Neighbor Deals

[RushHourFreak 1]

<p>I need to know if those types of business are convenient to your City (the one of you're offering the deal) or they're simply take pout power and water no matter what happnes. I'm wondering</p>

[Prophet42 1,501]

Neighbor deals are convient if you don't want to take up space with utility buildings in your city.  Also, it is useful to have one city set up as a power and/or garbage provider and sell the services to the rest of the cities in the region.  This way, you don't have to have a power plant and garbage disposal in every city.

[cogeo 960]

Neighbour deals are indeed convenient, for the following reasons:

- You often have excess capacity for power, water or garbage, and reducing funding isn't the best. For example, the large water pump costs proportinately 10% less than the normal ones. but produces so much water that you can't use in a single city, so you can sell the rest. Also a W2E plant burns 500 tons of garbage per month. This quantity is the garbage produced by a city of about 138,000 sims in size (both residences and workplaces). It's quite unlikely that you can feed your W2E plant with exactly this quantity, and if you don't do so your W2E plant won't generate power to its potential; pollution will be the same though. But by signing a deal you can get the garbage you need.

- In simcity 4 utilities are not profitable, they cost you money and signing a deal is usually more economical than having the utilities in your city, with all unwanted effects (pollution, NIMBY, space).

- Unlike SC3000, there are no penalties when cancelling a deal or in the case you are not in position to honour it (eg not generating enough power). You can sign the deal at any time or change the terms (the quantity). You will always find willing neighbours. Actually neighbour deals are so convenient that someone could consider this unrealistic, or even a cheat.

[MidwestSimGeek 0]

When you say "the rest of the cities in the region"... do you mean you can actually "sell down the chain" from city tile A, through adjacent and increasingly distant city tiles B and C and D and E... until reaching city tile F on the far end of the region?  That would be NIFTY. 

btw Cogeo... I can definitely understand what you mean when you say it might be possible to think of deals as a "cheat"... but I think it's also possible that they enhance the realism of the game.  I can only think of four power generating stations in the entire (geographically massive) Twin Cities metro.  These are in Monticello, Burnsville, and Prairie Island (on a NW-SE line with each successive station being about 50 miles from the previous), and something that appears to be one in North Minneapolis.  Perhaps I'm missing a small station or two, but in any event, these scant few serve over two million people.  Just a thought

[SC4BOY 20]

You may "sell down the line" if you wish to, but generally you will find it rather inconvenient to go more than 2 cities.. Also of course be sure you have power connections, roads, and water connections for the various trades.. I have one region where I have hydrogen power and sell to 12 cities surrounding.. of course only 8 touch so I have to "relay" power to the corner cities.. This really doesn't save a lot of money but it allows cleaner power to smaller cities and a lot of flexibility in how much they have to spend on power/water/ etc

[acidbomb2k4 0]

i have a city that was having some garbage problems, so i built a city with a garbage plant to handle it, and started a neighbor deal. as expected, the utility citys cost for 'collection and pickup' went through the roof. unexpectedly, so did the first cities. before the deal, the first city was making ~10,000 amonth. after the deal was losing abou 2,000. the garbage plant was one i found through a japanese site, so that may have something to do with it. in general, though, my expirience is that there's a pretty thin profit margin with the neighbor deals (although you could put a super high capacity power plant into a rual town, and sell off tons of extra power). like the rest of the game, its all about planning.