------------------------------- SimTower FAQ/Walkthrough for PC ------------------------------- Author: Kiwizoid First Print Date: 2/25/04 Latest Update Date: 9/19/04 You are reading Version 1.37 This FAQ should only be on: Gamefaqs.com(most recent version available here) DLH.net neoseeker.com If you see this FAQ on any other website than the ones listed above, please notify me at kiwizoid-san@japan.com. Contents*: 1) Intro(SNES) 2) Version History(DMCT) 3) Getting Started(NINT) 4) Transportation(WIDW) 5) Buildings(PSX) 6) Events(ATRI) 7) Walkthrough(FEB) 8) Semi-Cheats(PS2) 9) FAQ(JAN) 10) Credits(SEGA) 11) Copyright(SONY) *The words in parentheses are shortcuts to the section before it. For example, SNES is the shortcut to Intro. To get there, hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard and type in SNES. Hit Enter, and it should lead you straight to the Intro section. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Intro SNES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wow, my first FAQ, and I have NO idea what to say. SimTower is probably the best Sim game I have played in a long time. It has a sort of...nostalgic value to it. It is the game you play when you have one of those days where you want to play a game from your past (Super Mario RPG for me) that you loved but don't have the old system anymore. It's a game that has a simple foundation, but gives you the most difficult time trying to achieve the goals. You start playing and can't get off of it. The game gets to you through pure addiction. Starting at the beginning is simple and people underestimate the game. "No problem. At this rate, Tower rating will be mine by the end of the day!" By the end of the day, however, you're at a three star rating and are close to pulling out your hair trying to keep your tenants happy. You're either going to love this game for that difficulty or you're going to hate it. Any questions, comments, or suggestions can be sent to kiwizoid-san@japan.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Version History DMCT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version 1.37 - 9/19/04 ------------ When did this margin rule occur? Arrgh... i'm going to be spending some time fixing all these errors and making sure it doesn't go over the required 80 characters. Version 1.36 - 9/19/04 ------------ No, I did NOT forget about this guide...I just never got around to writing it. With the addition of school homework on my regular schedule comes the annoucement that I have received two e-mails since my last update 5 months ago. These two e-mails alone have reminded me that there are people around the world are reading this guide and it is my sole duty to finish it. So, I'm pleased to say that this guide will be finished soon enough! Hopefully. This update is really just to add in that I'm not dead and that I'm adding in the two comments which are pretty awesome. Big thanks to David Zhong and John Kao (I hope I spelled those right...) for re inspiring me to finish this guide. You may have noticed that this is Version 1.36. So, where's 1.35? I skipped it. I felt that this wasn't too big of an update to receive a full .1 upgrade, but it was too big to received only a .01 upgrade. So it receives a .02 upgrade. Version 1.34 - 4/12/04 ------------ Started 3 Star Walkthrough. Still no e-mails... :( Version 1.24 - 3/5/04 ------------ Changed 2 star requirements to needing only 1 Security Office, not two. Version 1.23 - 3/4/04 ------------ Started the walkthrough section. Version 1.13 - 3/3/04 ------------ I feel so popular... added neoseeker.com to my accepted sites list. Version 1.12 - 3/1/04 ------------ Added DLH.net to the accepted sites list. Version 1.11 - 2/28/04 ------------ I won't be working on it every day, but I still have a lot of stuff I forgot about. -Added in FAQ section(coming soon). -Added Rain in events. -Added in Walkthrough(coming soon). Version 1.01 - 2/27/04 ------------ -Added something in semi-cheats from GameWinners. Version 1.00 - 2/26/04 ------------ There. I think that's everything. There's still a lot of stuff missing that I can't remember, but it can be added in later. Here's to finishing my first FAQ, I guess. Version 0.50 - 2/26/04 ------------ The morning after... Mainly got through Buildings and finished up the Transportation section. Going online soon, hopefully. Version 0.00 - 2/25/04 ------------ After writing the Intro, I can see how much work this will be. Expect a lot of changes as I get submissions (if any =P). