This section covers the more common errors with Cities XL.


CitiesXL.exe - Fatal error: CLR error: 80004005. The program will now terminate

Download the latest .NET framework from here[msdn.microsoft.com], remove old beta versions of .NET frameworks and install the one you downloaded.



OS: WINDOWS XP SP3 / WINDOWS VISTA SP1 / WINDOWS 7
PROCESSOR: INTEL CORE 2 AT 2.5GHZ / AMD ATHLON64 X2 AT 2.5GHZ
RAM MEMORY: 1 GB (XP)/1.5 GB (VISTA/7)
GRAPHICS CARD: 512 MB 100% DIRECTX 9 COMPATIBLE
ATI RADEON HD 3850/NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 OR HIGHER*
DVD-ROM: 2X DRIVE
HARD DISK SPACE: 8 GB
SOUND CARD: DIRECTX 9 COMPATIBLE
INTERNET CONNECTION REQUIRED TO ACTIVATE THE GAME
INTEL/SIS/VIA-S3G GRAPHICS CONTROLLERS ARE NOT SUPPORTED


Cities XL error logs, saved games, screenshots and more are kept within your AppData folder.

If you have problems finding a folder called "AppData", follow these instructions:
Go to:


The size of the digital download is ~3.35GB, installed it's ~4.87GB.

The '8GB' listed in system requirements means "you should have at least 8GB free space before you install", not "the installation size is 8GB"


To solve "The game is currently unavailable at this time" issue on Steam, you may try this:


Install Button Doesn't Work
Disabling anti-virus software seems to cure this problem in some cases

Freeimage.dll - Missing

here[download.dll-files.com] is a .zip containing the freeimage.dll.


Failed to create D3D device (Bought from Steam)

To fix the problem is real easy just don't use HDMI cables use either DVI or VGA cables. Yes, we know how silly that is.

This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

mcCrypto: ERROR in CryptAcquireContext() with CRYPT_NEWKEYSET() msg:<Access is denied. (Error code = 5)>

{C}This error occurs when the encryption key is not present on the host computer.

Reinstalling Windows did not work.

However, I tried a final idea and I copied the encryption key from my laptop to a shared drive between my computers and moved it to my pc. It worked!!!!! CXL 2011 loaded up and plays wonderfully.

I wish I knew how to actually fix this problem though for people who don't have the option of installing the game on another pc and moving the key over


If you can't see the mouse cursor in game, your problem is probably that you have mouse trails turned on. Turn them off and everything will work fine.

Mouse Cursor still missing in my game. Why is this? running on 512 Nvidia Pentium 2dual core 1.8 GHz. Mouse will not show could this be a timing issue with the refresh rate?
Crash To Desktop During Play And Then Can't Reinstall

This problem occurred on a Windows 7 64 bit system, but the game seemed to be working fine for a time. The member then experienced a CTD (Crash To Desktop) and after this, his installation become non functional, which suggests corruption to the game files.

The obvious steps are to completely purge all trace of cities XL from the machine (keeping saved cities somewhere safe) and then reinstall.

Unfortunately complete removal of the game seems not always to be a straightforward task as this case demonstrates:

Open Computer then your (C:) local disk.
Open Users folder.
Open your username folder.
Open AppData folder (*)
Open Local folder.
Open Focus Home Interactive folder.
Delete Cities XL 2011 folder. ( You may want to make a copy of your saved files: C:\Users\romfromfocus\AppData\Local\Focus Home Interactive\Cities XL 2011\live\offline\solo )
Run Cities XL 2011.

The first thing you will do after clicking the Play button in the Main menu (which will only happen hopefully after you've gone through all the Tutorials) is marvel at the sight of the Planet approaching out of the Cosmos.

You will notice scores of gray dots on the Planet - these are all city slots, waiting for you to start constructing on them!

On the right-hand side of the screen you will see the Maps menu, where you will be able to select a map of your choice from a list the 62 maps currently available.

Each map has unique features such as different terrain and resources, such as Oil, Water, Agriculture & Holidays/Tourism.

Alternatively, you can click each one of the dots directly on the Planet.



If you would rather watch a good tutorial video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dXhYVYvXhA

What do you need to know about maps?

Each map has a difficulty degree. This has mostly to do with relief and the availability of resources or City-links. It's good to start with maps with smaller difficulty degree, until you get more experienced.

Each map has different natural features, which translates in different resources available. There are, however, some resources that are very important, because they allow the production of some key components in the game - we call these Map-dependent resources. Each map has one or more of these resources available - Oil deposits (for Fuel production), Arable land (for Agriculture), Water and Holiday zones (for Holiday hotels). If you want to produce any of these resources in your city, you'll need to choose a map with at least one star in the respective map resource. Otherwise, their production will be impossible in this city (with the exception of Holiday zones, which could be created additionally in every city).

Most maps are 'Land' maps - they are either completely landlocked, or have an extensive border with a landmass. These maps can connect with the rest of the Planet via the full spectrum of Inter-city transport options.

