Tourism Management

Establishing a successful and profitable tourist industry requires careful planning, patience, and constant monitoring of various moving pieces, so don’t delve into the tourist trade until your city is ready for it, emphasizing mass transit and police coverage.

As your tourist districts thrive, expand to keep the flow of tourists coming into your city. Despite the challenges, creating a city specializing in tourism is fun and rewarding. But it’s never boring—there’s always something to do. Here’s a few pointers to help get your tourist city up and running.

Mass Transit Fundamentals

Build a Passenger Train Station across the street from a casino and revel in the sight of tourist pedestrian traffic.

The importance of mass transit cannot be overstated when it comes to accommodating tourists. Before you even think of luring tourists into you city with a casino or landmark, establish a network of overlapping mass transit options. There are two important questions to ask yourself: how will tourists from the region get into your city?

Once there, how will they get around? The regional question is the most important to address as it can prevent the highway (and your road network) from becoming a parking lot. The Passenger Train Station is one of the most efficient ways to bring in low and medium wealth tourists—plop it within walking distance of your planned tourist district.

If your city has a waterfront, consider using the Ferry Terminal’s Cruise Ship Dock module to draw large numbers of medium and high wealth tourists. The Municipal Airport is another option for importing large numbers of medium and high wealth tourists.

Ideally, it’s best to place your casinos and landmarks within walking distance of these regional transportation hubs, cutting down on the need for taxis, buses, or streetcars. However, if such a layout isn’t possible, provide Bus and Streetcar Stops at each hub to facilitate transportation to your city’s attractions.

Remember, Sims will only walk 200 meters when attempting to transfer from one mass transit system to another, so place those stops right next to your Passenger Train Station, Ferry Terminal, or Municipal Airport.

Crime Suppression

This Police Precinct should be enough to handle the criminals pouring out of the nearby casinos.

Casinos don’t attract criminals—they create them. The simulation produces one blue collar criminal at each casino at regular intervals, leading to a massive crime outbreak if your city isn’t prepared. Open the Crime data map and notice the criminal activity around every casino.

When it comes to battling crime around casinos, spare no expense. The Police Precinct isn’t cheap, but is well-equipped to deal with the escalation in crime, particularly if you’re planning to build more than one casino. The mere presence of a nearby Police Precinct is usually enough to suppress crime around the nearby casinos.

But criminals may wander to other parts of your city, away from the police presence, to commit their crimes. Be ready to expand coverage with additional Patrol Car Lots and the Police Dispatch Tower. If you can afford it, the Police Helipad can make a big difference too.

Additional Police Stations posted throughout the city may be necessary as well to supplement your police force. As your police force rounds up criminals, they’ll need a place to put them. Consider adding additional Jail Cells to prevent early releases due to overcrowding.

If crime is overtaking your city, consider shutting down your casinos until the police can make a dent. The revenue lost from the casinos may be painful, but it may be the only way to make headway in the city’s fight against crime.

Casino Income

Open the Budget panel to see how much income your casinos are bringing in—look under the city specialization line in the ledger.

Casinos are a city specialization, similar to the metals, petroleum, trading, and electronics businesses. As a result, all expenses associated with casinos show up under the ledger’s city specialization line in the Budget panel. But unlike the other city specializations, casinos generate profit on an hourly basis.

So instead of showing up in the recent transactions window, all profits appear in the ledger, just like tax revenue. This creates a unique situation within the ledger where you can see both the (red) expenses and (green) income generated by city specialization.

This makes it easy to get a quick overview of how well your casinos are doing collectively. If for some reason expenses exceed income, click on the individual casinos in your city to see which ones aren’t profitable. A unprofitable casino can be a major drain on your city’s revenue as well as an indicator of a deficiency in your city’s attraction rating or mass transit system.

If these issues cannot be identified and addressed in a timely fashion, shut down any unprofitable casinos until you can iron out the wrinkles. But keep in mind, it may take a few days for a casino to begin generating a profit. So be patient, particularly when beginning your casino empire.

