--------------------------------------------------------------------- SimTower -- The Unofficial FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello, my name is Steve Novicki. I am a gigantic fan of Yoot Saito's masterpiece SimTower, and I will be narrating this FAQ, which took me approximately a full two days to write, so you better appreciate it! Also, this FAQ is legally Copyright February 15, 2000 by Steve Novicki. Do not rip off of this FAQ, I can and will take legal action against you, meaning that I will sue you and easily win. With that boring crap said, let's get to the FAQ! CONTENTS --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 - A SimTower Day's Schedule 2 - Tower Transportation 3 - Shops, Fast Food Places, and Other Places of Commerce 4 - Offices and Condos 5 - Hotels, Suites, and Housekeeping 6 - SimTower's Method of Evaluation 7 – When VIPs Come For a Visit 8 – Star Requirements 9 - And Of Course, Last But Certainly Not Least, Cheats --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 - The Time Schedule of a Normal Day (weekday) in SimTower --------------------------------------------------------------------- Every building in SimTower starts and stops at a specific time, as they do in real life. I have compiled a list of all of the starting and stopping times that different buildings open and close. 5:00AM : Dawn. 6:30AM : Hotel guests begin to check out, continues until noon. 7:00AM : Garbage pickup. 9:00AM : Workday begins (Offices open.) 10:00AM : Shops and Fast Food open. 12:00PM - 1:00PM : Lunch hour. 1:00PM - 4:00PM : Movie runs in the theaters. 5:00PM : Offices begin to close. Restaurants open. Income from Party Halls. 5:00PM - 8:00PM : Movie runs in the theaters. 6:00PM : Dusk. 8:00PM : Movie Theaters close. Income from Movie Theaters. 9:00PM : Shops and Fast Food close. Income from Fast Food. 11:00PM : Restaurants close. Income from Restaurants. There you have it, a complete listing of a SimTower workday, either the first or second weekday. It is always like this, no exceptions. Also, I'm not sure, but I think that it's at 5:00PM that your Hotel guests begin to check in, either five or 6:00PM. Check for me, will ya? --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 - Tower Transportation --------------------------------------------------------------------- In SimTower, your transportation system MUST be completely perfect and bug-free, or else it will crumble and fail when your tower ages. Fortunately, I am here to help you achieve this :) When you start out, you should have at least one elevator spanning all of your floors, at the most, fifteen floors. This helps ease congestion when your tower is older and more populated. Also, keep in mind that your Sims can only change elevators ONCE PERT TRIP. This means that if a Sim rides an Express Elevator up to floor sixty, and wants to get to floor sixty-eight, he can change elevators only once to get to floor sixty-eight. Keep his in mind when designing your elevator system. Also, the Sims cannot change elevators at just any old floor, they must ride up to a Sky Lobby and there they can switch. Shafts cannot be placed over other objects like stairs, escalators, and stuff like that, so be careful when planning them. One last thing for elevators, the shafts cannot overlap when they don't have at least eight floors of free space on either side. This frustrated me many times, so keep it in mind. There is a maximum of twenty-four elevator shafts allowed in a single tower. Stairs are SimTower's most primitive mode of transportation. However, they provide an excellent means of elevator congestion relief, such as at lunch hour. With a few well-placed stairs, you can alleviate almost half of your elevators' congestion. The Sims are only willing to walk at the most four flights of stairs to get to a certain destination, this is about the only rule to follow while placing stairs. You can have a maximum of sixty-four total stairs and escalators. They also cost a mere $5,000 per set of stairs, not that much at all. Escalators are special. They can only be used in commercial areas, like shops, restaurants, fast food, etc., but can also be placed in just blank floor sections. They, like stairs, don't cost much at all, just a lot of commercial space to use them in. You can have a maximum of sixty-four total stairs and escalators. This concludes the Transportation section of my FAQ. I hope that it has been most useful to you. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 - Shops, Fast Food Places, and Other Places of Commerce --------------------------------------------------------------------- Places of commerce are very important to your tower in the manner of money and population. They all have set amounts of daily income, like $-5,000, $0, and $5,000, and these are very important to your tower's funds. They also boost your population to be able to graduate to higher Star ratings. Fast Food Places -- These are available at the beginning of the game. They generate a pretty good source of income, however have a very bad environment, but this isn't very important to you. If I were you, I would only build three or four of these at the beginning just to generate some income, but then stop building these when restaurants come around. Fast Food places cost $100,000 each. Restaurants -- Available at the three-Star rating. These are VERY hard to achieve the Good and Very Good evaluation, mainly because not that many people patronize these, they are all at the Fast Foods instead :) Restaurants open at night, and usually lose money unless they are far developed. Build most of these when you get the chance, because they generate far more income than Fast Food places and are all around better than Fast Food places, the only downside to restaurants is their very large price. 