DAY ONE

Good day to you, people of the world! My name is Ross and I’m a balance designer here at Maxis. If you will allow it, I would like to share with you how I mayor. I will do so by building a city that is all about oil.

To begin, I chose a city that has a high amount of oil in the ground. As soon as I load my city up, I take some time to check out my oil deposits. Before I worry about where my citizens will live, I want to make sure that I have good access to the oil deposits, so I use some dirt roads to outline where my oil pumps will go. I’ll upgrade those to better roads later, but for now I just need something cheap so that I can plan out my city.

DAY TWO

Well, howdy there y’all! (just getting into character). I’ve got my oil city up and running now. Right now, my oil business is pretty simple. My oil wells pull the oil out of the ground and their trucks deliver it to the trade depots. The oil is then picked up at the depot by a truck to ship to the global market for profit. As you can see, I’ve placed my oil wells and trade depots away from my residential, commercial, and industrial. I don’t want any traffic to get in the way of my oil trucks.

DAY THREE

Welcome back! Things are going well in my oil city. With the addition of an Oil HQ, my oil business has begun to expand into an oil empire. I’ve started to max out my oil wells in order to maximize the amount of oil that I can pull out of the ground. Harvesting and selling more oil will allow me to upgrade my Oil HQ with modules that will allow me to place refineries and improve how I export.

DAY FOUR

With all that expansion I’ve been able to upgrade my Oil HQ. The first module that I placed is the refining division. That allows me to place oil refineries which can turn my crude oil into plastic or fuel, both of which usually sell for more than crude oil on the global market. So now my task is to convert over from selling oil to selling the more lucrative plastic and fuel.

I place my oil refineries close to my oil wells so that the trucks will have no problem delivering to them. Now I go ahead and add some plastic and fuel lots to my trade depots so that they can start collecting plastic and fuel and selling them to the global market. As I start getting more money I add expansion modules to my refineries to increase my manufacturing throughput. It’s important to remember to add garages to the refineries, too, because without more trucks to carry the goods, all that extra manufacturing power just fills up my refineries faster.

DAY FIVE

Another day, another upgrade on my Oil HQ. This time I added the commerce division. This will allow me to use the more fancy trade port instead of the trade depots. Not only do the trade port storage lots hold a lot more goods, but the trade port can be expanded with a train station or boat dock so that I won’t have to rely on global market trucks from the highway so much anymore. That’s great – now I won’t start pulling my hair out when there’s a traffic jam at the entrance to the highway and I’m running low on money.

I’ve done a great job of collecting, refining, and selling all this oil, but I’m not sure that anyone would want to live here if this was a real city. Let’s look at all the ground pollution that I’ve caused. Oh, golly – look at all the sick people, too. Maybe I should think about investing in some health care for all my Sims… Nah they can take care of themselves, right?