How to make a profit with the Economy 2.0 patch

[Hoopy Frood Jay©]

I'm at a loss on how to gain a financial net positive after the patch. I'm basically broke an hour or two into a new game. Can some of you maybe give some advice on the financial side of things?

[chriskisskiss]

id like to hear some advices as well )

[olorien]

Same problem. Startet a new City, i can use just one tile at the moment because of no money. I have around 15k residents. Import just a bit Oil. Making 250k minus per month. Now i shut down almost all services and now making more depts (500k). I produce a lot of Stone, Cole, Wheat etc. Making a bit Money with Transport Fees of the bus Service.

[AIRwolf79]

I played it straight after the update with no mods and I was soon making money.

1. Only utilise the tiles you are given and dont even bother buying extra until you have a
population over 50k. The land tax will bankrupt you.

2. Dont go mad with roads as this will only reduce your money. Just build roads as you go
along and Increase with demand.

3. Services should be a bare minimum and only upgrade if you need to. One police, hospital,
fire, school is enough. Garbage only requires a small square and you can make this larger
if needed. The same with water, electric sewage etc... One wind turbine will be enough
until you get to at least 5k pop.

4. Reduce the service slider to 50% until more is required. This should be done as soon as
you start building and saves a fortune.

5. Start Making money with agriculture, ores and forestry as soon as you can. with just a few
small fields and fores tries your balance will start to rise and more demand for industry will
happen.

6. Stay away from loans if you can as these come with hefty interest rates.

7. Keep your streets clear of traffic! Utilise the bus routes as you want at least 50% of your
population using public transport. Traffic jams = resources not getting in and out of your
city resulting in loss of income.

8. Plan ahead. Always do this before putting any road connection or service down. If you
build a Industrial area in close proximity to housing then the toxins might blow of to
your citizens. This will make them sick or move out. Always check where the wind is
blowing and where your resources are as its costly to keep moving things around or
demolishing them early game.

Hope some of this helps you buddy.

[🐺Blue Wolf]

The 2 main things I'd avoid early on now;

1. Only build the absolute necessary service buildings early on and avoid building more than one. Also avoid upgrades to service buildings unless absolutely needed.

2. Try to avoid buying additional tiles. Do your best to fit as much as possible within the starting area.

[Mysticalmaid]

Hold off building most services as long as possible, sell your excess power to the grid, don't buy tons of tiles or it will cripple you too early, build on the one you have for now as long as you can.

Raise the taxes on everything, but not so high that it stops them building at all, I found 10% was sweet spot for Office. I think Commercial was 11% but can't remember at this point, it's worth experimenting and running with it for a bit of game time to see what happens.

I tweaked the residential wealth taxes individually in a curve with most educated at 18 and the rest 1 click below each other.

Industry on 18% once you've got some started.

I reduced the budget for services I did install by quite a bit, down to 50% in many cases. I'm a little under 7000 pop now, it's taken a bit of tweaking along the way.

Remember you can take out loans, but you only pay the interest back on a monthly basis. It's the first time I've used them actually, I like that I'm having to.

If you have a coal plant, it's worth mining your own coal so you aren't buying it in, and it will drive commercial, normal industrial growth as well as residential/office. Farms will also drive growth commercial and industry growth, as well as saving them from buying in external food.

Industry pays a lot of taxes in my game ^.^

[Paddy]

I'm not a very good player and I'm making $750,000 a month. What are you guys doing wrong?

[john.glossop]

Just another small tip. If you have industries and services that are currently paying zero taxes, lower their tax rates to 1%, and watch them regularly. If any of them start to show a return, tax them higher (in stages until either you are taxing them at the rate of everything else, or until they are no longer growing. A small return is better than no return IMHO.
DO invest in some cheaper recreation areas - small parks can have a good effect on Cims, so don't be stingy with those - no more than are needed to turn all the "red" areas green, but enough to do at least that - and include doggy parks in the mix, as well.

[dulany67]

Add services only when you absolutely need to. Do not place service buildings proactively.

[✪ NoiZy]

My Best Tips to growing a city profitably

1. Manage the budget sliders according to your demand of services like water, garbage, healthcare and more. You want to be slightly above the needed demand.

2. Use electricity as an export source, build windparks for extra production capacity and export.

3. Only use loans for investing in assets (sources that increase your profits). This could be new windparks or solar energy.

4. Manage the tax sliders to increase demand for office, industry and commercial to increase growth and then raise taxes once growth is starting to slow down and you can earn more profit. Also, put higher taxes on the last customer and not on the input resource for the companies.

