In SimCity™, the rules are based on city planning and management, including:

• Human factors -- residential space and amenities, availability of jobs and quality of life.
• Economic factors -- land value, industrial and commercial space, unemployment, internal and external markets, electric power, taxation and funding of city services.
• Survival factors -- strategies for dealing with disasters, crime and pollution.
• Political factors -- zoning and keeping residents and businesses satisfied with your city and your performance.

The tools provide you with the ability to plan, lay out, zone, build, bulldoze, re-zone and manage a city. You'll start the game with $20,000 in your city treasury. Remember that every time you do something - from laying down roads to zoning to building power plants -- you'll have to spend money out of your city coffers. If Sims like the city you build and start moving in, they'll start paying taxes that will give you more money to play with. If they don't, you'll run out of money and be booted from office.

Here's a brief guide to the tools you have to build your city with our browser-based version of SimCity Classic:

The Edit Window: When you enter SimCity Classic Chat Live, you'll see in front of you a big "window" -- that's the edit window, with the terrain on which you'll build your city. It's not all of the terrain -- use the zoom buttons to pull back to see the entire map. When you zoom back in, you can right-click on your mouse (or left-click, if you're a left hander) to move the map around. You have three kinds of terrain for building your city: The brown areas are clear land, the green areas are forests and shrubs, and the blue areas are water.

Here's a guide to the icons you'll see in our Web-based version of SimCity Classic, along with how much you'll have to spend from your city's treasury to use them. Click on any icon for a more complete explanation of what that tool does and how you can best use it in your city-building strategy:

  Bulldozer for clearing terrain ($1 per tile)
  Build roads ($10 per tile)
  Build transit lines ($20 per tile)
  Build power lines ($5 per tile)
  Build coal power plant ($3,000)
  Build nuclear power plant ($5,000)
  Zone for residential development ($100 per nine-tile square)
  Zone for commercial development ($100 per nine-tile square)
  Zone for industrial development ($100 per nine-tile square)
  Build seaport ($5,000)
  Build airport ($10,000)
  Build park ($10 per tile)
  Build police station ($500)
  Build fire station ($500)
  Build stadium ($3,000)

These icons will help you manage your city's growth and monitor your performance as mayor:

Budget -- Use to set tax rates and departmental funding.
Mayor's Rating -- Use to check your approval rating from your city's Sims and your city score.

Save -- Use to save your SimCity Classic Live city to your hard drive so you can keep building it when you return to SimCity.com.
Load -- Load a previously saved SimCity Classic city.

Use the BUDGET function to bring up a window that will let you see how your city is performing financially, to set property tax rates, and determine funding for your fire, police and transportation departments. You can raise and lower budget and tax levels by clicking on the little arrows that correspond to each category. A percentage indicator displays the level of taxation or departmental funding that will be maintained once you are done budgeting (you may bring this up to reset your taxation and spending levels as often as you wish). Click on GO WITH THESE NUMBERS to exit the budget window.

The MAYOR'S RATING window gives you a performance rating. Public opinion is presented in poll form, rating your overall job as mayor and listing what the Sim public regards as the city's most pressing problems. Keep your Sims happy or they will move away, leaving you as mayor of a ghost town. In general, you can feel secure if at least 55% of your Sims say you're doing a good job. If 10% or less of your Sims say that something is a problem, then the problem isn't too bad. The Mayor's Rating window also displays statistics on Population, Net Migration and Assessed Value, as well as the overall City Score (on a scale of 0 to 1,000), which reflects a number of factors, including crime rate, pollution, housing costs, taxes, traffic, unemployment, fire protection, unpowered zones and city growth rate.

Hints & Tips for Playing SimCity Classic Live

Here's a list of problems your Sims complain about and what you can do to make them happier:

Here are some more general hints on strategy. You might want to try asking around in the chat room for other pointers.

• Building around waterfront areas is a good way to start your city as it boosts land-value.
• Build industrial zones on the edge of the map, so that pollution will have less of an impact on residential and commercial zones.
• Parks near industrial zones will keep land values high and reduce pollution.
• Try to avoid having heavily traveled roads next to residential zones.
• The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Curves always cause traffic congestion.
• SimCitizens love railroads. Use them wherever possible instead of roads.
• Avoid placing police and fire stations on the edge of the map or near waterfronts as they'll be wasted on uninhabited areas.
• Build plenty of police stations.
• Your city only needs one airport and one seaport.
• Try building power plants on the edges or in the corners of your map.