How your tenants judge you

What you can play, and what is coming.

In the game today Everything under this label is already running. Download the build, put up a tower, and you can watch every one of these numbers move.

Coming to the tower Designed, drawn up, and on its way to you. None of it is in the build you can download right now. We would rather tell you here than let you go hunting for it.

In the game today

Your tenants are already keeping score.

01 The wait

The wait is the score.

Ask anyone in your tower how they are doing and it comes down to one thing: how long it takes them to get where they are going. Every trip is timed, and their mood is the average of those times. A neighbour who has had forty easy journeys will not cover for one who is stranded, because each person’s own average is taken first and then averaged across the household. One trapped resident can sink a whole unit.

There is a worst a trip can be, and the count stops at 300. Four things push a trip toward it:

No route at all costs the full 300 in one go. A room your tenants cannot leave grades badly on the first morning it is judged, which is why an unconnected tower fails instead of just looking quiet.
A full landing costs a flat 5 the moment they are turned away, and they will not even try to plan another route for 300 ticks.
Walking counts, at an eighth the weight of waiting. Putting the lift near the door is worth something. Putting it across the tower will not ruin you and it is not free.
A tall lobby gives time back. Board at a two-storey entrance and 25 comes off the clock; three storeys or taller and 50 does. It is the only thing in the whole model that subtracts, which is why a grand entrance hall is real strategy and not decoration.

Site illustration. The car is one floor up, four people are already waiting, and this unit is sitting at 172. That reads as a C today. Get the tower to four stars and the same number reads as a B.

02 The grade

Every morning, every unit gets a grade.

Under 80 is an A. C starts at 160, and once your tower is rated four stars that line moves out to 210. What you charge shifts the reading. The bill, the lease rollover and the books all keep to the quarter, but the grade itself refreshes at the start of every day. That is on purpose. You get to watch a unit slide from A to C over several mornings, which means you get a warning and a chance to spend money on it before anyone packs a box.

The C line moving out as your tower gets better is not a mistake. People in a well-run building put up with more, and that is what stops a big successful tower from strangling itself the moment it gets popular.

Site illustration. The same 172 the queue above produced, read as a grade.

03 The notice

When they hand in notice, they tell you why.

Nobody vanishes on you overnight. When a unit hits C and something is identifiably wrong, the tenant serves notice, and the notice names the thing. Six causes today: a commute that is too slow or too crowded, noise from next door, garbage or recycling nobody has collected, no washroom in reach, no power or water reaching the unit, and a plant running past what it can carry. Each one hands you the fix in the same words the complaint used, so you are never left translating.

How long you get depends on how bad it has become. Past the departure line you have eight days. At 200 that drops to three. At 260 you have one, and they are gone the next morning.

One cause does not wait for a bad grade at all. A unit with nothing reaching it, no power and no water, is unliveable however the arithmetic reads, so the notice opens at any grade. That one comes with thirty days, because sinking a riser and building a plant is a construction project rather than a same-day fix.

NoticeOpen

Condo 22-04

Cause: Poor circulation; this unit's own commute is too slow or too crowded
Clears when: a faster, less congested route to the lobby brings the commute back down

Day 3 of 8

NoticeResolved

Condo 22-04

Was: Poor circulation
What changed: a faster, less congested route to the lobby brought the commute back down

+40 mood relief, three days

Site illustration of the two states. The wording is the game’s own.

04 The fix

Fix it and the tower tells you it worked.

A notice is a demand, and answering a demand gets you an answer back. Fix the named cause and the next morning closes the notice out loud: which complaint stopped being true, and what changed to stop it. You never have to wonder whether the expensive thing you just built actually landed, or whether the tenant simply gave up quietly.

A clean close, with nothing else wrong underneath, buys that unit forty points of relief for three days, which keeps one bad week from emptying a whole floor. It does not stack, and you cannot break the same thing twice to farm it. Flapping is supposed to hurt. Your tenants remember the last thirty days, so a unit you keep breaking keeps its score depressed and opens its next notice sooner.

