Strategy On Making Money?

[Fearino 0]

Without digging the natural resources as primary source of income, how do you guys earn large profits in a city with a lot of high wealth residential/commercial with large police/fire station and Hospital? The services is costing too much. I tried to raise the tax slightly but the Sims started leaving and instead i am losing more money.

[hym 358]

You can focus on building a city specialized in culture.  The opera houses cater to high wealth sims and generate a nice chunk of change (assuming you schedule them frequently and get enough sims to attend).  They will also drive demand for commercial services to support the visiting sims that come to your city.  (Though beware of traffic jams if you schedule all your events at once and don't plan for the traffic.)

[Fearino 0]

You can focus on building a city specialized in culture.  The opera houses cater to high wealth sims and generate a nice chunk of change (assuming you schedule them frequently and get enough sims to attend).  They will also drive demand for commercial services to support the visiting sims that come to your city.  (Though beware of traffic jams if you schedule all your events at once and don't plan for the traffic.)

 

Yeah i have another city with the Expo built to generate income. However i am experiencing the same problem, the city's services is dragging my treasury down and i am relying on the Expo's income to survive. Guess i should start experimenting more to see how it works best!

[hym 358]

That's always good.  Though I should warn you that city specializations can wreck your city's finances if you don't manage them well.  My oil and ore towns have always made their money off the shipment of raw resources.  The city's hourly budget was always deep in the red.

[Nique 291]

[sarcasm]

Write an unfinished game and sell it to your sims for a rediculous high price....

[/sarcasm]

 

Just zone a lot of residence. Thats all.

[DomoTheRussian 68]

As said previously go with Expo-Center. Tourist flow shouldn't be a problem. Also you can try to go with Electronics specialisation. Exporting processors an TV's on global market should cost a whole heep of money as far as I can say. 

[Fearino 0]

That's always good.  Though I should warn you that city specializations can wreck your city's finances if you don't manage them well.  My oil and ore towns have always made their money off the shipment of raw resources.  The city's hourly budget was always deep in the red.

 

 

As said previously go with Expo-Center. Tourist flow shouldn't be a problem. Also you can try to go with Electronics specialisation. Exporting processors an TV's on global market should cost a whole heep of money as far as I can say. 

 

Yea it's what i'm experiencing right now. I built Smelting Factory and import Coal and Ore to produce alloy, the profits are huge but once again the hourly budget is losing 3-4k. I just can't find the right balance. My city tile is already maxed out, can't zone anymore residential area.

[TinyWeeny 6]

You can make a decent amount of money through recycling. 

 

Build a Recycling Center with some Alloy Reclimation Lines and make sure you have at least one Trade Depot set to trade Alloy to the Global Market.

 

Alloy currently makes 48k per 10 tons and one recycling center can easily add 100k simoleons to your monthly profit.

 

It isn't the best way ever to make a ton of money, but you need recycling to keep your city clean anyway, so why not make some money in the process?

[Tramwhet 53]

strategy for making money ?

 

you should ask to EA 

[Fearino 0]

You can make a decent amount of money through recycling. 

 

Build a Recycling Center with some Alloy Reclimation Lines and make sure you have at least one Trade Depot set to trade Alloy to the Global Market.

 

Alloy currently makes 48k per 10 tons and one recycling center can easily add 100k simoleons to your monthly profit.

 

It isn't the best way ever to make a ton of money, but you need recycling to keep your city clean anyway, so why not make some money in the process?

 

Ahh ok i'll try that out! Thanks!

 

Anyway i started on another region. This time i focused on education system and it appears to be a good starting point! My current city have over 120k population. Supported by 2 fully upgraded  Grade Schools, 1 fully upgraded High School, 1 College with 2 Extension Wing, 2 Libraries and a University. Because of the highly educated sims, the crimes are low, injury and fire accident are kept at minimum so i don't need to build any police precinct or Hospital to meet the high demands. Currently my hourly budget is 12k profits. with 8% tax rate across all RCI. Planning to build one attraction now to earn even more money.

 

[infoman96 27]

You can make a decent amount of money through recycling. 

 

Build a Recycling Center with some Alloy Reclimation Lines and make sure you have at least one Trade Depot set to trade Alloy to the Global Market.

 

Alloy currently makes 48k per 10 tons and one recycling center can easily add 100k simoleons to your monthly profit.