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Getting Started NINT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Every game has a goal to reach and rules to set. The section here is going to explain those goals and give personal advice. Clicking on New Tower gives you a mini-map, an info bar (with a clock), and a tool window. Looking on your mini-map shows blue skies, moving clouds, and a gray box showing what you are looking at. By the time you've become experienced at the game, the blue skies will be replaced by a giant gray shape that is your tower. The mini-map in detail will show many things eventually, but for right now has four buttons on top: Edit, Eval, Pricing, and Hotel, currently grayed out. You should currently be in Edit mode; if not, click on it. See how the clouds are moving in it? Edit mode is the only mode where time will pass in the game. Eval mode will automatically pause the game. The gray in here will either turn blue, yellow, or red. These represent your buildings. As described just below the buttons, blue means an excellent evaluation of the building. Don't change a thing. They're happy, so leave them. Yellow is the cautionary status of a building; this is still nothing to worry about. However, if you ever see a red building, this is where you worry. At the beginning of each quarter, some red tenants will move out, and you lose the profit of the rent. This is bad for condos, because after the current tenants move out, more might move in almost instantly. Condos are the only building that you *cannot* change the rent for after purchasing. All other buildings are OK. Each rentable building has four price levels, which vary. The next button, Pricing, shows the price level for each building by a color, again explained underneath the buttons. Red colors mean the price is at the highest rent price. Yellow signals the average price (second from top in drop list), green coloring is sort of low (second from bottom), where as blue is the lowest rent available. My personal strategy has been to set all the prices to blue. This generates the lowest income, but a blue price also gives an indefinite blue Eval as well. In other words, the tenants never move out when they're given the lowest price of the bunch. I find it handy, even though I lose most of my 2.1 million income to a 2 million maintenance cost. The hotel buildings are a building that become useable starting with the single room at the two star level. The minimap will show rooms that are dirty in red. In order to clean them, you need a housekeeping staff, also available at star two. However, note two things about housekeeping: a) They CANNOT be bulldozed. Once you place them, they sit there until the end of your tower, good or bad. Therefore, plan carefully as to what you will do before you place items like housekeeping. b) The maids will not use a regular elevator to move between floors. Instead, you need a service elevator to transport maids. This may be confusing, but all will be explained. With the mini-map finished with, go ahead and close it with the little square in the top-left corner of the mini-map, not the whole application. You can open it later in the windows menu. The next focus is on the info bar with the clock. The clock is... well, a clock. If you can't read analog, it's OK. The clock is sort of unimportant in the whole scheme of things, unless you like watching people on their lunch break or something. You'll have more important stuff to do anyways. The star is your rating. As you can see, there are four hollow slots for you to fill with stars. So, how do you get the stars? The little chart here will try to help. Stars Requirements ----- ------------ 1 None; you start here. 2 Population of 300 3 Population of 1,000 & 1 Sec. Office 4 Pop. of 5,000, more than one Hotel Suite, Recycle & Medical demands met, and a favorable VIP rating (see Events about it) 5 Pop. of 10,000 and a Metro Station underground TOWER Pop. of 15,000 and a Cathedral. (VERY hard! Been here once) To the right of those stars is a chart e.g. 1st WD/1Q/1st Year. This means: First Weekday of the first quarter of the first year. In each quarter, there are 2 weekdays and 1 weekend. Office workers show up on the weekdays, while most shopping profits can be made on the weekend. After the weekend, it's the first weekday of the next quarter. After the fourth quarter, it's a new year. Offices fork over the rent at the beginning of each quarter, so be sure to make the tenants happy before then, or you'll lose money. Fund and Pop are your funds and your tower population. Pretty self-explanatory. The little white box at the bottom of the info bar is very, very, important. That box tells you the important things in your tower: when your buildings are sold, transportation problems, when your recycling centers are full, etc. Pay attention to it. Some messages go too fast to read, but they will be repeated most of the time. Some advice for your starting tower: don't make your tower lobby too big. You won't be able to jump all hurdles in a single bound. Instead, try something simple and use offices. Offices have a good population with low risks if you try a variation of my low-price policy. This game isn't linear at all, so experiment a little! Half of this game is trial and error; the other half is frustration. I personally believe condos can be good, but have caused too many of my towers to fall in later years. Just try to use offices, since you can change rent whenever you want. When you get into later stars, try adding a hotel division to your tower. Oh, right. Something I forgot... offices are loud and busy, and will annoy buildings like hotels and condos, but don't mind being next to each other. So, If you do build hotels, use the magnifying glass to make sure there's no note that says "Office neighbor is too noisy". If it does, move it further away. That about does it, I think. