Where to Start? Learn to Effectively Zone your Sim City

After you create your city it's important that you plan it out carefully! Because if you don't... It will be almost impossible to change the layout of your city without completely destroying it. So learn to pause the game and literally take ten minutes planning out your zones.

Residential zones are probably the most important in the game. They're the real meat of your city. So it's important to know where to put them to really make life easier for them. Let me tell you now. Never ever put their zones at the center of the region. It will work out OK for the first 10,000 people you have, but after that the commute times will skyrocket and people will abandon their homes because of it. Putting the Residential zone in the center will probably not lead to a very high population in the end.

Instead, you should place residential zones around a large commercial area. This way, all of your residents will be able to easily able to get to those center areas for work. I've been able to make several cities with a population of over 100,000 people by using this basic technique. If your thinking that it won't work then consider this...

If people in St.Louis want to go have fun they would say, "Let's go downtown!" Downtown is a fancy word for the center of the town. Why would they want to go downtown? Well this is because downtown is where all of the commercial is located. You know (the movies, malls, shops, Go - Karts, and any other fun thing you can imagine).

Now what about that last fancy little zone. Well, it's a little something we call Industrial Zones. These zones are usually high polluters of air, but provide many good jobs to your sims.
These zones will also have their buildings abandoned if you don't give them a place to ship out their materials. So if you have any water in your region, you should build a port onto it and set your industry zoning by it. This way the commute for shipping out industrial materials is much shorter. (And industries absolutely LOVE this). Plus it will also keep unnecessary freight trucks off of your roads which will really help with traffic problems later. If you don't have any water at hand, just build a freight train station. They are still cheap and they carry plenty of freight for the beginning of the game. Just make sure you connect a road to it (so the industrial companies can get the freight to the station) and a railroad leading out of the region that's connected to it.

I'll be posting a whole lot more on here soon so subscribe to continue getting tips to help you in constructing a great city.