Overview
A beginners guide to BoomTown! Deluxe to help you get the most from the game (although it may be useful for people who have already played the game as well).
Introduction and the Aim of the Game
The main aim of this guide is to help players get the most from BoomTown! Deluxe. We’ll cover most aspects of the game, but feel that the town building part has more to cover and the main bulk of the guide will be related to that. There will be a small amount of cross-over with the in-game help and tutorials, but I will try to avoid that as much as possible.
The aim of the game is explained pretty well in various places, so I’ll keep this part brief:
The aim of BoomTown! Deluxe is to build your town and gain the greatest population you can within the time limit set by the scenario you have chosen. Mine for gold to earn cash and build shops and amenities to attract people to move in to your town.
The game works in a turn-based fashion. Each day is split in to several phases, you buy upgrades and build your town on phase one, go mining and earn cash on phase two and then at the end of the day your town will expand and you can sell you gold before looping round to phase one again, where you get to spend the cash you earned the previous day.
Occasionally (every 10 days or so) you will get a Gold Boom – the price of gold will sky rocket and your population will rise quicker than normal.
Getting Started and Your First Day (step by step)
Scenarios
The first thing you will do when you start a new game is choose your scenario. The scenarios are explained within the game so I won’t go in to a detailed breakdown here, but there are a few things to bear in mind if you are new to the game.
The Sandbox mode is the standard mode for the game, growth is relatively slow, but illness, crime and dirt are also relatively easy to keep on top of. Although it’s the first in the list, it’s probably not the easiest scenario to choose for your first game.
The Gold Boom mode is a shorter scenario and constant Gold Booms mean you are guaranteed a good gold price throughout. The population also grows quicker so you can see more of what the game has to offer in a shorter time. This is a bit like a sprint mode and is the mode I would recommend for a newcomer to the game.
The remaining three modes (Tax Haven, Badlands and Lakesides) are more suited to players who have already played the game. Tax Haven is kind of like a medium difficulty scenario, Badlands and Lakesides should be considered the hard modes for those who want more of a challenge.
Choosing a plot
Once you have selected your scenario, you’ll be presented with six maps to choose from.
The main thing to consider is that maps with more trees/lakes make getting around to collect your gold ore more difficult, but as a flip side, these maps usually contain more gold. If you’ve played before then you’re probably comfortable with this, but as a beginner you’ll want to choose a map with less trees to worry about.
If you don’t like the look of any of the six maps you can see then click the Refresh Plots button and six more will be generated. In fact it’s worth generating a few plots before selecting one so you can get a feel for what a good amount of gold looks like (there is a bar indicating the amount of gold on each map).
Your First Day
You start each day on the Upgrades Screen (or Mine Shop). The tutorial requires you to buy four explosives before doing anything else. Try to get in the habit of buying your explosives before doing anything else – you can always sell them back if you need to, but if you go mad building your town and then find you can’t afford your explosives you have a problem!
Once you have done this you will have enough money left over to buy either an upgrade or begin your town. Personally I like to go to the Build Town screen and build my first Saloon – I normally place this near the top of the map because I want to concentrate on mining near the bottom near my Drop Zone. However, I know some people like to leave building their town for a day or two and concentrate on upgrades and mining, which is a perfectly good strategy because once you have a decent chunk of money, it’s quite easy to get your town growing pretty quickly by building several buildings at once. The choice is yours!
First Day Mining
So you’ve spent all your cash on upgrades or building and you have some explosives. It’s time to mine.
For the first few days you will get free gold surveys. That is, there will be a little sign on the map pointing out where there is some gold. The sign should be in the bottom half of the map on day one and it will have a small tutorial overlay advising you to mine around the area that is marked – gold appears in large areas and you should try to uncover the full extent of the area and then mine it until there is no gold left.
Upgrades
There are nine main upgrades available – most go up to level 12, but there are four one-off purchases.