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Transportation WIDW ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Transportation is no joke in this game. Long elevator waits will stress outside visitors and might discourage them from suggesting the tower to friends and family. This can then lead to those people not coming back and causing less customers in shops and fast food stores, effectivly killing $5,000 from your funds and in the long run, assuming you do not recognise the problem at hand, kill your tower expansion. If you are foolish enough to try and raise money by raising rent, which you hopefully aren't, it then encourages the office tenants to move and kill another $3-4,000 of your funds until you're stuck with an empty tower. But, that's a worst case sceneario. In reality, it won't get that bad, but it helps not to get all of your customers angry at your one elevator. Sims will only take two methods of transportation to their destination. For example, let's say you have two elevator shafts. One shaft goes from floors 1-30 and the other goes from 30-59. Elevators can only span a maximum of 30 floors, so this would be neccesary to reach something like floor 58. The Sim enters the tower on floor 1 and needs to get to his office on floor 58. There is only one elevator car running the 30 floor shaft. The Sim was late to work and showed up during the lunch hour. Assuming 2 Sims were on every floor except 1, the elevator would pick up the first 21 people and rush to floor B1. It rushes back up to the next floor and so on and so on. The Sim finally gets to his office with a lot of stress, which brings down the eval of the office. There are two solutions I've found to remove most stress on floors. You can add more cars in an elevator shaft, or you can only have the shafts go up 15 floors to the first skylobby instead of a full 30. If the elevator car has less floors , it can move faster and it helps a lot IMO. The most effective technique is a combination of both, but try not to over-produce your cars. Sims can handle a little stress. The elevator example may bring up a good observation to the keen-eyed. If elevators are 30 floors max, your elevators can't go above the 60th floor. However, you need the Cathedral on the very top height of your tower, floor 100. This is where the express elevator comes in. The express elevator stops every 15 floors, which is where you can place skylobbies. The express elevator has no length limit, so it can go to floor 90 and an elevator can go from 90 to 100. Problem solved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. Buildings PSX ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm going to try to make a chart for the buildings, but if you don't like it, tell me. Name Cost Available Removable ---- ---- --------- --------- Lobby 22,000 Star 1 No Floor 500 Star 1 No Stairs 5,000 Star 1 Yes Elevator 200,000/Shaft, 80,000/Car Star 1 Yes Office 40,000 Star 1 Yes Condo 80,000 Star 1 Yes Fast Food 100,000 Star 1 Yes Service E 100,000/Shaft, 50,000/Car Star 2 Yes Single Ho 20,000 Star 2 Yes Security 100,000 Star 2 No Park Ramp 50,000 Star 3 Yes Park Spot 3,000 Star 3 Yes Recycle C 500,000 Star 3 Yes Escalator 20,000 Star 3 Yes Express E 400,000/Shaft,150,000/Car Star 3 Yes Twin Hote 50,000 Star 3 Yes Hotel Sui 100,000 Star 3 Yes Restauran 200,000 Star 3 Yes Retail Sh 100,000 Star 3 Yes Movie The 500,000 Star 3 Yes Party Hal 100,000 Star 3 Yes Medical C 500,000 Star 3 Yes Metro Sta 1,000,000 Star 4 No Cathedral 3,000,000 Star 5 No There. Some items have special requirements, so let's tackle those. First, the Lobby can only be placed on Floor 1 and on every increment of 15 floors. Sims on elevators will only change floors at a skylobby, so it is crucial for your tower to have nothing but lobbies every 15 floors. Before I get an e-mail on how the lobby tool is only 5,000, let me explain why mine says 22,000. The 5,000 you see on your screen is for one tile length. However, the lobby tool spans four tile lengths. That makes 5,000 * 4, 20,000. The extra 2,000 comes from the 500 cost of the floor space, again set at one tile length. Since there are four tiles to place flooring on, that makes a 2,000 cost. Adding the costs together gives 22,000. The read-me file included on the disc explains this better than I can, and I should probably thank the read-me file for its explaination, since I got the explaination from it. The floor tool is to even out your building. You are not allowed to have a floor be wider than the floor below it. This tool widens the floor so you can place the really big stuff without having to lose a building. Anytime you build a building, the floor cost is automatically included. Open floor is gray. When you get to Star 2, you recieve the Security office. Security is used to sniff out the bombs your tower has when you get the terrorist event (see Events). Security only uses outside stairs on the side of your tower. You