 

It isn't the best way ever to make a ton of money, but you need recycling to keep your city clean anyway, so why not make some money in the process?

 

Ahh ok i'll try that out! Thanks!

 

Anyway i started on another region. This time i focused on education system and it appears to be a good starting point! My current city have over 120k population. Supported by 2 fully upgraded  Grade Schools, 1 fully upgraded High School, 1 College with 2 Extension Wing, 2 Libraries and a University. Because of the highly educated sims, the crimes are low, injury and fire accident are kept at minimum so i don't need to build any police precinct or Hospital to meet the high demands. Currently my hourly budget is 12k profits. with 8% tax rate across all RCI. Planning to build one attraction now to earn even more money.

 

 

I just don't get it, I've always been one to be pretty good at playing SimCity games and I understand this game in particular is a whole different monster but I just can't seem to play it well enough. I always specialize in Education which eats away at my budget but helps my city out, my budget is never red (usually I make about $7k an hour) but when it comes to growth it just doesn't happen. My city grows to about 30k and it stops, I can't zone anymore residential, the areas that are built with homes (not skyscrapers) won't go up even though they have high land value, high-density streets, and plenty of parks near them; in fact I spend so much money on parks that its the third largest proponent of my budget. I just want to grow my city to 75k but that just doesn't happen for me, I've been stuck at 30k for days now though my skyline is growing. So how are you growing your city? I always build my industrial zones towards one side of the city, I build two financial zones, and everything else goes to residential. 

[aparrot7 82]

Yeah I'm experiencing some of the same problems as you. My budget flow is barely a trickle, and I rely completely on tourism to bring in my profits. Turns out tourism is the hardest of the specializations in SimCity to live off. Education and healthcare are definitely a drain on the budget. Try the expo center, or even a gambling hall if you need too.

[Spatzimaus 77]

The others have covered the key issues (difficulty of specialization, region play, and so on), but I'll add one more piece of advice: Don't rush to make a city bigger just because you can.  When your city has 15,000 people it's not hard to maintain a nice steady 4-5k profit, which makes it a good time to do things like upgrade your roads, but ramping that up to 50,000 people means that one school, one clinic, one fire station, etc. aren't enough any more.  You start needing more civic buildings AND a mass transit system AND recycling/water purification, just to stay afloat, and you'll want to use the larger civic buildings (like the full police station), which means someone in the region has to have built a Department of Utilities.  Also, consider power; a small city can be fed off a single wind farm, but more developed cities need either really expensive plants (like nukes) or really dirty ones (coal/oil), and these add all sorts of issues.

[XisBlue 3]

Great tips. Last night I was playing a new city to complete my 3-city region (really wish the AI would do this so I could have a good 1-city,1-player game). I was tired and not in the mood to fully develop a 3rd city so I just zipped in some zones, a coal mine, trade depot and let it run. No schools or other frills.

 

Next thing I knew, I had about 12,000 sims in the city, a profit of something like $11k per hour and something my main city didn't: police/fire HQs. 

 

I played for a few hours later and just didn't build anything else. The city is a cash cow @ 12k people, so what's the point of making it bigger? I ended up adding the mega bus terminal with full upgrades. This city is swimming in cash and running perfectly. If anything, I want to keep people out and enjoy it.  

 

For fun I looked for any building that wasn't happy and bulldozed it. 

[Xenocity 343]

I do these:

 

• lend fire/police/medical services (they do pay some)
• Sell Electricity and Water
• Move Garbage and Sewage to my other city (You save money nearly right off the bat)
• Casino with good mass transit system
• 10%-14% tax on industry (only if there is a high demand for industry)
• 10% tax on Residents and Commercial (only if there is a high demand for industry)
• The 10% tax on Residents and Commercial will slow your city growth.

[Shardak 8]

Best way I found to make money was recycling.

 

Build a recycling plant, put 4 alloy reclamation lines on it. Also get a trade depot with 2-4 alloy storage bins.  Go into the trade depot options "Manage Global Market", and set it to Export alloy.

 

Once you do that for a while and unlock the processor factory, start recycling both plastic and alloy and stop exporting them.  Send them to the processor factory and then export the processors (results in 2x the profit of just exporting alloy).

 

My city of 200k residents makes close to 1 million per day just by exporting processors.

[kraftykyles 0]

you should ask to EA 

Perfect  

[GoldenShadowGS 0]

Didn't read all of the replies yet. I am making over 1 million dollars a month with an electronics industry.

