City planner extraordinaire: Tips, tricks, and hints for Venture Towns on iPhone and Android

Venture Towns is one of the more difficult Kairosoft management games. City building is not a simple matter, after all.

It is possible in this game to build a robust, bustling cityscape, but you're going to have to work for it, and understand the underlying economics of the game. I know, that sounds painful, right?

Don't worry: we're got all the tips and tricks that you need to challenge the likes of London and New York for the title of 'World's Greatest Place to Live'.

Check out our walkthrough and never be lost in the suburbs again.

Money, money, money



Cash isn't usually an issue in most Kairosoft games; instead, they're normally all about expanding and experimenting.

Venture Towns is not your average Kairosoft game, though. Rather, it's a lot more like SimCity than it might be given credit for, with money always being a constant issue. Hence, the most important thing you need to do is watch your bank balance, and your cash flow.

Don't just build shops and houses willy-nilly, as they may well not be profitable for you and they may actually do damage to your economy. The best balance appears to be having one shop for every two houses you have.

You can check whether a shop is turning a profit by touching it, holding down your finger, and then swiping away. The relevant information is shown at the bottom of the screen.

You can perform the same action on residents' houses to see if your citizens have enough savings. If you're finding that your denizens are constantly poor, make sure you have enough workplaces (we'd say one for every five residents is a good spread), and that you have promoted them sufficient times to keep their salaries rising.

A nice spread



Another key factor in your Venture Towns success is the way in which you evenly spread your shops, houses, and workplaces.

Residents won't walk too far from their homes at first - it would appear around six road spaces is their limit - so make sure that there is at least a couple of shops, a workplace, and a park within their range.

And while we're on the topic - place sensible roads. Connecting rectangles that leave a gap of 3x5 spaces are good, for they allow you to place buildings around the edges, and then trees in the three gaps in the middle.

Note that you can unlock the bicycle and moped shops pretty early on, so don't worry too much about sticking to the abovementioned walking limit once you've managed to grab those. You can also use Dev Projects to temporarily make a resident walk farther, for a relatively cheap price.

One final thought on spreading your shops out: your workplaces will research different jobs depending on the stores surrounding them. Make sure you have lots of different shops around each workplace, as unlocking jobs is a key part of the game.

They took our jobs



Having lots of different jobs unlocked and levelled-up will boost the research points you can unlock, and allow you to expand your town further.

When the game tells you that a resident has completed a job, tap on that resident and tell him / her to switch jobs. You'll be told the chance of success when changing to each particular job, so make sure the percentage likelihood of that resident being successful is over 50 before you try, or else you're just wasting cash.

If multiple residents have the same job, they will also contribute to 100 per cent-ing that job, so try to make sure no resident has a 100 per cent-ed job at any time.

The more jobs you take to 100 per cent, the more research points you'll be provided with to spend. And since these are used to unlock more industries, their importance cannot be understated.

Furthermore, you won't be able to upgrade your city size if you don't have particular job titles unlocked, so, again, try to unlock as many jobs as you possibly can.

And the rest



Replace old roads with new roads the moment you unlock them - newer roads boost the value of your city, and allow your residents to upgrade their houses.

Always have at least one vacant lot available for a potential resident. The more residents you have, the more cash you bring in, so obviously having a space for someone to move in to is essential.

Make sure you're frequently spending your research points on Dev Projects and new shops. It's all too easy to forget and allow your points to build up to their maximum, meaning that any you earn from then on are pointless.

On that topic, whenever Pumpkin Products comes to town, sell a whole boatload of your research points to him. You need the cash more than the points, and points are far easier to build up.

Don't forget to use items here and there, especially to boost the value of your properties. If you can find the property that has the highest value and throw loads of items into it, you may well enter the top 100 land value charts and earn sweet moolah as a result.

The biggest advice we can give you when playing Venture Towns is to sit back and take your time. Let the cash roll in, watch profits on shops to get a better overview of whether they're worth keeping, and have a clear goal regarding the direction you're looking to expand in.