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CityVille Beginner’s Guide

CityVille is the newest game from Zynga, the makers of the very popular FarmVille and FrontierVille games on Facebook. In CityVille, you move out of the quiet countryside settings of those two games to construct your own successful city from its humble beginnings into a booming metropolis. The game features a lot of different and challenging dynamics which keep it fun, but can also be confusing. So here’s a CityVille Beginner’s Guide, complete with CityVille cheats, strategies, tips and tricks to get up and running quickly.

Your tiny little town will become a booming metropolis quickly in CityVille.

CityVille Basics

If you’ve played many games lately on Facebook, especially any of the city building themed games, then the basics of CityVille will already be familiar. You’ll try to level up by accumulating XP, earn coins, utilize cash (the paid currency in the game) and manage your energy.
Energy is one of the more precious resources in the game. FrontierVille players are already familiar with the concept, but old-school FarmVille players may not have seen it before. Basically, you use up energy on each of the tasks you perform in the game. Energy recharges automatically over time (slowly), and there are several different ways to speed it up. So many, in fact, that we’ve got a separate CityVille Energy Cheats guide dedicated to the subject. All you need to know as a beginner, however, is that you’ll want to maximize your energy use early in the game.

XP, which is short for Experience Points, is earned by completing all the various tasks, quests and activities in the game. As you earn more and more XP, you’ll advance in levels. Besides looking cool, you’ll unlock access to many new buildings and decorations in the game as you reach the higher levels.
Coins and cash are familiar concepts. Coins are the lifeblood of your city. You’ll spend them to build just about everything. You can also spend coins on goods to restock your businesses. You earn coins by operating businesses in your city, which consume goods (more on that later). Cash is the paid currency in CityVille. You start out with some free cash and earn a little bit as you level up. But for the most part, cash must be purchased from Zynga. Cash unlocks certain special exclusive items in the game and also can be used to accelerate the building of some items, particularly community buildings.

Houses

All of your happy city dwellers need a place to live, and there are a lot of housing choices in the game. You also earn rent from all the houses, so they are an important source of coins, especially early on in the game. Each type of house holds a different number of people and larger houses cost more to build. You’re also limited by a population cap, which is the maximum number of residents you can have in your city. To raise that cap, you must construct community buildings.

Community Buildings

Community Buildings are a new concept in CityVille and one of the more confusing parts for beginners in the game. In order to grow your population cap, you’ll need to build community buildings. In addition to costing coins and energy to construct, community buildings need to be staffed by employees. You can either recruit your friends to join your staff for each building or pay cash (the paid currency) to fill the positions. The first community building you’ll construct will be City Hall. After that, you’ll want to build a post office and police station and so on.

Businesses

Businesses are another core component of your city. They provide a place for your residents to spend money, earning coins for your city. The first business you’ll build in the game is a bakery, and you’ll be able to create several different businesses as you gain levels. A very important concept in CityVille is the use of goods. Businesses need to be supplied with goods, which you can produce at your farm and later on through trade with neighbors.

People need to shop and businesses in CityVille are a big part of your growth.

Franchises

Another new concept in CityVille is franchises. Once you’ve build a Franchise Headquarters, you can place franchises of your businesses in your neighbor’s cities. You then supply your franchises with goods and collect coins from those businesses as well. Franchises require a little more management and require a solid supply of goods, but can be a very lucrative way to earn lots of coins in the game.

Farming

What? You thought that now you’ve moved to the big city you wouldn’t have to worry about farming anymore? Not so fast! Farming is a critical part of the game. Crops can be planted and tended to create goods, which supply your businesses and franchises in the game. The crops work very similarly to how they did in FarmVille and FrontierVille. Each type of crop produces a different amount of goods and has a different harvest time, ranging from 5 minutes to a day or two. Crops left untended will wither and die, resulting in a loss of the coins used to plant them.

Farming is still a big part of city life.

An added complexity is storage. Because your goods aren’t consumed all at once, you’ll need to store them. You start out with a single barn, but will quickly want to create silos and other storage buildings to contain all the goods you produce at the farm.

