Sometimes it’s easier to let the “breeders” just pay rent since the other family might waste your time by complaining a lot, and we all know that time is money in the world of business.įinding the perfect balance between income and breeding is one of the foundations of your success, you need them both. You can assign both to pay rent, or to breed, there are no restrictions on that. Some types pay more rent, while others reproduce much faster. In total there are five different levels of houses and two different tenant families per level. Your first houses are very shabby-looking wooden shacks, everyone has to start from somewhere. It’s still a lot more building than in an average RTS-game. The main emphasis of this game is real-time strategy, not city building.
If some family needs a shed for that extra space, someone wants a dog house. However, this also works as a source of complaints from your tenants. There are garden utilities like trees, gnomes, greenhouses, different fence styles and other things to liven up the city with. Here you have rectangular or square lots, and those same shapes are the only ones you can place properties on. You can curve roads how you see fit and place buildings almost wherever you want. Most city-building games these days offer a lot of freedom in building a visionary city. If you’d like a less stressful life, you can also build on your own by not selecting computer opponents and just enjoy the game at your own pace. They are really overpowered and can be used to secure the victory early. I found it was too easy to destroy everything if you rush for the gangsters and get the bribes going at a constant rate. No need for prisons with the Mafia around. Gangsters are also the best cure for any Undesirable since they just go and make the unwanted person disappear. The Mafia needs bribes, and if you fail to deliver they won’t help you no matter what is happening around them. Starting with a knife, they eventually gain access to a laser weapon that demolishes even large objects such as houses quickly. The more you kill, the better weapons your gangsters can carry. If your Undesirables fail to bring chaos, you can always call up the Mafia. Police force counters the Undesirables effectively, but of course, they have a cost. With thugs raising hell on the other side of the town and the ex-army major complaining about having the wrong kind of trees in his backyard I had my hands full. I could have repaired them manually if I wasn’t occupied with other problems. I lost many good tenants and expensive houses that day. I’ve had moments where my houses were burning, the repairman was jamming in the street and then the whole block exploded. Used at the right time, they can do serious harm leading to chain reactions that change the course of the game. There are many different Undesirables from the lowly thief to the supernatural ghosts and they all can perform 3-4 different actions to harm your competitors, or you. The thief can sneak into your HQ and steal the rent money you’ve collected in the past few months. Who are these Undesirables then? The hippies, for example, can start a street party, which attracts all your workers nearby and makes them uncontrollable for a while. I wish we all could kick back and listen to the King all day long.
More tenants mean more complaints, successful competitors mean more Undesirables sent to your town while the council is bothering you with their own problems, sometimes even to the point of exhaustion. The longer you survive, the more everything grows and becomes more complicated. All of these things create one big hectic mess, in a good way, if you like stress. In the midst of dealing with them, we have the other entrepreneurs sending over troublesome persons commonly known as Undesirables, leaving our own residents frequently complaining. Failing them gets us instantly fired, so they take priority. While reaching for our current goal we also have the aforementioned tasks from the council.
Game modes offer us goals like getting a certain amount of money in a fixed time, building unique buildings, world domination, achieving a utopian state where everyone is happy, free build and an all out war where the dreaded council missions are absent. I’d recommend getting really familiar with the game before trying it out on hard, or original. Unlike most modern games, even the normal difficulty will give someone problems.
There are six modes to keep busy with and it has a difficulty ranging from easy to hard plus the added, fear inducing Original(!!!). What creates the diversity and challenge are the game modes rather than the maps. Compared to today’s standards there aren’t many maps in this game. Maps and game modes are all the same as I remembered. Gangsters, hippies and finally, an explosion!