The game’s graphics are good; your city’s service workers (Bizzies) are adorable and generous, but progressing your city past its infancy is a slow process. Such is F2P gaming life.
These beginner’s tips are meant to help you lessen the pains of learning the ropes of City Mania, from the basics of good building placement and movement to the best use for your cash.
If you want to manage the best city you can, you’ve got to know how to use what’s available to the fullest. That’s what this guide aims to help you do.
Make sure to build houses within the range of vital services
City Mania explains to you early on that you should build houses near services like a fire station, and it wasn’t kidding. People will eventually abandon houses if they are not in range of vital services.
An extension to this is to make sure you don’t build houses near buildings that generate pollution, like factories. The pollution will make homes in the area less valuable, bringing down your city’s total happiness and effectively lowering your income.
How to move or demolish buildings
You’re going to make a few mistakes as you learn the mayoral ropes, and that’s okay! Moving and demolishing buildings is free and easy.
To do either you must first tap and hold the building you want to move or demolish. This changes the view to build mode.
You can then tap or drag the building you want to move to its new destination and tap the check to finalize the move. If you want to demolish the building, tap the demolish icon at the bottom left.
This also works for roads!
How to expand your city
Tap on one of the ‘For Sale’ signs around your town. Once you do, you will be prompted to spend rare items to unlock the expansion.
Rare items are pretty hard to come by. The most common way to get them is by tapping on Bizzies walking around town with present icons (seen at right) over their heads. Give them a high five and they may give you a rare item.
Rare items also come from crates, can be purchased from other players via the Buyer’s Marketplace, and obtained via daily missions.
Only upgrade one house at a time
It’s really tempting to upgrade a few houses at a time to save yourself time but with the above in mind, it’s best to upgrade them one at a time.
Since there’s a chance Bizzies will give you gifts when you upgrade a house, it’s in your best interest to do them one at a time. Upgrade one, look for gifts, and then upgrade another one. You need all the rare items you can get!
If construction zones are available, be sure to build them
Your city’s growth is dependent on how many houses there are, so it’s in your best interest to continually put down construction zones and upgrade them.
You can have three construction zones laid down at a time. Once you upgrade one into an actual building for the first time, another will become available. Upgrading construction zones into houses and leveling those houses up grants you EXP, gold, and additional population.
It’s better to buy crates in bulk
You can buy five of either type of crate for the price it would cost to buy four of them individually, so buying a set of five is always better than buying them one at a time – even if it takes longer to get cash.
For reference, a single rare crate costs 50 cash, while buying five at once only costs 200 cash (4x50 instead of 5x50, which would be 250). This is just simple math.
Bizzies are your biggest bottleneck to success
Bizzies don’t just work in your buildings and give them bonuses – they and their star levels also affect your personal Star Power level. As your Star Power level rises, more advanced buildings unlock.
Medium and large buildings have a larger area of effect and grant more benefits overall than their standard small counterparts, which makes them a must-have for a larger city.
Being able to use medium or large buildings saves you a ton of space thanks to their larger areas of effect, and production buildings have the added bonus of providing more slots.
The best use of cash is by far on crates
I talked about crates above and how the five-packs are better than buying individual crates, and ultimately, doing that is your best use of cash.
Cash is incredibly hard to come by outside of spending real money and, as Bizzies are the biggest component to your growth overall, your cash is best spent on bulk crate purchases.
The second best use of cash is storage space
You’re going to run into a problem with storage space pretty quickly, and as you progress the components to produce certain items get increasingly complicated. You have to upgrade your storage.
The actual cost of upgrading storage lies in rare items, but just as the name implies they are hard to come by.
If you are constantly running into storage problems and can’t produce, sell or use the items in your inventory fast enough – you may have to spend cash on storage space just to maintain your city’s needs. Each rare item can be purchased for 15 cash when trying to upgrade storage.
That’s about it for our City Mania beginner’s tips. Progression gets easier as you learn the ropes and learn to make use of all of the game’s systems, but it won’t ever get faster if you do things the wrong way. Spend your cash wisely, lay your city out optimally, and take all the opportunities you can get to get rare items and you’ll be an expert mayor yet.
