In the run-up to the time when players will actually have their hands on SimCity and be able to create their own cities, EA has started a series of tutorial videos to explain some of the basics of the game. The first of these looks at roads, though doesn't – as you might expect – focus on the new curved roads. Instead, the video addresses the different kinds of road and where you might want to use them.
To start, the narrator suggests, players might want to use dirt roads, since they're the cheapest and thus most practical when the city is new. But these roads only have two lanes, and so traffic can easily build up once your city starts to grow. When things start getting clogged, you'll want to upgrade to low-density streets, which also have two lanes but presumably deal better with traffic. After that, you can upgrade to medium-density streets.
The highest-density roads have four lanes, which means more Sims can visit the buildings along them. Higher-density roads mean more jobs and Sims. However, they also require more water and produce more sewage and garbage.
From the sounds of things, players should start with low-density roads and then it'll be pretty obvious when they should upgrade. If you click on a building you'll see if it's ready to go up in density, but you can only upgrade it if you also increase the density of the road it's on. Luckily, that's pretty simple; there's a road upgrade tool that lets you just click on a road to upgrade it.
What do you think? Will you follow the advice of the man in the video, or will you just lay down high-density roads and hope for the best? SimCity will be available on PC from tomorrow (5th March), and on Mac shortly afterwards.