Commercial Zones and Hotels

Cheap motels, like these, will appear in commercial zones near tourist attractions, giving visitors a place to spend the night.

Whether plopping casinos, stadiums, or landmarks, don’t forget to zone commercial nearby. Tourist attractions can generate some revenue of their own, but their main purpose is to lure tourists into your city. Commercial buildings benefit greatly from tourism, resulting in higher profits for their business and increased tax revenue for the city.

Hotels appear in commercial zones after a number of tourists fail in an attempt to find lodging vacancies in your city; simple supply and demand at work. Hotels serve an important role in your tourist industry, giving visitors a place to spend the night so they can resume their spending spree the next day.

After spending money at a nearby attraction or shop, a tourist will seek out a nearby hotel to spend the night—and spend more Simoleons in the process. As long as there are enough hotel vacancies and appropriate wealth level shops or attractions to visit, a tourist will stay in your city until they’ve spent all their money.

In addition to staying at hotels in commercial zones, tourists can also find overnight accommodations at casinos equipped with hotel room modules. But hotels aren’t the only commercial buildings tourists will visit, so make sure there’s enough shops in the area too, preferably within walking distance of key attractions. The steadier the flow of tourists, the more profit generated by your commercial zones.

Tourism Achievements

Icon	Name	Criteria
	Main Attraction	Have 300 low wealth tourists leave your city satisfied in one day.
	Penny Slots	Generate 200,000 in total revenue from casinos.
	Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!	Run a successful stadium event in your city.
	Sin City	Place one of each type of casino in a single city.

Chat with the Developers

The Circulatory System of SimCity

Tyler Thompson, Gameplay Producer

Hi everyone! I’m Tyler Thompson, the Gameplay Producer here at Maxis, and I’ve really enjoyed helping the team make the new SimCity into a great game.

The new SimCity ’s simulation is driven by Sims, road networks, and traffic. I enjoy explaining it with a biological metaphor. The roads are the city’s arteries and veins. The Sims circulate through those roads. They help keep the city alive by going to work, making factories run, keeping stores open, taking home money, going shopping with money, etc.

Power, water, and sewage also flow under the roads. Almost every building relies on a vehicle to be effective: garbage trucks, police patrol cars, coal delivery trucks, school buses, taxis, and more. The result is a city where the streets are filled with a variety of vehicles and pedestrians, streaming from place to place and keeping the simulation alive.

Traffic jams strangle like a heart attack. Several times, I have looked up from decorating a casino to see dreaded lines of red tail lights. The consequences are pretty dire. Ambulances don’t get to injured Sims before they die. Police don’t make it to the bank in time to stop a robbery.

The Coal Power Plant shuts down from lack of workers. Homes and factories are starting to become abandoned at the edges of the city. In a panic, I start demolishing troublesome intersections, replacing roads, and adding new avenues across town. I also apply some civic “blood thinner”. I create a mass transit system featuring shuttle buses, large municipal buses, streetcars, and trains. This usually clears the major arteries and gets things flowing again.

Combine this circulatory system with our curvy road tool, and it means that you can make functional, organically shaped cities. We’ve made face-shaped cities, concentric rings, guitar-shaped cities, and on and on. Often, the city’s topography encourages curves.

Riverside towns can have a snaking boardwalk. Mountainside cities bend around the base. Lakeside cities with a high-wealth district hug the waterfront. Yeah, I love to play optimized grids, but this game is frequently tempting me to throw away the ruler and start painting roads with a brush.

These curvy, organic cities can be effective because the simulation isn’t about distances—it’s about flow. When you start to understand this, it totally changes how you lay things out. When I place a Fire Station, I usually try to find a place that is central, well connected but not near heavy traffic.

When I create a central avenue, I often limit the number of intersections with it so that cars don’t wait for light after light. I sprinkle commercial sectors at the ends of residential roads to encourage pedestrian traffic. As the city grows, I watch for the long line of red brake lights and plop down bus stops like crazy.

Many times, I find myself just sitting back and watching the flow.