I have some trade depots set to buy alloy and plastic from the global market. I then use my processor factory to make processors. Then, I turn those processors into TVs and sell them on the global market. You get nearly 200,000 per truckload shipped out. This plan takes a lot of startup money for the required infrastructure HQ and factories, and initial cost of the raw materials, which are very expensive, costing 48,000 per shipment of alloy and 18,000 per shipment of plastic. Sell processors first until you have enough money to make a TV factory. Processors only have a small profit margin, but TVs are huge. I am running a -6,000/hr deficit and still making a million a month.

[Fearino 0]

The others have covered the key issues (difficulty of specialization, region play, and so on), but I'll add one more piece of advice: Don't rush to make a city bigger just because you can.  When your city has 15,000 people it's not hard to maintain a nice steady 4-5k profit, which makes it a good time to do things like upgrade your roads, but ramping that up to 50,000 people means that one school, one clinic, one fire station, etc. aren't enough any more.  You start needing more civic buildings AND a mass transit system AND recycling/water purification, just to stay afloat, and you'll want to use the larger civic buildings (like the full police station), which means someone in the region has to have built a Department of Utilities.  Also, consider power; a small city can be fed off a single wind farm, but more developed cities need either really expensive plants (like nukes) or really dirty ones (coal/oil), and these add all sorts of issues.

 

Yes. I think it is better to have 1 city concentrate on taking in the sewage/dump. Using education spec imo is very good for starting your first region because they are less likely to produce criminals that cross the border and harass your neighboring city. With crime at a lower rate, you can save money on Police services.

 

 

You can make a decent amount of money through recycling. 

 

Build a Recycling Center with some Alloy Reclimation Lines and make sure you have at least one Trade Depot set to trade Alloy to the Global Market.

 

Alloy currently makes 48k per 10 tons and one recycling center can easily add 100k simoleons to your monthly profit.

 

It isn't the best way ever to make a ton of money, but you need recycling to keep your city clean anyway, so why not make some money in the process?

 

Ahh ok i'll try that out! Thanks!

 

Anyway i started on another region. This time i focused on education system and it appears to be a good starting point! My current city have over 120k population. Supported by 2 fully upgraded  Grade Schools, 1 fully upgraded High School, 1 College with 2 Extension Wing, 2 Libraries and a University. Because of the highly educated sims, the crimes are low, injury and fire accident are kept at minimum so i don't need to build any police precinct or Hospital to meet the high demands. Currently my hourly budget is 12k profits. with 8% tax rate across all RCI. Planning to build one attraction now to earn even more money.

 

 

I just don't get it, I've always been one to be pretty good at playing SimCity games and I understand this game in particular is a whole different monster but I just can't seem to play it well enough. I always specialize in Education which eats away at my budget but helps my city out, my budget is never red (usually I make about $7k an hour) but when it comes to growth it just doesn't happen. My city grows to about 30k and it stops, I can't zone anymore residential, the areas that are built with homes (not skyscrapers) won't go up even though they have high land value, high-density streets, and plenty of parks near them; in fact I spend so much money on parks that its the third largest proponent of my budget. I just want to grow my city to 75k but that just doesn't happen for me, I've been stuck at 30k for days now though my skyline is growing. So how are you growing your city? I always build my industrial zones towards one side of the city, I build two financial zones, and everything else goes to residential. 

 

What type of roads did you build? I always start out with low density road. Then i build medium wealth parks and upgrade to medium wealth. Also, they need spaces to grow.

[GoldenShadowGS 0]

Didn't read all of the replies yet. I am making over 1 million dollars a month with an electronics industry.

I have some trade depots set to buy alloy and plastic from the global market. I then use my processor factory to make processors. Then, I turn those processors into TVs and sell them on the global market. You get nearly 200,000 per truckload shipped out. This plan takes a lot of startup money for the required infrastructure HQ and factories, and initial cost of the raw materials, which are very expensive, costing 48,000 per shipment of alloy and 18,000 per shipment of plastic. Sell processors first until you have enough money to make a TV factory. Processors only have a small profit margin, but TVs are huge. I am running a -6,000/hr deficit and still making a million a month.

 

Now I am at 2.5 million, I have 2 processor plants and 3 tv factories, each with 4x modules. I have 2 trade depots devoted to importing alloy and plastic. 1 trade depot to carry processors locally, 1 trade port with a dock extension to export the tvs, it has one tv storage room.

