Guide
Construction crews, ageing and city staff
Big buildings take weeks to finish, and everything you build starts wearing out the day it opens. Planning for both is what separates a city that lasts from one that crumbles.
Building takes time
Streets, zones, conduits, parks, fields and the founding kit of generators and water towers appear the moment you place them. Everything bigger, from a school upwards, becomes a building site and only starts working when it is finished. Until then it draws no service, employs nobody and covers nothing, though it already occupies its tiles.
| Building | Days of work |
|---|---|
| School | 8 |
| Train station | 14 |
| Hospital | 20 |
| University | 30 |
| Airport | 45 |
| Nuclear plant | 60 |
| Theme park | 70 |
Crews and the queue
Every site needs a construction crew. The city has 1 crew, plus one more for every 1,500 residents, up to 8. Sites beyond that wait in queue order, and each busy crew is paid $6 a day. The Construction app shows the queue; move the most important site to the front so it gets the next free crew.
Crews don't always work at full speed. Jammed freight slows deliveries to the sites, transport funding changes how fast they work, and research can speed them up (Mechanised building is the big one).
Tip. Don't queue three big projects at once in a small town. With one crew they are built one after another anyway, and you pay for all three up front.
Wonders are built in stages
The museum, botanical garden, stadium, zoo and theme park are wonders. They take the longest to build and draw their construction bill in 4 stages instead of all at once: 25% when you place the site, the rest as the work passes each quarter. If a stage comes due and the stock is short, and auto-buy is off for that commodity, the site waits until you buy what it needs. Keep an eye on steel and timber while a wonder is going up (see farms and trade).
Everything wears out
Infrastructure ages. Networks age as a whole class, so every street ages together and every water main ages together; plants, civic buildings and terminals age one by one. Condition starts at 100 and falls a little each day.
| Network | Funded by |
|---|---|
| Streets | transport |
| Power lines | utilities |
| Water mains | utilities |
| Sewers | utilities |
| Fibre and masts | utilities |
| Rail and subway | transport |
What wear does as condition falls:
- Upkeep rises. A worn network costs more to run, up to 1.6× at condition 0.
- Capacity falls below 60: a worn network or site supplies less, down to 85% at condition 0.
- Incidents start below 40: burst mains, failed transformers and the like. Each clears on its own after 10 days, or at once when you renew.
Funding sets the pace
Each network wears faster or slower with its department's funding. At standard funding wear runs at its base rate; cut the department to 0% and it runs 2× as fast, while 150% halves it to 0.5×. At standard funding with no help, the street network drops below 60 after about 267 days. Several technologies, the Street sweeping ordinance and the maintenance team all slow wear further.
Renewal
You renew a whole network, or a single site, from the Infrastructure section of the Finance app. The price is a share of what it would cost to rebuild, growing the more worn it is, and nothing is charged until you choose to renew. Finance also shows the total renewal backlog: what it would cost to bring everything back to new.
City staff
The Staff app lets you hire people to run parts of the city for you. There are 5 posts. Each has the same three candidates in every city: a cheap newcomer, a steady professional and an expensive star. Salaries come out of the treasury every day, and the efficiency figure is how well they do the job.
| Post | What they do | Candidates (salary, efficiency) |
|---|---|---|
| City maintenance team | Patches roads, mains, cables and track and services civic buildings, so everything wears out more slowly. | Fixit Brothers: $12 a day, 45% Northgate Works: $26 a day, 70% Keystone Asset Care: $48 a day, 92% |
| Police chief | Runs the Police HQ: assigns the squads and picks the priority district. | Sgt. Dale Moss: $5 a day, 45% Insp. Priya Varma: $11 a day, 70% Cmdr. Elena Ruiz: $20 a day, 92% |
| Music venue manager | Runs the Music Venue: auditions applicants, signs the good ones and books the nights. | Jonno Pike: $4 a day, 45% Marisol Tan: $9 a day, 70% Ray 'Gold Ear' Okafor: $17 a day, 92% |
| Prison warden | Runs the City Prison: sets the staff regime and sits on the parole board. | Gordon Hale: $6 a day, 45% Dr. Amira Said: $13 a day, 70% Warden Tomas Brandt: $24 a day, 92% |
| Head of hospital operations | Runs the City Hospital: moves teams to the longest queues and aims the public-health campaign. | Kevin Laird: $6 a day, 45% Dr. Hana Kim: $13 a day, 70% Prof. Lucia Ferraro: $24 a day, 92% |
The maintenance team
The maintenance team works citywide, patching roads, mains, cables and track and servicing civic buildings so everything wears more slowly. The saving scales with efficiency: Fixit Brothers cut wear by 25%, Northgate Works cut wear by 39% and Keystone Asset Care cut wear by 51%. Weigh the salary against the renewals and incidents it saves; the bigger the city, the more there is to save.
Venue managers
The other four posts each run one of the walk-in venues (the Police HQ, the Music Venue, the City Prison and the City Hospital), taking the same decisions you could take there. A sharper manager reviews their site more often: every 4 days at the bottom of the scale, daily at the top. You always have the last word. Any decision you take yourself at a managed site overrules the manager, and they leave that site alone for 7 days. Firing someone costs 3 days' salary at once. See the venues guide for what each manager is deciding.
For the cost side of all this, see money.