And if the thing you fixed was not the only thing wrong, the closing line says so rather than handing you a false all-clear. It names the complaint standing in its place, and what will clear that one.

05 Overload

Overload a plant and the whole riser feels it.

Push an electrical room or a water main past what it is rated for and it will not politely keep up. It delivers a share of what your tower is asking for, in proportion to how far over it is running, and the units at the far end of that riser are the ones who feel it. They can serve notice for it, and the notice tells them the plant serving them is overloaded, so you are not left guessing which one.

The bill stops climbing in the same breath, at 150 per cent of the plant’s flat rate. Both halves matter. A cap on its own would be a discount for overloading. A service penalty on its own would be punishment you cannot trace back to anything. There is a floor underneath as well, at 30 per cent, so an idle plant costs you a retainer rather than nothing at all.

Site illustration. The bill has a floor and a ceiling; the service does not.

06 Refusals

The tower will not let you strand a tenant by accident.

Lay a cell that would take away the last walking route between an occupied unit and the lobby, and the click is refused before anything is painted. The refusal names the unit that would have been stranded and the floor it is on, rather than the cell you clicked, and it tells you to open another way to a lift first or to build somewhere your tenants do not walk.

It answers by asking. The tower lays the real cell down, asks whether every tenanted unit that had a route a moment ago still has one, and takes it back before it answers you. So a block nobody thought about is covered the day it exists. It also knows who lives where. A service corridor across a security office’s only walk strands nobody, because staff walk service corridors. Same click, same cell, opposite answer, decided entirely by who is on the other side of the wall. And it fires on the last route rather than on any route, so a single tenant cannot freeze a whole floor’s layout the day they move in.

Coming to the tower

Drawn up and on its way.

None of this is in the game yet. Download the build today and you will not find any of it in there. We would rather say so up front.

07 What they need

Parking is the one thing nobody minds yet.

Most of this is already yours to play with, and we want to be exact about the piece that is not. Waste, washrooms, power and water all reach your tenants’ mood today. They are weighted against each other, capped so no single one can take over the reading, and folded in with the commute as one score. Parking is the row that is missing. It is in the game, and a shortage already holds your tower’s star rating down, but no resident currently minds it. Making them mind it is the part still to come.

08 Noise

Loud neighbours, and how loud.

Today noise is a yes or a no. A qualifying neighbour is either inside your tenant’s hearing or it is not, and if it is, they take a flat 60 and nothing worse. The reach belongs to the listener rather than to the source, which already gives you the good half of the mechanic: a condo hears 30 cells in either direction, a hotel room 20, an office only 10. The same cinema ruins one neighbour’s evening and goes unnoticed by the other.

Here is what is coming. Noise becomes a level each tenant carries with them, printed on the application before you accept it, so you can steer the loud ones away from the condos on purpose instead of finding out afterwards. Applications tell you income, household size and how soon they can move in. Nothing on there tells you yet how much trouble they are going to be.

Site illustration of the rule you play with today. How loud each tenant is, on top of it, is the part still to come.

09 Machinery

Machinery that makes noise because it is running.

A room has to be occupied to make noise today, which means your electrical rooms, water mains, garbage rooms and recycling rooms are all perfectly silent wherever you put them. That is going to change. Machinery will make noise because it is running rather than because somebody is standing in it, and where you hide the back of house becomes a decision with a price attached. It is not in the game yet.

Where these numbers come from.

Every number in the first half of this page was read straight out of the game’s own code before it was written here, not remembered from a design document. The thresholds, the deadlines, the penalties and the ceiling on the bill are the ones the running game uses.

They still need balancing, and playtesting by people who are not us. The deadlines in particular took their shape from published work on other simulation games and have not been tuned against a real tower yet, and this page will keep saying so until they have. Anything in the second half may change shape or be dropped before it reaches you.