How do you balance a budget?

[Leaf]

I am currently playing the map Tenasi Rivers and I had a small profitable city, but fires are constantly starting and I had to cut the budget for my fire departments. I had to place two down but might need to close one of them in hopes of smoke detectors.

But I almost have all social services down to the absolute minimal and yet I am still losing money. I just wanted to make small farming communities along the banks of the river(s).

Tips for balancing my budget and spending?

[Blake Walsh]

Balancing the budget is pretty simple really. Just grow your population, be stingy on non-essential services, and don't touch the budget sliders (if you halve the funding, you quarter the effectiveness - it's much more effective to just have half as many service buildings, or turn half of them off). The essential services are electricity, water, sewage, garbage and corpse collection. You can use the cheap option for garbage and corpse collection and just turn off the landfill/cemetery when it fills up. Non essential services are basically everything else. On hard mode, I delay building schools and high schools until there are enough eligible cims to fill it to capacity. I delay building a bus depot until I'm confident the bus service can make a net profit, I'm really stingy with freight stations (rail/cargo) because they are really expensive, and the same for advanced roads - you can go far with normal roads. As for fire and police, you need to build one of each, but you can get away without building any more for quite a long time, as their effective coverage is much larger than the 'green road' coverage, provided that the fire trucks can actually reach the fire, so basically in a city with sparse traffic a fire station can cover a huge area, the same is true of every other vehicle based service - don't worry about the 'green roads' coverage, as long as the vehicles can reach where they need to, and the building doesn't run out of vehicles to dispatch, service is provided (cims don't get happiness outside the green road coverage, but they still get their fires put out and corpses collected).
Also fires do no real harm as bulldozing is free for you, there's really no harm at all in just letting the odd building burn down if applying sufficient fire coverage is too expensive.

Also another tip, is to only use green power, the upfront cost is higher but the running costs are lower, so you have a healthier budget surplus in the long run.

I make a really good profit on hard mod difficulty (typically 0.5-1.0 profit per cim), so the "Grow your population, be stingy on services" approach is really strong.

[Freedom]

1. Early policy enactment is a nub move, do not be a nub. The only exception I have to that rule is, the business policies, they are very helpful.

2. These are digital Cims, there is 0 effect having your tax at 12% vs 7%-11%. At least none that showed up to me. Do not treat your digital cims like real people. Real people would love to have such low taxes.

[Maestro]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418195753