Infuriating game!

[AnthonyRM1 10]

Ive just been playing cities xl 2011 for the past 7 hours, and its driving me crazy. It is so difficult! I have a large city of 500k residents etc but its so hard to trade, I am permanently short of electricty and water- I've tried creating support cities that can trade with it but its impossible to have cities that specialise in utilities because theyre too expensive to run. I dont see why you have to have a positive cash flow in order to trade when you already have many millions in the bank- its so annoying!

Any tips?

[Ocram's Razr 963]

If you produce enough Utilities, you can get bonus production (+15%, +25%, +35%, +45%) and sell excess to OmniCorp for a small profit. If the profit is not enough, GlobexCo's Unlocker Mod v4 allows you to place any token multiplier buildings you earn (no limit) so you can support your dirty utilities with dirty industry.

[soltangris 42]

Sigh. The key to making money is not in selling utilities, guys. Learn this once and for all!

Even with the bonus buildings, it's still too expensive trying to specialize in utilities only.

So, the answer lies in industry. Which not only could produce excesses to sell to Omni, but also pays your city taxes. And also has production boosters, (it actually has one additional booster, compared to Utilities).

Do you need Utility-specialized cities? Of course! But, in every such city, specialize also in one or more type of industries and offices (depending on wether it's a dirty or a clean city). This way you get the necessary excess cash to support all your city network.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

My utility city, Marcopolis, has every polluting building in the game. It makes so much cash from selling and industry taxes. It recently became more profitable when I started using GCo's Unlocker mod and GD's pollution reduction mod.

[ws6daveg 0]

So with building industry, is their a noticable gain in building level 3 industry vs level 1 or 2.

I have created industrial pockets around the map, but eventually I get "Polution is killing everything" and I then scale back the level 3 industry.

But I do notice that by building more industry I can jump from -$35,000 to even if not plus really quickly.

[DaveParker 0]

Originally posted by: ws6daveg

So with building industry, is their a noticable gain in building level 3 industry vs level 1 or 2.

I have created industrial pockets around the map, but eventually I get "Polution is killing everything" and I then scale back the level 3 industry.

But I do notice that by building more industry I can jump from -$35,000 to even if not plus really quickly.quote>

From memory level 2 industry has twice the pollution but also twice the output, it just condenses it into a smaller area of the map and employs higher (and more fussy) residents. Level 3 outputs twice as much as level 2 and twice the pollution level while taking 50% more space, but I think its resource consumption is only 50% higher so you get more industry resources for the same number of fuel resources I think. I've not looked at the difference in profit / tax, I think most of my money comes from exports to omnicorp anyway.

Pollution is more of a problem in CXL 2009 and the big avatar parks seemed to be the best way to reduce it without resource problems, expensive though.

In CXL 2011 as you can trade between your own cities you can stick the pollution causing buildings in various support towns away from your main city. Pollution doesn't seem to be as much of a problem in CXL 2011 anyway though - even in my dirty industrial city of about 250,000 there aren't yet any pollution problems. Traffic noise has more of a negative effect on offices in 2011 though.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

This is a list of all the zoned buildings in CXL:LE statistics should be similar to 2011 edition.

http://citiesxl.wikia.com/wiki/Buildings