11:00PM : Restaurants close. Income from Restaurants. There you have it, a complete listing of a SimTower workday, either the first or second weekday. It is always like this, no exceptions. Also, I'm not sure, but I think that it's at 5:00PM that your Hotel guests begin to check in, either five or 6:00PM. Check for me, will ya? 4 - Offices and Condos Offices in SimTower, as in real life, are the primary building block of any good skyscraper. They are pretty much self-sufficient, but let's go over some basic facts about them, shall we? 1. Offices cost $40,000 each. 2. Offices require any kind of transportation, except Escalators, for obvious reasons. 3. Offices fork over their rent on a quarterly basis. 4. Offices can hold a maximum of six workers. 5. They do not need to be placed in any specific area of the tower. 6. They have three different rent rates. The facts listed above should pretty much answer all of your questions about Offices, but I'll go into some more detail. Each Office forks over their rent promptly at 5:00AM every morning of the first weekday (pretty different from real life, huh?) Offices start to open at 9:00AM every weekday morning, and start to close at 5:00PM every afternoon. But some workaholics leave their lights on well past 8:00PM. Also, you should never place Offices after 1:00PM on the second weekday. They do not sell until the next weekday, therefore cheating you out of a rent. The only times they do sell is on the first weekday, 9:00AM - 12:59PM, and the same for the second weekday. Last, since there is no limit to the amount of Offices you can have, you could build only commercial areas the first five floors around any Sky Lobby, and then use a mixture of Offices and Hotels to fill up the rest of the space. One last thing about Offices; they don't mind being next to other Offices. Some places, like Hotels, get cranky if they're placed next to a noisy place like an Office or a Restaurant; Offices don't care one way or the other if they're next to another Office or place that makes a lot of noise. It's just that Offices are the place that is noisy so you should place an entire floor of just Offices to ensure that people don't get cranky. Condominiums (Condos) are different from other buildings in SimTower; they do not generate a quarterly, daily, or yearly income. Instead, when a condo sells, the money is forked over to you in one large amount; there is no income. I think that this is kind of bad, because it costs money to keep those condos in working condition. And these figures add up fast in your account. Therefore, only place condos when you're completely financially secure. Condos cost anywhere from $40,000 - $200,000 each (please, don't make the mistake of selling a Condo for half of its initial building cost!), and like Offices, the price affects the happiness of the Condo's inhabitants. If you're not careful, the happiness of its inhabitants deteriorates due to an expensive price, so keep that in mind. And if you place a Condo anytime during 9:00AM – 12:59PM on either of the two weekdays, it sells almost immediately, so keep this in mind as well. I think that's all there is on Condos. 5 – Hotels, Suites, and Housekeeping Another form of excellent daily income are Hotels and Hotel Suites. Both of these provide a very good source of daily income to ease your budget (and, in the early beginning of all my towers, I use this income to live upon) and live on sometimes. There are two kinds of Hotels: Single Hotels and Double Hotels. Single Hotels are just what they sound like: single hotel rooms. Same for Double Hotel rooms, they are double hotel rooms. But double rooms bring in more income with less complaining. Single hotels take up less space, therefore fitting more in a given amount of space, but double rooms take up a larger yet smaller amount of space, and have more "bang for their buck". Single Hotels are available in the two- Star rating, Double Hotels in the three-Star rating. These are both adversely affected by noise from Offices, Restaurants, etc. and simply will not put up with the noise. If you let the problem go on too long, they will eventually pack up and boycott the rooms. Suites are like Single Hotels, but much, much more luxurious, therefore more expensive. But the Sims who stay in these Suites don't seem to mind. If the transportation system is good, they like it. Also, VIPs who come and stay in your tower only stay in Suites. (See more about VIPs in section 7 – Dealing with VIPs.) All Hotels, Suites, included, require some kind of transportation, in case you haven't already guessed. However, someone needs to clean up these dirty rooms after people mess them up, and the perfect people to do so are the Housekeeping staff. When you place a Housekeeping unit, you automatically have six housekeeping people to tend to all of your dirty Hotel rooms. They are crucial to your tower, because if you leave your Hotel rooms dirty for more than three days, they become infested with cockroaches, rendering the room useless and inhibiting other people from staying in that room. Destroy cockroach-infested rooms as quick as possible, because they spread horizontally to other Hotel rooms, regardless if they're clean or not. Getting back to Housekeeping, you need at least one if you have Hotel rooms in your tower. They also require transportation in the form of Service Elevators, a special kind of elevator available from the three-Star rating and on. You will know if you have enough or not by looking at the Map window under Hotel at five or six o'clock in the evening. If there are any dirty rooms, you clearly do not have enough Housekeeping staff. One last comment on Housekeeping: once you place a unit, you cannot bulldoze or get rid of it. Period. 