How much income is about normal?

[Turjan 1,048]

I was looking at one of the cities I built on a medium tile and which grew from an agricultural community to at the moment about 200k inhabitants. I noticed that the city has a monthly income of about 160k, compared to monthly expenses of about 40k, which looks out of whack to me. Part of this may be due to my choice of civic buildings (some don't charge enough) and due to the complete lack of any public transport, except one token rail line into the fields. However, I have the feeling that some of the plugin buildings might have wonky settings. Taxes are at a blanket 8.9%, so that should not be the culprit.

 

No idea where this should be. In case I have to look at the plugin buildings, what's the best list out there to look at expense settings for standard Maxis buildings, in case I need to compare some of the plugins? Btw, this is the only city that is that much out of balance.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Does seem out of whack, but some of the things you can do to balance this are:

 

• Drop taxes to 8% or less.  200K Sims should support you will somewhat less tax.
• Set up some city ordinances if you haven't.  These can be great income absorbers.
• By the capacity rule you should have eight recycling depots, maybe nine.
• Try spending more on public facilities like parks and plazas.

I occasionally have a run-away city like that.  It is often caused by tolls collected from an eternal commuter loop.  You should check your neighbour connections.  If there are more commuters in total than your population, you probably have a loop.  Find a way to break it.

[Turjan 1,048]

Thanks for the input. I have eternal commuter loops in all cities, and I'm not really sure what to do about them. Then again, I don't use toll booths.

 

I don't have enough parks, true. I don't have a single recycling center, all garbage goes into waste-to-energy plants. Which is a good point, btw, I have to look at the model I used. I don't have any ordinances, either. In principle, that city should be a hellhole.

 

I have the feeling that the main skewing effect comes from stuff like church plugins etc., and the abundance of "rewards" with positive effects makes living there much more desirable than it should be with standard Maxis means.

 

As an aside, this is still the Amsterdam region someone (frostback?) posted here about a week ago.

[Turjan 1,048]

Okay, I looked into it a bit. First results:

 

I should pay about 4.5 times as much upkeep for power plants as I do and use five times as much space.

I should also pay about 4.2 times as much for Waste-to-energy plants and use up double the space.

I particularly cheaped out on healthcare, and that's hard to enumerate. I noticed I didn't provide any healthcare for the whole NE of my city, except for the emergency room in the Disease Control Center. Which seems to be sufficient for the adviser to shut up.

I have no idea how to assess education, but that's obviously cheap, too, but I haven't looked at all the effects yet.

 

As the topic also veered into commuter loop territory, here two traffic volume graphs (medium simulator z):

 

 

 

As my city doesn't provide public transport, all bus traffic is from commuters. There's a bad loop in the lower left corner, and there's considerable traffic from one of the small cities in the south to the other small city in the south. Not much I can do about that, except completely redesign one of the southern cities.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

To see if that is the looping problem, make sure you have a save and break the link.  If this solves that branch of your traffic, think about changing any loops you have into tree structures with no loop backs.  It takes at least three cities to cause a loop.

 

Take a look at your eduction display.  The red areas not encompassed by education circles have no available schools.  Red areas within these circles are either underfunded, or recent.  Underfunding can be fixed with the sliders, but if you run out of space there, then you need a bigger school or more of them.  There are some large schools of all types on the STEX, LEX and PLEX.

[Turjan 1,048]

Yup, there is one large city tile with 950k inhabitants to the left, stretching along this and the city further south. I have since convinced myself that it's probably best to cut the southern connection in the corner and put a real motorway where the blue line crosses. This will need flattening quite a bit of the city to the south (and killing some highrises in this city), but in the end that's what makes this game fun .

 

Regarding education, I have not expressed myself well. I probably overdid it with unbalancing stuff like museums etc. I really have to look what the buildings I put there actually do (for example Simgoober's aquarium or the Museum of Ypiranga). I also placed both, the Enyati school and college, which by themselves probably already solve all education needs in ways that may be balanced or not.

[Turjan 1,048]

OK, I now extended the healthcare to all corners, replaced the power plants with game standards, exchanged the waste management to something that costs the right amount of money, and I even lowered taxes to a blanket 7% (except I-D). My monthly surplus shrunk to a mere 80k.

 

I also eliminated that commuter loop in the lower left corner, so no pesky buses anymore in my pure automobile stacks. I guess it may be time soon for the utmost: building public transport . After the university that is, which can now be built that I razed all those shoddy private schools.

 

Which means I still don't know why this city is so profitable, compared to my others.

[Lukav Minaev 2]

I noticed that the city has a monthly income of about 160k, compared to monthly expenses of about 40k, which looks out of whack to me.

congrat, and screenshoot it man   ... i can only hit 50K distance surpluss ...

[Turjan 1,048]

Really, with mods, that's not really an achievement. My concern was more that I overdid it. I guess the radius doubler also has a money-saving effect, now that I think of it. The current table after adjustments with about 80k income:

 

 

I also notice that my one piddly train line is quite lucrative.

 

Edit: Funny how it helps to just post a thing I have been looking at for quite a while. I guess it's time to look at some of those HKBAT high-tech lots. The high-tech tax income is ridiculously high. Which is also easy to do, as there are only four lots available.

 

Edit2: Found the culprit. Eliminating all instances of this one building in my city turned my huge profit into a slight minus. Someone must not have adjusted the default setting when modding that one. I wanted to change something with that building, anyway, so I'll try my luck with the reader soon.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well done.  There is always an explanation for anomalies.  Sounds like you have quite a few game-skewing mods.  I used to use some of them myself, but I find I get along better with the game by not having them.  Beyond that, the trick is to take your time and stay in the black.  If you find yourself in the red the most general solution is make more Sims. 

 

Toll roads also can make a lot of money.

[Turjan 1,048]

Yes, I have quite a few game-skewing mods. Some of them, like the radius doubler, are used on purpose, as I dislike civic pods every few houses. This doesn't really save much money with schools, but it admittedly skews the numbers with fire protection and police. With other mods, you often don't know before you try them whether they use realistic values or not. And many of them are just too nice bats not to use and should have their place in my game, if I manage to adjust their values. I really have to get PIM-X to run on my computer (the reader works, but is a bit more work). I think I only have one hospital with wonky numbers in use at the moment ($3,000 for 8,000 patients is too cheap), the rest should be okay.

 

On the other hand, this I-HT building was an accident. It's outrageously off in its values, and I had six exemplars of them in this city. After deleting these six buildings, HT taxes shrank from 80,000 to 800 . Which sounds about right.

 

If you find yourself in the red the most general solution is make more Sims. 

 

True, and something I experienced in this city, too. I went a bit overboard with motorways and civics when I started the city while paused, and I didn't notice that I had a monthly income of 2k paired with monthly expenses of 12k, which drained my treasury quickly. The solution was my first high density residential neighborhood, directly on the border to the big city, which grew just in time to save me from bankruptcy.

 

 

Edit: By the way, some mods also have the opposite problem. I remember those monorail stations with a monthly upkeep of about $1,250. Those killed my treasury quickly.