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Home > Housing > Workers – Unqualified, Qualified, Executives, and Elites

Workers – Unqualified, Qualified, Executives, and Elites

In Cities XL, there are 4 types of workers that correspond to 4 different types of wealth.housing

The types of workers/residents in the game are as follows:

  • Unqualified Workers
  • Qualified Workers
  • Executives
  • Elites

As you might guess, the level of wealth also determines what types of jobs they’re willing to work, and what level of services they expect.

In Cities XL, you’ll need just about all types of workers in some form or another as your city grows. You may be able to focus more on one type, but you’ll almost certainly need them all.

At one end of the spectrum, you have Unqualified Workers. They work in just about all the city services, most of the commercial, and the dirtier industries. They don’t pay as much in taxes, but on the plus side, they’re more easily satisfied by city services. Really, it’s fairly easy to keep them happy. Try to keep them away from pollution and provide the basic essentials, and they’ll usually be content.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Elites. There aren’t as many jobs that hire elites (and those that do generally don’t hire very many at a time). They pay the most in taxes, but they have pretty hefty expectations of your city. Expect to build many services to keep them content. Keep them away from road noise, pollution, and make sure they’re in nice areas of town. It might be a good idea to locate them near their workplace as well.

Qualified Workers and Exectuives fall in between. They pay a medium amount of taxes, and have medium expectations.

A few things in particular to keep in mind with residential:

  • Environment- Cloudy skies are one thing. Smokey skies are another. Nobody likes pollution, so try to keep residential away. Building on this, nobody likes noise pollution either. It’s tough to sleep when your house is on the side of a busy freeway. Nearby parks on the other hand are a boon for everyone.
  • Travel time – Driving across the city to get to work is never fun, but sometimes it’s a must. When you can, try to keep people fairly close to work. If they must travel, make sure your roads aren’t too packed. Building efficient roadways are very important. Whether you need to upgrade or add roads, make sure everyone’s able to get to work quickly and on time.
  • Employment – This is always a balancing act. You want unemployment to stay as close to 0 or 1% as possible. On one hand, without enough workers your businesses aren’t productive and may go bankrupt. On the other hand, too many workers leads to lower satisfaction, and you’ll have empty homes taking up space.
  • Services – Whether it’s schools, leisure, or police stations, everyone wants a degree of health, education, entertainment, and safety. Lower-grade workers tend to need less, whereas higher-grade workers expect more.
  • Taxes – The standard tax rate will last you quite a while. If you’re running short on funds, you can fortunately jack up the tax rate in many cases – some of the population will leave, but it’ll bring you some fast temporary income. Lowering the tax rate can bring more people to your city though. Be careful when jacking up the tax rate – if you go overboard and too many people leave, some of your businesses may not have enough workers which could cause them to shut down. If it’s important services that shut down, then satisfaction may drop further leading to even more people leaving. It’s a vicious circle, so be gradual when adjusting the tax rate.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can’t always please everyone, and you shouldn’t always try to. For example, if you’ve just started building housing for Elites, your services probably won’t be enough to keep them happy. That doesn’t mean that you should instantly double the services in your city to satisfy them – it’s not worth spending twice as much money to satisfy 2% of your population.

Above all, remember to make changes in your city gradually. Adding too many services to please your citizens might bankrupt you. Adding a new development area to your city can cause traffic jams which stop people from getting to work. Make changes slowly, take a look at the effect that they’ve had, then make more changes slowly.