6 – SimTower's Method of Evaluation One thing that I believe would be frustrating to new SimTower players is the seemingly complicated method of evaluation the game uses. I was building many different buildings and they were all getting red (bad) evaluations. Why is this? I wondered. Well, I found the answer from SimTower: The Official Strategy Guide from Prima Publishing. Read on to find this out. First of all, whenever you first build something, it has a Red (bad) evaluation. Then, as the customers start coming there and patronizing the place, its evaluation slowly increases. The highest it can increase to is Business Is Very Good. This means that whoever came to the store while there is a Good or Very Good evaluation will be very pleased with the store. So pleased, in fact that the next day, they will come back to that same store with a friend. If they encounter no transportation problems, and get to the store while there is a Good or Very Good evaluation, the same thing happens. For instance, maybe you have just built a Men's Clothing shop. Its current patronage is maybe three people, and it has a Red (bad) evaluation. As people come and patronize the store, the evaluation slowly builds up to Good, and the Very Good. The customers who visited the shop when there was a Good or Very Good evaluation will like the store so much, they will come back the next day and bring a friend. So in other words, if you have a shop that is more than a few days old and it still has constant Red (bad) evaluations, maybe you should look into it more closely. Offices are simpler. See, Sims hate to wait for anything. The only thing in your tower that would make them wait is your elevator system. Therefore, if an Office is suffering from a constant Red (bad) evaluation, that means only one thing: poor transportation. One rectification for this major problem is to personally name one Sim from the Office that is suffering. Follow that Sim around throughout the entire workday, or workdays if you have to. If he/she encounters any elevator that makes him/her wait, that could possibly be the problem, so fix it. Another way that Sims get mad and suffer from Red (bad) evaluations is that maybe a bunch of Sims from the same Office encounter a ad elevator, making them wait. If a bunch of Sims get mad and turn red, the evaluation of the Office that they're all from goes down very quickly. All Offices that have Red (bad) evaluations for en extended period of time eventually boycott their Office and seek another Office elsewhere. 7 – When VIPs Come For a Visit When VIPs were coming for visits to my tower, more often than not were they giving me bad evaluations. In case you do not know, you must have gotten a good rating from the VIP who stays in your Hotel Suites in order to graduate to a four-Star rating, then to five and Tower. VIPs come to your Tower once every nine years, giving you chances to make up for your mistakes of the past. Your job is to make their stay in your tower as comfortable and leisurely as possible. Listed below are some strategies to accomplishing this. 1. When the VIP arrives, quickly scan the parking garage and all elevators to see where he is, he's a bright yellow Sim. 2. Once you find him, pinpoint which elevator(s) he is going to take. 3. After this, find out exactly which Hotel Suite he is going to. 4. Once this is achieved, deactivate all elevator service to all floors except the one where the Suite he is staying in is located on. 5. Make sure that every, single, picky, little thing in your tower that he might use has a perfect transportation system. 6. Pray. Following these steps will almost guarantee you a successful VIP visit. At 11:00AM promptly the next morning, he will depart your tower. A message box will pop up on the screen, the box deciding your fate of whether you can graduate to a four-Star tower or not. 8 – Star Requirements In order to achieve certain Star ratings, you must meet certain criteria to graduate to higher ratings. Listed below are the six Star ratings possible of achieving, and exactly what you need to get them. One Star – none Two Stars – A minimum population of 300 people Three Stars – Minimum population of 1,000 people More than one Security office Four Stars – Minimum population of 5,000 people Recycling Center Parking Medical Center near ground floor Lobby More than one Hotel Suite Favorable rating from a VIP Five Stars – Minimum population of 10,000 people Metro Station placed New Recycling and Medical demands met TOWER – Minimum population of 15,000 people Cathedral placed on 100th floor There you have it, the complete criteria for graduating to higher Star ratings. 9 – And Of Course, Last But Certainly Not Least, Cheats So ya wanna cheat, do ya? Just keep in mind that with cheating, you are not playing the game to its fullest extent, therefore not getting your moneys' worth out of the game. But if you're like me and get the game's fullest amount of fun out of using cheat codes, this section is for you, my friend! NOTE: THERE ARE NO EASTER EGGS FOR SIMTOWER. NONE WHATSOEVER. But there are a few cheats anyway. 1. Start a new tower. Then click on the Lobby tool WITHOUT clicking anywhere else in the screen. If you do, you must start a new tower because clicking anywhere else than you're supposed to deactivates this cheat. 2. Scroll the screen down so that it shows the very, very bottom of the screen. Scroll all the way to the left. 3. Click ONCE in the far bottom and left area. You should double your starting funds from $2 million to $4 million. There, but I don't really consider this a cheat. I say a cheat is a cheat when you can get infinite funds if you want. But here is another that does not relate to money. 1. Start a new tower without a Lobby. 2. Click on the Lobby tool. 3. Build a new Lobby on the ground floor, but while doing so, hold down Control while you click to get a two- story Lobby. 4. Likewise, hole down Control and Shift to get a three- story Lobby. While this is not very healthy for your funds (it costs a lot), it also drastically reduces the amount of anger Sims go through while waiting for an elevator in the ground floor Lobby. This concludes my SimTower FAQ (Frequently Asked Question). I hope that you have enjoyed it to its fullest extent, and that it has somewhat helped you to become a better SimTower architect. I had fun typing this FAQ, and will probably type more to come. Look for other FAQs from me in the future, I love strategy/simulation games like SimCity 2000, Theme Hospital, SimFarm, and games like that. Farewell, my friends.
