Economy issues/ too easy

[Fire-Tyler]

Yeah we know the economy definitely needs some fixing and balancing.
But on top of that, the game seems pretty much impossible to lose/go bankrupt.
I feel like I’m playing with unlimited money turned on, there is no difficulty.
I believe this is due to the government grants/subsidies.

[buda atum]

Hope they introduce an option to remove government subsidies. I want hard mode where bankruptcy becomes an option.

[Nahui Ollin]

It was the same in CS1, you had so much money coming in you needed mega projects to get rid of it all. The bonus money from milestones also mean you get more money building than losing, but that isn't the main reason.

The real reason is exports of water and power, and only exports of those seem to make you go in the green because city services import goods from outside the map to make your costs always too high.

Importing cops, power, etc is cheap but actual goods are expensive. This is why the coal power plant barely breaks even for exports, you are paying max price for coal even next to a coal mine.

This is also why geothermal is so OP, no input from off the map.

[Nizaha]

Well once you get your city pop up you'll make so much from taxes that exporting water/power is no longer your largest earner, but exports definitely trivialize early to mid game no question. It does not help that you can absolutely get by without building other services and still have your city grow to increase your tax base without increasing expenses significantly.

[Th3_Jok3r_BR]

my city jas zero subiidies, its very hard to be positive, and almost nothing from export

[icedude94]

Also this:
"However, money doesn’t circulate in a closed system and it doesn’t appear out of nowhere.
Rents, import payments, company profits, and player income are money sinks that remove
money from the economic simulation. To balance the money sinks, the simulation also features money sources in the form of paid rents and company profits and the funds used by the player which are distributed so that half of them go to the citizens based on their education level and half are evenly distributed to the commercial buildings’ wealth. Other money sources are export income from businesses and city services, tourists, and the aforementioned government subsidies for the city and individual citizens."

From the dev blog: https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/features/economy-production

So the main purpose of the government subsidies is not so much to keep you in the green, but for you to spend to pump money into the city's economy.

[hubb]

Strange thing that all youtubers have deeply negative balance ) And keep youtubing. And real pros play and do not share )

[Rock and Roll Klown]

You can't just turn off the government subsidies because the game has been balanced around them. Metaphorically, the economy was designed to run along a rail, so you can't just rip up the tracks and expect the game to function like an off-roading sandbox.

There's no easy fix for this because they didn't actually simulate an economy in the first place. You win simply by growing your population and staying ahead of the loss with the subsidies and Milestone rewards and not adding service expansions/expenses until your population reaches the correct fixed amount. Do that, you win.

Once players work this out, that there's an actual best formula you can use to win every time...there is no game anymore. Then you simply follow the recipe: "Once your population reaches X, build a Y. Then expand it with Z once it hits this number. Set your taxes to N and make sure you zone using this ratio".

That is how shallow and simplistic everything is. But they didn't expect anyone to notice, I guess. Or maybe they THINK they created something very complex and clever, I don't know. Either way, there's no easy way forward.

[bish0p23]

You can't lose or go bankrupt. You just have a negative budget, and the game just keeps going. I don't even keep up with achievements, but there's not even one for going in the red and I was down in the negative millions.

[mikelleh63]

I just went over 100k pop and have $81 million in bank. Making money was hard before, but not anymore.

[Uffty]

Publicado originalmente por bish0p23:

You can't lose or go bankrupt. You just have a negative budget, and the game just keeps going. I don't even keep up with achievements, but there's not even one for going in the red and I was down in the negative millions.

Seems realistic (if you look at the debt of the world leading countries)..

[Funnybear]

Just push tax to max. Game keeps plodding along.

You make enough money to randomly place what ever object you want anywhere on the map. No zone of effect, no economic repercussions, just keep making more money.

They built a simulator, marketed a simulator, promoted a simulator and then . . . . . . removed the simulator.

The performance issues where a smokescreen. Promoted to actually smudge over the literal fact that the game, upon release, isn't the game marketed.

Can anyone say BF2042?

[CarWashMeNot]

I dont know what I am doing wrong, but my balance is ALWAYS negative.. bankrupt all the time, until I level up.

[icedude94]

I think they made this game too realistic and now you have a mixture of players with bad habits from CS:1 combined with people who have never played a city builder before and have no concept of what a finite money supply means.

There's another game that simulates the concepts of households and a finite money supply called Lords and Villeins. It's doing the same thing as this game but on a small medieval village scale.

[Professor H. Farnsworth]

This game is not about winning or losing.. It's about making a functional city.
I do agree tho that the it is currently far too easy to rely on importing goods and services.. It should be a last resort, not a go to method.

But CS1 was far easier.. It was impossible to "lose" even in the beginning. You never had negative income and it only got easier once you got access to your Industries DLC stuff.

So I don't get why people have issues with it now.

The biggest issue right now is not performance or that cost of importing goods/services. It's that Industries don't actually need to buy resources and sell refined resources, commercial zones to buy refined resources and sell goods or residentials to buy any of it to have a functioning city.
It'll function regardless that and.. As soon as something enters the map it's added to the storage/house/building etc.. It doesn't actually need to path there first, it's just visual.

[bish0p23]

Publicado originalmente por Uffty:

Publicado originalmente por bish0p23:

You can't lose or go bankrupt. You just have a negative budget, and the game just keeps going. I don't even keep up with achievements, but there's not even one for going in the red and I was down in the negative millions.

Seems realistic (if you look at the debt of the world leading countries)..

It's still a game and bad decisions in the game should have conquences or else it's a just a city modeler, making any type of simulation otherwise pointless.

The money is irrelevant, as are the npc's, along with the taxes, budget, etc.