Game economy

[rejected]

Authors of the game - do you play it yourself?
Built a diesel locomotive - got the achievement that I'm one of the 1% of the players who played this far.
Now I have 2 cities and productions. Optimized everything I could. But the balance of finances is constantly decreasing. Is that how it should be? How to play it? What am I doing wrong? Show, explain. I'm just running into a constant negative. There is nowhere to remove trains and production.

ps: modders - please turn off the economy, if the developers lack the competence to either explain how to play, or try to play it themselves and understand that their economy is ♥♥♥♥.

[EMAPhil]

I'm a little confused , you got to diesel and never had to remove a train or industry. I do it all the time.
Train: select then little cog wheel, either send to depot or sell
Industry : Select; destroy.

[rejected]

Thanks for trying to help. My English is bad. I want to say that I have already optimized both trains and production. I no longer see a reason why my expenses are higher than my income.

[Edmera]

Going from a good running economy to a death spiral isnt that difficult in this game. As i cant look into your save its hard to tell what is killing your economy, in general:
- Dont overbuild anything, build as needed. For example houses have a fixed upkeep regardless if its occupied by 1 worker or 20, so try to keep houses pretty much filled.
- Dont upgrade to the latest and greatest trains and wagons just because you can, those higher tier stuff is expensive in both purchase and upkeep.
- Most of your money comes from taxes and a part of that tax income is from happiness, if your citizen arent provided with every need they are less happy which result in less taxes. So providing them with every food and service they require is essential for your tax income. Be aware that as long as you never introduced a food or service to a town it isnt taken into account in the happiness, once you introduce something it becomes a permanent part of the happiness calculation. So before introducing something new plan to make it available for everyone who requires that new thing as soon as possible.

[jhughes]

Originally posted by Edmera:

Going from a good running economy to a death spiral isnt that difficult in this game. As i cant look into your save its hard to tell what is killing your economy, in general:
- Dont overbuild anything, build as needed. For example houses have a fixed upkeep regardless if its occupied by 1 worker or 20, so try to keep houses pretty much filled.
- Dont upgrade to the latest and greatest trains and wagons just because you can, those higher tier stuff is expensive in both purchase and upkeep.
- Most of your money comes from taxes and a part of that tax income is from happiness, if your citizen arent provided with every need they are less happy which result in less taxes. So providing them with every food and service they require is essential for your tax income. Be aware that as long as you never introduced a food or service to a town it isnt taken into account in the happiness, once you introduce something it becomes a permanent part of the happiness calculation. So before introducing something new plan to make it available for everyone who requires that new thing as soon as possible.

Lots of good in that post.

Not making enough money, are you maxing out taxes by having happy people?

Are you using adjacency bonuses for Brickworks, PaperMill, Oil Refinery, and Cheese Factory?

Are you overbuilding.. Lots of stone in extra storage at the warehouse (both small storages and oil tanks are expensive in upkeep costs). I tend to overbuild, it costs me money and upkeep resources in the long run.

[Biff Gimble]

I've had this problem with running a cash deficit. One thing I did was consolidate my routes. If I had 2 smaller trains on a route I combined them into one longer train. Also, my big city is maxed at 10k pops. So, in order to upgrade laborers to craftsmen I need to destroy laborer residences which brings my pop down so I can then do the upgrades. But, that's ok because craftsmen residences hold 35 vs 30 in laborer residences and craftsmen pay more in taxes. From my experience, craftsmen will do laborer jobs, so one goal of the game is upgrading all of your laborers to craftsmen. Just remember, you'll be transitioning out of fish and potatoes and into cattle and cheese.

[sadffwaawwreawer]

I think the economic difficulty is amped up a bit because the length of the game in terms of progress is rather short. Just 2 tiers of citizens at the moment.

[jhughes]

Some things to increase money:

1. Go above 150% happiness and get a 25% tax bonus.
2. Make sure to provide all 4 items that Laborers need and later one all 4 things that craftsmen need. This maximizes people in each residence and costs less in upkeep for a given population and more people means more taxes.

[Holy Cat]

I have the same problem as the creator of the post, except that for me, it starts to go into a negative spin as soon as I have the wheat fields. From there, no way to recover the situation. However I try to keep my inhabitants happy (they are), not to manufacture for nothing (I constantly control the ratio resources/manufacturing), but I am obliged to build and enlarge my road network so as not to becoming blocked due to too many trains on the same track... and that's it, impossible -_-

At this point, I tried (often) to raise their happiness to 150% but what to do apart from building decorations? Because decorations cost more than they bring....

