FrontierVille Moves to the City in CityVille

Zynga's latest addition to their ever expanding game real estate is CityVille. CityVille takes the ideas behind FrontierVille and moves them into a city, where you work to get the citizens to make you mayor.

Here are some helpful tips to help you grow the best city you can.

Increase Property Value

Decorations help to increase the amount of rent on properties. Strategically placed decorations can really bump up rent on properties. For instance, placing an arboretum in the center of an area of properties increases those connected by 16%. Throw in pink flowers to connect all properties

Importance of Roads

All property must be connected to either a road or sidewalk. Sidewalk is a cleaver item, since it allows for properties to be moved away from the street, while still connecting it to the street.

Sidewalk will also help citizens of your city get places faster and keep them off the grass.

Trees Everywhere

When you start playing CityVille, you will notice there are quite a few trees planted around your city. There are two main things you can do with trees: chop them down or uproot them.

Chopping down trees takes energy. For the energy you spend on chopping down a tree you are rewarded with coins and experience. The trees will be gone and the land will be clear for roads, decorations, or building.

Note: Do not chop down all your trees at first, as you will need to chop some down to complete at least one mission.

Uprooting trees requires no energy and yields no rewards. Uprooted trees can be moved to another locations in your city. It is unclear as to what real value trees add to your city, other than to keep your city from looking completely bare.

Uproot trees using the move option under tools (the arrow in the bottom right corner). Click the tree to uproot it and then move it where you desire.

Note: once a tree has been uprooted, it can be placed anywhere in your city. The tree will not be re-rooted, so uprooting only needs to be done once per tree.

Neighbors

As with FrontierVille, neighbors are important for completing missions. For quite a few missions you will be asked to perform tasks in the city of your neighbor. Some tasks, while not specifically targetted at helping your neighbors, can be completed not only by working in your city but also your friends cities as well.

Neighbors will also be need to open the train, which can be an additional source of getting goods for your city.

Goods

CityVille is basically FrontierVille in a city setting. Goods in CityVille are used to keep your business running, both in your city and those you franchise out to neighbor cities. Goods can either be harvested from items planted or through the train.

Unlike food in FrontierVille, there is a limit placed on the amount of goods your city can have stored, through the use of building to store the goods. Also, goods are only usable by your businesses and cannot be traded in for energy.

Expansions

Expansions come in 12x12 sections and require both 20000 coins and a zoning permit, the latter you can get from friends. The expansion is rather small, but there is a lot of land around.