Others are 'Island' maps - they are completely detached from landmasses and can only be connected to the Planet via Harbors or Airports. The name of the map usually suggests which one of the two types it belongs to (for example 'The atoll' is obviously an Island map).

Map filter and selection menu

Choose one of the maps you like from the Map Menu using the filters if needed or just scroll through each map. For each map selected, you'll see the following information:

- Resources available - marked with 0 - 3 stars for each resource, where 0 means no area and 3 - extensive area

- Difficulty - graded according to the criteria mentioned above

- Flat surface - what part of the terrain is easy for construction

- Available - how much of the border has spots for city links (intercity roads and highways).

- Free slot - shows how many slots of this map are left for construction. Each city you start on a map takes up one slot.

Tip: the Cities XL 2012 maps are highlighted with a red border.

When you have found a map you want to play select it and then click the 'Create your City button.

A dialog window will open, where you will type the name of the city (yes, it doesn't have to bear the name of the map), and select the style of roads you want to use - Default (no National style roads), American, English, French or German. Then press the OK button to Enter your city!

The in-game interface consists of 4 main menu panels. The Main Menu, Top Menu, Construction Menu, and the Layer Bar Menu.





The top menu is located in the top middle area of the game Interface. You have your main Budget, Population, Resources and Transport menus on the left with the Pause Game and Increase/Decrease Game Speed Tools underneath the transport menu. Your Cities title and playing tips are located in the middle panel and your Cities' Satisfaction menus on the right. These menus are your main informational tool - they will allow you to keep detailed track of all city activities.
TopMenuBar


The following menu options are available in the Top Menu:

Budget Panel - with the numbers of your total City budget to its right, and your Cashflow under it.
Population Panel - with the total population of the City to its right. Underneath will appear numbers when the population is increasing or decreasing (you'll see a zero if it's stable)
Resources Panel
Public Transport Panel

Satisfaction Panels

General Satisfaction buttons (right side of the top menu), whose color will immediately tell you if there's something wrong with something. It's simple: Green is Great, Red is Danger. You can figure out the rest in between.

Unskilled Workers Satisfaction Panel
Skilled Workers Satisfaction Panel
Executives Satisfaction Panel
Elites Satisfaction Panel
Factories Satisfaction Panel
Offices Satisfaction Panel
Hotels Satisfaction Panel
Commerce Satisfaction Panel

Clicking on each panel will call out several additional info blocks underneath.

The Main Menu is located in the top left area of the game Interface.

These are like quick links to the basic options of the game.

Most are pretty self-explanatory, click the menu option links below for more details.

The following menu options are available in the Main Menu.

Trade - opens the Trade screen
Blueprints - shows Megastructures under construction, or already constructed in this City
View Options
Trophies
Save - opens the manual save interface
Menu - opens the in-game Options menu
Back - exit to Planet view (with autosave)
Quit - exit to Windows (with autosave)





InGameMenuButton001 InGameMenuPanel001

This menu contains the following sections:
Resume

Click Resume will continue playing the game.

Options

Contains all the in-game settings:


You can change the size of the interface icons (CXL 2012) under. Menu > Options > Miscellaneous


Toggle Individual buildings/zoning

This option allows you to place buildings individually or by zoning.

When you have selected this menu option you should see a the Toggle Individual buildings/zoning Icon/button at the top of your Construction Menu.



You should also see all the individual buildings now available for individual selection and placement as per below screenshot.

ToggleBuildingsZones001

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Resources

Resources are all goods and services used in your cities in the context of the game. Every separate branch of the economy constitutes a separate resource (for example Heavy Industry, High-tech Industry, Offices, Business hotels, etc.). It doesn't matter if you take a physical entity (like Industrial goods), a service (like Office services), or the movement of people (represented by the Holiday or Citizen tokens), all of them count equally as resources. The only difference is the transportation mode they use - freight or passenger transportation.

Resources are both produced and consumed in your cities. Take a look at the information panels available for each building to see what resources it consumes (buys) and what resource it produces.

Resource balance is the difference in tokens between how much your city consumes, how much it produces, and also how much it imports or exports of a particular resource. You can see it at all times in the Resource panel. For more information on it and the overall economics of the game, refer to the Game Economics article.
Map-dependent resources

Production of some resources requires natural deposits or features, and can only be produced on maps that contain such features. This is the case with:

Fuel - requires Oil deposits

Water - requires artesian Water deposits

Food industry - requires Arable land

Holidays - requires interesting natural features, aka. Holiday zones

If you want to produce any of these four resources, you have to choose a specific map, containing its deposits. Holidays is a bit of an exception, because you can create Holiday zones in any city by vastly improving Environment. This is very difficult, however, and it will never create enough Holiday resource for industrial rate production.


Utilities

Utilities are a subgroup of resources that are vital for every city, because they include its basic functional necessities, such as Electricity and Water supply. Besides companies, Citizens consume (buy) these resources directly, so with the growth of city population there will be growth in the demand for Utilities, even though no other business is present in the city that consumes them.

The Resource Center that you build in the beginning of each city supplies the four Utilities at the same time, but its output is soon outgrown by the city, which then needs to start production of the Utilities, or to import them. Because of their vital importance, Utility production is always managed directly by the city, not by private companies, so you need to prepare for this expense!

