Cities of Tomorrow brings four new regions to your game and you can use these whether you own the expansion pack or not. These new regions are different from any previous ones as they contain tropical and desert themes – each with their pros and cons as you’d expect!
As I mentioned earlier there are also two new city specialisations – The Academy and OmegaCo. The Academy will help you bring all the environmentally friendly technology from the future into your city to make your city the perfect utopia. Not up for making an eco friendly future? Then try plopping down the OmegaCo factory and you’ll be in for a treat. This corporation creates Omega which Sims in your city absolutely love (and will be very upset if you take it away from them). OmegaCo will generate you a fair amount of simoleons but you’ll have to deal with the pollution, fires, and the damage it causes to your city. Many futuristic things, such as certain megatower modules or eco friendly technologies, work with something called ‘ControlNet’ which acts as a wireless network (turn on the data layer to see the awesome data visualisations). ControlNet, along with Omega, is tradable so you can buy/sell this from other cities.
One of the biggest complaints about the latest incarnation of SimCity is the map sizes. While Maxis has announced that they will not be making city sizes any bigger due to technical reasons, they seem to have some solutions up their sleeves. MegaTowers allow you to build into the upwards, not outwards, so you can cram in hundreds of thousands of Sims into your cities. I personally love them and you can really customise each one depending on how you want your city to be. Add residential, commercial, industry, education and more to your MegaTower to make it cater to the wants of the Sims living inside. This really is the way to go if you want to bump up your city population and fill up jobs in your city.
You can connect MegaTowers with a Skybridge (once you have the technology researched in the region) so Sims and commute between them. You could view this as a way to stop them going on the roads and causing traffic problems as they’re not in the sky! Something which I love is that you’ll get a few moments when you hear more music from The Sims games in these MegaTowers. Another way for your Sims to get from A to B is the addition of the maglev! You can place down maglev stations which have their own garage, removing the need for a main depot.