need two or more Security offices as a requirement to advance to Star 3. Parking ramps are demanded by office workers at Star 3. The first ramp must be below the lobby, and the next down must be vertically aligned with the first parking ramp. Parking spots must be touching the parking ramp or another parking space in order to function. If you bulldoze one the cuts the chain, all of the broken parking spaces have a big red X on them. The Recycle Center is a requirement to Star 4. The garbage fills up and is emptied the next morning. The instruction manual says you need a service elevator for them to work properly, but I have found this to be wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong. If the garbage centers fill up, the truck cannot get in and the center is effectively useless; bulldoze it and make another with an extra one touching it to spread the junk. Recycle Centers must be connected to each other or you can't build one. The escalator can only be used in commercial spaces like shops and theaters. In other words, you can't have an escalator in an office complex. The express elevator will only stop every 15 floors; this is why you want to place the sky lobbies where you get to. An express elevator is needed if you ever want your tower to go above the 60th floor (see Transportation). Hotel suites are a must for your tower. You need a parking space for each suite and the VIP will only stay in a hotel suite (see Events). Not only do you need a good VIP eval to advance to Star 4, you also need more than one Hotel Suite. I also find them good money makers, since hotels have customers daily. The Movie Theater is a good way to make income, but it costs 150,000 for an average movie and 300,000 for the new blockbuster, and they can't generate that much money. They span two floors and are really useful for attracting Sims to your shops, so place shops near your theater if you choose to have one. Party halls are used by your hotel visitors to mingle. If you have a lot of hotels, place one of these near them and you'll get some good income. The Medical station is a requirement for advancement to Star 4. Place one near your lobby. The Metro Station is the coolest item IMO. You need it to advance to Star 5. The Station brings in outside visitors and they will shop in your underground facilities only. You can't build anything under them and can't be removed. They span three floors, so you shoud place it on B8,9,and 10. The read-me file mentions that some versions allow you to build on B10. Do not even think of doing that. If you even move the elevator down to B10 it creates a floor tile that can't be removed, and your metro station is impossible to build. The station's tunnel goes through all of B10, so the floor tile blocks the tunnel from being built. I repeat: DO NOT BUILD ON FLOOR B10! Also, you can only have one metro station per tower. The Cathedral is where it will end. It is only available in Star 5 and is the only requirement, besides population, to get the all-mighty TOWER rating. The Cathedral can only be placed on floor 100, and in order to get the rating, you need a wedding to occur there. The wedding will only occur on a weekend. If the wedding occurs, then congratulations! You have accomplished SimTower's main goal. Try setting your own goals and start over or something. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Events ATRI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are only three or four events in SimTower. Here they are: Rain: While this isn't an event of importance, it is once in a while and has an effect on your tower, so I classified it as one. When it rains, people don't come to your tower as much, since no one wants to be drenched(where's their SimUmbrella?). It effects the fast food business mostly, and the rain usually stops before hotel check-in, so your hotels don't go to waste. In speculation, the rain shouldn't matter as much when you have a metro station, since it's underground, but I haven't looked into my theory. Fire: Basic. One of your buildings catches fire and spreads to other buildings. You are offered fire rescue for $500,000, but it may be too expensive at the beginning. It's probably best to let nature run its course. Afterwards, just bulldoze the burned buildings and build them again. Terrorist: I like this event even though it's bad. The adrenaline of it is sort of cool. Terrorists call up and blackmail you for $300,000 or they detonate a bomb in the tower. If you have the money, pay them. If you don't have it or want to save $300,000, click on find the bomb. Your Security forces quickly scan the building, with one of the six units from each office covering a floor. If you find it, that's good. If you don't, it literally blows up about 5 floors of your tower. One FAQ writer said that you should always click on find the bomb, because if it blows up, it's still cheaper than the blackmail. I found this untrue. My bomb blew up in a section of hotel suites, costing me 2 million instead of 300,000. The decision is yours to make. Actually, my bomb, which should have detonated at 3:00, detonated at 