Note that there are no Utility networks (such as there were in the Sim City series) - you only need to provide the production buildings and connect them by road. The four types of Utilities are:

Electricity
Water
Fuel
Waste treatment

Tokens

Tokens are the in-game unit used to represent all resources, regardless of them being tradeable, or not. They represent a quantity of a particular good, a resource or set of passengers (workers). The table indicates the amount of the resource for 1 token. Via the building list, you can convert how many buildings are the equivalent of 1 token of the resource in question.

These are valid as of: 10-18-2009, Build 383


The Cash tokens represent the money resource. Be warned that only your Cashflow is used to calculate available Cash tokens for the city, and not your total Budget!

1 Cash Token = 100 Credits in your Cashflow so 134 Cash tokens is an income of 13,400/mo.

You use Cash tokens primarily in your transactions with Omnicorp. You can use them also to 'wire' money from city to city.
Citizen tokens

These represent a large quantity of Unemployed citizens of the respective class in the city. Normally you don't want that (since unemployed citizens bring problems), but you will need them to build Megastructures.

You can trade Citizen tokens, but that will work only in two cases:

1. For building MegaStructures. The citizens traded to another city can be allocated for the construction process.

2. Trading with Omnicorp. The citizens 'sold' will properly diminish unemployment in your city, and will bring you some cash (both from taxes paid and from the transaction with Omnicorp). The same is valid when you trade them to another city; however, they won't work at any businesses in the other city and do not count towards filling jobs there. They do however count towards unemployment, so you will be practically transferring that problem to the other city.

Omnicorp is a server controlled city**. It's omnipresent and practically omniscient, appearing every time a simple Player thinks of trading. The city has a population of 0 and features not only the towering OmniCorp Headquarters but also a statue of Don Madoff himself, rivaling the Statue of Liberty.
**A server is a computer that is running Cities XL server software. It enables players to communicate with each-other. Each few minutes the alterations that a player makes to his city will be uploaded to the server.

These are no longer used because the Planet Offer has been removed.


It is present on every Planet and is always ready to trade resources with any city that has the means because the contracts it insists on always heavily favor it. In short, OmniCorp buys low and sells high.
Backed up by his empire and limitless resources, Don Madalff delights in signing contracts with cities that are very isolated or that have no‐one else to trade with. But don’t mistake him for a big‐hearted altruist, he’s completely unscrupulous. He simply takes advantage of this kind of situation to buy or sell goods at the best possible prices.
But that’s only a tiny part of his deceitfulness. What he likes best is putting whole cities in peril by organizing competitions or challenges with lucrative prizes.
There are many mayors – or should we say former mayors – out there who would love to see OmniCorp collapse and take Don Madalff with it.
It’s no accident that buildings owned by OmniCorp are surrounded with watchtowers and are more highly protected than prisons. Except that, in the OmniCorp mindset, captivity is what lies outside these enclosures…
Prices

Omnicorp's main purpose is to be a NPC trade partner, and so you can trade all tokens with it, even citizens. It sells resources for 80.0 cash per token and buys them for 35 per token. For selling purposes, use it freely to increase your budget. For buying, use it only as a last resort - if you have no proper cities that produce the resource you need.

Omnicorp has limits, after all - it has initially 9999 cash tokens available, and 99 tokens of every resource. This changes, of course, when you start trading with them - all resource you sell increase their supply, while decreasing their cash. It is possible that Omnicorp runs out of cash, so keep in mind that you can't sell them stuff indefinitely.
History

In the Planet Offer Omnicorp was to be a grand entity, representation of the 'masters' of the server universe. It was speculated that Monte Cristo would issue all challenges and special events through Omnicorp, but that was never confirmed (since not a single event was organised in the 6 months of the Planet Offer). In Single mode Omnicorp's importance was overwhelming - at the time there was no trading between your own cities, so you had to conduct all your transactions with Omnicorp and put up with their cutthroath prices. Needless to say, this raised an outcry amongst all who didn't want to participate in the Planet Offer.

Monte Cristo listened to the pleas of players and reduced Omnicorp's initial prices with the Christmass Pack, although that became an empty gesture couple of months later, when the game was turned into wholy Single player.

There are several mods that deal with Omnicorp's current limitations.

Your citizens are the lifeblood of your city, not only because they're the very reason for its existence, but also because they are at the core of its economy. First, citizens are the ultimate consumers of goods and services, produced by businesses. Second, they provide the workforce for all your buildings. Without enough workers, your businesses will quickly go bankrupt, or (if they're state-run) they simply won't function. And, of course, almost all buildings are keyed to reaching certain population (unless you've unlocked expert mode).

To attract citizens, you need to build residential zones. Once assigned, the zones will fill with residential buildings of the appropriate size and class, unless general satisfaction for this citizen class has dropped under 50%. New citizens will stop coming to the city at this point (the new residential zones will remain empty, and/or existing buildings will start emptying) and you'll need to do something to improve living conditions in the city.

