If this is your first time playing the City Island franchise, we recommend you to check our quick City Island 2 strategy guide, as we’ve got some tips that can help you get settled in as you run your city.
The brutal truth is that it does take a while for buildings to be completed in City Island 2, and that’s especially the case once you’re an expert and in the later stages of the game. And while the wait won’t be that long at first, you can speed up the process and not have to wait for your buildings. The key to doing this is the time lapse cheat, where you can advance the time on your phone or tablet by the amount of time required to complete your pending building. Return to the game and you’ll see your building all completed.
One drawback of time lapsing is throwing the date and time on your device all out of whack – it’s easy to miss appointments or reminders that way, after all. With that in mind, we suggest only using the time lapse cheat if the wait is simply unbearable, but not every time you need to wait for a building to be completed. Better yet, make sure you change the time back to normal after you’ve set it forward – you won’t lose anything and your buildings will still be there, in completed form.
Now, that you’ve got buildings, you’ll also want to have some roads next to them so that you can make the most out of your buildings. However, you don’t need to ensure that the roads are connected to each other. For example, you can stick to building just one road and surrounding it with as many buildings as you wish. That’s also the case with canals and walkways, which activate all buildings they touch.
Eventually, you’ll want to go for those rare buildings on the map, such as the hydroelectric station and the currency exchange center. Again, those buildings will be activated once your roads touch them, and once that happens, they can give you some nice benefits in the game. For instance, the trade center and the currency exchange center will both allow you to convert your cash into gold, which is the game’s premium currency. We’ll tell you more about that premium currency in a little bit. The hydroelectric station, on the other hand, provides more power to your buildings.
Aside from making use of the rare currency exchange building, there are other ways to get yourself some gold. One way is to go to the in-app store to make a purchase – that’s not going to be free, just to let you know. The free way is to go to the Free Gold menu that you see when you start playing a session of City Island 2. That menu contains a plethora of offers from Tapjoy; personally, we find their offers quite inconvenient and/or laden with catches. That’s why we suggest carefully reading what’s in the offers and checking what’s in it for you. Some of the offers are free and come with no strings attached, but others may ask for your personal information, including, but definitely not limited to your credit card number. Be careful when accepting offers, and once again, make sure there aren’t any gotchas included.
Last, but not the least, you’ll want to follow and complete the quests given to you by your citizens. Any time you feel like your game has gotten too big for you or like you’re in over your head, you can always regroup by following the quests, as they’ll lead you on the right path and provide you feedback on how you’re faring so far.