Possibly the most important upgrade to buy early on is the Permit upgrade. More and more powerful explosives will increase the gold you can potentially mine in one day. I also usually try and keep my Refinery and Permit around about the same level – don’t neglect upgrading your refinery!
There are some important one-off upgrades as well. The Mine Carts upgrade makes a big different to your mining, providing a much larger drop zone meaning less driving and more gold retrieved. Unfortunately you will need to buy the Vault upgrade first, but once you have the Vault it’s really useful – try and get in the habit of storing some gold whenever the gold price is low, at some point you will get a Gold Boom and the price will shoot up allowing you to earn more money.
The Survey and Lab upgrades come in useful later. Generally if you have a large patch of gold visible you don’t need the Survey upgrade yet. The Lab is the final one-off upgrade and increases the power of all your explosives, definitely worthwhile.
Next we have the truck upgrades. If you are easily managing to get all your gold ore back to base then you don’t need to upgrade your truck. If you run out of fuel before collecting all the ore, then you lose the ore for good – if this is happening you need to upgrade.
Mining Tips
Getting Ore Out of the Ground
Wherever you have placed explosives will leave a crater and you may or may not see some gold flecks in the crater. If you see gold flecks then it means there is still gold in the ground and you should hit it again at some point.
However, it’s a better idea to mine the areas next to the craters you can see that still have gold. This way you can uncover the full area containing gold and then sweep across it extracting all the gold later.
Early on it’s really important to try and mine close to your drop zone. The best advice is to hit the survey marker with your first explosive (to mark the area for later) while using your remaining explosives to try and discover some gold right next to your drop zone – so just randomly place them around it, hopefully you will uncover a patch nice and close to home.
Collecting your Ore
You will have to try and be efficient with your fuel in the early days, but your truck does have a magnetising effect on the ore – just stop nearby and the ore will be sucked in to your truck, saving valuable fuel.
If you are mining close to your drop zone, any ore that lands on it will be auto collected and also you can carefully park your truck on the edge and suck in all the nearby ore and drop it off all at the same time!
Also note that you don’t need to drop off your final load of ore – if it’s in your truck at the end of the day then it’s yours!
Removing Trees and Bushes
Trees and bushes get in the way – the only way to remove them is by blowing them up! Sometimes you will need to do this to clear space in your town, if you are planning on doing that then it might be worth using the cheapest explosives for the job, saving you some money.
Building Your Town
Undoubtedly the most important aspect of the game. Your score is based on your town’s population, so it’s important to master this.
Town Growth
The growth of your town is driven by three main stats, two of which are directly influenced by the buildings you build. Stats for buildings use a rating system ranging from N/A (doesn’t apply) to Bad, OK, Good, Great and Excellent.
Dev Potential
Dev Potential is directly related to the maximum population density of a square on the map. Think of it as the amount of people this building can support in the surrounding area.
Growth Speed
Growth Speed affects how quickly people move in to the area and develop the houses they are living in.
A good combination of these two stats will keep your town developing.
The other stats are generally more specialised. Down the left hand side are some buttons with the same stats icons and tooltips which you can hover over if you are not sure what each icon means. These buttons switch overlays on and off to give you an overview of how good (or bad) your town is.
Happiness
A lot of things affect the happiness of your town. If it’s too dirty or there is a lot of illness, people will become unhappy. We will go in to this stat in more depth later – one thing to note is that you can hover over any house on the map and see what is affecting their happiness.
Buildings and Categories
Shops
All the buildings in the Shops section earn you money. Most of the shops are optional and are there to help you earn cash from your town. The first three, however, are quite complimentary and help get your town started. The General Store is essential – your townsfolk will get hungry if they don’t have access to one.
You will definitely need to build a Saloon – it’s the first building available and every town in BoomTown! Deluxe starts with one. The Hardware store is good for increasing the rate people move in.
