Levels 6-10 - Starting to Grind

As you reach level 5 or 6 you would have unlocked more building and crafting options such as planks of wood and hammers. Planks take half and hour to produce so inevitably these will have to be ground out over time. Try to keep your building supplies store working constantly and if you want to use your SimCast, use it on adding extra slots to your commercial buildings this will allow you to craft more items in a queue and won't have to keep coming back to the game so often to clear items and more to the queue.

Also don't fill your storage depot as you may need items to fulfil a building request which you can't collect because your storage is full. Later in the game you can unlock trading options though which help clear inventory.

Mayor's House

Level 6 sees you unlock the Mayor's House and a whole heap of SimCash based achievements become available. You can plop the Mayor's House by going to Services > Government and selecting Mayors House.

Once it has been plopped you will see a start icon above it whenever you have completed an achievement, from there you can collect the SImCash associated with each 'chieve.

Upgrading Your Factories

Sometime while playing through levels 6-10 you'll reach a population of 4,000 inhabitants. Significantly, this will unblock the Basic Factory, this will give each factory three building slots instead of two and have a smaller dirty radius. To upgrade just allow your factory to finish it's pending jobs, collect your items and demolish the factory. You'll then have the same number of available factory building slots to re-plop.

Just select Basic Factory when you do this. For each one that you plop you'll need 500 Simoleans - Well worth it in my opinion!

Note: To demolish a factory just hold your finger down on the one you want to demolish then you'll see a small bulldozer icon appear on the right of the screen, select that and then press bulldoze.

Planning Your Upgrades

With more and more items to build and craft being unlocked, it does take a bit of planning to fulfil building requests especially when you only have limited capacity in your City Storage. My suggestion is to go for whatever task is easiest to complete first. And leave the long duration tasks to and builds to complete when you will be away from the game for a period, eg overnight. So don't clog up your crafting queues with planks which take half an hour, when your building upgrades need nails for example.

Your storage is upgrading by collecting special items then appear from time to time, usually these occur randomly when you select one of the blue icons that appear.

Building a Park

Sooner or later you should probably plant a park, and since you have waited until this point, and hopefully have amassed a nice stack of SImoleans you can probably afford a half decent one. Consider which one you select, make sure it's dimensions will fit in with the future growth of your city and consider where you want to plop it, although you can move it afterwards, it should still be placed near some residential buildings for it's population boosting effect.

Plopping a second Fire Station

Inevitably as your City grows and you plop more residential zones you'll eventually need to make a second Basic Fire Station. Try with different placements until you are happy, try not to make overlap of the existing firestation as in the screenshot below.

The Level 8 Money Drain

As you reach level 8 the sewage service gets unlock and by now you already have quite a large population so to keep everyone happy the best option is the Basic Sewage Outflow Pipe - you may even need two of these quite soon. However you are probably also going to need to increase your provision of power and water at this stage so all those Simoleans you've been stashing - here is when they are going to come in handy. Oh and not to mention the Farmer's Market - well that is just going to have to wait!

After you have got over spending on more sewage, water, power, the farmers market and even road upgrades (only do so if you get a heavy traffic alert). You are going to have to really save up now because when you get to level 12 you are going to next a couple of basic police stations - and soon after that health services... Good luck And catch up with you guys in the next chapter 11-15.

QUICK TIPS

Once you reach 8000 population you can start to sell any goods you don't want via the Trade Depot. And also, once you reach 10,000 population you can use the Global Trade HQ to purchase goods. This is particularly useful if you need to fulfil building requests for items which you cannot yet craft.

For example at this point in the game I am saving money for Police Stations so don't want to plop a furniture store at this point, but I need chairs (crafted in the furniture store) to fulfil building requests, so I can purchase some of these in the Global Trade HQ.