Veddy Bad Girlfriend’
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Contents
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1
ABOUT THIS MANUAL ..................................... 3
FROM SIMCITY TO SIMCITY 2000 .................. 4
GETTING STARTED ......................................... 4
TUTORIALS .................................................................................. 5
BEFORE YOU BEGIN ........................................ 7
TUTORIAL 1—THE BASICS ........................... 10
TUTORIAL 2—LANDSCAPE ENGINEERING . 25
TUTORIAL 3—ADVANCED FEATURES ........ 33
REFERENCE............................................................................... 45
THE BASICS .................................................... 46
MENUS .............................................................. 50
File Menu ........................................................ 50
Options Menu ................................................ 51
Disasters Menu .............................................. 52
Windows Menu .............................................. 53
Newspaper Menu ........................................... 54
WINDOWS ...................................................... 55
City Window ................................................... 55
Map Window .................................................. 78
Budget Window ............................................. 81
Ordinance Window ...................................... 89
Population Window ...................................... 92
Industries Window ....................................... 93
Graphs Window ............................................. 94
Neighbors Window ....................................... 96
INSIDE THE SIMULATION.............................. 97
STRATEGIES ................................................. 119
GALLERY ................................................................................. 125
APPENDIX: FROM SIMCITY TO SIMCITY 2000....................... 136
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................ 139
INDEX ...................................................................................... 140
SimCity 2000Page iv
INTRODUCTION
To search for the ideal city today is useless. For all cities
are different. Each one has its own spirit, its own problems, and its own pattern of life. As long as the city lives,
these aspects continue to change. Thus to look for the
ideal city is not only a waste of time but may be seriously
detrimental. In fact, the concept is obsolete; there is no
such thing.
– Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1898- )
THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
™
Introduction
Welcome to SimCity 2000.
When you play SimCity 2000, you become the planner, designer and mayor of an unlimited number of cities. You can
take over and run any of the included scenario cities, or build
your own from the ground up.
You’re in charge. You can choose to build small, rural towns,
or huge bustling megalopolises. As you design and build your
cities, simulated citizens, known as Sims, move in and build
their homes, stores and workplaces, raise their families and
invite their friends. If your city is a nice place to live, your
population will increase. If it’s not, your Sims will leave town.
And be assured that they’ll let you know what they think about
you and your policies.
One of the toughest challenges of SimCity 2000 is to maintain
a huge city without sacrificing your Sims’ quality of life, without going broke maintaining the infrastructure, and without
raising taxes so high that businesses relocate. SimCity 2000
lets you face the same dilemmas that mayors all over the world
are facing. We’ve all said at one time or another that we could
do a better job than our elected officials—here’s your chance
to prove it.
SimCity 2000 is primarily a “building” game, where you create
and try to increase the size of your cities—but you also have
plenty of opportunities to destroy. From bulldozers to earthquakes to air crashes, the implements of destruction are only
a mouse-click away. But remember, it’s a lot more challenging
to build than to destroy, and the lives, hopes and dreams of
millions of Sims are in your hands.
SimCity 2000 — IntroductionPage 2
About this
This manual is divided into four main sections:
The Introduction welcomes you to SimCity 2000, explains a
little about the manual in general, helps you get the game up
and running on your computer and sends you on your way to
play.
The Tutorials are small guided tours through different aspects
of city-building with SimCity 2000.
The Reference section describes in detail all the windows,
buttons, features and functions of SimCity 2000, and explains
much of the behind-the-scenes simulation action.
The Gallery section consists of contributions from a number
of people to give you varying views, feelings, interpretations
and predictions about real cities in words and pictures. Some
of these individual pieces are located at the back of the manual
in the “official” Gallery section. Others are spread throughout
the rest of the manual.
And for those who are familiar with an earlier version of
SimCity, there is an Appendix that lists SimCity 2000’s new
features and differences from the earlier versions.
Manual
In addition, the SimCity 2000 package includes a machinespecific Addendum to cover installation, startup, and any
special features and functions on your computer.
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From SimCity to
SimCity 2000
If you’re already familiar with an earlier version of SimCity,
then you should have no trouble moving into SimCity 2000. If
you haven’t played SimCity before, then skip the rest of this
section. You will not be quizzed on this material.