It’s important to note that people will only visit a single shop of a certain type per day (if somebody has already been to a Toy Shop today they won’t go to another one if it’s in the area) – putting down lots of Saloons won’t result in more income, but it will help even out demand. You need a variety of different shops to maximise your income. When shops run out of supplies people start to become unhappy because of the negative shopping experience.
Industry
Most of the buildings in this section serve as supply boosters to your shops and amenities. You don’t need to build these until your population builds to a level where your shops/police/doctors are struggling to keep up with demand.
The Drop Zone and the Airport are special cases. You might need an extra Drop Zone if you are mining an area that is far away from your main Drop Zone – it will help you gather up all the gold. The Airport has a big effect on your Growth Speed.
Amenities
This is where you can build your Water, Power and Cleaning facilities. They are all essential and you have no choice but to build these at some point.
Sub-stations are more useful than you may realise at first. They need to be put down in an area where there is power and they will boost the power in their area (needed for the towers that appear later), the boost in power is exactly the same as having two over-lapping power stations, but more localised and more cost effective. They also serve to extend the range of your power station – if you only need to extend the power supply to a small area, Sub-stations can save you money.
Civic
The final section. There are some essentials in here, Doctors and Sheriffs – which you will definitely need to build at some point if you want to keep the town happy. Some of these only serve to make the area nicer which helps if you have high population density and also helps to attract more people to move in.
Any buildings that have a limited supply can be boosted by building an appropriate building nearby. General Stores and Markets are boosted by Farms, Doctors are boosted by Hospitals and so on.
Maintaining a Healthy, Happy Town
It’s pretty obvious when your townsfolk are unhappy – there will be a red unhappy face icon on the map – you can’t miss it!
There are a few other “nag icons” (as we like to call them) which represent other issues that affect your town’s developments. These are Water, Power and Steel – you need to make sure the people have access to all three of these to grow to their full potential.
The other nag icon only applies to shops and amenities and let’s you know if they are struggling to cope with demand, which will happen as your town develops.
The following factors affect your town’s happiness and are revealed when you hover your mouse over a house:
Hunger
Fairly obvious – every day people get hungry. You will need to provide access to General Stores (and later Markets) to feed the people. As long as you have enough food supply you won’t get any hunger problems. If your people are getting hungry it usually means they either don’t have access to food at all or your stores are running out of supplies. More Grocery stores will help, but eventually you’re going to need to build a farm.
Illness
Illness can spring up almost randomly in highly populated areas, but usually starts in areas that are too dirty, hungry people are also more likely to get ill. Illness also spreads and although it will eventually peter out, you will definitely need to build doctors.
A large outbreak can take days to get on top of – even though your doctors may treat every body, not everybody is going to get better immediately, but trust me you will notice the difference if you have no doctors at all. If you have a particularly bad outbreak then you might even need to build more doctors on a temporary basis (two doctors will literally double the effect they will have on any illnesses).
Dirt
People make a mess, you can’t stop that, but you can help them by providing Refuse Facilities and Sewerage Works. Early on the people will tend to handle keeping their area clean by themselves, but as the population density rises you’ll need to help out. When you start getting towers then you will almost certainly need a Sewerage Works as well as your Refuse Facilities.
Crime
Crime is transient and mostly random in nature. You will get more in your high density areas. Don’t worry too much if a Sheriff is struggling to keep on top of it one day – you can get random spikes in crime – if you look at the Crime overlay you can see if there is a lot of unsolved Crime, a very small amount is probably not a problem immediately, look for Sheriff’s that are struggling day after day before you build more or build a Prison.
Shops
If there are no Shops for these people then you will see a full bar. Other than that the bar will increase for each type of shop they try to visit that cannot serve them.
Area
This might be the least obvious stat, but it’s pretty important later on. Good areas mean people will stay happy even if they are a bit ill or victims of crime. To reduce this bar (and improve the area) look for buildings with a good Happiness stat, such as Parks, Schools and Churches – also every shop you build has a small effect on this.