A few noteworthy tips to keep in mind when building your city.
- Use mixed zoning to improve the looks of your city and to reduce building repetition.
- To increase your cashflow significantly, export garbage (or water/power) for cheap money and import for big money.
- Always accept every deals you can early in the game. Just place far away from town and destroy them when your city gets big enough to generate a big tax income.
- Don’t lower your taxes (unless your income is very big) until your advisor tells you to, don’t ever listen to your Sims in this matter.
- Spread out your rewards over the entire map to give the city a better overall land-value.
- Build your industrial zones on the coast, in the corners of the map, and on low elevation land, do this to increase land-value for the rest of the city and to reduce pollution.
- Always plant trees on slopes and on unused areas of your city to reduce pollution.
- There’s no need to build a mass transit system early in the game, build it later when you have some spare money that you can spend.