Income with Larger Cities

[hashimoto4life]

I have a decently sized city (200K population) which I have been building for quite a while. I always had a nice healthy income stream and currently have a bank balance of 15M.

As the city grew, income starts to fall and now I am making a loss of -40K. Looking at the economy tab I can see that the majority of my expenses is due to public transportation. My train system is costing me -80K with an income of 300. That is insane!

Should I destroy all my trains? I would hate to start over.

[MarkJohnson]

You are fine. The game auto adjusts a lot of income.

Maybe check happiness of your cims and check for noise pollution. If you have any in residential, remove the noisy buildings outside of the residential area.

Check your budgets, taxes, and policies. Adjusting those can cause imbalance as well.

Or just post a saved game of your city and we can poke around and see what issues are happening. 200k, is usually when things start getting overloaded and likely many different issues at once.

[Mr. Monday]

Originally posted by hashimoto4life:

I have a decently sized city (200K population) which I have been building for quite a while. I always had a nice healthy income stream and currently have a bank balance of 15M.

As the city grew, income starts to fall and now I am making a loss of -40K. Looking at the economy tab I can see that the majority of my expenses is due to public transportation. My train system is costing me -80K with an income of 300. That is insane!

Should I destroy all my trains? I would hate to start over.

If you have any stadiums make sure you're not using the free public transport policy.

[cmerritt1351]

👍👍 great info

[Nite69]

If you have good fire coverage protection you can also disable the Smoke Detector Policy to save money

[mbutton15]

As MarkJohnson mentions, this game adjusts income as you go !!

I've never had a 200K population city, but from my experience (population around 40k to 90k) I found that once capital reached around 15million then income was fairly static around 3k-4k. If I wanted to increase income I found the best way was to dump out loads of cash from the game. I would usually dump around 3-4million at a time and income would magically double, at times even treble.

I built a park in the asset editor that cost me 500,000 every time I built one. So I would build 5 or 6 on a completely unconnected piece of road, which would instantly dump out 2.5-3million. Then when I next wanted to dump some cash I'd delete the parks and instantly rebuild them.

[Justa Guy]

One thing to consider is a lot of the game has been changed as new DLC came out, if you don't have them you will struggle to balance your city. Some things like Metro lines have had their maintenance cost increased dramatically, I think it's now 5x more expensive to run track underground.

So if you don't have Park life, to do the cheaty park paths to make money. Or have the industries DLC and so on you might really struggle with just base game taxes. It's not impossible to balance but you might have to do more cost saving measures than you'd like.

Only keep the most effective forms of public transit, like Monorails and ditch busses, ferries, blimps etc for costing too much. Other such cut backs will be made in the name of saving a buck... or you can just get mods to fix it for you.

[mbutton15]

Originally posted by Justa Guy:

One thing to consider is a lot of the game has been changed as new DLC came out, if you don't have them you will struggle to balance your city. Some things like Metro lines have had their maintenance cost increased dramatically, I think it's now 5x more expensive to run track underground.

I've only recently come back to this game and started playing one of my earliest saves. I don't own any DLC, other than Mass Transit, and am playing without any workshop either.

One thing I recently did was demolish a sizeable area of the city residential, commercial and office. Whilst there was an initial drop in income, to the point that I was losing money, it did recover back to profit. I think that demonstrates the game adjusts income as it goes. It now sits above 3k profit. I'm also using 10% tax on residential and 12% tax on everything else.

So I'm pretty much running the base game in profit, with no DLC and also running a large metro system which dates back to before the metro mechanic upgrade. And thanks, I wasn't aware that they increased the maintenance cost. I assume the new cost applies to old track.

[Termite]

Try this mod:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1393820309&searchtext=Ticket

You can charge what you want for public transport same as a private company can in real life in order to make a profit.

[Spector]

The game lowers your tax income from RCI as your city grows. The developers implemented that system but never disclosed that information to the players.

You can see it in action as my 1,000,000+ city goes from a minimal income to over $3,000,000 per week depending on the amount I have in the bank.

https://youtu.be/dMdAM2eqroA

[macluk]

yeah... that's the unfortunate game mechanics - the more you have in your bank, the less you earn. Absolutely silly and with no good reason behind it.
As mentioned before - get Ticket price customizer.
If you wanted to watch city income expenses mechanics - it's a shame but it's not the game for us (as i wanted it too).

[Justa Guy]

Originally posted by mbutton15:

So I'm pretty much running the base game in profit, with no DLC and also running a large metro system which dates back to before the metro mechanic upgrade. And thanks, I wasn't aware that they increased the maintenance cost. I assume the new cost applies to old track.

From what I Understand the old track gets the new prices, but the old Metro cars remain. They went from a 180 capacity down to 150 which can pretty drastically hurt your ability to stay in the black as you need more metro cars to cover the same number of passengers.


I am not saying Metro alone can bankrupt your city, it's just one of the changes I noticed the most and might just do that if your metro set up is big enough and possibly have it set to free public transit.

[chic.aeon]

There are plenty of places that you can lower you budget without getting an outcry. I did that at one point when working to get monuments and need MONEY!!! So aside from water, power and garbage (depending of course on how well that was covered -- those could come down too maybe) other items can often have cutbacks. Just save your game of course before experimenting. I have only had about 8M in the city coffers as backup but aside from the money needed for monuments, I not understanding why that matters so much.
I

I DO heartily agree that having more tax money than expenditures is a GOOD THING. NO argument there. Good luck.