For thirty-one years I sat at the long table at the front of the room while citizens came to the microphone and told me what they thought of the proposed rezoning on the old dairy property. I retired in May. My daughter, who has a sense of humor, gave me SimCity 3000 as a going-away present, and I have not left the house much since.

Here I am the planning staff, the zoning board, the county commission and the mayor all at once. Nobody comes to the microphone. The sims do complain, but they do it in the newspaper ticker along the bottom of the screen, where I can read it or not as I choose. It is the most restful job I have ever had.

This page is my scrapbook of cities, with a few words of advice from someone who spent a career watching real towns make the same mistakes the game lets you make. The staff reports on each city are on their own page.

About the pictures. There aren't any yet. When I pressed Print Screen and pasted the result into Paint, the file came out well over a megabyte, which at my modem speed means you would still be waiting for it at Thanksgiving. My son-in-law says there is a way to make them small, and he has promised to show me. Until then, the gallery is words and numbers. In my experience that is how planners prefer it anyway.

1. Zone to the demand, not to your hopes. Watch the little R, C and I bars. If commercial demand is low, painting a whole downtown will only get you a whole downtown of empty lots. In real life we called that "speculative zoning," and it never worked there either.

2. Keep a buffer. Dirty industry next to houses drags land values down, and the sims will tell you so. Put a row of parks, or light commercial, between them. Parks cost a little upkeep and pay you back.

3. Plan for garbage on the first day. Garbage is new in this version and it catches everybody. A landfill is ugly but cheap, so put it on the edge of the map, far from anyone who votes. Later on you can switch to an incinerator or a recycling center when the money comes in.

4. Water before wealth. Your city won't grow past a small town without water. Lay pipe under the zones before they fill in, not after. My pumps along the river always seemed to do better than the ones out in the fields.

5. Power plants get old. They won't last forever, and the game warns you when one is getting on in years. Build the replacement before the old one gives out, not the week after. Coal is cheap and dirty, gas is cleaner, and the fancy plants come along as the years go by.

6. Look hard at business deals. Somebody will offer you a great deal of money to put a casino, a toxic waste plant or a maximum security prison in your city. The money is real. So is what comes with it. I took the casino once and regretted it; see Tallow Creek on the cities page.

7. Neighbor deals are free money, until they aren't. Selling power or water to the next town over is fine as long as you really have spare capacity. If you run short, you break the deal and pay for it.

8. Schools, then colleges, then libraries. An educated population brings the clean, high-tech industry. It takes a generation, same as in life.

9. Roads fill up. Put in bus stops early. A subway is expensive but it is the only thing that has ever fixed a downtown for me. Highways need on-ramps or they don't do a thing.

10. Read your ordinances. Some cost money every month, some bring money in. A neighborhood watch is cheap and helps with crime. Don't pass everything on the list just because it sounds nice.

11. Listen to the advisors, then decide. They mean well. Each one only sees their own department, which is exactly like the real thing.

12. Save a spare copy. Before you try anything drastic, like tearing up the whole east side for a rail line, save the city under a second name. I learned this the hard way.

On cheat codes: people write and ask for them. I don't use them and I won't print them here. If you want free money, you can run for county commissioner like everyone else.