Social City on Facebook: Tips, Tricks and How to Play the Game

Social City on Facebook allows you to become the mayor of your own town, without ever having to campaign for office! Throughout this game, players design their cities infrastructure, add neighbors, and try to keep their citizens happy. Here are some tips and tricks on how to play Facebook's Social City.

Factories:
Put your population to work! Each factory you build has potential to earn money, provided you give the workers a contract. A factory will not run without a contract. To give the factory a contract, click on the building to bring up the "contracts menu." From the contracts menu, select the item you wish to produce. Each item has its own production time and cash flow. To see how much time is left on the contract, mouse-over the factory.

If you forget to give a factory a contract, a "ZZZ" bubble appears over the factory, reminding you to give its workers a contract. After the contract is finish, click on the factory to collect the money. Click on the building again to clean the factory, making it ready for the next contract.

When building a new factory, you must wait until the factory is constructed before you can give it a contract. Typically, this takes about an hour. Once the product is ready, you must collect it within the same amount of time it took to produce it (for example, the Prom Dresses take 20 minutes to produce. Once the dresses are ready, you have 20 minutes to recover your inventory before it is lost.

Population:
Growing your city's population helps you level up in the game. To increase your population, build homes (found in the residential tab).

When your residential buildings are ready, click the icon to add the people to your population. If you receive a message that says "Not enough leisure" you need to add more leisure buildings or terrain to your city before adding these people.

Leisure Buildings:
Although these buildings do not generate cash flow, they do keep your population entertained and happy. Check your town's happiness by viewing the face icon on the upper left corner of the screen. A green face indicates your citizens are happy and you don't necessarily need to add more leisure buildings. A yellow or red face icon indicates your citizens are bored or unhappy. If you don't build additional leisure buildings, your population will not grow.

Each leisure building has a happiness points level-for instance, the tennis court adds +2050 happiness points, while the Q-Mart adds only +250. Your population determines the amount of total leisure points necessary for you to keep moving through the game.

Terrain also increases happiness, but at a lower level. If you're running out of room, plant flowers or trees-these items take up less space than the buildings.

Other notes:

Social City does not allow building rotation, so use caution when designing your city. Roads are unnecessary (as of March 2010) - this game is not like Sim City, where you need to have a road within "X" pixels of each buildings. The basic roads are free.