Some Tips For Cityville
December 28th, 20101. Add as many neighbors as possible.
In Cityville, it is absolutely key that you get neighbors. Zynga has setup this game in such a way that you CANNOT build a thriving city without having a lot of neighbors. Each time you visit a new neighbor you get +3 Energy, and you can earn goods and coins by helping out your neighbors. The more neighbors you have, the more people will visit your own city, and will harvest your crops and do things for you without you having to use your own energy. But the best thing about having lots of Cityville neighbors is that they will gift you items such as Energy, permits, decorations and a whole lot more.
So how do you get neighbors? Well, many people invite their friends that don’t play Cityville, which is a waste of time. Instead just do a search for “Cityville” on Facebook and open up all the Cityville-related fan pages. “Like” all of them. On each post on a Cityville fan page, you’ll see tons of comments from people saying things like “add me” and “add me plz”. Send a friend request to all these people with a note just saying “want to add u on Cityville” or something like that. Once they accept, send them a neighbor request in Cityville (go to the My Neighbours tab). You should also post a comment saying “add me” on every Cityville fan page, so people will friend request you. Here are screenshots illustrating the process:
Search for Cityville fan pages:
People requesting adds:
2. Personally ask for items and gifts.
You can post a status update on your facebook wall asking for a particular item in Cityville, or you can add items to your “wishlist” (in your inventory menu). Anytime you are short of an item like Energy or Permits the game will prompt you to ask your friends. The more neighbors you have, the more response you’ll get. I like to send a chat message individually to each Cityville friend. Facebook shows you which of your friends are online, and you can chat to them (it’s in the bottom right). Here’s an example of posting a status update, and asking someone for an item:
Posting a status update:
Asking someone individually:
3. Place businesses in a cluster around a central decoration.
Decorations are meant to be used to improve the payouts of businesses and housing buildings. You want a decoration to influence as many buildings as possible. To do this, build your buildings all around a decoration. Here’s an example:
Take a look at the above screenshot. A tennis court gives +64% payout and is the most powerful decoration in the game at this point. Notice how all those Sushi bars are placed around a line of tennis courts? Each time you collect from one of those, you’ll get 1,300 Coins. That’s a heck of a payout for just one business. But most importantly, each one of those tennis courts reaches out to lots of different Sushi bars.
4. Build farms depending on how often you play.
You’ll notice that farms and shipping routes take different amounts of time to give you a different amount of goods, so which ones should you build and when? It depends on when you will next play the game. For example: Lets say it’s the end of the day, you’re just about to go to bed and you think you’ll next open up Cityville in about 12 hours. You should then build Cranberry farms as they take 12 hours to harvest. Or if you won’t play the game for two days, plant Wheat as that takes 2.1 days to harvest. The same goes for Shipping. You have to get this right as if you don’t harvest your crops soon after they are ready for harvesting, they will wither and you won’t be able to collect from them.
This also applies to housing. Different housing buildings produce coins at different times, and if you don’t play very often you’ll want to build housing that you won’t collect from very often, but which has a high payout.
NB: The bigger your city grows and the higher your level, the more you’ll concentrate on high paying farms, shipping routes and businesses, because each time you collect from one of these you use 1 Energy. You’ll use more and more energy with a bigger city and you don’t want to waste it by having lots of low income farms and business you’ll collect from often.
5. Buy a professional strategy guide.
These are basic tips only, and I’ve actually only just scratched the surface. Many people think that Cityville is really a very simple game and there are no secrets to level up fast. However, this is far from the truth, and the reality is that some players know things that will blow your mind. If you have neighbors that get from level 20 to 60 in a couple days you’ll know this.
For advanced strategies that can earn you tons of coins and cash, I recommend checking out The Best Cityville Guide Online by James Green, which is fantastic value for the price and a “must have” for any serious Cityville player.
