One of the major factors about SimCity that is giving mayors headaches is how it handles different wealth classes and density of buildings. The way it’s laid out seems organic to me, but Balance Designer Ross Treyz posted a blog about the differences and making them work for you just in case I am in fact the only one in the world that likes it 🙂
Hey everyone – I’m Ross Treyz and I’m a Balance Designer on SimCity. In this blog post we’re going to go over the difference between wealth and density.
There are three wealth levels of Sims in SimCity (low §, medium §§, and high §§§). There are also three levels of density a building can reach (low, medium, and high). These two things (wealth and density) are not linked, meaning you can have high wealth/low density buildings, low wealth/high density buildings, or various other combinations.
To make it easy, let’s look at all the different wealth/density types:
Low Wealth / Low Density
Low Wealth / Medium Density
Low Wealth / High Density
Medium Wealth / Low Density
Medium Wealth / Medium Density
Medium Wealth / High Density
High Wealth / Low Density
High Wealth / Medium Density
High Wealth / High Density
Got it? Good! Now let’s go over how both density and wealth work:
Density – Buildings will go up in density when they collect happiness. This happens when your Sims are able to successfully complete their life cycle. Residential buildings must send out their workers and shoppers who need jobs and places to shop. Commercial buildings need workers to keep them running and shoppers to buy their goods. Industrial buildings need workers to keep running and places to ship their freight to.
Wealth – There are actually two different levels of land value: medium and high. Medium and high wealth residential and commercial buildings will move into areas of medium and high wealth land value respectively. Industry has its own “wealth” level, but we call it Tech Level and it is not related to land value (in fact, industry always lowers both medium and high wealth land value nearby for residential and commercial).
