SimCity BuildIt for Beginners

When I first started playing SimCity BuildIt a couple of years ago, I looked around online for tips to speed me towards success in building my own beautiful and thriving city. Sadly, all I found were the same tired old snippets which were of little use to me. So now, as I begin my second city from scratch, I’d like to share some things that might actually be of use to a new player. I'll skip right over the obvious stuff and go straight in with the meaty tips.

Read on my friend and hopefully you’ll glean something from my experience that will help you on your way.

War

As Culture Club so eloquently put it: ‘War war is stupid, and people are stupid’ and I couldn’t agree more. If your raison d'être is to build a glorious city, war is not going to help you out. Sure you can win stuff when you do well but honestly, think of all those resources you’re going to use in the war deliveries depot trying to win war items. And what about those you spend fixing your damaged buildings? For me, it’s just not worth it so I’ve left the club and I go solo. Be a lover not a fighter is my mantra.

Top tip: If you decide that war isn’t for you either, and you have a bunch of war items clogging up your City Storage, then put them up for sale. Even if you aren’t in a club, they will eventually sell when Daniel swoops in to save the day.

Daniel

Speaking of the sharp suited and stylish Mayor Daniel, I recommend visiting him regularly. His trade depot often has goodies that just don’t come up that often elsewhere and they’re always at the lowest price possible so win-win. Even if you don’t need any of his items you can buy them, then immediately put them up for sale at full price giving you a quick and easy profit.

Travel the world

The Global Trade HQ is great for picking up stuff you need back in your own city. But even if you see nothing you need, it’s still worth visiting the neighbouring cities. Once there, come out of the trade depot and have a look round. You’ll often find little blue parcels containing gifts and some of them are brilliant! I’ve regularly found special dozer expansion items: the exhaust, wheel and blade, or items for the Vu Tower which are always handy.

Another benefit of travelling to neighbouring cities is that you will find some amazing designs on your travels. There’s some really inspirational stuff out there, so keep your eyes peeled!

Vu Tower

Whilst we’re on the Vu Tower, let me tell you why everybody else is wrong. So many folk, in their tips and tricks articles, dismiss the Vu Tower as pointless. Well, I disagree. Sure it’s expensive to upgrade but when you do, it becomes a great source of gold keys and a brilliant way to meet the assignment targets of launching disasters and repairing disaster zones.

Assignments

Assignments in the Mayors’ Contest are worth their weight in gold because of the rewards you can win when you earn enough plumbob points. When you complete a high-scoring assignment, it is replaced with another high-scoring assignment so it’s worth doing these first if you can.

If there are challenges you cannot do — for example if it’s a war challenge and you’re not in a club (like me) — then ditch them. You can do this by starting the challenge then immediately hitting the red and white cross button next to it. Confirm you want to cancel it then in twenty minutes' time a new assignment will take its place.

I’d recommend doing this throughout the game as hidden assignments could be much easier to do than the ones you’re given.

You might get to a point where it looks like there are no more challenges but fear not, you get to open 15 new ones with golden tickets.

I’m not advocating doing this but I’ve recently started paying a small amount of money (£4.50 I think it is) to open up the other items available as rewards. There are some ace ones in there and for me, it's not a lot of money for the benefit.

Top tip: One final tip that’s not immediately obvious when it comes to assignments: when it asks you to upgrade a residential zone, it doesn’t just mean a standard residential zone or building. You can complete this assignment by upgrading regional specific residential buildings as well as Latin American, Old Town House, Parisian, London and Tokyo buildings. I didn’t notice that for a long time.

More is more

This might sound obvious but it’s worth increasing capacity wherever you can: City Storage, Omega Storage, NeoBank, and of course your city area.

By the way, do not sell the dozer wheel, exhaust or blade until you’ve expanded the entire area — they become harder to come by and more and more are needed as your city grows. Use your SimCash to buy the dozer items and expand your city. It’s the most valuable thing you can do with it in my opinion.

Another area that is sometimes overlooked at the beginning of your city, and where you should certainly expand, is your industrial buildings. Make them as big as possible as quickly as possible. They double up as extra storage when your City Storage is full because you can produce things and just leave them sitting there till you need them.

Okay, so some of them are right…

If you read other tips articles online, you’ll no doubt come across people suggesting you get the biggest services you can i.e. Fire, Police and Health, (and even ControlNet and Drone bases). I agree with them, if you can afford to go big, do so. Otherwise you’ll end up with a scattering of services that take up extra space and overlap each other — which is wasteful. Not ideal.

Design Challenge

I was late to the game with Design Challenges but I’d recommend getting involved fairly early in your SimCity BuildIt career. They’re a great source of goodies when you submit a design and there are some brilliant prizes when you cash in your blueprints. Now of course you don’t need to make your city pretty in a design challenge just to be awarded stuff, but it’s worth it because it’s lots of fun.

When you vote on other designs (which you should for the gifts) you’ll see some doozies. Seriously, some designs are amazing and I can only hope I’ll be able to do that one day. Those players must have bought up so many landscape items to do them — I mean, look at the amount of water people use, that doesn’t come easy!

Regions

My favourite region is Cactus Canyon and the sole reason for this is that it’s a big square playing field so great for tinkering with little creative projects. That being said, I’ve never opened up Frosty Fjords, and I’ve only just launched Limestone Cliffs so have little to say about it as a region.

AOB

Finally, here are a few tips that don’t really warrant a full paragraph each:

👉 Upgrade your commercial buildings as quickly as you can — it’ll save lots of production time.

👉 Build small roads with lots of junctions — long roads are expensive to upgrade and they will need upgrading in time.

👉 Upgrade your roads as soon as you can — even if they don't need it just yet.

👉 Make and buy lots of nails, they’re always handy.

👉 When you see the following for sale, buy them rather than making them: bread roll, beef, and fire pit (you won’t need many fire pits but they take such a long time to produce, it’s not worth making them).

👉 Sell stuff all the time. Somebody will want what you’re selling, even one piece of metal will go.

👉 Take part in the Epic Projects when you have enough speciality items needed for that round. They’re hard work, they deplete your stocks, but it’s really handy to have a steady stream of speed up tokens as you progress.

👉 Zoom in on fully upgraded Omega buildings and you’ll see tiny Sims walking along high rise walkways between buildings. You won't gain anything by doing this but it's fun!

👉 Move your beach and mountain items around to see which position yields the most amount of population — you’ll be surprised at the difference.

That’s all I have to say for now. I hope anybody starting out with SimCity BuildIt is enjoying themselves and finds these suggestions useful. If you have any of your own, share them in the comments.

And finally, look out for my cities — Dogfinger is the old one and Catfinger the new one. See you around and happy building!