Rewards have always been the added incentive that keeps you playing. SC3000 has a lot more rewards than SC2000, but they all seem to come along very quickly at the start, and then there's a huge gap followed by the spaceport which is the last one. Even worse is the fact that they don't do much in SC3000. At least in 2k clicking on them in query mode would tell you something about your city.

Mayor's house

...should tell you your approval rating. Definitely. It'd also be nice if the house changed as your city grew. So it starts out as just a normal house, and grows into a larger house, then a small mansion, then a medium sized mansion... perhaps some other things to refect your status or approval rating, like telling you how many cars you've got, that sort of thing. Perhaps you could have the ability to spend some of the cities money on your house (increasing the size of your house and buying yourself more cars etc.) and then being thrown out of office by your residents because you're corrupt? ;-).

Town hall

This building should give you a few general statistics like how long you've been in office, population etc. I know you can get these easily anyway, but it's nice to have them in more than one place. The town hall should also be the place where citizens take petitions, or write you letters, so you could click on the town hall and there'd be a button labelled 'check mail' (or something not so email-ish) and then another window opens with a list of all the petitions, hate mail(!), letters, fan mail (from young 6-year old would-be-mayors) etc. that you've got. It'd certainly be a nice way of getting feedback from your citizens. As with the Mayor's house, the City Hall should grow as your city does.

Other rewards

I think SC4000 should use more events as rewards, rather than buildings. I'm not saying there shouldn't be buildings as rewards, but how cool would it be if one of the rewards was to host the Olympic games? You could get asked whether you want them or not, and if you do, you get given a huge, state-of-the-art stadium, and your city gets vastly improved job opportunities and increased commerce for a year. A similar idea could be done with the World Cup and other large scale events.

Possible rewards:

• Events/championships
  • Host the Olympic games (includes huge stadium)
  • Host the World Cup (also includes football stadium)
  • Host the Oscars
    
    
• Festivals
  • A rock festival (eg. Glastonbury, for the English readers - increases tourism)
  • Travelling circus
    
    
• Buildings
  • Some form of large art sculpture (increases city-wide 'cultural levels')
  • Film studios (increases commerce and city-wide enjoyment through the films produced)
  • A race circuit, allowing you to host future Grand Prix's
  • Observatory, with a telescope that rotates every now and then. If they find a comet they name if after you.

Contributors: D Lewis (from forum), Christopher Nuclear (from forum), "big guy" (from forum), Terry Miller, Eleanor Fountain.