This one really is pretty simple, and I owe it to @Nightshade, who says she actually got it off of this site though can't exactly remember the post or topic in question; just saved it for a rainy day and that rainy day is now, or something...
Should you care to go there now, just click and play. Otherwise, read on for more details and banter and blabber and ranting and raving and running my mouth because I have room to run it and... I think you get the point.
Anyway, if you're still with me, and if you plan on clicking above linkage, your goal is to build a city. The bigger and better your city, the more citizens you'll attract. the catch here is that you don't obtain any benefit from citizens until you restart, so restarting is required in order to truly progress through the game. The beauty, however, is that there's no one size fits all solution. Provided you can start new cities, you don't have to worry about how many citizens you actually have. You can start with 1, 10 or 100 if you prefer, but only when you start will you see them working for you at all.
Every citizen gives you a 2 percent bonus to whatever profit you make, meaning that the more citizens you have the higher the multiplyer per citizen. Twenty citizens collectively give you an extra $1.2 per citizen. There are also upgrades you can purchase either through the cash you are making or through a separate currency system you can also earn called coins. Many of these upgrades will increase citizen effectiveness allowing you to increase your earnings.
But what are coins, you ask? Coins are a separate currency to add a little more strategy to the game which allow you to purchase certain upgrades. You obtain coins by building; one building or structure of any kind is equall to one coin. If you have 1000 roads you earn 1000 coins you can then turn around and spend on upgrades or save for another time.
This is a good little time killer if that's what you're in the mood for; you can walk away from it whenever you like and it'll actually just keep going and going for you until you're ready to return to it again. You can also use the export option if you like so you can keep your progress and play it on another PC or device of your choosing. All you need do is copy the code in the read-only edit field under the settings option called export, then paste it into the edit field under import on your target device. I've not tried this on any iOS or Android devices so cannot give any honest answer on how it works, but as it's rather simplistic in appearance and works nicely with screen readers in general I'd say the results should be rather good; I'll update this section if and when I can confirm that for sure. Nuff said? Maybe? Go ahead and start your city!