Spiraling out of Control!

[BoxCarRacer 1]

Hey Simtropolis!

I need some help. My city was going very well, making a profit, expanding fast, high industrial and residential demand. But now it seems that my growth has spiraled out of control. Just as my income nears my expenses, I need new water pumps and power plants. That sends my money way down, so I zone frantically and stuff grows immediately. Then BAM! I need more power plants, police stations, hospitals, you name it! Is there anyway I can break this cycle and start turning a profit? I've already raised taxes quite a bit. Please help!

-Ed

[slystone2 20]

Use the advantages of "regional play" - select a central city that you want to build up to a huge size, and select adjacent cities to specialize in certain needs like power, water, and landfills

use one city as your main Water Supplier, one that doesn't have a lot of farms (heavy water polluters). Connect it to your major city by pipes and sell the water. Demolish the water plants in the major city to save costs

Use one city as your main  "power supply", one that you set aside as a high pollution area with industry that you won't care if the environment meter goes down. If you put Res in the power city, "make historical" low wealth housing, because they don't mind pollution as much.

and so on

most importantly, TAKE YOUR TIME. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither should your city be. Don't get ahead of yourself by building too much infrastructure too soon - only supply what is needed. And don't always listen to your advisors - they're biased. (Education advisors always want you spend the most on education, Recreation advisors always want you to spend the most on parks, etc.) Just like real-world politics - take their advice, but realize their bias.

Getting to far ahead too soon is the cause of most of the troubles people have

[mightygoose 92]

you shouldn't really play more than 25 game years at a time without changing city tile to allow the region to catch up with any new demand, helps maintain balance.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

If you're having trouble keeping up with utilities, try taking out a loan so that you can demolish and rebuild your utilities.

For water, make sure you have the right amout of normal and large water pumps.  The large water pumps are cheaper per galon, but if you build way over capacity you'll still loose money.  So try to build close to your water needs, using as many large water pumps as possible.

For power, coal is the cheapest.  For garbage, you can build a waste to energy plant and reduce the funding to zero, and it will burn garbage for free (although this might be considered cheating).

All of the utilities wear over time, and as they do so they become more expensive, so you'll need to replace them occasionally.

Build densly around your schools and hospitals so that you need as few of them as possible.  For every new facility you'll have to pay for the ambulance or bus radius.  Or build in such a way that you build many facilities but so that you can cover your population after eliminating your bus/ambulance funding (they have a miminum radius which you get for free).  Keep track of your funding so that you're not paying for capacity which you don't need.

Another thing you can do (which could also be cheating), is building up a lot of dirty industry, and then raising taxes to the max.  Dirty industry won't abandon due to taxes.  You can make a lot of extra money that way.

Doing things that way, I've been able to make my cities very profitable very easily.

But I do think taking out loans for stuff like that is a good idea.  The money you save streamlining your services could be more than the loan payments, and your service problems only get worse and worse while the loan payments go away after a few years.

If that doesn't work, if you post some pictures of your city maybe we can give other advice.

[BoxCarRacer 1]

Okay, i'm going to play a bit right now. I'll try some of these tips out,especially the waste to energy "glitch". Thanks guys!

[BoxCarRacer 1]

Just an update- Your tips work great! I've start some neighboring cities and each one works a bit better than the last. The most important tip I think is to take it slow. It really helped out. Thanks guys! I'll post some pictures later to show you!

[BlackStar 0]

Centralized utility management is a false economy. By creating power/water/garbage disposal in another city, you actually add to your financial issues.

The unit price of electricity for home-generated power is considerably lower than purchasing it.

Things like extra pumps required, etc are just an intentional obstacle which add to the difficulty of bringing up a large city.

If you don't want to fork out for more pumps, consider conservation ordinances, or withdrawing the water supply for suburban and low wealth zones.

Carefully choose your power sources, too. Working out the unit price for each mode will give you the best choice financially (however you have to offset this against the overhead cost of the plant). For example, wind farms are cheap, but the unit price is very high. Nuclear power plants are very expensive, but you get good value for money each month.