Social City came out very recently on Facebook, just like previous well known games like Farmville. It’s called Social City, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has played SimCity or any of the social networking equivalents. When you join, you’re greeted by a Social City guide who takes you through the basic concepts of managing your city. As a player, you will have to deal with three things: money, happiness and population.
You earn money by setting up factories. You can have a certain number of factories based on the population of your city. All kind of strange items and objects are made. For a fee, the factories will work on a contract for a set amount of time, which can be anything from minutes to days, before shipping it. A lot of currency is earned once this is done. You will need to keep the people in your city happy in order to have them stay in your city. So you build leisure buildings. The various leisure buildings, which include theaters, stores, restaurants, and other happiness generating things like flowers, statues, and trees, all grant a certain amount of happiness.
To increase your population, you can build hotels, houses, and apartments. Each accommodates a fixed number of citizens. However, each building grants that set amount of population at certain intervals. For example, the smallest house in Social City allows you to have 10 extra people. This takes a little getting used to.
As you progress, you are rewarded by getting to have more people in your city. Any time a player achieves a special accomplishment, they earn population with unique rewards and unique buildings for population and level. Every time the player takes an action, experience towards the various levels is earned. Cash, special buildings, housing units, extra factories and City Bucks (the virtual currency) are some of the rewards. In-game currency you use to buy things is used in the various buildings that you construct. You can spend in-game currency to make your cities borders expand out further.
You can expand your city in the game with in-game currency, or have a set number of neighbours by inviting your friends over and having them build cities next to yours. For the most part, running a city is pretty standard. The game shares some similarities to Farmville because of the way players can compare their cities with each other. Players just starting out get a decent amount of money to get a new city started and looking good. This makes the game more fast paced than those where players may have to wait several days to get their virtual space the way they want it.
Unfortunately, right now there are no Social City cheats or Social City hacks out there, because the game only just came out. The game is fairly easy to get the hang of after a while, and is likely to do very well in the coming months as more people try it out.
So next time you have some spare time, load up Social City and play around with it for a bit – you just might enjoy it. Of course only time will tell if this game becomes successful.