[girlaroundthecorner]

It's a very, very slow build. My experience; build your population and give them jobs and good road access. You'll be losing money at this point. Get those farms working as soon as you can, also oil, ore, coal and rock. Doesn't matter how small just so you get the signature buildings. For me they were the key to reducing unemployment and boosting industry as they need a lot of employees. Ensure residents are moving in, and jobs are being filled before expanding. No empty buildings allowed. Build a coal fire plant near a coal mine to sell electricity, or at least make enough for your city. I ended up with three, and then saved enough for an incineration plant to get garbage until control and also sell more electricity. Small parking areas gave me income, plus also charging for street parking. I hardly changed taxes at all but lowered budgets on services ie medical, police, fire etc until I showed a profit, then slowly, slowly increased the budget. Who cares if they complain as long as they stay put. My cims are happy now - some more than others lol. Traffic is my nightmare, but I'm working on an additional link into the city from the highway. Baby steps.

[icedude94]

Early game, open up the budget sliders for industry and turn all the raw resource materials up to 30% tax. Those are resources like livestock, grain, rock, wood, etc.

Those industries do not suffer any penalty from high taxes.

Use windmills in the early game for power instead of the coal plant so you aren't paying for input resources or labor. If you get the full 5 MW, you can export excess power for profit.

Only build a little bit of commercial. Let most of your starting jobs be in industry. Your city needs to export stuff to bring money into circulation in the city. The cims won't have enough in the beginning to do much shopping.

[Kalligula]

Import energy at the start, dont biuld coal power, to expensive!

[wolfpost]

1. For me, building a farm or "two" as big as you can, from the start, really helps pay the bills. I imagine other industries will work as well. I don't plan to keep them where they are now but just until I can put them somewhere more out of the way. Which will be pretty soon.

2. Get at least a Grammar School and a HS. College is next major purchase for me.

3. No need to buy any new zones. And when I did buy a new one, I only had the garbage dump in it and a few industry. Your gonna have to build one because at some point the pollution, will start messing with your water and electric and cutting the output in half for both.

4. Started with windmills. About 10 or so of them. Added a few at a time until I had 10. No reason for 10. Just what I needed on my dam near windless map. When you can afford it, skip the small coal burning power plant and build a gas one. 4 wind mills at max output make the same as the coal plant. Seems to cost about 17k/hour to operate the gas power plant. Not positive exactly though. Most likely will need to buy a new zone for the Plant as it is big. Only the second zone I have bought. Might be migrating my farms into this zone as well. I didn't need to take a loan for it. Only took about an hour of game play time to earn the 650k it costs from about $0. FARMS!!!!!!!!! LOL.

5. I apparently have mods that allow me to build smaller and cheaper utility type buildings. I have no idea when I downloaded it. I build a small tomb, FD, PD and a regular clinic instead of the default ones. But to be honest, once I started building the two farms, this didn't matter at all.

6. Lower the maintenance costs and raise the taxes? But again,FARMS!!!!!!

7. Don't build unnecessary stuff.

Can't say if exporting electricity is good or not as I have no way to export it at the moment. I wish I did. I am using 30mw and my city is producing around 280mw with the gas plant and wind mills.

8. Parks seem to help with economy. So plopping one down, often seems like my money/hour goes up instead of down.

I am told to keep an eye out on unemployment. I was building small and medium and slum high rises like it was going out of style. I had 45% unemployment. So, I stopped building housing. I am down to about 25% unemployment and it seems no different to me.

Right now I have about 11k peeps. I have a grammar school. HS. That are both full. FD, PD. Clinic. Tomb not graveyard. Numerous parks. Gas burning power Plant. 2 farms. Never took a loan out for anything. Taxes are at about 11% across the board. Industry a bit more because I want to cut the demand. Very large Office area. Need to check how many peeps are actually working in the buildings though. LOL. Just starting to grow demand for Commercial Zone. And I am making about 17k an hour. It was about 35k an hour before I bought the gas plant. Forgot to lower the maintenance on the power. Whoops.

My main issue is the city before this just as I was figuring this out, the economy stopped working after the last save. And killed the city. it was working when I saved it. Just not after I loaded it. It might have been just dumb luck that I saved it just before the pollution cut my water and electric in half but I am not sure. So now I get worried every time I load the last save of this city. LOL.

[Bender Bending Rodriguez]

I was struggling too as well but i find it much more afforadable to buy power from outside connection than building and maintaing coal plants. i was going to buy water as well but the map i play does not have a outside water connection so i had to buy it. keep all services to a minimum only when you have double the needed monthly expense should you place any services. making the specilized industries also helps the monthly expenses but i dont see it making the money.

[bish0p23]

I love seeing threads like this. It feels like an actual game now instead of just a city painter.