Citizen immigration also depends on the level of unemployment - nobody will want to come to the city knowing that there's small chance to find a job. The thresholds are different for the different social groups - Unskilled will tolerate lots of Unemployment, while Elites - quite less.

Sometimes citizens will switch their home inside the city. This happens when the area they were living originally becomes undesirable, while another area with better conditions becomes available at the same time. When it happens, citizens will sometimes also change jobs. You can track these movements by checking the option in the Menu>Options>Advanced>Display residents movements - you will then see blue arrows shooting into the sky between residences in the city.

Of course, if ALL areas in a city become sufficiently undesirable, citizens might decide to leave the city altogether!


Satisfying the many requirements of your citizens is one of your most important tasks as a Mayor. What do they require to be happy? Many things, starting with jobs and ending with the environment nearby. You can check citizen satisfaction from the Population tab, Satisfaction and Services/environment subtabs. There you'll see general satisfaction levels, in %, broken down per wealth level and type of service.
Citizens panel 1

More information on Citizen satisfaction is available in the following places:

- Informational buttons in the Top Menu

There are series of buttons in the upper-right part of the screen that also show citizen satisfaction (one button per each wealth level). Clicking on them will give you immediate feedback for the citizen class in question, and also inform you of problems. Colour-code is: bright green - everything is topsy-turvy; dull green - some problems, nothing serious; yellow - problems requiring attention; red - you get the idea.

- Individual houses Informational panels

You can also click on individual homes to check their satisfaction. This will bring up the following information panel:
House info panel

- Inhabitants shows the level of occupation of the house
- Average satisfaction gives you a general idea of the satisfaction level of the house (if it's red there's nobody living there currently).

- Taxes satisfaction reflects how well the residents of the house are doing financially (this satisfaction group includes all living costs).

- Taxes shows the amount paid by the house monthly to the city.

Underneath you'll find more specific info about what you need to improve. The more red the colour of the info, the more you need to improve it.

Unqualified Workers, now called Unskilled Workers are the first class of Citizens in Cities XL. Being the lowest class of citizens, they usually occupy low-tier, low-density businesses and industry such as Heavy Industry, Agriculture, Manufactoring and Shops.

Qualified Workers, now called Skilled Workers are the second class of Citizens in Cities XL, also known as middle class. They occupy the widest range of jobs in the city, and you'll see them in all Industries, Offices, Hotels and Leisure buildings. That's why Skilled workers usually form the biggest part of the population of every type of city.

Transportational wise, they are similar to Unskilled - they would gladly use Public transport and leave the car at home; they would also willingly change several lines to get to work.

Skilled residences are a bit more refined then Unskilled - their houses are nicer (and most of the time have 2 stories), although most are still small, fitting multiple houses in the same lot; Medium density apartments are very often the so-called Row houses (which Elmo uses with such success in his Limitless Residential mod), and look much better than the ugly Unskilled buildings. High density buildings have some style, although they are still more wide than tall (rarely more than 10 - 11 stories).

Skilled workers are more demanding than Unskilled Workers, but they are still relatively easy to satisfy. A basic service coverage (including all required types), and a medium amount of Leisure, both sport and cultural, will make them happy.


Executives are the third class of citizens in Cities XL. They are considered higher than upper-middle class (more like lower-upper, or borderline upper), and take high-profile, specialized jobs, or otherwise supervisor posts. The main businesses requiring many Executives are Manufacturing and High-tech Industries, Offices, as well as some jobs spread around the top-end establishments of other businesses.

Transporting Executives is somewhat of a challenge: they are not that ready to take Public transport, but they would also hate congestions. So, if you provide a convenient line nearby, they will take it.

Executives are much more difficult to please than Skilled workers. They require a full set of services, abundant shops and considerable Leisure (both Sports and Cultural). They are also quite sensitive to pollution, both air and noise.

Executive residences are very nice: small houses have gardens and many times pools, Middle density buildings are stylish (most of them inspired mainly from European cities such as Paris and Berlin); their High density buildings are mostly Highrises with 20+ stories, and form a nice downtown area.

Elites are the wealthiest subgroup of citizens in Cities XL, the pinnacle of Cities XL society. They live in posh villas with palm trees and pools; or in richly decorated highrises and spacious 6 - 7 story edifices, inspired again mainly from European architecture. Elites pay the biggest amount of taxes, however, they are also the most demanding class of citizens.

Elites take the jobs of CEOs in the upper end businesses of the city. You won't see them in Dirty industry, or in common Offices - they appear only in high-density Manufacturing and middle and high density High-Tech Industry, as well as high density Office skyscrapers. There are few other buildings in the city using them, again mostly upper tier special buildings and research labs.

Elites will almost never use Public transport. Only if there is no other way would an Elite leave the luxury of his Bentley and get in the Metro or the Bus. However, they might consider taking an yacht or a helicopter to go to work.

Satisfying Elites is the greatest challenge in the game. They want all, and they want it abundantly. Full access to Security, Health and Education services, many shops and malls nearby, and plenty of sports and cultural leisure activities. Elites will also complain at the slightest sign of pollution in the city (although you may appease them by providing plenty of services and impressive Landmarks to make up for the bother of breathing poisoned air).

