If you want to be on the leading edge of technology, the electronics specialization is for you! It takes the most amount of work, resources, and money to get started, but it has the highest profit potential of any specialization. Also, it's integral to the construction of many great works, so every region should have a couple ready to go. Electronic cities require vast amounts of education, and will likely be the educational hub for the region as well.
The downside to electronic cities is also its upside: due to the need of medium- and high-tech industrial zones, your city will minimize pollution. While this means an overall healthier, safer city, it also means it will be difficult to have any dirty buildings at the same time, such as the mining specialization buildings. You'll want to choose a city that has low amounts of ore and coal to minimize the waste, or at least build your special Electronics buildings away from them.
Check out the embedded video to see an electronic city in action!
Getting Started with Electronics
Electronics cities differ from the other specializations in that there is little to plan at first. To minimize later problems and and maximize efficiency, you'll want to build most or all of your industrial zones in a fairly central area. If possible, try minimizing pollution early by using clean power or simply buying it from a neighbor. By the same idea, consider exporting your garbage.
The main difference between electronics cities and others is that you'll need to prioritize education as soon as you can. Don't prioritize it over other, more important concepts; your city should have fire safety, police protection, and healthcare solutions before you build your first school. Once you do commit to education, go all-in: be sure every house is covered with school bus stops, and be sure your schools have enough capacity so that no student is left behind.
Once your city is covered with education, you'll need to start advancing your industrial zones' tech levels. To do this, you'll need to build either a community college or a university as close to the industrial zones as possible. Community Colleges tend to only affect the industrial zones immediately around them, but a University will help almost every industrial zone in your city's borders. Either way, placing the building central to your main industrial zones is paramount.
Once you have five medium-tech industrial buildings, you'll unlock the ability to plop a processor factory to officially start your electronics specialization. At the same time, you'll need to plop a trade depot to import the raw materials. Be sure the trade depot has storage lots for plastic, alloys, and processors.
As long as you provide the resources, your Processor Factory will immediately get to work. Set your Trade Depot to export your processors unless you're sending them to a great works site, and you'll soon be turning a profit. Even if you need to import both plastic and alloys, you'll still gain a profit from the finished good.
Once you sell enough processors per day, you'll gain access to the electronics HQ building, which in turn lets you access the consumer electronics factory. It allows you to build televisions and computers, which have a much higher profit margin and will maximize your income. Computers can be sent to a Space Center Great Work and televisions to an Arcology Great Work.
Due to this and their high profit margins, it's possible for an electronics city to be able to provide Simoleon gifts to all the other cities in the region to help them out with any early problems, or to provide cash for huge projects.
Downside to the Electronics Specialization
Although electronics have the ability to make your city an absurd amount of money in a very short period of time, it does come with its own set of risks.
A major risk is wholly depending on importing resources to be used to create processors (alloys, plastics) or computers and televisions (alloys, plastics, and processors). Importing alloys, plastics, and especially processors can become very expensive, very fast. It is quite possible to import more resources at a faster rate than your city can produce others to sell. For instance, importing plastics, alloys, and processors can cost your city $180,000 every few hours, while the profit from exporting computers, televisions, and processors could make you $180,000 during that same span.
Now you may feel that you’re breaking even, but you have to consider that the electronic specialization can cause a loss of $20,000 every hour. To overcome this problem you must make sure you are producing more resources to export than you are importing. This can be done by expanding processor plants, consumer electronics factories, and trade depots or trade ports to their full output as well as maximizing the trucks in each. Even placing more than one of each is a viable option if your funds will allow it. Small things like placing trade depots/ports very close to your factories and keeping the road clear will improve the amount of product you export and thus your bottom line.
If you are lucky enough to have ore, coal, and oil under your city, as well as good enough to sell those resources and unlock the smelting plant as well as the oil refinery, you are well on your way. However, you have to keep those resources moving as well as keeping the plants open. A major problem is that your smelting plant and oil refinery can shut down due to lack of resources. Also they require a lot of workers to operate so those plants can shut down due to lack of workers and bring your entire money making machine to a halt. If the plants require more people, then zone residential. If your city is filled to the brim, then consider making a sister city to supply workers to the industrial city and building buses or rails in the two cities. If plants shut down for lack of resources, do your best to correct the problem immediately. Make sure there are enough trucks to move the resources around your city and also make sure there are trade depots/ports that can hold those resources so if the mine is filled to capacity, the resources can still be shipped to the depot/port and stored until it is needed. This will keep the mines constantly producing and effectively maintaining a steady supply of raw resources.
If your city does not contain oil, but does hold coal and ore, then you can import plastics or build a recycling plant to bring in plastic from around your city and region. Be warned that you have to upgrade the recycling plant to bring in plastic (you can edit it so it only recycles plastic) and that the plant will only bring in resources during a certain time of day. After hours the plant will no longer collect recyclables until the next morning. Recycling plants are also very expensive to build and maintain, but having one or two can cut down on your reliance of importing plastic.
Contrary to popular belief, electronic factories pollute, a lot. They produce ground pollution and generate large amounts of air pollution. Consumer electronics factories are the worst offenders. Consider that the smelting plants as well as oil refineries that keep the alloys and plastics flowing also produce a large amount of pollution.
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