SimCity 3000: Prima's Official Strategy Guide

Authors: Rusel DeMaria and Rebecca Michelle Hines
Publisher: Prima Publishing, 1999
Pages: 314
ISBN-10: 0761511245

In my SimCity 2000 page (here) I briefly discussed SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, And Planning, Revised Edition as a definitive resource for the game, which weight in at over 470 pages. In comparison, its counterpart, SimCity 3000: Prima's Official Strategy Guide, is just over 300 pages with a larger font size. The reality is that it's somewhat smaller because SimCity 3000, despite having new features, is a less featured than SimCity 2000, with the original 1999 SimCity 3000 as released was known for a rushed development schedule and effectively just SimCity 2000.

The guide reflects both the lack of bells and whistles added onto an already fairly complete strategy guide and a game that is rather starved of much of what its predecessor had. In the first category, there's no interview section, no "review of cities" section, no chapter breaking down how the simulation worked, and discussions talking about the future of the franchise, and by extension, Maxis. There's also what it doesn't have because of what SimCity 3000 didn't have, like a SCURK equivalent or even scenarios.

The guide reflects both the lack of bells and whistles added onto an already fairly complete strategy guide and a game that is rather starved of much of what its predecessor had. In the first category, there's no interview section, no "review of cities" section, no chapter breaking down how the simulation worked, and discussions talking about the future of the franchise, and by extension, Maxis. There's also what it doesn't have because of what SimCity 3000 didn't have, like a SCURK equivalent or even scenarios.

To me, however, the greatest flaw of this guide lies with Chapter 3, and in many ways is an extension of the ways the game failed itself. See, SimCity 2000 was an improvement in so many ways. It added entirely new models like Health and Education, added a third dimension to the graphics, added seven new power plant designs, new divisions between "Light" and "Dense" zoning, and a handful of new municipal items to build off of the new and improved mechanics. However, SimCity 3000 isn't nearly on the same level of advancement, most of it is just window-dressing, and in a few aspects went backwards.

This particular chapter basically takes the opportunity to dump on SC2k in one of its first chapters and like any propaganda trying too hard, falsifies information. They claim that SC2k has "completely random" growth within zones, when it's actually measured by land value. Cheap rental homes and crummy apartments are in low-wealth residential areas, nice upscale houses in high-wealth, and you'll have to go a ways into your city before you see the more impressive buildings like the KSIM tower in your commercial zones. They say that SimCity 2000 had floating palettes that "often obscured central activity", when the reality was both the city window and the toolbar were fully independent of each other, while praising the awful fixed UI that will always be on the right side of the screen and wrap around no matter what. Of course, all the things that were left out were made no mention of. There's no arcologies, there's no way to set the tax rate of individual industries, there's no terrain editor, there's no scenarios, there's no waterfalls (or Hydroelectric plants), and there's no newspaper.

Once you finish with that, however, it's not bad and there's useful information afterwards. But SimCity 3000 makes a lot of changes that make the game a lot easier in the process.

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