Goals (Quests)

Your early experience with CityVille will be filled with several goals and quests that you receive. In addition to teaching you some of the core concepts of the game, the goals provide you with important early rewards that will help you grow quickly. In fact, you can pretty much stick to following goals through the first several levels of the game. In some cases, you might want to hold off on doing certain tasks (like building storage silos) until you get a goal that requires you to build them.

Friends and Neighbors

Friends and Neighbors have always been a big part of games on Facebook, but they become critical in CityVille. You can visit all of your friends cities and help them tend to houses, businesses, and farms. In return, your friends will be able to do the same in your city. And friends become especially important when it comes to expansion. You’ll need your friends to help you out when it comes to staffing your community buildings so that you can grow your small little town into a thriving city. Visiting and helping friends is also a great way to quickly replenish your diminishing energy supply.

Energy Cheats

In CityVille, one of the many things you need to think about is proper use and management of your energy. Each time you perform a task in the game, such as collecting rent from your houses, constructing buildings, harvesting crops, or collecting coins from your businesses, you use up an energy point. Once you run out of energy, you have to wait for it to refill before you can perform any additional tasks. Here are some energy cheats and tips to put some strategy into play when trying to conserve your energy in the game.

Ask Your Friends

One simple way to get more energy in CityVille is to ask your friends. Everytime you get low on energy, you’ll see a pop-up message from the game suggesting you do this. You can submit a request that will appear on your Facebook wall and your friends will be able to gift you a +3 energy battery. Of course, this will only get you energy right away if your friends are online and respond quickly. So it’s not the best method for dealing with an energy emergency. A nice bonus is that your friends will get 50 coins for sending you the energy.

Need Energy in CityVille? You can ask your friends for more.

Visit Your Neighbors

Visiting your friends is one of the easiest ways to quickly refill your energy. You’ll get one energy for each neighbor you visit. Plus, when you help tend to their city, there’s a small chance that extra energy will drop while you’re performing tasks on your neighbor’s buildings. You can only get energy from each neighbor once per day, but this is a great way to refill that energy bar for free.

Frustrated with energy in CityVille? There’s even more secret tips and strategies in this CityVille Guide which bills itself at the Best CityVille Guide Online We took a look and liked what we saw. It’s filled with incredible tips, tricks and cheats, including detailed information on how to best use energy in CityVille.

Buy Batteries

You can always trade in your cash for energy refill batteries, which come in increments of +3, +7 and +12. CityVille cash is the game’s paid currency, so buying batteries can be an expensive way to go when it comes to getting more energy in the game. But if it’s an absolute emergency and you’ve exhausted your other options, this is one way to do it.

Wait It Out

Energy normally refills at the rate of one point every five minutes. A perfectly fine way to go is to leave the game for a while and let your energy refill naturally. In the early stages of the game, it will only take an hour or two for your energy bar to refill completely, leaving you plenty of time to go outside or get some real work done.

Advanced Energy Cheats and Strategy

Remember that friends can help you out in your city by performing a lot of the tasks you would normally have to do. Except when your friends do these tasks, it won’t cost you any energy! A little planning and coordination with your friends can help you maintain several parts of your city without burning through all of your available energy. This works best when you have lots of friends who regularly play the game. For example, you could have two friends tend to the same five businesses each day they visit. When you log in, you’ll be able to accept their help one at a time, and they’ll do a full pass of your businesses, collecting payments and restocking the goods. Instead of spending 10 energy points to do this, you’ll spend none! And as a bonus, it won’t cost you any goods to restock, either!

CityVille Decorations Cheats and Tips

As your racing to build your metropolis in the popular Facebook game CityVille, don’t overlook the importance of decorations and the effect they have on the coins you earn whenever you collect rent from houses or payouts from businesses. Here are some CityVille decorations cheats and tips to help you get more income from the properties you build.

