Watch it change
run to the end plays the current city forward in visible frames, updating the map and numbers as it goes. Click it again to pause or resume.
The 1x setting is the slow watch speed; run to the end starts there. Use the faster settings to skip ahead, or choose paused to stop while keeping your place. Drag the timeline to inspect a turn you have already watched.
For large boards, lower zoom as far as 0.1x to see a 256-wide board at once. Tile coordinates remain aligned when zoom changes.
Sound starts muted. Click enable sound to hear a confirmation tone and original background music; the status beside it reports running, suspended, unsupported, or zero-volume states. Use test to play the confirmation tone again. Founding, growth, stasis, decline, fire, and ending change the musical mood and cues. When you zoom in on a district, a local layer for traffic, industry, housing, or blackout joins the city score, based on the area around the view centre (or the selected tile when visible). Zooming back out leaves only the city score.
Read the city
The map shows the current city. Switch skin for dots or text, then use layers to overlay terrain, land value, pollution, noise, elevation, zones, building levels, traffic, crime, fire risk, power, or police/fire/transport coverage. Higher values use stronger colours, and each layer has its own opacity. Noise is observational only; source-compatible environmental effects on population and land value are consolidated into pollution.
Click a tile to see its name—residential, commercial, industrial, road, plant, fire station, hospital, or church—and why it matters. Residential, commercial, and industrial zones use the original-style 3×3 footprint. The traffic layer routes aggregate trips from homes to powered workplace frontages over the road graph. “RCI composition” shows the current residential, commercial, and industrial scale in the original game's units; “Demand” separately shows which zones can grow next.
During a fire, the broadcast records the report, dispatch, arrival, spread, damage, destruction, and containment. Fires damage buildings and can destroy roads or other artificial tiles, but they do not spread to empty land. Click a burning tile to see its fire-response state and the distance to the nearest fire station.
mayor is independent from the board seed. Ambitious, conservative, green, and other profiles make different deterministic choices on the same board. In options, edit expansion, fiscal caution, environment, services, disaster risk, and residential/commercial/industrial priorities. The same seed/personality/difficulty combination always replays the same way.
Buildings include roads, bridges, tunnels, rail, power lines, parks, power plants, police, fire, hospitals, churches, stadiums, seaports, and airports. The mayor unlocks them as population, pressure, blackouts, and service shortages grow.
difficulty changes starting funds. options changes the mayor's auto-bulldoze, auto-budget, automatic-disaster, and zone-demolish-wait settings. Editing personality never changes the current city; use start a new city with this personality. These settings are deterministic.