Tips for the start of the game:
- Finish building an entire estate before moving people in, or only place one building site at a time. Each unfinished building site on the same estate as a house decreases the tennant's happiness by about 10%.
- Increased happiness actually increases reproduction speed too! A Level 1 tennant making workers goes from about 120 days at 0% happiness to about 60 days at 100%. Stress similarly reduces reproduction rate, and they stop making babies at 50% stress. It's almost as big a factor as bedroom upgrades, but is almost impossible to get their happiness that high. This does mean that it makes sense to give your breeders good sized gardens, garden gnomes etc, though
- Since reproduction rate slows down with each successive birth, it's still faster at the start of the game to build breeding houses with just one extra garden space (no space causes a complaint that the garden is too small for kids). Cram loads of houses into your first estate churning out workers and L1 tennants to quickly produce a big workforce and expansion base. This also means you don't need to rush to build a gadget factory for trees, as they only ask for trees if you give them a big garden.
- Only upgrade one or two room types in the same house (bedroom is most important for breeding houses, lounge for rentals). If you upgrade three rooms to Level 2 but leave one at Level 1 etc, they will complain and make you upgrade the remaining room.
- Your workers get tired out as they work and fight. Don't forget to send them to your home base (or hospital if you have one) when they're idle to let them rest up.
Building tips:
- Don't build factories and undesirables at the minimum size. Expand them a little to leave a small gap at the entrance so you can build a dog house inside the fence, which will fight off undesirables and enemy foremen trying to take over the building.
- Since you can only have one gadget factory, build a subway station right next to its entrance to minimise the delivery man's travel time. Build a subway station at new estates before building any gadgets in the houses, so he can use the new subway.
- Always build the dog house LAST out of all the garden furniture in a house. If you don't, the dog will attack the delivery man and he'll get stuck in an infinite loop of delivering, getting bitten, and running home.
- Buildings placed in an enemy estate cost twice as much, but making your building larger doesn't cost much extra. Waste all of the enemy's space by making larger buildings, which will be harder to take over because the fence is larger too.
- When the enemy builds on your estates, YOU get the cash he spends! You can buy up estates near your enemy and leave them empty for him to use. If the council complains about your land usage or won't let you buy another estate because of no houses on the empty estate, build a massive level 1 house on each to fix the problem, and then sell them later.
Undesirables:
- Undesirables can't use subways to travel to their target. The AI will build undesirables in his own estates so you can see them coming as blinking dots on the map. Build your undesirables in enemy estates to reduce their travel time, so you can use them more often.
- Instead of building resources in the factory, just build a pawn shop near the enemy factories and repeatedly steal from them. The chances of police catching you on a short walk are low, and stolen resources are capped at 50 even if your factory isn't upgraded, so you can steal tons of resources much quicker than building them.
- When a hippy pickets a house in your area, it's often best to leave him alone unless it's causing a major problem. Sending your workers to attack him can get some of them killed or tire them out.
- Mr Fixit is overpowered as hell, because the AI doesn't repair buildings if there's a gas leak. You can keep the AI completely shut down just by taking the ovens out of every building they have, or wait for a mission to get rid of enemy police/undesirables and blow them up to get easy white marks.
- Your repairmen won't repair undesirables on an enemy estate on auto, so you have to manually send them to repair stuff. I like to build a Mr Fixit in enemy territory and install a dedicated repairman to hold the building together while buildings are exploding all around it.
I'm sure I have more, but those are the ones I can think of for now. I love constructor, wish they'd do a modern remake, but I don't even know who owns the IP rights to the game now.
Post edited June 13, 2014 by Nyphur
