SoonerCity 2000
SoonerCity 2000 is a SimCity 2000-style city building game set in Norman, Oklahoma, played in the browser on a phone, a tablet or a computer. You start with the university, a stretch of prairie between the Canadian River and I-35, and twenty years to build the town around it. The campus is your first employer, so the students need housing from day one.
How to play
Zone homes, shops and industry. Roads carry the power. Keep the books out of the red. Twenty years on the clock. 25,000 people makes it a city.
Pick a tool, then drag across the map to paint roads, zones and power lines. LOOK taps a tile to read what stands there. Two fingers pan and pinch to zoom. Each month is one tick; run it at normal speed, three times as fast, or paused. Set the tax rate with the slider. If the treasury goes negative you cannot build until you are back in the black, but nothing is taken away.
How the town grows
Power flows from a gas plant or a wind farm along roads and through zoned blocks; the far end of a long line browns out first. A zone needs power and a road within reach before it grows.
Jobs make housing demand. Every shop, factory, landmark and campus building employs people, and each job supports a household and a half. Industry pollutes, pollution lowers home values, and parks raise them. Busy roads jam, and a jam caps the shops it serves.
Norman, built in
The university grows with the town. Each population milestone breaks ground on the next campus building, from the Oklahoma Memorial Union to the Couch Center towers to Catlett Music Center, and every one adds students and staff. The stadium is on the map from the start, and every fall brings a simulated football season: shops near it boom and the roads around it jam.
Shops are the storefronts you would expect: OnCue, Braum's and a long list of local restaurants, and big boxes like Walmart. Landmarks unlock as the town grows, among them the National Weather Center, Lloyd Noble Center, Sooner Mall, Norman Regional Hospital and the Santa Fe Depot, each with its own effect.
Tornadoes and other weather
Spring brings tornadoes, winter an occasional ice storm, and some summers a drought. A tornado gives one month of warning. Build the National Weather Center and you get three, and storm shelters go on sale to cut the damage.
Along the way the city council puts questions to you, three small goals pay cash bonuses, and a local newspaper prints a report card every five years.
Scenarios, the daily town and records
Besides the twenty-year game there are four scenarios: Tornado Season, Big 12 → SEC, Ice Storm and Move-In Day. Each starts from a built town with one goal. The daily town is five years on a map that is the same for everyone that day.
A scenario scores the people you have when the clock runs out, plus 2,000 if you met the goal. Your town autosaves on your device, along with your best population.