If you are first starting the game of SimCity BuiltIt, you are very likely to make some beginner mistakes that slow down your game play. In this guide, we will go through various strategy and tips to help you advance in the game as fast as you can.

We will go through various concepts of SimCity BuildIt including how to build out your residential areas efficiently, keeping your manufacturing buildings functioning at optimal, and how to keep your services running within capacity.

Although services are important, we have dedicated the coverage of the services in SimCity Buildit Optimal Service Guide. This guide will mainly focus on residential, manufacturing, and ways for you to make coin money.

Residential Area Strategy
Manufacturing Guidelines
Ways to Get More SimCity BuildIt Coins

SimCity BuildIt Residential Area Strategy

The biggest part of SimCity buildIt is to increase your city’s population through upgrading your residential buildings. We will go over various aspect of the residential buildings in SimCity BuildIt.

In a nutshell, keep max number of your residential buildings under or equal to 31. Make sure you offer enough utility and other services for your population to stay above 90% happiness rating. We will go over the reason behind this strategy in the section below.

Residential Building Basics
When you start a new residential housing or upgrading it, you will earn coins, population increases, as well some XP.

At any given time you can have 3 ongoing new permit projects. And about 4~5 of your existing houses can be upgraded (Not including the default permit building). So this means that at any given time, you should have about 7~8 potential upgrades that you can do.

Abandoned buildings cannot be upgraded, no population will be credited for those abandoned buildings. However, if you have unlocked a specific building after reaching a population limit, you do not lose the eligibility after the building becomes abandoned.

Based on our observation, you can not “force” a specific residential building to become premier or luxury. The game determines which ever upgrades are worth more money.

Avoid Over-starting Permits Early On
The hardest part starting your SimCity in the beginning is the lack of coins cash. You will need coins to build many of the needed utility services like Power, Water, Sewage, Traffic, Fire and more.

If you start more residential projects than you can chew, you will be scrapped for services for a long time. You should start with roughly 15~20 residential slots in the beginning to avoid over building. Then carefully work within the services that you have available.

Avoid building too many residential and focusing on upgrading has several benefits. It is much easier to manage your happiness level while the number of residential slots is low. As you level up further, more services and requirement gets “unlocked”. For example, you unlock Police services at level 12 and waste management at level 14, during these periods, your City will quickly become “unhappy” due to deteriorating conditions. Your happiness level can drop like a rock which results in abandoned buildings.

Without the proper building to service ratio, you will find that your cash will be running consistently low. And you will almost always have abandoned buildings. When this happens, you will either have to generate more coins for other services. Continue to upgrade or worse building out new residential areas cannot get you out of the hole. You will end up in even bigger loss as more services are needed at level 10, 12, 14, and 16.

Tear Down Buildings to Keep Your Happiness Ratio
If for some unfortunate event that you over built, and you do not have enough Cash to bring your service back online fast enough. Tear that new residential building down, although you did work hard for those materials, they cannot counter the negative effect. Whenever you overbuilt, you run a chance of losing a building completely, and it can happen to your biggest building, so do not risk it!

Focus On High Population Buildings First
If you have to choose between placing your services, pick the area where you have the most dense population. This means if you only have enough money for a fire station or police station, you better make sure those cover your tallest buildings.

Your tallest buildings will have the most impact on your city in terms of happiness and money. Cover those, and boost the population as much as you can via parks.

Road Building Strategy for Traffic Improvement
Roads can be really expensive to upgrade. You typically will receive notices when you need to upgrade them. Once you upgrade the roads, you cannot move them and you will lose the amount invested if you bulldoze it. So make sure you really mean it when you upgrade.

Next, the road upgrade is segmented by how you intersect the roadways. It means that you can potentially save money by only upgrade the roadway that is impacted. You can make the road upgrade smaller by running another road into it, this will help you save significant amount of coins.

How to Ensure Optimal Residential Upgrading Flow
As a rule of thumb, you should request for new upgrading plan, whenever the upgrade request asking for 2~3+ items that you do not have.

Always go forward with the upgrading plans that require materials only from the factory. At mid point in game with upgraded factories, you will find yourself loaded with the basic materials.