A few major features have changed and some tools have moved
since the earlier versions of the game, so you may have just a little
trouble finding things. A summary of all the changes and differences between the programs can be found in the Appendix. But
to help you get started, here are the three most-asked questions
by SimCity users when we sat them down in front of SimCity 2000:
• Where the heck are the power plants?
They’re in a submenu under the power icon. Select Power
Plant... from the submenu and you’ll have a choice of from three
to nine different power sources, depending on the city’s date.
• I click and click—why won’t the durn thing set down zones?
Instead of the fixed-size zones that you plop down, SimCity 2000
lets you make any size square or rectangular zone by clicking
and dragging the mouse where you want to zone. You can zone
over roads and rails, and place roads and rails in zones. By the
way, airports and seaports are placed the same way as zones.
Getting Started
• What’s the deal with the water system?
We’ve added a water system to the game, including pumps,
pipes, treatment plants, water towers and desalinization plants.
You don’t need to worry about water to start a city. But you will
need a water system before the population can grow very dense.
SimCity 2000 must be installed to a hard disk before you can
run the program.
Once you’re up and running, feel free to jump right in and play,
or if you want some guidance and a quick introduction to the
main features and functions of the game, check out the tutorials.
SimCity 2000 — IntroductionPage 4
TUTORIAL
The experts are all saying that our big cities have become
ungovernable. What the hell do the experts know?
Newsweek, April 5, 1971
– Richard J. Daley (Mayor, Chicago) (1902-1976)
THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
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Tutorials
Congratulations! By the virtue of owning SimCity 2000 you are
hereby proclaimed Mayor of a million cities and ruler of a
billion simulated lives (your Sims). It’s a tough game, but
somebody’s gotta play it.
These tutorials are designed to help you adjust to your new
office with as little transition time as possible.
There are three tutorials, each designed to be finished in one
short sitting so you can get them out of the way and get on with
the important business of building and running your cities.
The first one is a general overview of the basic features of
SimCity 2000—enough so you can start a new city, and get
going on your own. The second one focuses on creating,
editing and modifying your city’s terrain, both before and after
you’ve begun building your city. The third one goes into detail
on a few of the advanced features.
This series of vignettes about cities
and city planning was provided by
Richard Bartlett, AIA, Architect.
Spread throughout the manual, they
give a historical and humanistic
perspective to planning that you may
wish to incorporate into your city
designs.
We suggest that you whip through the first tutorial, then go
play on your own for a while. You may figure everything else
out on your own, and never need the other tutorials, but
they’re here if and when you want them.
Cities are for people: a place for their hopes and dreams, their work
and play, their homes and homes for their children. Cities are alive and
have personalities, each different from all others and
each in constant change. A living organism made up of
its collective inhabitants, a city is many things, but it is
above all a storehouse of human characteristics.
I
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 6
Before jumping into the tutorials, take a moment to look over
the following skills and conventions that will make your stay in
SimCity 2000 a pleasant one.
Before You Begin
SimCity 2000 requires a mouse. To play, you must know how to
use a mouse for the following actions:
• Click—point the cursor to an object and briefly press
the left (or only) mouse button.
• Double-click—point the cursor to an object and briefly
press the left (or only) mouse button twice quickly.
• Click and drag—point the cursor to an object, then
press and hold the left (or only) mouse button, then
move the mouse to drag the object. Release the mouse
button to release the object.
Unless otherwise specified, whenever this manual refers to
clicking, double-clicking or clicking and dragging, use the left
(or only) mouse button.
When you see the term “Shift-click,” it means to hold down
either Shift key on the keyboard and click the mouse button.
When you see the term “control-click,” it means you should
hold down the Control key on the keyboard while you click.
Mouse and Keyboard
Stuff
In these tutorials, when you see text that looks like the text in
this paragraph, it’s an explanation of something.
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Instructions and
Explanations
What Makes a
(Sim)City?
In these tutorials, when you see text that looks like the text in
this paragraph, it’s an explanation of something.
When you see text that looks like this, it’s an actual instruction for
you to follow.
When you see text that looks like this, it’s a note
or a warning or other important message.
To prepare you for building your city in the rest of this tutorial,
here is a basic explanation of exactly what is city in SimCity
2000 is made of.
