Starting your first city should be simple for new people to the game, but for more experienced players it should be possible to tailor the land and setting to your needs as much as possible.

Choosing location

One of the main features I'd like to see would be the ability to choose which part of the world your city you're going to start your city in. Each area would have different problems and benefits, for example the Los Angeles area would be susceptible to earthquakes, the Bangledesh area would be liable to flooding, most of Africa would have a very dry climate so water pumps would be a lot less efficient. This would allow you to have a rough idea of what disasters you're likely to get (although obviously there would have to be freak earthquakes in England or the game'd be boring and predictable), and give a new depth to the game. This would also be a good way of including a subtle difficulty level in the game - it would be far easier to create a city in Western Europe or Northern US than central Africa.

Terrain editor

BRING BACK THE TERRAIN EDITOR! I have no idea why this was left out of SC3000, but it's nice to be able to fiddle about with the terrain before you actually start the city (after which it actually costs you money). I also really wish they'd sort out that selector thing (where you use the slidey bar thing to set how much of your land is to be taken up by mountains, water etc.). I was hoping this would have been fixed somewhere in the transition from SC2000 to 3000, but this was not the case. If you select '0% mountains', you shouldn't get any mountains!

Neighbours

A few people have suggested that it might be nice to be able to pick who your neighbours are before you start, either from a list of "real life" cities, or from previous cities that you've created. There would of course be a few problems with this idea, for example if your neighbouring cities already had connections would you start with roads and rail lines joining on to the edge of your map? If each of the cities you picked had a river running through them would you end up with rivers coming into your terrain from all sides? It would be an improvement on the randomly named computer cities though.

Contributors: Stefan Croft.