A NECESSARY STATEMENT... #stitchincoming
Hello EA_Lanna and everyone,
First of all, this post may sound a bit controversial, but since I’ve been quite critical before — including on this forum — I think it’s only fair to share this reflection as well.
Today, after roughly two months of the Services 2.0 rollout, I’ve finally managed to complete the structural redesign I originally had in mind. Back then, because time was short during the grace period (before population happiness would be affected), I chose to do an emergency setup, mainly to sort out infrastructure and utility services first. Now, though, I’ve been able to rework everything into something much closer to what I believed was possible from the start.
And here’s the fair criticism: it was far more difficult and labour-intensive than it probably should have been.
That’s where the structural criticism comes in. EA got the implementation badly wrong, and quite possibly the communication strategy too. Even if updates and notices were recurring, they didn’t really make clear just how much work would be needed to adapt cities to this new model.
That said, after all this time (and after using a temporary in-between layout just to avoid wrecking my cities’ happiness and ruining gameplay) I’ve now managed to convert all infrastructure services into smart services.
To give one example: in Frosty Fjords alone, I reduced my electricity, water, sewage and waste services to roughly a single 4x10 block, plus three extra tiles for water, by relying on Omega services — which are honestly the real masterstroke here, the key to making the whole system work.
That reduction was so significant that I ended up freeing 26 new residential plots, where I built Omega homes as well, without sacrificing landscaping areas. And that matters to me, because I’m one of those players who believes that, before anything else, a city should be beautiful — not just a grim pile-up of buildings with no design or charm whatsoever.
In my case, with the Capital City plus four fully expanded regions, this was a massive gain. It felt like a kind of endogenous expansion — internal growth rather than external expansion. And that was exactly the clever upside I hoped for.
It also feels far more believable, more realistic, and more coherent for a city-building simulator. It never made sense that a residential plot would consume the same amount of electricity at level 1 as it would at level 7 after becoming an Epic building. That simply doesn’t add up.
There are still a few little issues that seem like bugs. Services tied to coverage area and population density — such as police, fire, health, and regional services — sometimes suddenly show as insufficient even though nothing has changed. But, to be fair, that’s fairly manageable now.
What I’d say overall is this: after a huge amount of work — honestly, perhaps more than necessary, and work that EA could have reduced significantly — I’ve ended up with a city that is far better balanced, far better designed, and much more satisfying to run.
That’s why I thought it was worth sharing.
The big strategy is simple: convert your infrastructure services into Omega services. They are vastly more efficient in both land use and service output. Their upgrade steps are also much more coherent and achievable compared with the amount of NeoSimoleons generated by buildings.
So I’d say it’s a genuinely useful tip for anyone still going through this transition.
And one final note: at no point during the entire process did I lose my 100% happiness. I never dropped below it, and I still maintain 100% happiness today while using the minimum necessary footprint for service buildings — which feels like a very solid result.
