Intro to Village City Island Sim

This post is an edited compilation from two previous posts on this site. According to my records, they were both published on 05/18/19, so this may be out of date information. I haven't played this game recently, but I think this intro may still have some value.

This is a free game that only provides you one file, so you can only have one city at a time in this game. So if you want to start over, you have to kill off your existing city in the process.

In order to start a new city, you go into settings, which is that gear icon in the upper right area.



It will give you this long menu. One of the options is New Game.



It will then ask if you are sure. This is so you don't accidentally destroy a city by fat fingering something. Oops!



If you confirm that you really want to destroy your current city and start over, the game reboots and takes you back to the opening screen that you see every time you start the game.



Click play and it will take you to a new city on clean terrain.



The land is always the same, except for the fact that the boulders aren't fixed. In fact, boulders periodically sprout from the ground like new weeds. Removing them is one of the activities that helps you convert cash to gems.

Every time you start a new game, it puts you through the tutorial. I find that a bit annoying. I've never found a way to skip the tutorial.



I've played the game often enough, I know I want to clear any boulders inside the tract of land I already own, plus inside the first two tracts I will purchase along the beach. There are three reasons for this:
  • You can't place structures on top of the rocks.
  • The more development you have, the more expensive it is to remove rocks.
  • Clearing rocks gets you bonuses
The price of rock removal starts at $3000. It will never be this cheap again and every single thing you put on the map just pushes that cost up.

So I typically try to clear at least five rocks at the beginning of the game before I do anything else. This means I immediately get my first rock bonus for the lowest possible cost.

As noted above, I start by clearing rocks in the tract of land you own at the start and then in the first two tracts of land I intend to purchase next. If that doesn't get me to at least five rocks, I pick the nearest rocks to clear until I hit five total.



Conveniently, this map has exactly five rocks within the borders of the three tracts of land I want to clear. You get your first gem after clearing five rocks.



The tutorial starts with having you build some housing. I always put my first four houses along the edge near the beach.



Your early buildings don't take long to build, so it's not a huge imposition to simply wait. However, your earliest buildings are also super cheap to speed up and speed ups are another source of bonuses. So I always speed up the early, cheap buildings immediately.



I built my first house without building a road next to it. This means no one can get to it, so it won't attract any citizens to my new town. I have to add a road so people can move in or my population will remain at zero.



Next, the tutorial asks you to build something from the decorations menu. These are parks, lakes and trees.

Decorations are the only items that don't need road access, so I always start with the only park that is 3x3 tiles. I place it three spaces from the road for future planning purposes. It will eventually be the central tile in a 9x9 block of 3x3 buildings.

I failed to get a screenshot of just the park. The screenshot here shows the park and additional buildings from a later stage in the game.



Decorations and community buildings both provide happiness. Decorations are inexpensive, provide minimal happiness and cannot be upgraded. On the other hand, no matter how many you build, you can pay with cash, not gems. Gems are relatively scarce and become a serious limiter in the late game.

Next, the tutorial has you build a commercial development that provides jobs. But it initially doesn't give you many options.

The first building I want to build is the bank. If you promptly build two or more houses, a park, a road and speed up the houses, you will go up in level and this will give you access to the ability to build the bank as your first commercial structure.

The bank provides a lot of jobs and good income in a compact footprint. Balancing income, physical space and other critical metrics is what this game is all about.


I also promptly speed up the bank because it's only 750 cash. That's the cheapest speed ups ever get. The cost never goes below that.

That does two things for me. First, it means I don't have to wait for the jobs offered by the bank. Second, speed ups are on the things that get you bonuses when you do enough of them, so it's another tick mark towards a bonus for speed ups.
I build the bank first because I've played the early game many times and tested different scenarios. If you do it right, you can fit 100 people and 100 jobs and into that first tract of land and also get enough happiness points to actually get both 100 people and 100 jobs.

If you don't have enough happiness, you will not get the full number of people you think you should have. Buildings will be only partially full.

The bank is part of that plan to fit 100 people, 100 jobs and enough happiness into that first tract of land. It provides 30 jobs and makes good money fairly quickly for an early game building.

In the early game, you go up in level fairly quickly. Going up unlocks new structures and you want to look at the features different structures have and make informed decisions about what to build next.

You also get bonuses fairly quickly in the early game. You get all of your first bonuses after doing five things in that category, such as remove five rocks, build five facilities and do five speed ups.



And that gets us to this point:



If you look closely, I'm at 97% happiness. I'm also one person short of my max population.

That's not "coincidence." When you fall below 100 percent happiness, your housing will not fill up. It will suppress your numbers.

This is problematic. You don't ever want to drop below 100 percent happiness.

So, the next thing I will build will be a community building, in part because that's the next thing the tutorial will demand and in part because being below 100 percent happiness is a bad thing.

Generally speaking, you want to do things in this order:
  • Happiness facilities (decorations or community buildings)
  • Housing
  • Commercial
You need to raise your happiness before you add housing because more people will bring down your happiness.

After you have adequate happiness and people, then add commercial. It provides jobs which provide your city with income.

Unemployment is not a problem. It's fine to have a gap between how many people you have and how many jobs you have available.

In this simple city building game, unemployment does not cause unhappiness. It only suppresses your income

I try to not get too hung up on details like that. I chalk it up to "It's a game. A lot of this is symbolic."

So don't take it too literally. If you take it too literally, then every man, woman and child can have a job in the early game because it gives you direct counts.

Tip: Later in the game, it starts making up the "maximum" figures. Which means they stop being reliable and meaningful data.

So you have to check the last building you built or upgraded to check if you are actually at 100 percent for population or jobs.

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