Income Fluctuations

[Stringer Bell]

Has anyone encountered this problem where the income of your city fluctuates ALL THE TIME? I am playing a city of about 200K citizens and my weekly income is constantly fluctuating between -25K to +45K (so I have still managed to accumulate a few million dollars). I wonder what the reason behind this is and how I can fix it. I haven't really made any adjustments to the default settings for the budget / tax rates / policies.

[Mag]

My guess is cycles... Industry closes down, workday is over, and you don't earn from export.
Trains and busses gets more expensive as fewer people, use them at certain times.
And sometimes during night hours your leisure might pick up and move you into the positive from a former negative.
There are various reasons, and they might fluctuate a little i imagine because of transport times of your workers, trucks and whatnot :)

[barrygreybeard]

Thats the feature of after dark, income is not constant throughout the day. You can monitor whats happening in your income tab. There's been a bit of discussion about this and my observations are that its to do with commercial income, very high in the morning and can drop by 30-40% in the evening, on average. This can be offset by the new leisure/tourist specialisations. Every city is unique to a certain degree but as said, you can monitor it yourself for a day or two.

I haven't found that industrial income varies a great deal though.

[Mag]

Originally posted by barrygreybeard:

Thats the feature of after dark, income is not constant throughout the day. You can monitor whats happening in your income tab. There's been a bit of discussion about this and my observations are that its to do with commercial income, very high in the morning and can drop by 30-40% in the evening, on average. This can be offset by the new leisure/tourist specialisations. Every city is unique to a certain degree but as said, you can monitor it yourself for a day or two.

I haven't found that industrial income varies a great deal though.

Nice to know. I did not monitor, and only guessed. Seem you have done the legwork :)

[barrygreybeard]

there was a few of us in another thread and we all came to the same conclusion :) I don't think anyone found out if using the new specialisations for commercial if that in fact does even out the income though...

[Stringer Bell]

Thank you for the insight!

I will keep an eye on the budget, it never occurs to me it's a day-night cycle because I was relying on the "date" you see in the lower-left corner of the screen.

barrygreybeard, do you happen to know if office has the same problem with commercial, i.e. high income during the day, low income during the night? I'm trying to figure out what zones I should put more if I want to balance out the fluctuations.

Thank you!

[barrygreybeard]

I think office is treated as a type of industry so it doesn't fluctuate that much.