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This leads to "not enough workers" Not enough resources" etc type warnings. Sure they happen some times naturally, but most the time it's because the people can't get to where they are going before the game removes the car/truck.
A huge tip too is don't pay too much attention to your demand meter. A lot of the time they will ask for comercal industry but you already don't have enough jobs or shoppers to keep your current ones happy. Also remember roads, trains, busses etc cost money so try to avoid too much wasted space early on.
I have been doing a no mod run with just hte four basic starter DLC pack and it's tough. Without Industries, Parks or Universities DLC making money is pretty tough.
Education is the big money maker early game. Outside of the initial power/water/sewage of the start, I build schools only. My first three buildings I plop, are all schools earned from the milestone bonus money, plus a garbage dump as they start needing garbage collection by this time. Then usually police/fire are the next milestone bonus income, as they start complaining by this time.
But don't buy too many plopable buildings early on. A small city doesn't need much services.
For example, cims move in as adults and take about 4-5 years before they die. So you won't need a cemetery for 5 years. You may get one or two complaints of a dead body, just ignore them as they will reoccupy quickly.
Same for Heath care. Cims don't get sick. So you won't need hospitals or clinics for a while. Just make sure residential is about a block away from commerce/industry, so they won't get noise or ground pollution. Make sure to not plop building that have noise pollution in residential. Keep them a block or two, sometimes more depending on how much noise pollution it generates.
Good luck.
This.
The game will keep prodding you to look at new unlocked buildings, but you can wait. Wait until you get a crime complaint to put down a police station. You can even wait to put a fire station until there's a fire, if you pause the game when you see the fire. There's no need to put in a high school for a while. Don't use any parks but the small park. (It's by far the most efficient, just a bit big. But at this stage you have plenty of space, so that's not a problem.) You don't need busses because cims will walk the whole width of an unlock area, and your city's not that big yet. You'll get plenty of demand without going heavy on services at the early stage of the game.
The game wants you to spam all services. Just make sure your roads are green for all services, high density residential can have up to four times the residents living in them, so they need overlapping coverage for pretty much everything.
Just make sure ALL services are mixed in with your city buildings. Do not clump any of them together, not even two of them. And don't put them out on the highway on some offramp by themselves. They offer no happiness bonus to anyone out there and can mess with other coverage stations. For example, I helped on a city with death care issues and he had crematoriums out on the highway so they could cover 4 different districts. It was messing with local district crematorium coverage and cims not getting picked up promptly.
You want to start by moving at the pace of your needs. When you start, place your entrance setup, your initial roads, then your water and power setup (wind turbines, power lines water tower, sewage pipe outlet). At this point, you want to carefully zone about eight 4x4 areas, not all in the same cluster. Forward about 10-20 days, which should get you commercial and industrial demand. At this point, zone both to about 50% demand bar. You want to try to zone about four to eight 4x4 residences every 30 days.
***The reason we do this is a Cim has 6 years to live, then dies. So if you zone all at once, they all move in at once and guess what? Die at once, starving your city of workers and spamming hearses all over your roads at the same time. So, when you zone this way for the first 6 years, you will lose a sick amount of money. I am usually about 2m in the hole, and I do not ever take that achievement killing loan.
1. Place down fire when you get your first one. Place police when you get crime, one medical clinic. Place one elementary and high school for now, and defund them, click individual buildings, not in budget tab, and you want to be right in the yellow area. Don't overeducate all your people. We want a college too, but we don't wanna spend the cash. Place down your trash incinerator ASAP and don't rely on big space killing landfills. Get down a bus ASAP and get that going. Bus Routes help level up areas.
*You may place Low Density Commercial near Residential Zones as a sound buffer against Noise Pollution. Once you understand Pollution, you won't need more than 2-3 medical clinics in your entire city because people will rarely get sick. Use smaller roads in residential zones - they don't need big roads because they don't get freight or customer traffic.
2. Expand some roads and pipes so that you have space. Your big concern is that if/when you run out of money you can still zone, but can't build anything else. Just in case you go broke, you want to retain the ability to zone your way out of it, provided you have enough demand to keep going and have your parks, trashes, water and power covered, you're going to be fine if you run 200k in debt or more.
3. I keep taxes around 7% which keeps lots of people moving in. When you become overdependent on 12% taxes to break even, you've already lost. You want to look at your budgets. Don't build stuff you don't need. It's okay to build out a grid you want to fill in, but fill it in slowly like I said, about 4-8 4x4 residential per month.
When you can get High Density Residential, don't do more than 2-3 per month, and if you do, don't zone low residential at the same time. Same as before, but a LOT more people. When High Density residential levels up you get a huge spike in tenets and you get a huge spike in new births which helps flood your population and contribute to death waves.
My first priority is not profitability, it's reaching "Year 6" and having a good population distribution among all age groups. I define failure as seeing 35%+ Seniors. When I hit my year 6 mark, every month I will have a roughly equal number of births and deaths.
Then you can keep it going - by about year 30, you will have your high density residential situation stable without calamity deathwaves. Don't overthink it, but be aware of it.
Profitability means you need enough services for your Cims to make/keep them happy and healthy while having enough income to pay for your services. A lot of people like to hit that point where they get about 2k-5k/mo and fast forward on 5x speed to get 100k income or something as a safety buffer before going wild.
You will become profitable as your born Cims, not the ones who move in, but the ones they give birth to - grow up, get educated, and get higher category jobs and residences, and land value increases. That is when they will generate the income above the basic services you must have. Don't add all the mass transportation at first, a few buses are fine (so are trams if you know what you're doing).