How does the gameplay of Imagine Earth work?
Put simply, you start to populate your virgin planet and have to deal with the needs of your people. For that reason it soon gets tricky: Which buildings, capacity expansions, efficiency advancement or environmental research will be the best choice for your growing civilization is always the burning question …

It starts with the construction of a City Center…

The first problem is to find a good building place by looking at the surrounding fields like desert, farmland, mountains. Powerplants, farms and factories can only be built next to urban environments. The different color-markings on the ground and the efficiency bar at the building show its productivity for each place. On fertile ground for example, a farm produces nearly twice as much!

Producing resources…

The people in your city pay taxes – the money for new investments. For this they must be adequately supplied with electricity, food and goods. These four resources form a closed circuit with different priorities:

Ground pollution

is caused by each type of building in different strength and spreads to the surrounding fields.

• It damages buildings and therefore causes repair costs,
• reduces the production of a building especially of farms.
• Forests will reduce ground pollution, but are also degenerated if it’s too high.
• From 50% upwards polluted areas cannot be used as building place. Cleaning of such fields with the Clean Tool is expensive!

Exploding plants cause catastrophic environmental pollution. You can prevent this by pulling buildings down when there is no time left to repair them. Industrial ruins still emerge pollution.

Air pollution

is a global degree of pollution in the atmosphere. The output of all buildings in industrial greenhouse gases adds up to an existentially threat to your planet.

• It melts the polar ice and rises sea levels. This threatens buildings near the coast.
• It increases the occurrence of hazardous natural disasters that harm your civilization.
• A rich and vibrant flora helps against this, so pay attention to your forest – reforestation is expensive.
• At a certain stage you’ll see the global warming thermometer showing a countdown to the total collaps of climate. This is your last chance for drastic changes or your planet will be doomed.

At a lack of electricity the productivity of all buildings will go down and your people will pay less taxes – energy production is as crucial question in Imagine Earth as well as in reality. A lack of food is reducing the population in your cities and without enough goods it wont rise, even if there are free flats and all other conditions given.