Heavy Industry is the most heavy polluting business in the game. It consists of such things as refineries, cement factories, etc. It is considered a low-tier business, because it requires (buys) relatively easy to find resources (fuel and offices), and it employs mainly Unskilled and Skilled workers (only High density HI employs some Executives).

The factories produce various chemicals out of Fuel, such as plastics; or basic building materials such as metals, concrete or metallic moldings. The whole process emits gargantuan amounts of Air Pollution (emphasized graphically with the smoking chimneys of most factories), that will turn the neighborhood practically uninhabitable. The Industry also needs Office services for their accounting, public relations and trading needs.

A city that concentrates in Heavy Industry will become a big polluter - you need many, many factories to properly develop the resource and gain access to the bonus buildings, and this means tons and tons of pollution will spill everywhere on the map. For that matter you should try to combine HI with Electricity or Fuel specialization, and also maybe with Manufacturing Industry, which all emit pollution. To offset the negative effect, you'll need lots of parks in the city, along with Landmarks. However, you'll never be able to properly develop a 'clean' industry in the same city (such as Offices or High-tech industry), so, don't even try. Instead, simply concentrate on managing the satisfaction of the Executives and the small amount of Elites you'll need.

Special buildings: A great way to increase production without the air pollution resulting from actually placing more buildings.

And here are the various satisfaction factors, in order of importance:


An unemployed man is an unhappy man. Good thing that your city has so many ways to employ people! When you create a residential zone, always think if you'll have jobs for the relative type of citizens. If you won't, it's advisable to create some. Once you have a business somewhere in town to employ your new citizens, they'll find it automatically. Be careful to create the right business, though - look in the popup info panels of the businesses' tumbnails in the Construction menu to find what types of workers, and how many approximately they need, then select the appropriate business (according to your city strategy, of course).

If you click on a home, you'll see a colour line coming out of it and connecting it to a business somewhere in the city - this shows where the guys from that building work and is also handy to trace their way to work (which is important when solving traffic problems). If there's no line, then people in that building are unemployed - there's also gonna be a red warning text to that end.

Different jobs have different degrees of attractiveness - working in a dirty factory is much less desirable than working in an office. Although, of course, every class will work something according to its qualification - an Unskilled worker in a factory will stay down with the dirty machines, while an Executive will be snuggled up in the control rooms, supervising stuff. In a hotel, an Unskilled worker will be sweeping floors and cleaning rooms, while a Skilled one will be at the reception, etc.

Workers are constantly trying to find better jobs, and since industrial jobs are the worst, you'll see the most movement there - people will be constantly coming and going. That's why it is very important to keep transport to and from industrial districts well organized - if not, some factories might stay without workers long enough to go bankrupt!

On the other hand, once the citizen has a job, he will be satisfied (although looking for a better one), as Job satisfaction goes. The time it takes a citizen to reach his job, however, is a factor that also counts for job satisfaction and depends much more on your mayoral capabilities. The distance a worker travels, the means of transport he uses, the number of switches, the traffic he encounters all count towards his Travel Satisfaction (you could track this in the Layers>Transportation>Travel satisfaction). If a citizen becomes unsatisfied with travel time, he'll look to switch jobs into another, better served district, and he'll also become unsatisfied with his current job.
You can find general info on jobs and employment in the Population panel in the upper center part of the screen (between the resource and money tabs). Here, in the Statistics part you'll find your overall population, available jobs, the relative percentage of the different types of citizens, and the unemployment rate.

I like to keep a 1 - 2% unemployment rate for each citizen class - this guarantees that some new buildings that I erect will have workers right away, without me having to worry about them. Creating large residential zones, especially in the early stages of a city, will create large unemployment rates, although you could create jobs just as fast. Don't get scared when you see 50% unemployment! With 5000 population you can turn that around with a single industrial zone.
In later stages of the game you can create citizen tokens by attracting more citizens than your city really needs. The excess will convert into citizen tokes, which you can use to trade, or in Mega-structure projects. But be careful - lots of unemployed citizens that have nothing to do create problems!

Note: houses containing unemployed citizens DON'T pay taxes! So, if you see a message 'Employment satisfaction is low', expect to see a reduction in the taxes the house pays, relative to the number of unemployed citizens there.

Those include retail, education, health, police (security) and fire protection. Of those only retail will generate income for the city, the rest are expenses!
General Service satisfaction levels are shown in the Population>Services/Environment panel.

All services have limited range, even those that state that the range is 'city' (i.e. the entire city). However, the range isn't a fixed circle as in SC4; instead, it travels through the road network, and is thus subject to traffic. In short, if the streets around the service-providing building are congested, it's effective range diminishes. The tool allowing you to monitor service coverage is the 'Services' layout on the right side of the page. Here you'll find all types of services, and clicking on a particular service will light up the buildings that provide it, and the road network delivering access to it. Generally speaking, the greener the network - the more service coverage in that area. Bright yellow means middle coverage, faint yellow - low coverage.
Also, when your city grows, your citizens require more and more quality services, that is - bigger service buildings. You'll be forced to use more advanced buildings where before the basic ones did the job.