While SimCity has many layers of complexity and lots and lots
of features and all sorts of stuff to put in your city, it’s fairly
easy to get a small city started. All you need is:
• A place for the Sims to live: a residential zone
• A place for the Sims to work: an industrial zone
• A place for the Sims to shop and conduct business:
a commercial zone
• A source of power: a power plant
• A way to get the power from the power plant to the
zones: power lines
• A way for Sims to travel between work, home or shops:
roads
That’s all you need to build, and Sims with that pioneering spirit
will move into your city and build their own houses, factories
and offices. They’ll drive their cars and carry on business and
complain about taxes. If you build it, they will simulate.
A small ring of stones holds together the glowing embers of last night’s
fire. Leaning on his staff, the herdsman quietly scans his flock, also
contained within a larger circle of boulders and posts. Maximum land
within minimum fence—today we call this radiocentric planning.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 8
II
Once your city has begun to grow, you can add:
• More zones with different density levels
• Multiple above- and below-ground means of
transportation
• A complete water system
• Custom landscaping
• Airports and seaports
• Police and fire stations
• Educational and recreational facilities
• A whole lot more
Enough talk ... time for a simulating experience.
In the distance an ox pulls against the farmer’s timber plow, adding another
straight line to an ever-widening rectangular plot of soil. As a time-saving
invention, the plow gave the farmer freedom for other pursuits, but because it was
a shaper of plots, it was the precursor of planning—zoning by brute force
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Tutorial 1– The
Basics
The Start of
Something Big
If you haven’t already, take a look at your machine-specific
Addendum, and install SimCity 2000 to your hard drive.
Start SimCity 2000.
See your Addendum for instructions.
Either the first time you play the game or during installation,
you will be asked to enter your name to personalize your copy
of SimCity 2000. Be sure to type your full name—and be polite
because the name that you type in will appear a number of
times and places in the game.
Soon a list of four choices will appear; it’s time for your first
real decision. Here you can load a city that you’ve already
saved, start a brand-new city, edit a new map (we’ll be doing
this in Tutorial 2), or play one of the pre-built scenarios. For
this tutorial, we’ll want to start a new city.
Click on Start New City.
In mere moments you’ll see a dialog box that asks you to make
three decisions: how hard or easy you want your game to be,
what year the game should start, and what your new city
should be named. The defaults are Easy and 1900, which will be
just fine, so all we need to do is type in the name.
Make sure the City Name is highlighted and type in: Tutorial 1 City.
Click on Done.
Note: On computers that allow long file names,
the city name you type here will also be your file
name. On computers that require shorter file
names (systems with DOS or Windows 3.1) ,
you’ll get to type in a file name when you save
the city to disk.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 10
Soon the founding of your city will be announced in the
newspaper. The newspaper is your tool for staying in
touch with your adoring SimConstituents.
Click on the headline. Read the story that zooms out. Click again.
Open and read the other stories if you like, by clicking on them.
Click in the Close box in the upper-left corner of the Newspaper to send it to the recycling bin.
You are now looking at the City window, where you will spend
most of your time as you build, run and rule your city.
At the top of the window is the Title bar. It contains the current
city date, the city name, and the amount of money you have in
your city treasury.
Over on the left side of the screen is the City toolbar. It has lots
of buttons—your tools for creating and running your city.
Note: Every January, the Budget window will
pop up. For now, just click on its Done button to
make it go away. We’ll worry about the budget
later. If the Newspaper pops up, click on its
close box.
Title BarCity Name
Zoom Box
City
Toolbar
City Date
City Funds
A Window onYour City
Scroll Bars
Resize Box
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In the window itself you see the site of your city-to-be. A
pristine wilderness: bare land, some forest areas and some
flowing water. And the land isn’t flat—there are hills and
valleys, peaks and canyons. The terrain is divided into tiny
squares. Each of these squares is called a “tile.” Each tile is
approximately one acre, or a 200 x 200 foot square.
We’ll explore your new domain in a moment, but first, we need
to take a detour and go straight to the top ... of your screen.
And on the Menu
Tonight...
At the top of your screen is, of course, the Menu bar. These
menus are well-behaved and work just like the menus in your
other programs. Click and hold on the menu name to open the
menu, slide the cursor to the menu item you want to activate,
then release the mouse button.
Take a moment and open each of the menus, revealing their hidden
glory.
Once you’ve looked them over:
Open the Options menu.
