Introduction

Foreword

Enter Micropolis and take control. Be the undisputed ruler of a sophisticated real-time City Simulation. Become the master of existing cities such as San Francisco, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, or create your own dream city (or nightmare slum) from the ground up.

Whether you take over an existing city or build your own, you are the Mayor and City Planner with complete authority.

Your city is populated by Sims -- Simulated Citizens. Like their human counterparts, they build houses, condos, churches, stores and factories. And, also like humans, they complain about things like taxes, mayors, taxes, city planners, and taxes. If they get unhappy, they move out; you collect fewer taxes, the city deteriorates.

The next few sections will explain the overall concept of Micropolis and give information that will help you win Scenarios and design and build better cities.

About System Simulations

Micropolis is the first of a new type of entertainment/educational software, called System Simulations. We provide you with a set of Rules and Tools that describe, create and control a system. In the case of Micropolis the system is a city.

The challenge of playing a System Simulation game is to figure out how the system works and take control of it. As master of the system, you are free to use the Tools to create and control an unlimited number of systems (in this case, cities) within the framework and limits provided by the Rules.

Rules

In Micropolis, the Rules to learn 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 for city services.
Survival Factors: Strategies for dealing with disasters, crime, and pollution.
Political Factors: Public opinion, zoning, and keeping residents and businesses satisfied with your city and your performance.

Tools

The Tools provide you with the ability to plan, lay out, zone, build, bulldoze, re-zone, and manage a city.

Plan: Mapping systems give physical and demographic overviews of the entire city.
Layout: Design living and working areas, road and transit systems, and recreational areas.
Zone: Set zoning boundaries for parks, residential, commercial and industrial areas.
Build: Place roads, rails, airports, seaports, fire and police stations, sports stadiums, and power plants.
Bulldoze: Clear forests for city growth, build landfill along waterways, clear and re-zone developed areas.
Manage: Using the mapping and graphing systems, gather up-to-date information on traffic density, population trends, power grid status, pollution, crime, land value, police and fire department efficiency, and cash flow. Set the tax rate and funding levels for city services.

But the most important Tool of all is the Simulator itself. Test your plans and ideas as you watch the city grow or shrink through the immigration and emigration of industrious Simulated Citizens. Sims will move in and build homes, hospitals, churches, stores and factories in the zones you provide, or move out in search of jobs or a better life elsewhere. The success of the city is based on the quality of the city you design and manage.

Simulator Reaction Time

The simulator is a very complex multi-tasking piece of software. It is constantly performing many checks, calculations, and updates, as well as keeping watch on the mouse and keyboard to respond to your demands. When you load in a city, give the simulator some time to compile its data and update the maps, graphs, population levels, etc. Some of the other times when the simulator lags behind you are when powering zones and updating the city services map after installing police and fire stations.

The Goals of Micropolis

There are many goals to be pursued and reached in Micropolis.

Scenarios

Each of the eight included scenarios is actually a game in itself, with an unlimited number of ways to win -- or lose.

Each Scenario is a city which is either the victim of horrible planning or about to be the victim of a natural disaster. After you load in a Scenario, you will have a limited amount of time to correct or repair the problems. If you are successful, you will be given the key to the city. If not, you may be ridden out of town on a rail.

If one strategy doesn't work, try another. There are a million stories in each city, and you write them.

Your Dream City

Perhaps the main goal of Micropolis is for you to design, manage and maintain the city of your dreams.

Your ideal place to live may be a bustling megalopolis, lots of people, lots of cars, tall buildings: high-energy, high density living. Or it may be a small rural community, or a linked group of small communities providing slow-paced country living.

As long as your city can provide places for people to live, work, shop and play, it will attract residents. And as long as traffic, pollution, overcrowding, crime or taxes don't drive them away, your city will live.

Getting Started

Micropolis Requirements

Micropolis requires an Intel processor running the Linux operating system, with the X11 window system installed, a 16 bit deep color graphics display, a kernel with the shared memory option enabled, and at least 32 megabytes of memory.

Micropolis Features

On-Line Help

You can get help on the Micropolis user interface, by pointing the mouse at anything mysterious, holding down shift, and clicking the left button. The Help window will pop up, giving instructions and useful hints on how to use the controls.

Multiple Views

You can open up any number of animated city maps and editors at once.

Pie Menus

Micropolis features pop up "pie menus" for quickly selecting city editing tools. Pie menus are radial menus with their choices in different directions, and they're very fast and efficient to use. Since you change editing tools quite often while building a city, you can save much time and effort by using the pie menu shortcuts instead of the moving back and forth to the tool pallet.

Micropolis, Unix Version.

This game was released for the Unix platform in or about 1990 and has been modified for inclusion in the One Laptop Per Child program. Copyright © 1989 - 2007 Electronic Arts Inc. If you need assistance with this program, you may contact: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis or email micropolis@laptop.org.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

ADDITIONAL TERMS per GNU GPL Section 7

No trademark or publicity rights are granted. This license does NOT give you any right, title or interest in the trademark SimCity or any other Electronic Arts trademark. You may not distribute any modification of this program using the trademark SimCity or claim any affliation or association with Electronic Arts Inc. or its employees.

Any propagation or conveyance of this program must include this copyright notice and these terms.

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