Budget in the red!

[dont-shoot 0]

Hi --

I'm pretty new to SimCity 4 (friend sold me his copy) -- and I've been having some budget problems.  I'm not new to the series, and I was heavily in the green ($3000 surpluses per month on a super tiny city) for a while.  My population is around 25,000 -- and the city itself is on a mid-size terrain slot.  I've used up about 1/3 the map. (Education is above 180, Life Expectancy is at around 90, Avg. Income is at around 75k, and Fire/Police coverage is good, Traffic is green everywhere, and commute times are under 30 minutes)    I don't see any glaring issues.  I've tried to micro-manage where I can, limiting all schools, hospitals to meet demand. 

I was just about to try to expand my city to a larger size when I noticed I was in the red -- pretty heavily in the red, running at a $2,500 deficit.  I don't want to take out a loan, since I still have some cash left over, but I'm not sure what I should do to recoup those losses.  Should I just continue to grow and expand so that the revenue eventually beats out expenses? 

I haven't spent cash on anything silly, and I have connections to neighbors (no real neighbors yet -- just started this city) -- but does anyone have any suggestions?

PS -- Don't wanna use cheat codes!

[saltandsauce 0]

what usually puts people in the red is a new power plant specificly a nuclear or hydrogen power plant look at anything that has been demolished or built since you went in the red and rebuild/demolish it

[hitomichan1 0]

The solution is in basic economics, rather than in game play.

Income - expenses  = profit (in the red/black)

What is your income and where is that coming from? 

Income comes from Sims - thus residential zones are critical to your income.

Industry & Commercial give a much smaller income.

You can affect this through taxation and residential zoning.

Expenses need to be examined & paired down as much as possible.

look at each line in your budget and really think about those items which are big ticket. Can you reduce expenses for them? Is it a power plant / school / hospital that can reduce capacity to reduce expenses? Do you have too many parks & you need to bulldoze some for a while?

Your own analysis will tell you what all of us cannot: why you are in the red.

Keep cutting expenses & adding residential zoning until you see profits every month.

Mike

[villagemayor 0]

When starting, use coal power plants, gives you more bang for your buck. You can also use wind turbines as they are cheaper but produce less power.

You don't have to build police stations as you are not going to see too much crime.

Firestations may be necessary to eliminate pesky fires.

You can increase the tax rate high enough until the breaking point (when demand is negative). It should give you some more extra bucks

You don't need to implement all of the city ordinances. My favs are tire recycling (delays building landfill or incinerators for a little while) and free health for low income.

You don't necessarily need highschools and libraries immediately. Delay building these until the population is larger.

Hope these tips help.

[dont-shoot 0]

I just figured it out.   I checked my expenses and like I said I'm new to the game.  I wasn't aware that you could scroll down.  (my question was more along the lines of why the numbers weren't adding up properly)  Real bad mistake on my part.   The funding in the water department was super high, because I got the highest tier pump available.  (up from two regular water pumps)

I took a few ECON courses these past two years in college, and I have to say that this game has a lot of interesting things going for it, relative to the other Simcities where the RCI Demand projections were pretty useless.  (I can actually apply stuff I learned in class to a game!)

The most aggravating thing about this game is that growth occurs in insane bursts.  Are there any mods that help regulate the lack of spikes in growth?  For some reason, even though I zoned over the ridiculous number of low density wealthy residential with medium-density res., they arbitrarily (like 5-10 years after zoning-over) chose to become large apartment complexes overnight.  I hadn't set up any new infrastructure, and C/I medium-density were in place long before. 

[bbfan02 23]

Also if you want to save some money when you start a city, if you are going to make a farming community with not that many people in it, for fire and police coverage, plop the smallest for each. (I think it is the small police station and small fire station), and you can do the same with the elementary and high schools if you downloaded the "rural elementary and high schools" on the STEX. If you have any other problems, dont hesitate to pm me.