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Thriving City: Songis a popular city builder based in an eastern setting, where you rule your own medieval village and turn it into a bustling city. Unlike modern city builders, you’ll get to explore various new and unique buildings and functionalities and even train your own army.
While all of this sounds quite easy to do, there are various complex mechanics that you need to be aware of in this game. Especially as a beginner, if you don’t know certain tricks, your city will be ravaged by plague, starve from famine, or be plundered by raiders. So, to help you on this journey, here are some essential beginner tips for Thriving City: Song.
Look Out For Missions, Quests, And Rumors
When you start your first playthrough of Thriving City: Song, you’ll be accompanied by an assistant who will guide you at every step of the initial phases of the game. But, apart from her dialogue, you should be mindful ofoccasional missions and quests that pop up in the bottom right corner.
These can be quests from your citizens or directly as an edict from the emperor.
Apart from quests, you’ll also encounter’rumors', especially when your city grows into a flourishing town. Rumors are of two kinds:
you may handle negative rumors bybribing or imprisonment, quickly to minimize the losses caused.
Know Your Building Bonuses
As you play this city planner, a hidden feature you may overlook as a beginner is the’Building Bonus' menu. This menu offers various building combinations you’re able to make together to gain additional efficiency and resource production boosts. Here’s a list of some of these building combinations:
20% extra consumption by tourists
Income increased by 20%
Iron/Clay Mine
Production efficiency increased by 20%
When you build buildings with one or more bonuses on them,you gain boosts like 20 percent extra production or income. These bonuses can stack with more combinations that you can build together.
Stack Up On Resources At The Beginning
One essential tip you should always follow at the start of every playthrough isclearing all the resources in a 20x20 area. This not only provides you with sufficient resources tobuild most preliminary buildings, like shacks and lumber huts, but also helps you preventresource wastage when you build roads or buildings over trees.
After clearing the resources, be sure to place four lumber huts in four directions with sufficient space in between to solve all your wood needs that you might have in the initial stages of your city.
After you’ve created some lumber huts, the next thing on your to-do list should be farming. When winter arrives, all the produce from your farmland will be collected, and youwon’t have many alternate food sources for the next three months.
Creating sufficient farming plots on ‘Fertile’ land in the first two months of your playthrough can help you avoid initial deaths from starvation that might occur during the first winter.
Manage Your Jobs Properly
As you start constructing new buildings in your city,you’ll unlock new jobs for your citizens. Having too many idle citizens will cause you tolose out on taxes and decrease the overall happiness of the city.
While keeping your citizens occupied is good, if you don’t manage them regularly, you’ll be facing storage shortages and food wastage very quickly.
One way to avoid this is by regulating your citizen’s job allotment byusing the ‘Jobs’ interface by pressing F or navigating to the dashboard in the bottom right corner of the screen. Here, you can rearrange the job priority, which is usually builders at the top, followed by farmers, and so on.
If you’re facing food wastage, drag food-producing jobs like farmers and fishermen to lower priority till your extra food is used up.
Similarly, if you have storage shortages (usually extra from wood or stones), drag lumberjacks and quarry workers to lower priority.
Start Researching Early
You might face various bottlenecks, especially when it comes to population growth. These can also be problems likejob shortages or lack of income from buildings. The easiest solution to all of these problems is tostart researching as early as possible.
Once you unlock research, be sure to put ‘Scholars’ as the top priority in the ‘Job’ interface.
This ensures that you always have 100 percent efficiency when conducting research, completing your research progress significantly faster.
The option to research unlocks when you build an Academy. While all research isn’t worth investing in,there are some that you shouldprioritize early, such as ‘Cohabitation’ and ‘Relief Fund’. Just having two of these can give you a200 housing capacity boost and 100-200 extra gold every year as a bonus.
It is easy to forget to start new research, so a solution is to start multiple research all at once. This allows all of them to start one after one, giving you extra time to check up on them without wasting valuable research progress.
Learn About Tiles In Your City
The land and water in Thriving City: Song is segregated by tiles, each having a unique property. Some tiles can be ordinary land, while others can be’fertile land' that provides bonuses to farms built upon them.
Similarly, even in water bodies,some tiles have fish which you may leverage to create additional food sources, while others can be used to build bridges as well.
You should always check the tiles before building anything over them toavoid penalties and maximize the bonus you can acquire from them.
Also, when you navigate to the edge of your map, you’ll see certaintiles labeled ‘Carriage Point’ and ‘Burial Point’. These are essential tiles that are necessary tofacilitate tourism and burials in your city, respectively.
Be sure to connect roads to these points early on to ensure that tourism and burials start in your city or else your population won’t grow and people will be unhappy. Especially if you’re starting on an island map, you should connect to these points using bridges.
Be Careful Of Fire Risk And Crime Rate
As you may have guessed, city planning plays an important role in Thriving City: Song. One aspect that most players, especially beginners, overlook is the building properties. Not paying proper notice to these properties canresult in your city being burnt to ashes or being plagued by crime.
Every building has a ‘Fire Risk’ and ‘Crime Rate’ valuethat you should know about.Be sure toplace buildings with a high fire risk, like coal mines, away from homes with space in between,to prevent fires from spreading. Also, be sure toplace them under the coverage of a Fire Towerto minimize damage.
Similar to fire risk, mostleisure buildings and high-end homes have a higher crime rate. Be sure toplace them around prisons to have constables patrolthe area and reduce the overall crime rate.