Decoration Basics

There are many different decorations in the game, and they each have their own impacts and attributes. Each decoration takes up a certain number of spaces and provides a certain percentage boost to the buildings within its influence range. When you place the decoration, you can see the impact it will have (where and how much) as indicated by the blue lines and text that appear. Each decoration can impact more than one building, so a common technique is to leave spaces between buildings so that you can place decorations in-between them. They’ll have a positive impact on all the adjacent businesses and houses.

You can get a bonus for your buildings by surrounding them with decorations.

Understanding Energy

The key to grasping the power of decorations is to understand how energy works in CityVille. Each task you perform in CityVille normally takes away an energy point. As your city gets bigger and there are more things to watch over, careful energy management becomes crucial. In fact, we put together a whole separate guide on energy cheats, but for now all you have to think about is how to minimize your use of energy while collecting as many coins as possible.

Extreme Decorations Cheats and Tips

Remember that each time you collect money from a business, it will cost you 1 energy. So operating 10 separate businesses will cost you 10 energy points to collect. This is a key principle! By using decorations to increase the output of your businesses by 100% or more, you’ll get more coins per energy point used than if you had to collect from two different businesses.

Now here’s the sneaky part. Once you’ve built up a “sweet spot” for a building surrounded by decorations, you can swap your buildings in and out of that spot before you collect from them. You have to do this one at a time, and it can be a little cumbersome, but you’ll get the bonus on collection for each business you swap. Using this technique will earn you a huge profit of coins for minimal energy consumption without having to buy lots of decorations.

Cityville Quests Guide...

Quests Guide

Quests are a very important part of CityVille, especially during the early stages of the game. In many ways, they’re required to get going in the game, as the early quests unlock critical items such as your City Hall building and more. But they’re also fun to play and can provide some really great rewards as you’re getting started. In fact, it’s recommended that you just focus on doing all the quests once you start playing, since they cover tasks that you’d be doing anyway, such as placing decorations, building your first businesses, and collecting rent from your citizens.

 

Here’s a look at some of the earliest quests you see in the game, along with the completion rewards.

CityVille Quests

Quest Name	Description	Reward	Spawns New Quests
First Neighborhood	Increase population to 50 and build 2 asphalt roads	50 coins	Build a Bakery! and Farmin’ with Rita
Build a Bakery	Purchase and supply a bakery and then collect from that bakery	25 goods	Plant a City Flag and The Pasty Tour!
Farmin’ with Rita	Plant and then harvest 4 crops	gray bunny	The Lost Bunny and Rita’s Rent
The Lost Bunny	Place gray bunny and 2 flower patches	50 coins
Rita’s Rent	Collect rent from Rita’s Country Home	25 goods
The Pastry Tour!	Visit a neighbor and click on one of their businesses, one of their homes, and harvest one of their crops	25 goods	The Fussy Baker!
The Fussy Baker!	Ask two firends to send Chocolate	1 Energy
Place a City Flag	Place the city flag anywhere in your city	unlock the City Hall community building
Clear Trees!	Clear 3 wild trees	100 coins	Rita’s Flower Garden and Find Hidden Key
Rita’s Flower Garden	Place 6 shade trees,2 Pink Flowers and 8 Blue Flowers	50 goods	The Burger Joint
The Burger Joint	Build a burger joint	Unlocked: Modern Chateau	Build A Silo! and Build Edgar’s Chateau

Cityville Mayor Guide...

Mayor Guide

One of your very first objectives in CityVille is to become mayor of your city. Once you become mayor, you’ll unlock a number of different goals and features, the most important of which is the ability to bring shipping to your city via the waterways. Plus, it’s just cool to be mayor! The good news is that although it’s quite a bit of work to get there, becoming mayor is really as easy as just completing a number of different quests in the game. Here’s a list of the CityVille quests you must complete before you are elected mayor of your city.

• Name Your City!
• City is Born
• First Neighborhood
• Incoming Shipment
• Build a Bakery!
• Plant A City Flag
• User Flies City Flag Proudly
• A Post Office!
• Build City Hall! – This is where you become nominated for Mayor, now let’s get you elected!
• Clear Trees!
• Rita’s Flower Garden
• The Burger Joint
• Build A Silo!
• Build Franchises
• Build Headquarters
• Run Remote Franchise
• Fuel Town Finances
• Build A New Park
• Increase Population
• Build School
• Become Mayor!