The different types of services are:

- Retail (Shops)

- Health

- Security (Police)

- Fire services

- Education

The next requirement of your citizens is someplace to have fun. Providing the necessary coverage is some work, since you have many types of leisure buildings with all sorts of effects and coverage areas. Again, as with Education, bigger is not always better here; you'll need to combine several kinds of leisure activities to satisfy your citizens. And of course, Elites will require much more variety than Unqualified workers. And again, Leisure is city-funded, so you'll be spending a lot of money here.

We have two general types of leisure, found under the Commerce/Leisure tabs.
- Sports
- Cultural

Providing good leisure satisfaction will require a lot of play with combinations. Keep in mind that even the largest establishments (the tennis courts and the restaurant) don't have city-wide coverage; so be mindful where you place everything. Use the Satisfaction/Leisure overlay to gauge effectiveness.


This includes the quality of air, how pleasant the neighborhood is, is there noise, etc. It is also known as 'Quality of life' and, overall, is the most difficult satisfaction category to provide, especially if your city is not a clean holiday-oriented paradise. You can check the status of the environment drom the 'Environment' layout . The following things influence environmental satisfaction:
- Air pollution - the ugly brown cloud over your industries will ruin not only this area, but also the quality of air in the entire city. There are 2 types of air pollution: direct (the said brown cloud), and indirect, which is a thin smog spreading over your entire map. The smog gets worse the more polluting agents you have, and bad news is that currently there's no way of cleaning it. you can only try to counter it.
- Noise pollution - not so dangerous, but still harmful to the Quality of life. Traffic produces noise pollution - you can see through the 'Environment/environment' layout that the areas around busy roads have lower quality of life satisfaction. All-too-realistic, also.
- Parks and plazas. Here I mean the 'Big parks ' (City services>Environment), the park- and plaza areas don't seem to help a lot (although they DO have an effect since a recent patch). The Big parks cost your city 3000/month, but they work relatively well to increase environmental satisfaction.
- Landmarks. Those special buildings also increase quality-of-life satisfaction. They have a circular area-of-effect (as well as the Avatar parks), so place them carefully in order to maximize their positive effect. Executives and Elites neighborhoods come to mind.
Cultural leisure buildings also provide lesser landmark effect .
- Waste treatment. Critical lack of Waste disposal services in the city (the resource is in the orange or red) will impact negatively Environmental satisfaction. After all, all these piles of garbage can't smell very nice, can they?

How to deal with environment? Well, the easiest thing to do is EVADE pollution. Don't build heavy and manufacturing industry. no power plants either. Your city will then have little problems with environment, and your parks and landmarks will provide the necessary boost to maximize this satisfaction type.
If you DO have industry, however, all you could do is to plan carefully your residential neighborhoods. Build them away from busy roads, build lots of parks and landmarks. It's interesting also that placing residences right next to farms works very well with this kind of satisfaction ('Ohhh, the pastoral view of cattle chewing grass on the other side of the fence ). Amd, we could hope FH will provide us with more tools to counter it in the future.


This is represented in the game by the Holiday resource. As your city and population grows, you'll find that your citizens need holidays. Think of it as 'a nice place to spend the vacation'. If your city has holiday capabilities, you only need to construct holiday hotels to satisfy this need. Otherwise, you'll need to import holiday tokens. Lacking those will result in a negative bonus to all your citizen's satisfaction, a bonus that you can't counter. Currently, the negative bonus is -3 (if you keep the holiday deficit orange), or -6 (if it becomes red). Positive tourism bonus is also possible, but to achieve it you need to have overproduction to at least orange level.
6. Resources

Your population consumes-resource directly as well as indirectly. This includes the 4 types of Utilities (energy, water, waste and fuel ), and also Food, Manufacturing and Hig tech industry . So, you'll need some amounts of those even if nothing else in the city consumes them. Of course, the level of consumption is nothing near what industries and other things will consume. Just don't be surprised when you see your food resource indicator going negative even though you haven't build more retail (the only other thing that consumes food).
Citizens panel 3

A good way to keep an eye on your citizen's resource needs is the Population - Cost/Job panel. Here you can see if some of the resources needed is so needed in the city that generates dissatisfaction. If everything's OK, you shouldn't see any negative numbers here. Again, if you're overproducing enough, you could receive positive bonuses.

Those are provided by some special buildings, such as Landmarks and Mega-structures . Look for the '+X satisfaction ' in their info tab. Once built, they'll add a permanent positive bonus to the relative wealth group's general satisfaction.

Note that the main Satisfaction for each class is comprised by a combination of four groups:

Services - Education, Health, Fire protection, Police, Leisure and Retail all combine to provide this satisfaction
Environment - the Quality of life + Waste treatment
Job - availability of a job + travel satisfaction
Global cost - a combination of the resources citizens need + tax levels

From the four components, Services weight twice as much as others, so if Total satisfaction = 1:

1=0.4(Services)+0.2(Environment)+0.2(Job)+0.2(Global cost)

We can easily see that the most efficient way of keeping your citizens happy is to provide lots of Services. Of course, this is related to great expenditures, since all Services but Retail are state-run.

