Green Cities comes with many new city service buildings and for the first time alternative buildings to existing ones, so that for example not all schools in the city need to look exactly the same. The most important additions are new electricity and water buildings, that allow for more options on how to build an eco-friendly city. Producing electricity and getting rid of waste water pollute the ground and water, making the city less appealing to citizens and even causing low health in extreme cases. Aside from industrial zone, these are the main sources for ground pollution in any city.Want to produce electricity without pollution? Why not go for the Geothermal Powerplant, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Plant or Solar Updraft Tower? Electricity production is one of the main causes of ground pollution in any city. Producing electricity with coal or oil also requires production or purchase of resources, and creates more traffic as the resources need to be transported to the power plants. This where the new power plants come in. In Green Cities several new ways of producing electricity become available. The least powerful one is the Geothermal Power Plant. It uses the warmth stored in the earth itself to create electricity. It is roughly the same efficiency as the Oil Power Plant, giving you a good option for green energy.The next one to unlock is the Solar Updraft Tower, which in cost and production is between the Nuclear Power Plant and Solar Power Plant. The final one is the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Plant. It is little more efficient than the Solar Power Plant and does not reduce production during the night. The technology behind all of these power plants is already in existence and they offer interesting ways of handling power production.The other basic need besides electricity is water. Waste water is bad for drinking and can even pollute the ground next to a body of polluted water. For better control over polluted water, Green Cities introduces the Eco Water Outlet and Eco Water Treatment Plant. The outlet unlocks the same time as a regular waste water outlet. The eco version is more expensive, but reduces the amount of pollution in the water significantly. The capacity of the eco outlet is less than a regular one, so you need two per one water pump.The Eco Water Treatment Plant is a very powerful water treatment plant that allows you to reduce water pollution of wastewater let out. It does not completely remove pollution, as that would be just plain boring, but makes it much more manageable, helping to make the city green. In real life water is treated before used as drinking water, and thus the waste water let out is not absolutely pure but suited to the environment. Because the game system handles natural water as pure, drinkable water with no need for anything more than a moderately priced pump to get it the the citizens, to get the difficulty level to rise and have any challenge to providing clean water, the water let out needs to have some pollution in it.For handling garbage, two new buildings are available: Recycling Center and Floating Garbage Collector. The latter reduces water pollution and is a building that can be placed on water. Basically, if the eco water facilities still leave you with too much pollution in the water, you can place a Garbage Collector on the area where most of the polluted water is. It will cleanse water flowing through it. The Recycling Center is an alternative to the Landfill Site. It accepts garbage, but instead of just storing it, it generates goods from the garbage. Not all of garbage is turned into goods, and the process is slow.The Recycling Center lessens the amount of garbage that pollutes the ground and creates valuable goods that can be transported to Commercial buildings and sold, generating tax income.In the healthcare category there are new buildings that function much like the Sauna in Snowfall. They provide a small boost in health around them and are a popular location for citizens to travel to. Green Cities has three of these buildings: the Yoga Garden, Community Pool and Sports Hall & Gymnasium. You can use these as boosters for areas where only a little healthcare is needed, instead of building a new Clinic or a Hospital, that would have much higher building and upkeep cost.In education, Green Cities is all about variety. All larger cities need several schools, and now with new education variants, you can show what your city is all about, or just have some visually different areas. The cozy and small Community School is perfect for detached house areas, while the Institute of Creative Arts and Modern Technology Institute are more suited for inner city areas. All serve the same educational functions as base game schools, but with a new, more technology and eco-oriented visuals. The new schools are a bit more expensive than the old ones, but despite the lower student capacity, their area of effect is larger so they can gather students from a very large area.The main addition to public transport is the Bio-Fuel Bus Depot. It is an alternative to the regular Bus Depot and sends out more environmentally friendly vehicles. The bio-fuel buses are less noisy than regular buses. The bio-fuel buses model bio-diesel powered vehicles, currently in use in some countries, as they are a growing market. In the future most vehicles might switch to ethanol or electricity, but just to keep things varied (and as we are bad at predicting the future), we wanted other fuel types in the game than just gasoline and electricity.You can also keep the old depot and just add a Bio-Fuel Depot to have some of the buses be more eco-friendly. The Deport work automatically and the amount of vehicles they can house and maintain is depended on the budget for the transport type. The larger the budget, the more buses Depots can send out. The vehicles are assigned to lines automatically and return to Depots when they need service. Usually having more than one Depot is not needed, but when you have a very large city you might want to consider placing several Depot to serve the different parts of the city, so vehicles don’t need to make long trips to get to the lines. This is important if you use different amount of buses during the day and night.While some of the new service buildings are mainly visual, we have put much effort into making them meaningful. They fit better in a green city than the base game buildings, and can help make different city areas feel more unique. For the basic needs, electricity, water and garbage, the new choices offer more control over what kind of a city you want to build. It’s your city, after all.