Social and Civic Services Overview

By now you've connected your city to the regional highway, created a basic layout of roads, added a heap of RCI zones and added water and power services. Depending upon how much you have borrowed and how many zones you have you should be raking up a decent sized population - and profit! If you have zoned well and already placed a lot of zones (see image below) you could be seeing profit in excess of 5,000 Simoleans per hour. The next thing you'll be requried to do is either zone more RCI, or start adding social services.

In most cases, every city should have the following:

• Health Service
• Fire Service
• Police Service
• Education Service
• Parks
• Garbage Service
• Recycling Service
• Mass Transit Service

But you won't have the money to implement all of these services initially, so start slowly, have some money stacked up and wait for the game to prompt you to add the service it feels it requires first, this may be a clinic, a fire station or something else. In any case, be prepared and start small - Even if you have the option to build a hospital initially (you'll need a Finance Department in a City in the same region) - a clinic is usually the preferred choice due to the size of your population when you are starting the game and the hourly difference in costs between the two. Clinics and other the smaller versions of any of the fire, police and health services can always be expanded as needs demand.

On the following pages, we'll deal with each of the services you'll need to add, but remember:

1) Be prepared - stack your cash

2) Wait for the game to prompt you to add the service it wants you to add...

...Nothing worse than spending all your money on a police station, on to find fires start breaking out over your city because you've got no cash for a fire station. Only exception to this is education which is needed if you see your crime rate start to increase.