On the other hand, the easiest way to satisfy them is to maintain clean Environment (no pollution) and keep your general economy running - so that citizens will have a job and all the goods they need at reasonable prices.

It depends largely on the type of city you're making what way you'll choose to satisfy your citizens:

- A Dirty city will have lots of pollution (mainly Air), so its Environmental satisfaction will be always low. This will also prevent development of several types of businesses that provide very good income (like Offices and High tech), so you'll need to concentrate heavily on Industry to provide enough jobs. This will lead to traffic issues (because of separating Industry from residential areas), which might also damage Job satisfaction. So, you'll need to maintain good Resource supply to keep Global costs good, and provide lots of Services.

- A Clean city will have good or very good Environment (it usually depends on the size of the city), Here the main problem will arise from concentrating activities in downtown areas (which creates traffic and Noise pollution), and the need to provide Landmark boosts to your Offices to maintain their profitability. Still, your Environmental satisfaction should be much better, so you could afford to spend less on Services while using all cash on Landmarks to maximize productivity from Offices and High Tech Industry, which will be your main trading means. You'll also need to import Utilities (you can't afford to mass-produce Electricity, Oil or Waste).

Retail is the first and most fundamental service required by citizens. Shops are created with the Retail zones from the Commerce tab. We have three densities:

• Low density shops include mom and pop stores, markets, minor grocers, local bars, family restaurants, cafés and the like.
  
  
• Medium density shops include groceries, large restaurants, small malls/large shops, large restaurants, large pubs, and similar buildings.
  
  
• High density shops comprise mostly of urban
  malls (compact, 60x60m but multistory).

All shops, regardless of their size, sell lots of groceries (either as raw food items like fruits and vegetables, or as processed food like pizzas, burgers, popcorn, etc.) and they are the main consumer of the Food Industry.

The way Retail functions is similar to other services, regardless of the fact that Shops are the only private-owned business branch. This means that each Shop produces an area of service coverage, extending through the road network nearby. More and higher density shops provide better quality service. But be careful - retail is a resource that has demand/supply ratio, and you can easily go over the line and create oversupply! This is dangerous for the prosperity of retail, since there's currently no way to sell it outside the city (it doesn't create tokens as other thinks). Look in the Resource tab (right from Population), freight subtab, in the bottom - there you can see retail demand/supply. Try to keep it in the middle. Sometimes the location (or type of shop) creates an oversupply of Retail Goods while providing inadequate retail services.

What you need to do is build few shops, and spread them out in your residential areas. Retail isn't affected by freight or passengers, so you need not worry about putting a shop in the middle of the block on a small street. As your city grows and you start creating high density residential areas, you can create some malls and retail zones, but still, spread them out to create a network. Think of it in means of coverage - the Satisfaction overlay will help you with that (right-hand side of the screen, satisfaction-shops). When the streets light up in green, your coverage is perfect.

Again, currently ONLY residents need retail.

This is one of the services required by your citizens. Its buildings are found under City services - Health, and consist of various healthcare institutions like clinics and hospitals:

• Health center (1000/mo) - small neighborhood facility
  
  
• Clinic (2000/mo) - a larger neighborhood facility
  
  
• Medical institute (3000/mo) - a major city health institution
  
  
• Hospital complex (5000/mo) - the biggest health institution

The Health center and Clinic have somewhat limited coverage area, and thus are suitable for use only in the beginning stage of a city, or to cover a remote area far from your city center. I've found that couple of Medical institutes and a hospital are more than enough to cover the entire map and turn up almost maximum health satisfaction. Of course, try to build them in different parts of the city. Again, an overlay will help you identify the coverage: Satisfaction - Health, with dark green showing perfect coverage, and faint yellow the least effect. You can try experimenting to see what the effect of a new health center would be: click on the building, then hover with it over an area: as soon as it touches a road, the future coverage area will light up in the respective color, showing you what effect the building will have.

So, what do you need to trade? The following:

1. Trade capacity

This means available freight and passenger capacity from your city links/airports/seaports. Every token you want to trade uses up part of this capacity (one unit per each token), with the exclusion of electricity, which you currently trade for free. Note that the in-city freight and passenger services quality doesn't have anything to do with external trading - it affects other aspects of the economy, as explained before. Resources are divided in what type of trade connection they require - freight (goods-related resources, such as Fuel, Water, Industry), or Passengers ('life' resources like Office Services and Holidays). You need to expand your city's trading capacity according to what resources you trade the most, but most of the Inter-City Links provide both types of trading capacity.

2. Cash tokens

Technically these represent the money flow used in trading. You'll basically use cash tokens in every transaction with Omnicorp, whether giving them to buy stuff, or receiving them when you sell your production. Each cash token=100 cash, BUT - only your cash flow is used in determining that, not the entire city budget! In other words, if you want cash tokens, you need to maintain POSITIVE cash flow.
When trading between cities, you don't need cash tokens (you could give or receive other resources even if your cash flow is negative). But you could also make 'financial transactions' between the cities - swap cash tokens. In this case, of course, the city that gives needs to have a positive flow, which turns into cash tokens.