Select Auto-Budget.
This option makes the simulation repeat the same budget until
you tell it otherwise—and stops that pesky Budget window
from popping up and spoiling your view.
Open the Disasters menu.
Select No Disasters.
This setting keeps random disasters from occurring. (Those
disasters really mess up a tutorial.)
For safety against roving thieves and predators, the farmer and herdsman laid their camps
together, and through this simple act of survival and cooperation, attracted like-minded
countrymen into their midst. The camp became a village, with a better standard of living,
and more visitors became residents... and the village continued to grow.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 12
IV
And speaking of views, behold the vistas and valleys of your
city-to-be. How’d you like another angle on the place?
Click on the Rotate Counter-Clockwise button in the City toolbar.
Do it again.
Click on the Rotate Clockwise button until you find the angle that
pleases you.
As you can see, you can rotate the city and view it from all
sides. This’ll come in very handy later, when you’re building
your city. What’s that? You want a closer view? No problem.
Click once on the Zoom In button in the City toolbar.
How’s that? Closer?
Click again on the Zoom In button.
That’s as close as you get. (Notice that the Zoom In button is
ghosted and unavailable.) Now that you’re here, how do you get
around? Let’s zoom out for a wider view, then do some travelin’.
Click once on the Zoom Out button.
Click on the Center button.
Click anywhere on the landscape.
Put a New Spin on
Things
The landscape will redraw in the City window, centered on the
spot where you clicked. You can also use the Scroll bars to
move around the landscape, but the Center button gives you
more precise control.
A millennium would pass before any substantial innovations would drastically change the size or character
of cities. But then...
“...within a very recent period, three new factors have been suddenly developed which promise to exert a
powerful influence on the problems of city and country life. These are the trolley, the bicycle, and the telephone.
It is impossible to foresee at present just what their influence is to be on the question of the distribution of
population; but this much is certain, that it adds from five to fifteen miles to the radius of every large town. It is by
such apparently unimportant, trifling, and inconspicuous forces that civilization is swayed and moulded in its
evolutions and no man can foresee them or say whither they lead...” — F.J. Kinsbury, 1895
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Make Yourself
at Home
A nice, flat spot.
Let There Be Zones
Time to pick a spot to found your city. Since each landscape
generated by SimCity 2000 is different, the landscape on your
screen, and therefore the city that you build, won’t look
exactly like the one in this manual—but it should be close.
Kinda. Sorta. Maybe.
Click on the Zoom Out button until you are as far out as you
can get.
Look for a nice, flat spot.
If there is water nearby, or even running through your spot, all
the better, but not necessary. If there is no spot in your city that
you are willing to call home, then open the File menu, and
select New City. You’ll be asked if you want to save the old
one—click No. Then a new landscape will be generated, and
you’ll get to name your city and all that other stuff you did a few
pages ago. You can repeat this until you find a home.
Once you’re satisfied, then it’s time to zone out.
As mentioned in What Makes a (Sim)City above, we’ll need
three kinds of zones in our city: residential, where the Sims
live, commercial, for offices and stores, and industrial, for
factories.
A residental zone.
Survey your chosen territory and pick a
spot to zone residential. If there is water
nearby, include some waterfront in your
zone.
Click on the Residential Zone button.
Click and drag on the landscape to form a
rectangle where you want to make a residential
zone.
You can zone right over hills and trees.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 14
Now find a spot for the industrial zone. It is in your Sims’ best
interest to leave a bit of a buffer zone between residential and
industrial zones.
Click on the Industrial Zone button.
Click and drag on the landscape to form a rectangle where you want
to make an industrial zone.
Now find a spot for a commercial zone. Close to residential is
handy. Some waterfront is nice, but not necessary.
Click on the Commercial Zone button.
Click and drag on the landscape to form a rectangle where you want
to make a commercial zone.
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Power to the People
The Sims that live in SimCities may have that pioneering spirit,
but they won’t move in until you supply electric power. After
all, they are electronic life-forms.
To supply power, you need a power plant of some sort and
power lines to get the power to where you want it. Both of these
things are available from the Power button in the City toolbar.
Click and hold on the Power button in the City toolbar.
Move the cursor to highlight Power Plant... and release the mouse
button.
