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TSTO Game Play Tips: Economic Zones

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Economic Zones

Tapped Out is created using practically every element considered typical for what has become known as the “freemium-grinder” online video game genre.

A type of game quite new in terms of modern gaming, it relies upon elements that have long existed in the now defunct “public domain gaming genre” made popular during the Bulletin Board System (BBS) wave of the early 1980s all the way to the early 1990s when the Internet finally took over.

Widely considered unique within its genre due largely to its co-opting of elements from a number of unrelated and related game genres (particularly the text-based choose-your-own-path and puzzle-solving genres), Tapped Out offers gamers a take on free-to-play mobile gaming that is very unusual indeed in that its foundations are engineered to permit it to be played without the player actually spending any Money at all.

Enabling Economic Zones

The underlying foundation for Game Play in TSTO revolves around the management of resources and wealth, that being the primary means by which the game and its revenue stream is maintained and controlled.

Roughly translated, what that means is that the successful player is the gamer who structures their game into many small and independent economic zones from which the player is able to profit from what amounts to an initial investment whose basic Strategy is to generate Income minus any maintenance costs.

The operative event that establishes Game Play in Tapped Out is the disaster that resulted from Homer Simpson's failure to pay attention to the alarms in the power plant due to his immersion in a tablet-based free-to-play video game.

This is far more important an element in the game in terms of Game Play because it essentially defines the style by which the game is played.

Specifically it allows the player to create their own Version of Springfield, using the familiar Characters and Buildings representative of the television show, whose tie-ins provide players with a familiar theme that, when combined with the voluntary Task system for The Characters in your game that together represents the primary revenue stream.

To capitalize upon that system though, the player must create what, for lack of a better definition we are called “Economic Zones” and that, naturally within the scope of that label, provide the player with a predictable source of Income which is quite literally the grease that makes the wheels turn.

Gamers who are familiar with community simulation gaming -- or city Building -- will easily grasp the need to structure their Springfield using zones -- that is to say creating a mixture of housing values and cost that are clustered together in typical zone-types.

A variety of structure types is important. Considering that the zones you are creating in the game are, in nearly every respect, consistent with the types of zoning found in the real-world, it will help to maintain in the back of one's mind the need for Residential, Light Commercial, Commercial, Retail, and Manufacturing Zones as the first goal.

Once that target has been managed, the next goal follows quickly with the creation of non-revenue-generating zones like Parks, Public Spaces, and Parking, among other objective creations.

The idea being not simply to establish the sort of continuity with real-world town planning, but in addition to offer the viewer (visitors to one's city in other words) the impression that the player means to do a proper job of creating -- or re-creating -- their Springfield.

Once that interim goal is managed, the final logical zones to be created consist specifically of more affluent housing areas for mansions and luxury housing, as well as zones in which the player places the special Buildings that are generated via the Missions, Quests, and to a lesser extent, the actual Tasks that each character can complete, largely as the product of enabling those Tasks.

A deeper examination of the process by which these economic zones are created addresses the issue of supporting the Mission, Quest, and Task subsystems. For instance specific and key Tasks that are required in order to unlock and flag the key Missions that actually move The Story along rely heavily upon the contents of those non-revenue-generating zones!

When one creates a Town Park, it is natural for the player to endow that creation with objects that are typical of that sort of zone -- inside these zones the player will place objects like Barriers, Benches, Bushes, Cars, Garbage Bins, Gazebos, Hedges, Homer's Hammock, Lamp Posts, Monkey Bars, Parking Lots, Phone Booths, Planters, See-Saws, Shrubs, Topiary, Training Dummies, Trees, Walls (including at least one Training Wall), and Weather Stations.

If that confuses you, bear in mind that many of these seemingly random objects end up being central objects for the wide array of one-off Missions and Quests that are used as bridging elements between the various story-mode Missions.

So even when the player has not followed the typical example of creating Economic Zones, the game itself will prompt the player to place the specific objects as a matter of course.

With all of that in mind, now is when we should examine the creation of the specific economic zones and the logic behind how the structures and objects within them are chosen, and why.

E-Zone Content Planning

As you approach the construction of each type of E-Zone the player is faced with the need to select the specific structures that will obtain in each. While that may seem to be a purely random process in each of the zone types, in the end the game itself influences that process.

Take the Residential Zones as an example: the game contains an array of home types -- specifically you will find the following structures inside of this zone: Brown House ($355), Purple House ($1,100), Blue House ($1,800), Pink House ($3,400), White House ($7,700), and the Orange House ($24,500). But it does not stop there.

Thanks to the various but unrelated Missions, Quests, and The Story-mode of the game the player will also eventually need to place the Bachelor Arms (Apartments Complex), Spinster City (Apartment Complex), and luxury housing that so far is made up of Burns Manor and the Wolfcastle's Mansion -- note that the Sleep-Eazy Motel does not really apply here, though the Springfield Retirement Castle does.

Commercial Zones can easily be divided into service-oriented, retail, and manufacturing to begin with -- the primary influence being which type applies to the Mission that prompts their creation, this being something of a predictable though reactive process.

In basic terms the only benefits that are obtained via the creation of zones like this is to group like-Buildings together, making the harvesting process a bit more convenient in that they happen to have similar timers to them. This is particularly true with the commercial structures, which is why they are more convenient in terms of not needing to separate them into types and sub-types (like housing, which works best grouped by specific types).

Ideally what you want to do is designate a specific block and then place your like-type Buildings. That way gamers who like to log into the game several times each day will find the bulk of the collection process in tidy chunks.

Holiday-Prompted E-Zones

Because the game is constantly being updated with new Content via the various and predictable holiday and special events which are an integral part of the Expansion process, most players will find themselves reacting to this by creating a new zone specifically for the Buildings that are added by the Current Event.

This is not a bad thing but it does make it rather awkward should the player find themselves lacking adequate free space for placement, or lacking the funds to obtain free space...

This is not really a concern though because rarely do the holiday structures result in adding to the revenue stream -- though they do often contribute to the Missions and Quests for that event.

 
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