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Okay, so you're having gameplay trouble? Read on.

Starting out, it's good to disable the computer opponent, so that you can learn the build order, and how to get around to do stuff in the game. This will disable some missions, like the "get rid of troublesome tenant at blablabla estate". (That can be resolved by having a foreman take over his house, BUT! That will lead to enemy foremen constantly bugging you trying to return the favour.)

Now, to start out, you just build the wood yard, as close as possible to your HQ. It can be good to add a little extra space inside the fences to put a dog house there later. (Dogs chase away enemy foremen trying to take over your factory). You will have two foremen, each with 3 workers assigned to him. To assign the two additional workers you have, select one of the foremen, and add the workers with no "[ ]" on them, then select the "reunite team" button.

When the wood yard is completed, build one house of each kind available to you, but leave space for the cement yard on that same estate. (This will save you time when the three residents on that estate starts complaining about noise; you just move the team in one factory to the other factory, which leads to a short, but adequate pause in the noise).

Rent the houses to the "wife abuser" couples (these pay less, but make kids faster). Have one couple producing lvl 1 tenants, and the other two produce workers. If you feel it's taking too long, upgrade their bedrooms.

When your cement yard is complete, immediately buy another estate (preferrably close to your starting one), and build one of each new house. Don't bother with giving them any space, because you'll sell them as soon as you have your brick yard. When the brick yard is available, build it on the same estate, and sell the lvl 2 houses. You only got the brick yard to gain access to building a school anyway.

When you have the school (on that same estate), use ALL of the remaining space there to build a final lvl 1 house. That should make for a pretty huge garden for that house. Fully upgrade the bedroom, and have that lvl 1 couple start producing lvl 2 tenants. You'll need a lot of them. If you lack funds, then build lvl 2 houses and sell them right away. They'll get blown up anyway, so you don't loose estate space.

When you have messed around a little in the game (built a gadget factory, and got your residents set up with trees and other stuff they might demand), buy a large piece of land. This will be your milk cow for the rest of the game. Set it up as follows:

One BIG lvl 2 house in the middle, with TWO of the smaller lvl 2 houses on each side. In the middle one, place a "hippie" couple. In all of the other four, place punks. Give the hippies a hedge (they'll demand one pretty fast if you don't) and the punks their white picket fences. Have the hippies make police cadets, or have them make lvl 3 tenants for later use. The punks should ALL be set to pay rent.

This will very soon lead to the punks growing angry with the hippies hedge. They'll demand drastically lowered rates, or else they'll give you 100 black marks (bad). However, solving this situation will reward you with 20 white marks (good), and multiply that with four punk couples, that's 80 white marks... each month or so! 100 white marks can be cashed in for 10 000$.

So now, all you have to do is: When the punks complain, go to their house (you can do that from the complaint letter) and switch them to making a kid instead of paying rent. They'll stop complaining, so now you can switch them right back to paying rent, which will lead to another complaint next month. Rinse and repeat with all of them, and you'll be set with money for the rest of the game. Black marks aren't a problem either, since white marks will cancel them.

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That's how far I've gotten yet. A few tips:
- Police cadets can be set to patrol enemy territory. Right outside an enemy pawn shop, for instance. (Solves the enemy thief mission).
- Some gadgets in the gadget factory requires you to upgrade your wood/cement/brick/etc yards to factories.
- Some gadgets can be collected by the tenants themselves (double glasses, alarms, etc) which saves time for your delivery guy, of which you'll only ever have ONE.
- You can set up more than one hippie/punk estates if you like to keep busy, and could use a lot of cash
- Don't buy ANYTHING to tenants unless they require it in written form. I once bought a garden gnome to one of four tenants in a lvl 4 tenant estate, and INSTANTLY got four complaints. Three couples wondered why their neighbour had gotten something THEY didn't get, and the last one wanted that ugly gnome removed...
- When the park mission arrives, make SURE you manufacture the pond and the trees right away, but before placing them, make SURE to put a subway entrance right on the entrance to the park FIRST. This will save a lot of time for the delivery dude.
- Make sure to have around 4-6 of each lvl tenant in your HQ at all times. Not more than that, since it will lead to overcrowding missions, but preferrably not less, because tenants die from time to time, and if you can't refill their houses, they'll get infested.
- Repair guys will NOT repair non-residental buildings when set to auto-repair. You have to turn it off, and manually order them to the building that needs repair.
- Gangsters gain new weapons from killing stuff. Build a hospital to heal them up faster, and watch over them. If they kill a building, make sure to get them out of there before the building blows up, else they die in the explosion.

Hope I helped

I use DosBox 0.72 to run Constructor, turn off "Display All Video" option and the game works pretty good.
However, some times Constructor crashes and shows this annoying message:

Error = Unable to find movie file

I know that the reason is some files in FLIC folder are missing. I've read this topic, and found some links to download them but unluckily, links were dead.
Please show me how to find those files on the Internet.

Thank you.

[Luchsen]

Show how to find files on the internet?

Google?

Originally Posted by Luchsen

Show how to find files on the internet?

Google?

Yes. Having those files in FLIC folder, the error will go. :-)

[ashdevils]

finally there is a solution for the missing flics file...
refer to page 39...
thanks...

Originally Posted by DigitalBath

A few hours ago i found the solution in a brazilian forum
[...]
Unzip them and then add them to the FLICS file in the Constructor File. Works Perfectly.

Hope it helps

THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Now I can enjoy this game 100% fully.
It was annoying when it crashed - "Did I win...? Did I lose?!"

Now it works perfectly!

So I have on my hard drive (found via torrents) an MSI version of the full game released by Classic Gaming. If interested I can put it on a rapid share or something. [BEEEP]@gmail.com

[The Fifth Horseman]

"Classic Gaming" is nothing but one big scam. I wouldn't trust ANY software from them.

I'm not one to disagree, from what I can tell, all it really does is install dosbox, and the game, then starts the game with a dosbox script. The one bonus is it DOES have all the animations

[The Fifth Horseman]

If you were registered on the forum, you'd know we have a copy of Constructor in the "ISO Cellar"...