An assortment of power plants will appear, with pictures of,
prices for and outputs from each plant. There is also an INFO
button for each power plant that brings up even more fascinating facts. Power plants are not available to you until the city
year reaches the time when that technology is available. In
other words, you can’t have nuclear fusion in 1901.
Click on the Coal Power Plant.
The power plant assortment will disappear, and a grey 4 x 4-tile
shadow will follow the cursor. This is the size of the base of the
power plant. Find a place—preferably near your industrial
zone and far from your residential zone—to place the power
plant. It must be placed on flat ground.
Click on the terrain to place your power plant.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 16
Now we need to power up the zones. We’ll need power lines to
get the power from the power plant to each zone. Power won’t
travel from zone to zone without power lines, even if they’re
touching. Within zones, the building-to-building power lines are
built by the Sims when they build their buildings. (But that’s a
private sector problem—you only have to power up each zone.)
Placing power lines can be a bit tricky, so it’s best to zoom in
as close as you can get.
Click on the Center button.
Click on your power plant.
Click on the Zoom In button until you are as close as you can get.
Click and hold on the Power button in the City toolbar.
Move the cursor to highlight Power Lines and release the mouse
button.
You’re ready to lay some power lines.
Click or click and drag to place power lines that connect the power
plant to each of your zones.
If you place power lines that aren’t connected to power, they’ll
blink to indicate that they aren’t hooked up yet. If your power lines
flash, then you’ve missed a connection. You may have to rotate
the terrain to get a good look at your power plant from all sides.
I’ve Got a Line on You
Note: Laying power lines in hilly areas can be
tricky. You may have to rotate the landscape
and zoom in for a good close look. Try to stay on
flat land for this tutorial.
Villages, cities, landscapes, regions and places in general derive their
uniqueness from intangible forces. A sensitive planner or architect will
recognize these qualities and incorporate them into the master plan.
VI
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The Drive to Thrive
Now all we need is a transportation system, and your town
should be ready for some Sims to move in.
Click on the Road button in the City toolbar.
Click and drag through and around your zones to set up a network
of roads.
By the time you get your roads down, some Sims should be
moving into your town.
Power cannot travel through roads without wires, so place
power lines across the roads to make sure each section of
every zone has power.
Click and hold on the Power button and select Power Lines again.
Place power lines across the roads to connect all parts of each zone.
Now sit patiently for a few minutes as your city slowly begins
to grow.
Note: If nobody moves into your city, then it’s
either because the zones aren’t powered up, or
the residential and industrial zones are too far
apart. Sims like to drive their cars, but they
hate to commute very far.
Your Just Desserts
Your city should be growing now. Go ahead and add some
more zones, or play with roads to get in some practice. Fairly
soon a newspaper will announce to the world that your little
town has reached the lofty population of 2000, and as a reward,
you may build yourself a house.
Note: If you don’t get this message after 5 or 7
minutes, then you may not have made your
zones large enough.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 18
This is but the first of many rewards that you will reap as mayor
of SimCity. Rewards are based on population, and include your
own house, a city hall, a statue in your honor and ... well, you’ll
find out.
Rewards show up under the Reward button in the City toolbar,
which is ghosted and unavailable most of the time. Once you
reach the population of 2000, then the Reward button will no
longer be ghosted.
Click and hold on the Reward button, slide the cursor to Mayor’s
House and release the mouse button.
Place your house in a prestigious spot,
preferably with a good view.
Connect your house to the rest of the
town with roads and power lines.
Congratulations. You’ve successfully
taken a hunk of barren dirt and built
a small city. But this is no time to rest
on your laurels. For now, save your
city to disk, then we’ll move on.
Open the File menu.
Select Save City.
Depending on your computer, it will either go ahead and save
without asking you any questions, or prompt you for a location
and file name. See your machine-specific Addendum for details
on saving files and file names.
An aware planner is a steward of the earth, whose designs enhance the natural evolution of
a place instead of inhibiting it. If you move to a mountain, then live on the mountain—
don’t try to turn it into a valley. If you move to the desert, live in and with the desert—
don’t pretend it’s something else and plant yards with water-hungry grass.
VI
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Belly on Up to the
(Tool)Bar
Bulldozer
Landscape
Power
Roads
Rails
Residential Zones
Education
City Services
Signs
Rotate
Counter-
Clockwise
Zoom Out
Maps Window
Population Window
Neighbors Window
Show Buildings
Show
Infrastructure
Underground
Let’s take a quick look at the City toolbar. If it ever gets in your
way you can move it around the screen by clicking and dragging the bar at the top.
