Cities: Skylines Oppression Office Guide (How To Unlock + Uses)

Oppression Office
Cost to Build	₡80,000
Upkeep	₡880/week
Tourism Value	100
Entertainment Value	50
Noise Pollution	10

To unlock the Oppression Office, you need to keep your city’s unemployment rate above 50% for 5 weeks & achieve the “Busy Town” milestone (around 2,500 population).

The Oppression Office is located in tier 4 of the unique buildings category.

Getting the Oppression Office is a challenging task, due to the amount of damage you must cause to your city and economy. You need to de-zone your workplaces (commercial & industrial zones) and discourage citizens from trying to better their lives.

Below are a few key details to keep in mind during this process:

Your unemployment rate must be over 50% for 5 weeks to unlock the Oppression Office
You must achieve the “Busy Town” milestone
You should start by de-zoning your commercial and industrial zones
Also raise taxes on your commercial and industrial zones
Keep an eye on your population
Make sure you have enough resources before attempting to unlock the Oppression Office – that way you can ensure a quick recovery

Oppression Office Specifications

Unlocking the Oppression Office is not an easy task to achieve.

But building this office is a requirement for unlocking the Medical Center monument, which is why many players decide to take on the challenge. The Oppression Office is expensive and contributes slightly to noise pollution, but also provides a small amount of entertainment to your citizens.

Tip: When placing down the Oppression Office, there is a ring around the building to show the affected area. This is slightly deceiving because even buildings outside of the ring can benefit from the entertainment provided.

Checking Unemployment Rates

During the entire process of attempting to unlock the Oppression Office, you will need to stay updated on the employment/unemployment rate of your city.

To do this, simply hit the ESC key or the gear icon in the top right to bring up the main menu. From here, click on “city statistics” and look at the employment rate portion.

An example photo of a statistics page showing employment rate over time

Removing Workplaces

To start unlocking the Oppression Office, the first thing you need to do is start de-zoning commercial and industrial zones.

Depending on the size of your city, you may want to do this in small chunks at a time.

If your city is small enough, you may be able to guess how much you need to de-zone to get 50% unemployment.

Using the statistics page from the previous section, keep de-zoning and checking back to keep track of how much you still have to de-zone or if you are on track to achieving a 50%+ unemployment rate. This is important to mitigate damage to your city & to maintain a healthy population despite the inevitable losses.

A bare city with residential zones intact without commercial and industrial buildings (before-left, after-right)

Note: Keeping an eye on your population is key. Since the unemployment rate is dependent on population numbers, it’s vital to ensure that you retain as much of your population as possible.

If you want to do this faster and without as much precision, you can choose to de-zone all commercial and industrial zones at once.

If your city is large (larger than the required 2,500 population to unlock tier 4 buildings) then you can take the economic hit without losing everything. And smaller cities will require more care.

Other Tactics To Decrease Employment

If you choose the slower method of leaving some of your commercial and industrial zones instead of removing them all at once, then one method you can use is to increase the taxes on these types of zones.

Increasing taxes on workplace zones will make it harder for them to operate, and they will ‘naturally’ adjust their workforce, not requiring you to demolish them.

A sample budget for a city trying to unlock the Oppression Office

Additionally, you can choose to turn off certain service buildings.

Buildings such as schools and other non-essential services can be shut down to decrease employment in your city. This method is best used for smaller cities, as the impact will be low, making it ineffective for a larger, more populated city.

Building The Oppression Office (Uses & Recovery)

Unlocking the Oppression Office can take a massive toll on a city.

Once unlocked, the very first thing you need to do is re-zone all of your commercial and industrial zones immediately.

Demand for these should already be extremely high.

So the recovery process will be hard, but entirely manageable.

Note: If you decided to change the budget or turn off any service buildings, remember to set these back to their previous positions.

You can place the Oppression Office anywhere in your city; it’s up to you to decide where you think it fits best. Typically, unique buildings are best placed in the center of a city – but due to the lower-end entertainment value, this typically will not affect the function of the building.

The Oppression Office does not do anything more for your city other than providing entertainment and asserting dominance over your citizens. But it’s a requirement for the Medical Center monument, which makes it even more valuable to unlock and build.