Some of the above quests are very simple to complete, but a few are more involved. One of the most challenging will probably be the final quest, where you need to grow your city population to over 1,000 and collect from 30 businesses. Collecting from businesses is easy, but getting the population cap over 1,000 could be tough. To do this, you’ll need to have already constructed a few community buildings. Presumably by the time you’ve become mayor, you’ll already have the City Hall, the Post Office, and likely the Police Station already in place. Together, these give you an additional 200 to your population cap. After that, you’ll get the Museum from doing the pigeon lady quests, which will give you another 300 towards your cap. To push over the 1,000 mark, you’ll build the school in the second to last quest, and that will increase your cap by 500 more.

Once you become mayor of your city, you’ll get to unlock the seaport and start your own shipping empire to bring new goods from all over to help stock your businesses.

Cityville gifting guide ...

Imagine having a game which can attract tens of millions of gamers worldwide, larger than the population of several countries? Surprising and even unbelievable it may seem, but CityVille has just done that. CityVille is a new and very popular game on the most famous social network, Facebook. Many of your friends are already playing the game, and its possible that you’ve tried it as well. Now the only question you might have is how can you catch up?

There are several ways to gain advantage in the game, and one of these is gifting, the process of sending and receiving gifts with your friends. These gifts vary, and many are very useful (most especially the energy) during the game.

Holiday 

From time to time there are special gifts available in CityVille that correspond to seasonal holidays. The gifts are usually available for several weeks at a time and then go away. While these are available, you’ll want to make a point of gifting them to others and asking your friends to send them to you in return.

SnowflaKe

The gift does not require you to be at a certain level in the game; you can freely give it to anyone. It comes as a part of a task, to ask for five snowflakes from your friends to set off a snowfall. Picture your city covered in a cloud of beautiful snow, causing envy to anyone who visits your place. Cool isn’t it? TIP: Don’t just ask. IMPOSE on your friends to give you snowflakes. Beg if you have to. It wouldn’t hurt to demand at times, especially if the result is an amazing winter wonderland.

Energy

Want to finish that much needed building? Need to harvest more of your crops? Expand your city? This is the thing that everyone needs most. You can acquire a quick and small refresh of this through gifting. Energy gifts come in three different sizes and you’ll need to have a certain number of neighbors to send the more powerful amounts, +1 does not require any neighbors, while +2 require 7 neighbors and +3 with 9 neighbors.
There are other ways to earn energy besides gifting, and these are covered in detail over in the CityVille Energy Cheats Guide. But the basics are: visiting your friends villages and buying through city cash. TIP: You can maximize your energy by doing all your tasks first, (harvest your crops, collect rent) and by the time that you’ve already used up your energy, accept the help offered by your friends (it usually pops up when every time you open your account) and while they are finishing your tasks, pay a visit to your neighbors, they’ll give you what you need, along with added coins and reputation.

Zoning Permit

The Zoning Permit allows you to construct certain buildings in the game, such as the museum, which is one of the first free Community Buildings that you earn through doing quests. The gift does not have a requirement, so you can give and receive it at any time.

Community Building Materials

Certain Community Buildings require special construction materials which are available as gifts. You’ll find that these are in high demand amongst your neighbors, as they’re frequently needed by players trying to grow their city population.

Decorations

Eager to decorate your city? Avoid buying too many decorations (Especially flowers and trees) in the first 10 levels of your game as this uses up valuable coins. Instead, ask your friends to give you gifts like orange flowers and fences during these first stages. These gifts are actually much more than mere decorations. They give percentage bonuses for any buildings that are nearby.

Of course there are lots more decorations available in the game and part of the fun in gifting is experimenting with sending all kinds of different items., The best advice I could possibly give is this, have as many friends as you could possibly have, and make sure they play CityVille! Then coax, torture, or sweet talk them to give you gifts. Next best advice, watch out for new gift guide updates!