1:00 instead. Don't trust terrorists... VIP: This event is important, since you need a good evaluation to advance to Star 4. VIPs only stay in Hotel Suites, and after they check out, you will be told if they liked it or not. Some people have suggested things like cutting off transportation services to all floors but the one the VIP will stay in. This works, but I find it defeating the difficulty. The VIP is supposed to tell you how the tower was, and if the VIP doesn't experience a little stress, it sort of seems like cheating. If they aren't happy, don't worry. You'll have another chance to please them. The VIP is almost like constructive criticism in a way. Use it to your advantage. Santa: Jolly old St. Nick drops by on WE/4Q/whatever year. At night, look for a red dot across the screen and click on it to see him. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. Walkthrough FEB ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Star ------ So, you have a lot of open space, $2 million, and all these items in a tool bar. What now? Well, for starters, click on the left side of the mini-map. Build a lobby and stretch it one screen length; if the screen scrolls, you can stop. You want it to be all visible so you can manage stuff on a small scale. Once you get the hang of it we'll be expanding. Build as many offices as you can above it. On my screen, it perfectly fits 11 offices with no leftover space. Results may vary from screen to screen. Before building any transportation to your new offices, if you want to follow my low rent suggestion in Getting Started, lower the prices now. They may seem low, but over time they pay themselves off and make profits. After you've lowered the prices(if you chose to; this is in no way a linear game), it's time to make some transportation up to those offices. Since you're starting out, do not build an elevator yet. You only have one floor, so it's useless at this point of the game AND they cost 10,000 in maintenance every quarter. That can really cut into your profits. Oh, right; there's also the fact that they cost 200,000 per shaft! However, stairs don't have a maintenance cost and are only 5,000. I'd say that's pretty good for your limited funds. Don't overload your tower with stairs. It's just being over-effecient. If your tower holds 11 offices as well, then you should have a population of 66 people. Yay. Since you need 300 people to the 2 star level, let's do some math. 66 people per floor means about 5 floors to get 300 people. Build 4 more floors of offices. Lower the prices again before you make some transportation up there. If you can't afford all of the buildings to go in yet, just minimize the game and let it run without you. Once you can make all of the buildings, change the rents to your liking. Then, build an elevator up to floor 6 and let the buildings be sold. If all goes well, you should be at a 2 star rating. Addmitedly, this strategy can take a long time in your tower e.g. 15 years until 2 star. If you're not worried about time then you should be fine. If you are, then you might want to find another guide. 2 Star ------ With this star comes the addition of one of my favorite items, the hotel rooms. Anyways, after your offices sell, you should have enough for a new elevator car. Buy one and put it in your elevator shaft. You can afford the maintenance now and also there's going to be long lines at the elevator stop and people will get agitated. Once again, wait a couple of years and build up some money for some stuff. Once you have about 150,000, build your elevator into the B1 floor and make a fast food place on the far left of the floor. The fast food makes some good money on weekends once it becomes popular among your office workers. My fast food right now can get 225 people on weekdays but only about 25 people on weekends. However, 5,000 twice followed by -3,000 is still a 7,000 profit. It will have more visitors on weekends, but you'll have to wait. To get to 3 star, you are allowed to count hotel people towards your population. However, once you do get to star 3, you cannot count the hotel people towards your population. You can add hotel rooms if you want for money, but you won't need one until 3 star, so I'm skipping them until later. For now, follow the same rules you did on 1 Star: keep building offices in a line until you hit the target population. Remember to make a sky lobby every 15 floors. After you hit the 1,000 mark, you still have another task: make a security office. This is a good idea since you want to get rid of bombs in the building or put out a fire. They cost maintenance, but they're worth it. If you place two stations next to each other, it's only effective in one area. You want to spread your stations for total coverage of the tower and work in harmony with each other. When you get make a bigger building, don't forget about security offices to cover higher floors. Otherwise, your floor 11 men will have a hard time finding the bomb on floor 56. After you get the security office put in, you should get a notification that you've made it to star 3. 