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About This File
Welcome to the age of factory automation and mass production. It increases production of the high-density heavy industry by 2.5 times, and makes it pay more taxes too, at the "cost" of also hiring about a third more unskilled workers per factory.
It will leave the low and mid density factories unchanged, because I didn't want to screw up your economy while you still have a tiny city and can't build much else to provide jobs. But as soon as you're big enough to zone for high-density heavy industry, you can demolish the old factories and zone for these more efficient ones. And use the left over space and workforce for, I dunno, manufacturing or high tech.
The basic story is that I hated having to build that much heavy industry, and the pitiful taxes they paid didn't even cover the cost of cleaning up their pollution. I COULD use the wonderful sandbox mod, but it's not very realistic, and trips my suspension of disbelief. I wanted something which still maintains at least a thin pretense of realism.
So the changes are as follows:
- as mentioned, I increased each factory's production by 2.5 times. You'll still need to zone several full square blocks before coming anywhere near a sandbox factory, but you don't have to fill half the map with heavy industry either.
- I've increased their workforce from 3 unskilled, 3 skilled and 2 executives to 4 unskilled, 3 skilled, and 2 executives. On the whole, because you need less heavy factories and can build more manufacturing and high-tech, you'll still end up with a lot less unskilled workers in the city, but I still wanted to have a half-way believable number of them. A city with twice as many elites as unskilled workers is kinda silly.
- I've reduced their profits per unit sold to half (mass-production lowers prices), and increased their maintenance per factory by 6 times, so they don't pay insanely high taxes. They still do pay a lot more tax per factory, but it is still quite a bit lower than an equivalent manufacturing factory. The point I'm aiming at is basically that zoning for it isn't a loss, but it doesn't turn into a cash cheat, either, and it doesn't remove the incentive to build more manufacturing and high-tech instead if you can.
How to install it: just unpack the .zip file in your Paks folder. Any existing high-density heavy factories will be automatically upgraded, so in a large city you'll end up with an instant surplus. Sell it or demolish some.
How to uninstall it: just delete the .patch file from your Paks folder. Any existing high-density heavy factories will be automatically downgraded to the vanilla ones. I.e., large cities will have a massive defficit of heavy industry until you build some more to make up for the downgrade.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This has only been tested with Cities XL 2012. I have no idea if it works with any other version.
