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I had a very stable 5k city and switched from importing power to building a coal powerplant. I was burning 250k/month on imported power and on paper the coal only cost ~110k/month. With this change I was on paper making 80k/month or around 4k/hour, but my total money continued to dwindle.
I read a comment saying we should be going up the education tree faster, so I tried adding a college in addition to my elementary & high schools. If it did help I wasn't seeing it and I continued to slowly go deeper into the red all while I was in theory making at least 1k/hour.
So yeah, I think there is a bug somewhere. Maybe you are correct and its during the 1000 rollover.
There seem to be a few major bugs in Economy 2.0 that need to be worked out. That, or there's some hidden (or obvious) mechanic that we're missing.
A user has already reported this issue on the Paradox forum.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/loosing-money-on-positive-trend.1691104/#post-29728153
What I think is happening is that the indicator on both population and money seems to be a moving average, which is probably the right way to do it. The game doesn't calculate based on the tick with an even distribution of gain or loss like older city builders were. Basically, the pattern seems to be that depending on the tick and what's due, the city will either have a net gain or loss. Because of this pattern, on any given tick you might get a reduction when the indicator suggests an upward trend, just like a moving average with a longer period will do in the stock market.
So what you kind of have to do is see if over a longer period of time you're net losing or gaining.
After experimenting with smaller cities over the past couple of days, what I've also found is that Econ 2.0 is really sensitive to unemployment rate. When you're growing your city, you want to go slow and keep jobs plentiful for your cims, but keep things close to balanced. You want a very slight excess of jobs because that seems to have a more positive impact on wages. If you're running high unemployment, household wealth will drop, and with low household wealth, your residential area can't grow in level.
Growing in level is the key to pushing more tax revenue, so what you want to do is establish a slow pace of growth, adding small plots to balance jobs and cims. Once you get access to taxation, create a tax curve that benefits whatever education demographic jobs are looking for. Education level has something of a correlation with wages, so lower education cims will need more subsidization to become household stable, and a stable household with higher wealth will have more stable consumption patterns.
The reason you don't want to flood the city with jobs is because that will cause commercial income to suffer, and will hold commercial levels behind, which will also have a net negative impact to cim wealth.
So go slow, use the tax system to promote job slots at education levels that you need. Make sure you're leveling up your residential, and a big part of that is having a higher density residential pipeline so cims can move between cheaper, higher density residential when they need to build wealth.
If you do all of this, and balance your service costs based solely on need and ignore all of the initial demands until you can afford them, the trend will be more stable and the indicator will not be as erratic.
I've had success stabilizing the indicator this way in Econ 2.0... I could not do it at all in the last iteration in part because the government subsidization was all over the place a lot so the moving average before was almost entirely worthless within a 1,000 range of neutral in my experience. Now it's more consistent, but only if you're managing your growth and balance.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/949230/discussions/0/4343240481094369568#c4343240481095283622
And my follow on posts.
It's not a bug as such, it just seems people are taking a static tick snapshot forecast to literally mean they'll make xxxx money or close to it if they just let the sim run.
But every second there's going to be variances that get taken out of your cities funds straight away as the exact state of your city shifts from the last snapshot taken, the forecast isn't really a accurate tool, but more of a loose guide to just how well your city is being able to cover those constant variances.
If your forecast isn't holding at least around a positive 130-150k and your city is still going through extensive growth, then typically you're going to be losing money for the time being.... and people thinking that a positive forecast of 5-20k means their city is going to be making money..... it's just not going to I'm afraid, your cities budget is in a state where it's not going to have enough revenue constantly coming in to compensate for the spikes in expenses that occur between one static snapshot taken for the forecast prediction and the next.
The trick is really paying very close attention to unemployment and excess jobs and managing the tax situation well.
If you can do that, then there will be a limit to how much growth and expenses can grow.
One place where expenses can get really out of line is buying power externally, which used to be the trick to an early city expansion, but is now an unmanaged cost. The solution that I found was to plop windmills, which are not an efficient energy gain, but provide much more granular control of energy growth. By not plopping down a power junction on the external lines (or I think disabling, not quite sure if that worked, I'd have to test it) you basically block your city from getting external power costs. Of course, if you plop down a lot of zoned land or services, you then run the risk of running short on power, but that's manageable as long as you resist the urge to satisfy every demand the cims have and resist the urge to just spend and expand.
If that urge can be resisted, there's a limit to how much the city can spontaneously grow. That's really the key, at least in my testing, to being able to guarantee a cash flow on small starter cities.
IMO the game is a little too punishing on service costs and Econ 2.0 doesn't have granular enough control of spending on external resources. I like that there's some balance here promoting the establishment of local services, and that there are some costs. Overall, I like that the system works more like a real economy now... there's real challenge in the early city now, which I enjoy, and it CAN be made to work... but it's definitely very punishing and as it stands right now the choice is either to accept lots of variance in spending early on, or restrain growth early on.
Then why even bother to have a bar showing how much money is coming in or out every hour if its just " speculation" and not fact? like i stated earlier, i had minus 7k ish in the bank and plus 3k in per hour.. after trying to balance the economy for 1 hour irl i gave up because i never actually got money in that i could spend.. also could not develop new areas for people to live because i could not build roads etc lol.. also when people moved in to houses my economy would take a hit and not recover..
started a new city 2 hours ago and i am trying to be alot more strategic with my cityplanning and so far i am actually making some cash and the bar seems to represent what i am earning pretty well.. so i think maybe there are some bugs around and it does not help that i am set in the old ways of city building :P
In my case, I achieved this by giving the maximum possible subsidy to the office zone, even if this meant generating substantial losses. After a while, I restored the zone's taxes to a normal level, which provided me with a high enough income to generate profits. I repeated this process several times (initially only with the office zone and then with all other ones) until all zones started generating stable incomes. This helped me achieve high and stable city revenues and allowed me to keep progressing.
It's also important to keep an eye the unemployment rate, make sure it's as low as possible And if it increases, taxes should be adjusted to reverse the situation.
It's a tedious process, mainly because it is complex to maintain the city's growth while doing it and takes some time, but it worked for me.