3 Star ------ After you build the Sec. Office, put offices to fill in the rest of the floor. You're going to be bombarded with a bunch of messages about recycling and medical requirements. The first thing you should do is place a medical center near your Fast Food facility on B1 (the medical center can be found in a sub-menu of the security office). The medical demands will be cleared immediately. After this, build an express elevator on the opposite end of your tower from your first one (if you placed the first standard elevator shaft on the left side of your tower, place the express elevator's shaft on the right side of your tower, and vice versa). Stretch it up to floor 15. Now, in order to settle the Recycle Center demands, access the sub-menu of the Fast Food icon. Look at all those new toys :). We'll deal with those later. I felt like getting you hyped about them. In order to really get a recycle center, hold down the new button next to the security office. The recycle center button is the one at the bottom with the picture of the... trash cans! Whoa! Who would've guessed? Heh...The recycle center is two floors, and can only be placed underground. Place the first one next to your medical center so that it takes up some of B1 and B2. Place a second one next to that one (hotels use them a lot and they're useless full). This should clear all demands except for one: Parking. Your tower as is doesn't have enough room for a parking ramp or any spaces, so it's time for an expansion. The expansion will not only help you for parking, but also will allow you the room to build your hotels and suites. Click on your lobby tool and set the view so the emergency stairs on the right side of the tower are barely on the left side of the screen. You can use the scroll bar to fine tune the view. Extend the lobby another screen length. It's safe to go a little over just in case. Build the parking ramp right next to the recycle center. Access the sub-menu of the ramp after that and select the P (Parking Space). Click on the area to the right of the ramp. You should get a parking spot created. If there's an X over the spot, it's not touching the ramp. Bulldoze it and place it so it touches it this time. All parking spots must be in a chain touching the parking ramp. Here's a little trick I learned: You can build parking spots like a lobby. Click, hold, and make a long chain to the end of the lobby. Make a second parking ramp directly under the first one; it won't work any other way. Of course, make more parking spots. Click on the one bed hotel room. Build rooms until you're touching the offices on floor two. Pause the game and look at the rooms near the offices and go right until you find one that does NOT say, "Office neighbor is too noisy". Bulldoze that one. This will act as a marker. Bulldoze the rooms to the left of that (not the offices, though). Place a housekeeping unit next to the hotel rooms. Also, build an elevator in the middle of the hotel rooms. Because of Suites taking up parking spaces, it will be necessary to stretch them down to the parking levels, even if they're only used by offices so far. Your housekeeping (for some reason) will only send out one worker per floor. Your hotel length is too big for one unit to clean; this will lead to an unused room and, if un-attended for a long time, a cockroach infested room. The cockroaches spread to other rooms and will eventually infest the entire chain. The only solution to this problem, apart from removing some rooms, is to build a second housekeeping. Since your hotel area will have more rooms on higher floors, I recommend building a second housekeeping a floor above the first one. After that, build a service elevator (in the elevator sub-menu;it has an S on it) and connect floor 2 and 3. Go ahead and make more hotel roooms on floor 3 (two workers per floor easily get the job done). Don't forget to drop prices to the bare minimum. Build six more floors of offices on top of the other offices, lower the prices, and stretch the elevator up. You should have about 1500 people; you need 5000 to advance. However, the offices will balance your maintenance costs from the new elevators and housekeeping (I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but if you're ever curious about what your maintenance costs or profits are, you can click the magnifying glass on the lobby or any skylobby). Take the hotel service and standard elevators and stretch them another floor up. Yes, we're building more hotel rooms. This time, however, they're going to be two bedroom spaces. They cost a bit more, but they're worth it. Access the sub-menu of the hotels and select the button with a 2 on it. You should align these rooms with the one-bed rooms below it. Look at the leftmost one-bed room on floor 3. Place the two-bed room above it so that the left ends of each are lined up. Keep building to the right until you hit the end of the lobby. Lower the prices and repeat for floor 5. It is not necessary to have a housekeeping building on every floor. As you recall, I stated that there is one housekeeping person sent out for a floor. This means that one building can