An important—and useful—thing to remember is the built-in
help. Just hold down either Shift key, and click on any button
in the toolbar for a complete explanation of what the button
does.
All of the buttons in the top five rows activate
submenus that give the button more power
Emergency
Rewards
Water
Ports
Industrial Zones
Commercial
Zones
Recreation
Query
Rotate Clockwise
Center
Zoom In
Graphs Window
Demand
Indicator
Industry Window
Budget Window
Show Signs
Show Zones
Help
and flexibility. You’ve already seen that with
the Power button.
Click and hold on all the buttons in the top five
rows, one by one, to see all their submenus.
Two of the buttons will not do anything: the
Reward button and the Emergency button.
The Emergency button, which lets you dispatch police and fire departments to the
scene of an emergency, only works during an
emergency. And as you already know, the
Reward button only lights up as you reach
certain population levels.
Seeing all those submenus should assure you
that there’s a lot more to mastering SimCity
2000 than building a town of 2000 people.
Many of these features will be covered in
Tutorial 3, but there are a few items that will
prove useful to you right away: the bulldozer,
landscaping and building bridges.
SimCity 2000 — TutorialPage 20
The bulldozer has a number of uses, but for now we’ll concentrate on its Demolish/Clear function.
Click and hold on the Bulldozer button.
Highlight Demolish/Clear.
Now go on a rampage through your city. Bulldoze any extra
sections of road, abandoned factories or anything else you’d
care to eliminate. (Don’t worry, the city has been saved to disk,
you can undo any damage you do by loading it back in.)
The first time you ’doze something, it turns it to rubble (with
quite a jolly explosion). ’Doze it again to clear the rubble.
Doin’ Some Dozin’
The Landscape button lets you add trees or water to the
landscape. Click and hold on the Landscape button.
Highlight Trees and release the mouse button.
Click or click and drag across the land to add trees.
Trees add value to land as well as an aesthetic touch to your
creation. Now for water.
Click and hold on the Landscape button.
Highlight Water and release the mouse button.
Click or click and drag across the land to make a small lake—but
keep it small, adding water is expensive.
Water also adds value to land, and has recreational value, too.
Over the River and Through the Woods
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THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
™
A Little Bridgework
And speaking of water, how do you make your roads cross it?
Locate and center the screen on a lake or river that has flat land
surrounding it.
Click on the Road button.
Click and drag the cursor so it crosses the lake or river.
Just by laying a road over water, the SimConstruction crew
knows that you need a bridge. So they pop up this dialog box
to let you decide what kind of bridge you want and tell you how
much it’ll cost. There is also an Info button you can press for
more information on each type of bridge. Depending on the
year in your city, and the width of the water, you will be shown
a choice of one, two or three different bridges you can build.
For now, go ahead and build a causeway bridge.
Click on the Causeway button to build the bridge.
The causeway is only one of the three types of bridges that you
can have in SimCity 2000. Let’s build another one, or two if they
are all available.
Click and drag across the water next to the causeway.
When given the choice of bridges, build a raising bridge, if it is
available.
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Now build a suspension bridge if it is available.
Ancient civilizations often identified their
places with a particular deity that
personified its distinctive qualities.
VIII
SimCity 2000 — Tutorial
A handy-dandy feature of SimCity 2000 is the ability to add signs
to buildings or spots of interest in your city.
Click on the Sign button.
Click on one of the bridges you just built.
Type “Orthodontist’s Dream” into the dialog box.
Click the Done button.
Give Me a Sign
At the bottom of the City toolbar are six buttons. The one with
the question mark brings up a reminder that you can get help on
each button of the toolbar by holding down the Shift key and
clicking on the button.
To the left of the help button is the Underground button.
Clicking on it reveals SimCity’s soft white underbelly, where you
can build an underground transportation system and run water
to all your city’s buildings. Clicking on it again takes you back up
to the surface.
The four buttons above Help and Underground are Show Buildings, Show Signs, Show Infrastructure and Show Zones. Each of
these buttons toggles on and off different parts of the city. The
parts aren’t destroyed, they just turn invisible until you want to
see them again.
