As relaxed as Urbek City Builder may take some getting used to the automated upgrades and sudden changes in resource production. Getting all three stars in each biome involves a lot of trial and error, especially as new players become familiar with the different ways each neighborhood can evolve.
The game will allow you to create your voxelated utopia however you want, but clever gameplay will lead to happy citizens, a strong production chain, and a map worthy of first-person exploration. If you’re just starting out, follow these tips to make your city a better place to live.
Housing is the key
It wouldn’t be a big city if there weren’t people to live in! Housing is the very first thing you will build on each map, and the evolution of each residential area will have a dramatic impact on your game. There are dozens of housing types in Urbek, and each produces and consumes a different set of resources.
The main factors that determine the type of housing block are the available jobs and services in the area; houses near industrial buildings such as mines, for example, will not produce much work, diverting residents’ labor to produce more of the associated resource. Reverse houses with easy access to education, leisure and shopping will rapidly grow into affluent suburbs and beyond, producing skilled and highly skilled work but consuming more food.
Adjust your policy if necessary
Your city can approve or withdraw a Policy every six months. Policies can significantly change the inputs and outputs of your buildings, allowing you to correct for surpluses and shortages if necessary. Building more advanced government buildings unlocks more policies.
The default hotkey to pass or revoke policies is the J key, so you don’t have to zoom in and hunt for your government buildings to access the interface.
Since most policies have both an advantage and a disadvantage, it can be beneficial to: pass laws in the short term and withdraw them in six months to a year. The only limitation is the cool-down period, so if a policy turns out to be an error, you can easily fix it.
Build small
As satisfying as it is to pop down a huge block of buildings with a single click and drag, it will! eat your resources quickly, usually from work or food. If the initial cost doesn’t exhaust your reserves, the sudden increase in consumption can send shockwaves through your economy.
Build up new neighborhoods step by step, especially neighborhoods that take up a lot of space, such as homes and farms. This allows you to adapt your production elsewhere and prevent unexpected shortages. There is no time limit in Urbek, so you don’t have to rush anything.
Use the empty space around villas and mansions
Villas and mansions are needed to bring your city down Path of Wealth. They offer good luck but require a lot of space and their demanding landscaping requirements require an investment of unskilled work. Villas & Townhouses must be more than five tiles away from any other residential building, including other villas and townhouses. However, their owners don’t seem to care about other types of buildings, so that the empty space around the houses can be put to good use.
Fields and orchards are an excellent use of the land surrounding high-roller homes. On the edge of the five-tile buffer, you can also place service buildings such as football fields, making homes outside the radius useful. The only exception to this is: buildings that cause pollutionthereby demoting the Villa or the Mansion.
Overproduction of one raw material means wasting another
Ideally, you want every resource in your city to have a healthy but not excessive surplus. This way you build what you need when you need it, but it doesn’t cause too much waste elsewhere in the production chain. If you produce hundreds or even thousands of raw materials every month and have nowhere to go, that means the resources used to create that surplus are being wasted.
If you see any of your resources being produced in excessive amounts, cut down on production or look for ways to reinvest it. For example, if you’re producing too much food, it’s time to build more houses, and if you have too much unused work of any type, it’s time to get people a job. Alternatively, you can pass a law that increases the consumption of the overproduced raw material and effectively converts it into something else with one click.
Beware of pollution
Pollution is a necessary evil in Urbek. The industries you need to get advanced resources will inevitably cause pollution, impacting the environment. The greatest danger of pollution is that even a single point of it will happen change the housing within its radius.
Middle class and wealthy homeowners will move quickly if there is pollution near their neighborhood. In densely populated areas, this turns the houses into low-income apartment blocks. These produce a fair amount of unskilled work, but driving out the suburbanites can cause your skilled and highly skilled work to decline.
The best approach to pollution is to: designate a region on the map for industrial production and focus your Pollution Buildings there. The best place for this is near natural iron deposits, as this only place on the map where you can build iron mines.
Choose your path
In the early stages of the game, your choices will put your city on one of three paths; the path of wealth, the path of productivity and the path of leisure. The path you choose determines the victory conditions on the map. Starting any path requires a fair investment of resources, but if you’re not careful, you can accidentally and permanently set yourself on an unintended path.
The easiest path to accidentally choose is the path of productivity, as players naturally want a strong startup economy and will try to exploit the available resources right away. If you’re hoping to earn your Wealth of Leisure star in a particular biome, limit your wood production to what is strictly necessary and try to get the required Villas or Parks in place quickly.
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