# Strategies

### In General

Fires

Floods

Hurricanes

Earthquakes

Others

> ### Online Help Table of Contents

> ### In General

> The first thing to do is decide what kind of city you want to build. Once you know what your long-term goals are, you can best plan your strategy.
> If you want to grow your population as large as possible, then zone densely, keep control of crime, and watch the newspapers for public opinion and important inventions. If you want to make a lot of money, then tax your subjects until they scream and keep your spending to a minimum. If you want to create a city that you'd like to live in, then keep your eye on the newspapers for public opinion, and mentally put yourself in your Sims' places.
> Once you start to build, stay small and go easy on the infrastructure. Keep your costs down. You want to get out of the red and into the black as soon as possible. Show a little patience and build up a good reserve of funds.
> As you build, try not to make large, densely concentrated areas. The denser the population of an area, the more pollution and the more crime you have. Try to find a happy medium between suburban sprawl and super-dense city.
> Remember that not only does it cost to build city infrastructure, but it costs to maintain it.
> If you need to skimp on city services, go ahead, but keep your police well-funded. If your town is small or you have a lot of police stations, you may not need to keep them fully-funded, but be careful. Use the Query tool to see your police stations' effectiveness. If the arrests are equal to the crimes, you can try lowering the funding for a while. Once the arrests fall behind the crimes, add more funding or more police stations. High crime destroys land value, chasing out some of your population and lowering your tax income.
> Skimping on fire department funding is a little less drastic, but can be dangerous. Do so at your Sims' risk. You can turn off disasters in the Disasters menu--if you're a wimp.
> Try to maintain high land values to keep those property taxes coming in. But be sure to zone for some low-cost housing, since all your Sims can't afford to buy luxury homes on waterfront property.
> Remember that you have to replace your power plants every 50 years. Buying the big expensive power plants is more efficient as far as cost per megawatt, but only if your city is large enough to need all that power.
> You need a good balance of the three basic zones, with the number of tiles zoned residential approximately equal to the total tiles zoned commercial and industrial. In a small city, you'll need more industrial than commercial. You'll need equal numbers of each at a population of about 100,000. Above that, lean more towards commercial. The Demand Indicator in the City toolbar lets you know which zones you should be adding.
> Try to work with the land instead of using brute force to overpower it. You'll not only end up with a much more "organic" looking and feeling city, but it'll save you a lot of money. Best yet, pick or build a beautiful site for your city before you start to build.
> As for the actual layout of your city, maps of cities from all over the world are easily available. Start with your favorite city and improve on it.
> Try the modular approach. First try to design a small, compact "neighborhood," complete with all the zones, transportation and city services you need, that runs very efficiently, or better yet, at a profit. Then copy the pattern of that neighborhood all over the place. Place them strategically so they can share the high-cost city items like schools, colleges, museums and power plants.
> Above all, use your imagination.

> ### Dealing with Disaster

> Unless you have No Disasters set in the Disasters menu, disasters just happen. If you're the adventurous type (or just plain mean) you can set off your own disasters from the Disasters menu and test your preparedness, your quick thinking and the robustness of your city's design. Not all disasters are available in the Disasters menu. Also, the server machine's player can disable disasters for all players in the Network Server window.
> Certain conditions in your city attract or discourage disasters, and certain city events can even cause them. So, to a certain extent, you can prepare for and even lessen the likelihood of disasters.
> In the event of a disaster, the first thing to do is stop any fires that you can. Next, rebuild the utilities, then the transportation system. You can check your fire coverage in the City Info window. In general, firemen are good at fighting fires, but can be wiped out by rioters; police are good at controlling riots, but can get burnt up in a fire. Both fire and police can handle the manual labor of building dams to help fight floods.
> Where a disaster causes destruction in a zone, you must manually bulldoze the rubble in Demolish/Clear mode before the zone will begin to rebuild.

> #### Fires

> Fires are most likely to occur when the weather is hot and you don't have good fire department coverage. You can bulldoze around a fire zone to try and prevent its spread.

> #### Floods

> Floods occur in the wet season, and can be the byproducts of hurricanes. They are most likely to occur on the coastline, but occasionally a river will flood. There's not much you can do once a flood begins, but you can prepare for the worse. Floods only destroy things at sea level. Your buildings that are even one tile up will weather the storm. Since seaports must be at sea level, they are prime targets for flood damage. If you have a river, try building your seaports upriver, away from the coast. You can also use the Raise Terrain mode of the Bulldozer tool to build protective dikes in areas that you think might flood.

> #### Hurricanes

> Hurricanes occur because of climatic conditions, and cannot be prevented. Keep an eye on the weather reports of high winds in the newspaper and you might receive enough warning to reinforce your police and fire departments in time. While they are very different in the real world, as far as their effect in 2KNet goes, they are pretty much the same--hurricanes can really mess up the place.

> #### Earthquakes

> Once again, there's nothing you can do to prevent them. All you can do is treat the symptoms--and those are many. Earthquakes not only shake down buildings and damage your city's infrastructure (roads, rails power lines, etc.), but cause fires, lootings and riots. All you gotta do is put out the fires, restore power and transportation, control the mobs and rebuild your city.

> #### Others

> There are a number of other disasters that will pop up from time to time in 2KNet, but you'll find out all about them in your own good time.

> ###
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