Zoom out, center on the built-up part of your city and play with the
four Show buttons, the Underground button and the Help button for
a while.
Hang in there. We’re almost done with Tutorial 1!
Show and Tell
The sizes of most early cities around the world were originally
determined by the capacity of surrounding farmlands to feed the
population. Many modern urban planners are aware of the
importance of determining how large a population can be sustained
within the boundaries of a municipality. But then again, many aren’t.
IX
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THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
™
You’re in Demand
What a Pane
Maps Window
Graphs Window
Industry Window
Budget Window
Neighbors Window
Population Window
Now take a look at the City toolbar and pick out the
Demand Indicator. This lets you know what type of
zones are in demand in your city. The bars stick up to
show demand and down to show oversupply for Residential, Commercial and Industrial zones.
To the left of the Demand Indicator are six buttons. Each of these
buttons opens small information windows that sit on top of the
City window. The information in these windows helps you understand what’s going on in your city, and helps you keep things
running smoothly. Some of them will be covered in Tutorial 3. All
of them are explained in detail in the Reference section.
Most of these buttons (all but the one with the money sign)
work in two ways:
1.Click and hold on them to see a small pop-up information display that disappears when you let go of the
mouse button.
2.Click and drag them away from the toolbar to open a
window that stays until you tell it to go away.
One at a time, click and hold on each of the six buttons, take a quick
look at what comes up, then release the mouse button. (Note that
the Budget window stays there unless you click the Done button.)
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One at a time, click and drag each of the six buttons to open all the
windows.
Close all the windows.
Well, that’s it for Tutorial 1. When you’re ready for more, check
out the next two tutorials. And the Reference section is always
there when you need it for details on every window, toolbar
and button. Now go play.
Play.
Have fun.
Have more fun.
SimCity 2000 — Tutorial
Welcome back. In this tutorial, we’ll be modifying and
customizing the landforms that you build your cities on.
Tutorial 2–
In the last tutorial we touched on adding trees and water with
the Landscape button, and looked at the submenu under the
Bulldozer button. These are powerful tools for molding, shaping and beautifying the land. But if you make drastic changes,
it can drain your city’s treasury.
All the time you spent in Tutorial 1 was in “City-Building mode.”
As an alternative, SimCity 2000 has a “Terrain-Editing mode”
that allows you to make all the modifications to the land you
want—at no charge—before you actually start your city. When
you’ve created the perfect locale for a new town, you can
switch to City mode and start building. But you can’t switch
back. Sorry, them’s the rules.
Enough gabbing. Put on your work boots and grab your hard
hat—we’ve got mountains to move.
Landscape
Engineering
The attitude of the ancient Greeks toward town design reflects their sense
of the finite, the idea that all things should be a definite size to be
comprehensible and workable. Aristotle described the ideal size of a city,
or “polis,” noting that less than 10,000 people are too few to constitute a
viable political entity and more than 20,000 are too unwieldy.
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X
THE ULTIMATE CITY SIMULATOR
™
Make River
Generate New
Landscape
Raise Terrain
In the Mode
First, we’ll get into Terrain-Editing mode.
If SimCity 2000 isn’t running now, start it up. You’ll soon see this
dialog box:
Click Edit New Map.
If SimCity 2000 is already running, and you’ve been playing for
a while, save whatever you’re working on (if you wish) and:
Click on the Zoom Out button until you are all the way
out.
Open the File menu.
Select Edit New Map.
Make
Coast
This is the same old City window as in Tutorial 1, but
with a big difference—this time we’re in Terrain
mode, and the City toolbar has been replaced by the
Sliders
Terrain toolbar.
Near the bottom of the toolbar are six buttons that
you are already familiar with. The Zoom In, Zoom Out,
Rotate, Center and Help buttons work here exactly as
Lower Terrain
they do in the City toolbar.
Stretch
Terrain
Raise Sea
Level
Place Water
Place Tree
Zoom Out
Rotate
Counter-
Clockwise
Center
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Level
Terrain
Lower Sea
Level
Place
Stream
Place
Forest
Zoom In
Rotate
Clockwise
Help
Leave Terrain Mode and Go
to City Mode
And, of course, if you ever need a reminder of what a
button does, hold down either Shift key and click on
the button.
SimCity 2000 — Tutorial
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