Last 7 Minutes: Strategy — the run that ended with a full warehouse

The round in which I did the most work ended with almost everything still on the shelf: 100 MW of dispatchable power, three spare power modules, four rescue drones, three repair crews, two traffic-control orders. Only two lines moved: backup compute fell from 40% to 17% and the emergency budget from ¥100m to ¥28m. The stock I actually own — modules, drones, crews, my own power — was never touched.

The city's transport metric stood at 2.95 out of 100. Score 6669, grade C, and a profile label the game picked for me: Risk aggressor.

That is the whole trick of this dispatch sim. The resources you are handed are not the thing you are being judged on. The thing you are being judged on is whether you spent your own stock or your neighbour's capacity.

The round

Seven minutes, eight facilities with plate numbers — First Central Hospital H01, Metro Interchange T02, North Waterworks W03, South Data Center D04, International Airport A05, Fire & Rescue F06, East Residential R07, West Energy Station E08. A fictional city with real coordinates printed in the panel: 30.67° N / 104.06° E.

Ten crises come to your desk per round. The first one is always the same and lands on the fourth second: the hospital UPS is offline, intensive care loses power in 62 seconds. The other nine are drawn from a shuffled pool of 23 and each start time is jittered by up to six seconds, so the order changes between rounds and the opening never does.

I ran three rounds in a row with three dumb policies, to see which one the game punishes.

Round one: touch nothing. 1691 points, grade F, profile Silent observer. Medical and traffic hit zero, 128 casualties, and public order finished at 87 — the calmest number in a dead city.

Round two: answer every crisis with the first affordable option, without choosing. 8456 points, grade A, ten resolved, nobody died, one chain line in the log. Power fell from 100 to 62 MW, backup compute from 40% to 16%, the emergency budget from 100 to 10 million, and one of three spare modules burned.

Round three: answer every crisis with the option that borrows. "Take 35 MW from the waterworks", "Cut the civilian network, hold the emergency channel", "Pull aviation reserve from the airport", "Move the firefighting water reserve into the city grid". Fourteen resolved, zero expired, zero casualties, the chain counter jammed at the engine's ceiling of four, and 6669 points.

Round three did more work than round two and finished two grades lower. It also kept every resource I own.

Transport is what it paid with: 2.95 out of 100. Twice in the log the same line appeared — "Chain reaction: Water tanker convoy blocks the main roads". Every time I rescued water by taking it from a neighbour, the engine waited 32 seconds and put the tankers on the main roads, and the next link in that chain is written into the same option: "Gridlock delays ambulances, hospital transfer efficiency drops". The chain counter stops at four spawned links per round, but it does not stop the log: 47 lines that round, 17 of them starting with "Chain reaction".

Where the meter actually moves

The engine spends the city second by second. Power leaks 0.018 MW per second at the start of a round and up to 0.043 near the end — the decay term contains elapsed/420, so the grid falls apart faster the longer you keep it alive. Public order leaks a flat 0.006 per second; that is why my silent round still had order left. Every crisis sitting unresolved drags its own facility metric by 0.023 times its severity per second.

Then the part nobody shows you on screen. Below 45, a metric starts feeding on its neighbours: power under 45 pulls medicine, water and comms down together; comms under 45 pulls transport; transport under 45 pulls medicine; water under 45 pulls human safety. There is no line drawn at 45 in the interface. You cross it and notice only that an unrelated bar started falling.

The final number is a weighted sum of the seven metrics — safety 27%, medical 19%, power 14%, water 11%, transport and comms 10% each, order 9% — multiplied by 100, minus 2 points per casualty and 0.6 points per million yuan of damage, clamped between 0 and 10000. A life costs three times what a million costs.

Start the round and plug in the opening metrics: safety 97, order 90, comms 88, medical 86, water 85, transport 82, power 76. You get 8762. Grade A+ needs 9000. The city is handed to you already degraded — its power grid starts at 76 — and the top grade is out of reach before you have made one decision.

The ledger keeps names

One branch I never reached in three rounds, and it is worth knowing it exists. If the east residential tower fire expires unresolved, its damage multiplies by 1.65 when the low-pressure flag is set or water sits under 45, and by a further 1.2 when the roads are blocked. The enlarged loss is not booked to the fire. The engine walks back through your decisions, finds the one that dropped the water pressure, and appends a line to that decision's consequences: "Low pressure lets the eastern fire grow."

The round is graded causally, not chronologically. A move from three minutes ago can be twice as expensive as it looked, and the log will say so later, against your name.

Six profiles wait at the finish: Balanced dispatcher, Risk aggressor, System stabiliser, Life first, High-cost rescuer, Silent observer. Which one you get depends on what you paid with, not on how much you saved.

Play it free in the browser, no install and no stake: Last 7 Minutes: Strategy.

Since round three I read a crisis differently. Before I take 35 MW from the waterworks, I look at what the borrow line promises in its own text — usually thirty-odd seconds later, somewhere else — and I keep the two traffic-control orders for the roads rather than dying with them unspent. Two other city games in the catalog run without that arithmetic: SimCity 3D: Build Your City grows zones and power lines with no clock on the desk, and Datacenter Survival shrinks the whole problem into one machine hall of supply chain, heat and PUE.