take care of six floors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. Semi-Cheats PS2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There aren't any real cheats for SimTower, but I can tell you some things that could be semi-cheats. "Cannot place on top of other items" override: For a quick way to place in something new over something old, instead of clicking on bulldoze and then clicking on the new item, hold down shift and click on what you want to get rid of. It will destroy the old item and place in the new. Thanks to GameWinners.com for this tip. Word of warning: if you do not line up your click, you could accidentally end up taking out two things. Be careful. Doubling Funds: Start a new tower. Before you do anything, click on the mini-map's bottom left area. Click on the lobby tool and click on the very bottom left area of the editing screen. The lobby will not build, but your funds should go from 2,000,000 to 4,000,000. That's the only money cheat. 2/3 Story Lobby: When building your lobby, hold Ctrl for a 2 Story lobby and Ctrl+Shift for a 3 story lobby. This only works on the ground lobby. Also, if you want to use the doubling funds cheat and build a 2/3 story lobby, you need to hold down the buttons when clicking on the bottom left area. Super Money (contributed by John Kao): I'm quoting this from an e-mail received by John Kao: There are times when you need money, but you have to wait till the next day to get it. 1. Double your money 2. Make a lobby, 2-3 floors, doesn't matter. 3. Make a number of floors, just offices. 3 floors at least. 4. Make a number of floors, just condos. 3 floors at least. 5. Have a few shops underground. 6. Make sure theres an elevator going to each floor to reduce stress. 7. Put evaluation and make sure its always in blue. 8. Run a simulation of it for a few days to see how things go. 9. Get 2 Stars. 10. Make a number of floors, just hotels with service. 11. Make sure that there are elevators that start on the floors with hotels. 12. Make sure that there are elevators that start on the floors with offices. 13. Make sure that there is at least 1 elevator going to the middle of the floors with condos. 14. Put Stairs, 1 on each floor. 15. Run a simulation of the tower to see how things go. 16. Make sure everything is evaluated in blue. 17. Make sure you have no security offices yet. 18. Make sure you are making a profit. If everything is running just fine and theres no stress or complaints, leave your game on fast animation (under options) and let it sit overnight. When you return, you should be on your 100th year or so, with 100+ million dollars, giving you ample time to build without pause. The nifty little escalator trick (contributed by David Zhong): The other e-mail I got that re inspired me to do this guide again: Quote from The escalator can only be used in commercial spaces like shops and theaters. In other words, you can't have an escalator in an office complex. Actually, if you demolish your office, build the escalator, then rebuild the office, you will have built an escalator where your offices are! See? Isn't that nifty? Now if someone can tell me how to fix the font from e-mail to Notepad this section would be perfect. Right then, that's all I have. If you know of any new, tell me and I'll credit you fully. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9. FAQ JAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can't have an FAQ without questions. E-mail me and this'll be up and running. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. Credits SEGA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Extra thanks to: David Zhong for the nifty little escalator trick. John Kao for the money trick (in the Semi-Cheats section), even if it is pretty obvious. Still a contribution nonetheless, and for that I thank you. GameFAQs for being my only source of info for games and for accepting my guide. It really is better than the strategy guides out there. Excellent place. All you other websites that make me feel popular by asking for this lame little file... You for showing up and reading this. If no one read this, I'd be useless. My computer for putting up with all of this. NotePad+, which helped me get past the little memory problem with NotePad. GameWinners.com for the little override trick in Semi-Cheats. Maxis for making one of the best Sims out there. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11. Copyright SONY ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Kyle McDonald 2004 This FAQ is the sole property of Kyle McDonald (That's me, Kiwizoid). I allow this FAQ to only be shown at the web sites listed above at the top. If you see this FAQ anywhere else, please tell me. I don't care if you keep a copy at home to print out as a guide, but if you want it on your site, just be sure to ask before doing so. Failure to ask may result in legal action being taken against you. I'm more than happy to have my FAQ distributed, but only in its entirety with no modifications and if I am identified as the owner. ------------------------End Of File-----------I've always wanted to say that...