In short, the one and only part where I managed to reach the clay bricks before it degenerated, it is the only one where I kept the trains in base version without any increase (S10). But I doubt that's correct, since I can build the S30 that much... And even then my economy went into negative very quickly as soon as I got the hop fields...

In short, if someone could explain clearly how he does not fall into this infernal spiral, because I really like this game but there it is frustration x10.

[Biff Gimble]

Hop fields, brewing and bars gets very expensive very quickly. Lots of $$$ upkeep for those buildings.

I'm having the issue now that over the course of a minute of gameplay my income can fluctuate from like negative $5k to positive $10k. And it keeps bouncing around in that zone without settling. Happiness is quite high in both of my cities. I posted in a different thread that at one point my economy was running like negative $20k yet my wealth and total wealth levels were gaining incredibly fast. So, that indicated something was badly broken at that point. That was "fixed" apparently by the next time I started the game. So, maybe it's a balancing issue that hasn't been resolved yet?

Still have an issue where a train full of laborers will pull into an industry station where there are tired workers but there is no exchange of fresh for tired and the train immediately drives off.

I haven't played for about a week because it just gets very frustrating. You think you've solved one problem only to have 3 more other problems crop up. And then the random income fluctuation and trying to figure out once and for all how the worker system is supposed to work. Then it becomes hair-pulling-with-exclamations-of-"Stupid game!" time.

[andreykl]

Originally posted by rejected:

Authors of the game - do you play it yourself?
Built a diesel locomotive - got the achievement that I'm one of the 1% of the players who played this far.

Built one myself and found it lacking.

Sure, diesel is faster (not a plus if something that needs workers is too close already) and more powerfull, but it doesn't really compensate the need for a diesel distribution network and for diesel storage maintenance so I only run diesel to and from my storehouse (I can't do a 'that station low on fuel, go there' type of logic here so I don't bother). It would have been another thing if tier 2 wagons had reasonable maintenance price to be able to tap into diesel's horsepower properly and if storage wasn't as expensive. Game's scale isn't particularly conductive to faster trains either, most distances are miniscule and trains spend more time unloading&waiting than traveling thus making most speed improvements redundant.

Basically combined upkeep for newer trains is just too high for them to be trully useful. I suggest avoiding that in general.

[NullPointerException]

Well economy is indeed tough in this game. I'm not watching any tutorials, instead trying to figure out everything myself. I'm quite struggling as well. I had many times situation when having +10000 income, then I built something new like a cheese production (thinking it will boost my income), but instead I was going to minus - 15000 just when i delivered cheese to craftsmans. I dunno what's wrong, but game economy probably works a different way.

From the same reason I had to totally close my steel processing, tools processing and diesel processing, sold all buildings and trains, keeping just stations and lines for future re-expansions. It was 5 minutes to 12 before bankrupt. When I did it my income turned eg. from -20000 to + 10000.

I don't give up, I'm saving game often. When it goes wrong (negative income), I reload older save and try optimize better.

I'm quite missing information about more structure of income and expenses in the game. It would make desicion making and planning easier. I probably don't understand a few mechanics as well.

But at the end it's great and challenging game. I love it so far.

[-VG- Napster]

Originally posted by rejected:

Authors of the game - do you play it yourself?
Built a diesel locomotive - got the achievement that I'm one of the 1% of the players who played this far.
Now I have 2 cities and productions. Optimized everything I could. But the balance of finances is constantly decreasing. Is that how it should be? How to play it? What am I doing wrong? Show, explain. I'm just running into a constant negative. There is nowhere to remove trains and production.

ps: modders - please turn off the economy, if the developers lack the competence to either explain how to play, or try to play it themselves and understand that their economy is ♥♥♥♥.

1) do not overbuild storage at your warehouse its expensive
i have 1 city with 7.5k peoply and only build 1 additional storage for steel (wich iam not producing efficiently currently)
did not build a bar and cheese yet but thas my next task

2) do not upgrade every single train
only upgrade the ones that make sense to upgrade.

3) check your productions like bricks for example you probably only need a few "kiln" and around them place the drying yards
you can fit easily 11drying yards around 1 kiln wich also saves upkeep
this took very long for me to figure this out.
and for some but not all other productions its probably similar.

4) try to get 20 attractiveness in your settlement if you can.
i personaly use a lot of "small park"

[fefnir3284]

I was having issues with income until I got attractiveness to 20 then that +25% tax income BOOMED and I got +25000. I had no issued until getting Craftsmen bar up. that one bar cost 11000 and I was only at 9000, but then I jsut added 10 more worker houses and got +5000 more income, then bar made cratsmen happy and boom double their income.

its easy to screw this game up.