There was a joy, even in the original, to watching your city tick over. If you aim for high wealth and build Elite MegaTowers, your city will look like concept art for an as yet unbuilt smart city. If you aim for low and mid-wealth MegaTowers, your city will be marked by Blade Runner-esque black buildings and glowing neon. It also allows you to build cities which look radically different than before, or quickly give your existing successful cities a new look. That allows you to reach higher populations than in the base game, without using any more space. You build them chunk by chunk, plopping down mall levels atop office levels atop mile high park levels. Lastly, there’s the MegaTowers, Ballardian skyscrapers designed to contain everything a sim might need in a single vast, multi-tiered structure. It’s a way of re-decorating your city with a futuristic sheen.
The effect is that a successful OmegaHQ will convert other industrial buildings to Omega franchises, and when you eventually start producing drones, residential and commercial buildings as well. The OmegaHQ is a new type of factory, which uses oil and ore to produce a mysterious new substance called “Omega”, which everyone in your city loves. The Academy also generates ControlNet, a new resource which is quantum (i.e., it doesn’t have to simulate its flow along roads), created by attracting different classes of workers to the Academy, and which is used to power most of the new futuristic buildings.
The Academy is a research center for unlocking new technologies, like wave generators, air scrubbers and those skyways. These futuristic additions are introduced via three new specialisations.