Sometimes if you are low in cash, you have two choices:
1. Build out the stores, generate the goods and sell those goods.
2. Slow down on building the stores, refresh the upgrades, and only upgrade if you do have the materials that can be made from your existing buildings.

SimCity Buildit Manufacturing Guidelines

Now we will discuss the topic on how to manage your factory and store productions. Having a streamlined item production is key to smooth sailing in SimCity Buildit. Once you have the product, you can either SimCity Buildit trade them, or use them for upgrades.

Factory Building and Basic Material
As you level up and unlock more advanced factories. Always tear down your old one and replace them with the modernized version. You will need the extra item making power. The more basic materials that you can make and hold at the factory, the faster you advance and upgrade your buildings. If anything, you can always sell the basic factory materials to other players.

When you reach level 13+, you will start unlocking basic materials that take longer to make such as chemical (2 hour) and textiles (3 hours). This is when a superior factory will truly shine to make a difference.

As a general rule, always make the lower waiting time items first. For example, you want to keep a healthy stack of metal and woods to continue your own product making routine. Try not to buy from other players since it’s really easy money to be saved.

Store Manufacture Best Order Practice
Similar to your factory, keep a healthy stack of shorter items can go a long way. You never want to get stuck waiting for a long duration item to finish.

The best place to invest your SimCash is to expand your store queues. If you have spare SimCash, spend them to add to the queue of your earlier stores such as Building Supply store and hardware store. You will use the products from them for a long long time.

Upgrade Your Storage
Always always upgrade your storage when you are 1~2 items away from completing it. As you level up in SimCity Buildit and unlock more items, you will run out of storage quite often.

Having a big storage place makes your item manufacture process much easier. You can stock up on more basic materials, buy or importing them from other players, and simply complete some of the harder orders that require lots of the easy items.

Cargo Ship Dock and Golden Key
Cargo Ship Dock should be built as early as you possibly can. The Cargo ship deck generates golden keys for you, the golden keys are needed to build out specialization buildings, while generating small amount of coins. The Cargo Ship works on a timer basis, it will give you a list of items and amount of time that you have to prepare.

Ways to Get More SimCity BuildIt Coins

1. Buying an Selling
You can make money on the difference from the global trading market. Buy products from other players if you see them selling low, then resell them back on your own marketplace. For more details check the SimCity Buildit trading guide.

2. Completing Deals
The deals are found periodically in your City. They are usually triggered by parks or utility buildings. Completing the deals that make sense is usually a good way to get additional money. However, try to avoid completing deals that require store products. You are better off to hold on to those products for residential upgrades.

Reject the bad deals right away so that better ones can spawn.

3. Finish Residential Upgrades
You will earn increasingly more coins as you upgrade your residential buildings. However, these upgrades generate less coins than you would for the services until level 16+. So if you do not have a good background supporting network, you should avoid going crazy by make more residential slots.

4. Complete Cargo Ship Orders
Cargo ship is unlocked after you purchase it with 10k coins. It is like a periodic “deals” that allow you to exchange items for coins. In addition, you can earn gold keys. Upgrade the cargo ship dock as soon as you can, if your coin stash allows you to.

5. Happiness Population Tax
Based on your population total and happiness rating, your city generates tax revenue that can be collected via the City Hall. This is the primary reason why you need to keep your City running at 90%+ happiness. Your income takes a serious hit at 80~90% happiness = 14% tax, and much lower after that.

By having a nice and well planned city generating full tax, you can spend less time stressing over trading or deal making. If you are in no rush, you can actually build out your City at around level 10~13 with good population, let your City sit for 2~3 days and collect the tax revenue.

With this, you will have enough money to carry you all the way to level 20 without stressing over money.

6. Purchase them with SimCash
This method is the worst possible way of generating coins in SimCity Buildit. It simply not economical and you will spend much more real life money that way. It is better to invest your SimCash on store queue upgrades or even special premium buildings.

Note on Dr. Doom’s Disaster
After you reach population of 90,000. You can unlock Dr. Doom’s disaster building. However, it will require 60,000 coins for the unlock. So you better start saving up coins!