
It’s not all good news though, since OmegaCo buildings cause plenty of pollution and increases fire risk – they’re a kind of super-industrial unit. This system of franchising can even be spread throughout a region, into the neighbouring cities of your friends. Those factories then ship Omega-infused products to the shops of your city, which also eventually become franchises and the proliferation of Omega products around the city (as well as your handy Omega HQ drones) will convert private households into unthinking Omega consuming franchises.

Once you’re producing Omega, it begins shipping to factories and eventually they will convert automatically to franchises too, all the while increase your delicious profits. Tomorrowland was foolishly founded in an area with barely any ore and absolutely no oil, so I have to import with a Trade Depot rather than go mining myself. The first OmegaCo facility you place begins the process of synthesising Omega from Raw Ore and Crude Oil. There’s also the arrival of a new giant of industry, OmegaCo, which allows you to convert your region’s factories, shops and even houses into franchises that increase profit.

It appears to me that The Academy is probably the most important new branch because its presence in a region allows for a plethora of new research and that naturally leads to lots of new add-ons and buildings in other areas of your virtual conurbation. With this educational specialisation, connected wirelessly to ControlNet (its resource) you can research new technologies and unlock new buildings for the entire region. Every area has a little boost of future content but the real meat of the expansion is in the new systems it creates – not all of which were available to me in Tomorrowland, but I was able to adapt some of my other cities with elements of the new expansion in order to see how it all ties together.Įducation hasn’t been left behind in the past, as Cities of Tomorrow allows the construction of The Academy. The new additions go beyond simple elements in the existing SimCity systems, although there are a handful of new parks and other bits and pieces for some of your existing building types. There’s a depth to this expansion that seems to justify its label (and pricing). I got a fancy hydro pumping station instead of a normal water tower and I spotted a sewage sanitiser that required an Academy (more on that later) but sounded like just the ticket for keeping unpleasant odours to a minimum, later in the city’s life. During this stage of development, I also discovered and began using a couple of the new futuristic buildings available. I could jump straight ahead to vertical wind turbines when my population needed more power, for example. Then I crank up the speed, get my bulldozer tool ready to keep on top of abandoned buildings and rubble and wait for some profits to tumble in.īuilding in a region with some existing cities gives me a bit of a head-start on options for power stations and other useful buildings too. Throw up some basic amenities – water and power to begin with. So Tomorrowland needed to start in the same mundane way I start all my cities: drag a main road off the highway, build a large grid of dirt road zoned for residential, zone a small grid for industrial and zone a bit of commercial in between. I’d start a new city, with the future in mind right from the start. I’d call it Tomorrowland and I’d pack it with the wonders of the age. It’s called Gaugin Valley but we can soon change that. Happily, there was still an empty city that’s looking for a mayor and it’s just down the highway from New Blueville. So, New Blueville must be left unmolested by these unwieldy new buildings. Now, I’m not generally too fussy about these things but the idea that I might disrupt the elegant pattern of my burgeoning utopian metropolis (my circular experiment is an assured success) was horrific to me. Megatowers, it turns out, need a much greater footprint than regular placements.
