Greetings, Mayors! When you think of a city of tomorrow, I’d bet you picture amazing high-tech buildings using mind-blowing, innovative science. Well, welcome to The Academy! The Academy is a new building in the SimCity Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack that helps transform your city into that futuristic metropolis in your imagination. The Academy is a think tank that hires workers to research new high-tech buildings and modules. While there are jobs at The Academy for all wealth levels, most are high wealth, so The Academy thrives in a gleaming and pristine city of rich people.
Once The Academy employs enough workers to open, you can start researching high-tech buildings. You’ll immediately have multiple research projects to choose from, including the Maglev, a hyper-fast elevated train, which we’ll be talking more about in the coming weeks. After you complete at least one research project, you can research a level upgrade for The Academy. With each upgrade, you can add a new annex module to The Academy, unlocking additional research projects.
Annexes to your Academy will allow you to research awesome new buildings like the Fusion Power Plant, which provides large amounts of clean power at a huge cost (perfect for cities that want to stay nice and clean). Another module leads to the Garbage Atomizer that slowly atomizes garbage to reduce pollution. Keep in mind, however, that researching these upgrades will require a lot of upkeep, so it’s best to ensure your city is making a steady profit before you invest in these clean technologies. But if your city can support it, building The Academy will not only support your current city, but also the neighboring cities in you region as well, as everyone can take advantage of all the beneficial research it provides.
One of the best effects of The Academy is that all of the high-tech research being conducted at The Academy raises the tech level of nearby industry. The Academy also raises the land value around it, so you’ll have to decide whether to position it near industry or residential. Providing more high wealth workers to The Academy will help you complete research faster, but they’re a notoriously picky bunch, so keeping them happy will be a challenge. You can build a MegaTower near your Academy to bring in those high wealth Sims fast, though. Part of the challenge of building a future city is balancing the wants and needs of The Academy works against the wants and needs of your MegaTowers.
The Academy not only researches new buildings and their modules, it also researches new modules for some of your existing buildings. Complete the Solar/Wind Power Amplifier research for example, and anyone in the region can double the power output of their Solar or Wind Power Plants. These particular modules unlock for anyone in the same region, even if they don’t have Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack.
There’s one thing you need to know before you start deploying all these cool new technologies. All of the buildings and modules researched by The Academy require a connection to ControlNet. ControlNet is a wireless quantum computing network that The Academy generates. The workers at The Academy will generate ControlNet bandwidth. If the signal is weak, your city won’t be dealing with dropped calls, it’ll be dealing with buildings shutting down, so keep The Academy supplied with workers! High wealth workers create more ControlNet than lower wealth workers, so a high wealth city is your best bet to keep that technology running. Keep this in mind when building out the levels in your MegaTower, as what you choose may have a significant impact on how your city develops.
