Building

This article is an overview of how the player interacts with the game during different stages.

An economic city featuring different types of buildings.

Buildings are player controlled objects in the Civilization stage and Space stage. Strategic placement of buildings can greatly affect the amount of income yielded by spice mining. Buildings can be destroyed by nuclear weapons such as ICBMs or demolished by Military vehicles, and have a health of 800, except for City Halls, which have a health of 3600 (measured in space stage).

Creating Buildings

Buildings are created in the Building Editor from a variety of simple shapes that can be morphed, rotated, stacked, and intersected. Buildings were the only objects in the game that could be asymmetric without hacks or mods until patch 5. The building designs you choose have no affect on game-play; buildings have no functional parts and no statistics which the player can change through the editor. Building design is a purely cosmetic decision.

Price

Buildings are priced differently based on location. In the table below, building prices in civilization stage and space stage are listed. The values for space stage were measured on easy difficulty, and prices may vary on other species' homeworlds, but the price ratio between buildings stays the same.

Building Type	City hall	House	Factory	Entertainment
Civilization Stage	1 per city; never bought	1,600	1,200	800
Space Stage	Comes pre-fabricated in a colony	25,600	19,200	12,800

Building Types

There are 4 building types.

• City hall: The center of the city, and primary target in military and religious takeover. This is the only building cannot be placed.
• Entertainment: These buildings give the city +1 happiness automatically, and an additional +1 happiness for every link between them and Houses or the City Hall. However, each link between Entertainment and Factories means -1 happiness for the city. They are the secondary target in religious takeover.
• Factory: These buildings increase the city's productivity, especially when linked with Houses or the City Hall. However, they each give -1 happiness as well.
• House: These buildings increase population, important in Civilization Stage, since population determines how many vehicles one can control at a time. They also give more happiness and productivity when linked with Entertainment and Factories respectively. In civilization stage, they will also increase vehicle capacity by 3.

Trivia

• Adding the tag "set:_____" to buildings for example "set:bubbles" will cause the whole set of buildings to naturally spawn together. This is why in a Maxis-only game you will often see similar buildings grouped together.
• Windows (If added) will glow at nighttime ingame.