Trade is conducted on the Trade screen, accessible both from the City (from the Main menu), and from the Planet:

The screen is divided in to halves, representing the two sides of the trading process. On the left side, you could select either one of your cities (the City you're currently playing will be selected by default here), and on the right side you can select other cities, or Omnicorp, as the trade partner.

Right below the city names you will see their current trading capacity (determined by their City links), and then the individual tradeable resources. The different columns show the following details about that resource trade: (from left to right)

- Total production of the resource in that City

- N of tokens currently used in Megastructure projects

- Total trade for that resource with partners other than the one currently selected

- Trade for that resource with the current partner

- Net balance for that resource in this City

Between the two partners, you will see sliders (one for each resource), and arrow buttons at both ends of the sliders. They are the interface that allow you to control trading amounts. The white numbers in the center above each slider will show the net trade amount per resource - a positive number means the left city is exporting tokens, while negative number means that it is importing. To adjust trading amounts, either grab and move the slider, or use one of the arrows on either side.
Selling

In order to sell, or export, you first need at least one positive token of the resource (that is, overproduction that your city doesn't need). To sell your excess, go to the trade screen (which I like calling 'the market' - a leftover from the Planet offer, I guess), select the city you want to trade with (or Omnicorp), and move the slider of the relevant resource towards the second city (alternatively, click on the arrow on the right side of the slider). If you trade with Omnicorp, you'll sell for real, and receive cash tokens in return. In the case of your cities, you just use up freight/passenger capacity. Be warned that if in the course of the game production of the resource you're selling decreases (or if internal consumption increases), the game will automatically adjust the traded amount, which might affect your Budget! Always keep an eye upon the resources you sell, and try to maintain a couple of tokens of excess so that you don't get nasty surprises.
Buying

The opposite of selling. Works the same way, only you'll move the slider towards the original city (or click the left arrow). If you're buying from Omnicorp, you'll need cash tokens to buy stuff, and a lot of them! Reminding again that cash tokens represent the positive cash flow of your Budget, and if that cash flow suddenly goes negative (because of that shiny new metro line you just built, for example), Omnicorp imports will get cancelled!
Financial transactions

You can also swap cash tokens between your cities, effectively transferring part of your positive cash flow to another city. Again, this will last until you have enough cash tokens available. Using these transfers, you could actually set your own price for resources when traded between cities.

Trading tips

After the end of the Planet Offer, trading becomes more of a single empire management - a single city won't be self-sufficient, but several cities will complement each other with resources. So, as a tip N 1:

- Always develop at the same time several cities specialized in different resources, complementing each other.

You always have Omnicorp as a potential trade partner, but the prices of the resources they sell are exorbitant, so Tip N 2 is:

- Buy from Omnicorp only as a last resort.

So, most of the trading will happen between your own cities. It sounds simple, but it is from simple - you have to think of the freight/passenger trade capacity of each city; developing different resources across your 'empire'; selling to Omnicorp when you need cash; transferring cash from more successful cities to others.

In the ideal situation all the resources your cities need will be provided by other cities. However, it doesn't always happen like this. The biggest danger is not to be able to afford the maintenance fees in some cities (not enough cash). Remember that Omnicorp is not omnipotent - its cash is limited, and you can't use it as a cash resource indefinitely by selling to them outrageous amounts across your empire. So, tip N 3:

- Don't depend entirely on Omnicorp for cash.

Instead, transfer cash from cities that have too much to others that need it. Also, always develop private taxable businesses, even in cities where your concept doesn't fit them - the taxes earned are 'bonus', they don't diminish other cities' or Omnicorp's cash reserves.

Doing all this, across several cities is quite a challenge. Managing the shortages in each with the surplussed of the others, while IN THE SAME TIME selling to Omnicorp for cash. Anybody that thinks this is easy.... think again. Especially when you start building MegaStructures.

To summarize:

- The key to successful trading lies in thinking strategically and not depending too much on selling to Omnicorp.

Note: There are some bugs in the trading engine of the game. Sometimes you get cash 'for free', or you get much more than you should, and then later all of a sudden you lose it... Most of these problems can be evaded if you use the sliders in the Trade panel as few times as possible (instead using the arrows for transactions).

The Security, or Police service is one of the services your citizens require. Its primary function is to suppress crime in the city, which currently is only present as a form of satisfaction (no riots and thefts, sorry).

We also have the LACourthouse, which is a Landmark, but also provides a 10% boost to overall security satisfaction.

Again as in Fire and Health, bigger is better. Using more advanced structures will ensure larger and more quality coverage.

The Multipurpose Station and Multipurpose Center also supply Police Security Services.

The buildings available are:

Fire services is one of the services your citizens require. It protects the city from fires, which is currently only a satisfaction category, sadly without actual incendiary shows happening.

Again, as in Police and Health services, bigger and more expensive buildings provide larger area and more quality service.

The Multipurpose Station and Multipurpose Center also supply Fire Services.