SimCity Societies

If you are looking for SimCity 5, you should keep looking because SimCity Societies takes a completely different approach to the city-builder theme and distance itself from the economy-simulation that SimCity 4 was.

Instead of laying out different zones and caring for the infrastructure, you now place every single building by yourself. But also you technically only need money to do so, each building also produces or needs one of the six resources to function. These resources include productivity, prosperity and creativity. So if you built a normal three storey house which needs prosperity to function, it won't work until you also build for example a bank which produces prosperity. What resources you need also depends on what type of city you want to build which range from a normal town over industrial cities to a cyberpunk metropolis. To make the process of building a specific type of town, the buildings can be filtered for the different city-types.

Since you don't need to build water or power-infrastructure, it's only required to place a power-plant somewhere and it will automatically supply all the buildings until his reserves are maxed out. Then it's time to build another power-plant. But you still need to build streets, subway-systems and other public transportation.

The Sims will come also automatically into your city once there's an open room available regardless if you cared for their needs like schools or police. The important thing is to keep them happy by giving them a place to work and other things to do like a baseball-stadium. Many of these pleasure-buildings also feature a special event which gives your Sims a short happiness-boost and makes them more productivity for a short period of time. In the case of the baseball-stadium it's the Nickel Root Beer Night. But these buildings and events can also be a danger to your citizens by having a greater chance of being injured during it.

Although the game is still open ended, there are some achievements in forms of medals and trophies waiting for you and at the beginning of the game you first need to unlock all of the buildings in normal play before you can use them in freeplay or god-mode (unlimited money). The criteria range from simple tasks like having a big enough population to more detailed and mixed up requirements which include population, happiness of your citizens and a fixed amount of resources.