Have yet to figure out how to make money

[Trun]

Like, everything is far too expensive, and taxes are NOT enough. Economy just broken?

[Stealthy]

No it's not broken. You just don't know how to.

Need more information from you before can help, but in general, keep costs at minimum, don't place too many services and keep adding low density housing and industrial. Unlock tourism buildings as soon as its possible as that will start injecting lot of money into your city. I've made at best months over 8 million.

[danmak27]

Ookaay. Have you ever played a game like this before?
That was to the op.

[c0hKaine]

im making 300k/h. get all resources out of the production deficit. lower taxes on commodities/productions that you wouldn't lose much money on lowering ($5,300 -> $1500 wont matter and it will increase efficiency). lower taxes on education and above by 1 point. lower office taxes to 9%. use a cargo bay and link the train you can give it with an upgrade and link it to all 4 sides of the map if you can. educate all your cims as much as possible.

[bish0p23]

I just started a new game recently and really all you have to do is just zone.
Occassionally you plop a service building down as you need it, which will probably put you back in the red, but then you just zone some more after.

I barely play with the taxes. I've messed with the service budget slightly. But not much else.

I also have 3 farms, and one forestry industry, that are not using the max amount of resources available for aesthetics.

[Zengrath]

This game is far easier then Skylines 1 for making money. However the beginning of the game does look rough due to negative loses until you get a larger city. However despite the monthly loses you get literally millions and millions of money simply from hitting the city milestones so I recommend not to worry about it too much. for me I think i started getting regularly into the green on monthly rate at about 12k or so people, for sure once you hit about 20k you should see a positive amount, if not try figuring out what may be wrong.

At 50k I have every single service, all my citizens are happy with 0 negatives, and I am raking in 50k a month despite literally meeting every demand, garbage, mail, healthcare, police, fire, education, etc. So for me, this is certainly easier then previous games and many other you tubers I follow have said the same thing over and over.

In early game I simply wouldn't worry about keeping people happy as long as demand for zoning is still there. So just keep building city how you want and zone away. When you finally get to a place when zoning demand isn't increasing then look into tackling one of the needs at a time. I bet if you do this you'll be making a profit at a much earlier stage in the city. Don't try and provide every service that unlocks immediately if you don't want to always be in the red, however again with the millions you get from milestones this never becomes an issue anyway. I never came close to running out of money in my city.

EDIT: i've not once touched taxes in city skylines 2 to date.

Also a lot of times when your in the red, your still making money, i think there is something wrong with monthly calculation in this game. I've watched my total amount go up so many times while game said I was in the red and I was still going up millions in my bank without any new milestones while in the red on fastest speed, so it's not 100% calculating everything it seems.

EDIT2: Sorry for edits. I just wanted to mention, making your industry as soon as you can and unlock them, for example wheat farms and forestry and stone quarries. for me this was a massive boon to income, because industries will now import raw materials locally instead of off map, they make more profit and upgrade and that means more taxes. the bigger the city the bigger the impact of this I found. For example at 50k pop I noticed industries complaining about high resource cost, looking at them i seen it was all stone requirements, I then expanded my stone quarry to more then make up for the deficit and I think my profits went up another 15k a month from just doing that and waiting in fast forward a little to see the change.

[anti678]

While it's not entirely difficult to make money in cities skylines 2, it's certainly not as easy as the original.

[HaM.lord_striker835]

Originally posted by Trun:

Like, everything is far too expensive, and taxes are NOT enough. Economy just broken?

Don't worry about it. I got to 100k pop, my budget is 3.5 million in the red, yet I still make money over time. Think when i mouse over the money, it's like 150k negative per hour. MY city about to go broke when the fix the finances lol

[Harlequin]

No worries, economy in CS2 is just completly broken. I make 15k minus an hour according to the infobox but have an income of 2-3 million per hour. You just can´t get broke in this game because it´s such a mess.

In CS1 I never got in the red and instead made millions easily but the economy in CS1 was understandable and not just one big dumpster fire.

It will be interesting to see if CO will be able to fix the economy at some point in the future.

[Scaristotle]

Originally posted by c0hKaine:

im making 300k/h. get all resources out of the production deficit. lower taxes on commodities/productions that you wouldn't lose much money on lowering ($5,300 -> $1500 wont matter and it will increase efficiency). lower taxes on education and above by 1 point. lower office taxes to 9%. use a cargo bay and link the train you can give it with an upgrade and link it to all 4 sides of the map if you can. educate all your cims as much as possible.

Mostly, this. Those production deficits can kill you.

[Kizakami]

Money is not really an issue here. If you just want to see some green words from income, you have two way.
1. get a big power plant at the edge of map, and sell the energy and import water for it, there will be a short time for power plant to work.
2. Get your citizens EDUCATED, people have higher of education level going to make more money, and with this your purple zone

[aevansjr35]

started over 84k and making 43k a hour not sure what I did.

[Trun]

Originally posted by danmak27/Athebes1:

Ookaay. Have you ever played a game like this before?
That was to the op.

Yes, pretty sure I can make a pretty kick ass profit in CS1, CityState2, Sim Citiy (All of them) so yeahI think I've got a good understanding

[Trun]

Originally posted by aevansjr35:

started over 84k and making 43k a hour not sure what I did.

Yeah me niether

[Trun]

Originally posted by Kizakami:

Money is not really an issue here. If you just want to see some green words from income, you have two way.
1. get a big power plant at the edge of map, and sell the energy and import water for it, there will be a short time for power plant to work.
2. Get your citizens EDUCATED, people have higher of education level going to make more money, and with this your purple zone

Purple zone? What purple zone? If you mean offices, that's pink on my end.

[Trun]

Originally posted by Stealthy:

No it's not broken. You just don't know how to.

Need more information from you before can help, but in general, keep costs at minimum, don't place too many services and keep adding low density housing and industrial. Unlock tourism buildings as soon as its possible as that will start injecting lot of money into your city. I've made at best months over 8 million.

I don't see how I can keep costs at a minimum, one of each service building appears to be too much.