[Sunfighter 186]

^ basically what he says up there. With a smart population processors and TVs are a way to go, they are fairly unbalanced right now on the money intake. BTW guy above me, do you have a recycling center? Those generate alloy and plastic, could cut down on your import costs a bit.... (dont ask me why recycling centers are profitable, they arnt in real life at all..but whatever)

[GoldenShadowGS 0]

And right after I took this screenshot, the game crashed. I reload and find my progress seems to be set back to a point when I had a much smaller population and far less money, even though it says last played 7 minutes ago. But The city didn't load, so I couldn't tell for sure how bad the damage is.

^ basically what he says up there. With a smart population processors and TVs are a way to go, they are fairly unbalanced right now on the money intake. BTW guy above me, do you have a recycling center? Those generate alloy and plastic, could cut down on your import costs a bit.... (dont ask me why recycling centers are profitable, they arnt in real life at all..but whatever)

I do have a recycling center, but it doesn't make enough product to supply 5 factories upgraded with 4x modules.

 

I wouldn't say it unbalanced since I still haven't upgraded the Electronics HQ to the max tier, that requires nearly 4 or 5 million in daily profits. I am only at 2.5 million

[TinyWeeny 6]

With that many factories, you're going to have to import your resources.

 

I found that a Recycling Center with 2 Alloy Reprocessing lines can usually keep up with the amount of material your recycling trucks bring in, even if you have the max amount of trucks built.

 

At first, you city usually has a ton of extra recycling, so it may seem crazy busy at first, but once they clean the city up a bit, you'll notice it slow down a lot.

[Trooth 22]

If you want to go high pop fast you need jobs. Lots of industry and a good amount of commercial. You shoul get maybe 1/3 of your city as residential. Zone it for high density and let that residential demand grow. Once you have fire health and medical you should start seeing medium density pop, let it fill up, no more residential zones. Once they fill up it will start popping high density. Once that dills go to the region and start some bedroom communities. Focus everything else on jobs and services. I can get to 125k easily within six hours of play at llama. By the way I am enjoying llama speed, I am getting better at budget management, services, man agent, and city planning than I was at cheetah.

[GoldenShadowGS 0]

One of the big problem is the taxes do not scale linearly. On a new city, 1,000 resident = 1,000 dollars in taxes.

On my city with 90,000 residents, the taxes are only 19,000 dollars.

[malik8888 0]

here is how to make serious money! what "goldenshodowGS" is saying is the trick...it is city specialization. You can never really make tons of money having a well run city. you might make 4-5k per hour doing that. But when you get into the city specializations you will make A LOT more. Right now as you can see im loosing like $55K an hour, but i make 3M a day or something. This turns out to make over 1M a day.

 

This city can be seen at region (drm city) and city of Paykullii my origin name is "mantismanmalik" I could have 500M if I really played this city a lot.  Now i practice how fast i can do it, and trying to get better at other specializations.  So for example if your city specialization is gambling, make sure you have sufficient population in your city and make sure you have a ton of police.  You WILL run in a neg city budget...dont worry about that. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vorox3 0]

Get your sims educated, build at least a high school, they will want to recycle, when that happens get a recycling plant to get plastic and alloy(you have to add alloy to the plant), then ship it to a prosessor factory and them ship the prosessors to a depot or port. Upgrade to TVs then to computers as you go along.

[Cob92 360]

Industry + big commercial downtown. I keep a strip of land along the edge of my city for industrial use, and I am able to make 10,000 profit an hour with large police station, large fire station with 2 choppers and 4 trucks, hospital, 2 high schools, college, 3 fully upgraded power plants, 3 fully upgraded bus depots, 3 sewage plants, 3 water pumping plants, and of course parks and libraries and other junk.

[r00n83 12]

Why import alloy. built a smelting factory or 2 and import ore and coal if you aren't producing any. Use the alloy in the factories and export the metal. By doing that you'll cover the costs of of importing ore and coal. Alloy is the most expensive resource used in the factories.

[tristanrob 0]

pshh, I got a electronic city, and I have the highest of city services, I'm in the red of about 60k an hour, BUT!!!! because of the processors, TV' and computers, I'm making millions easily making the red unnoticeable, I think my next region I want to make a city with high wealth, electronic spot, and then the same high wealth with straight culture. I think it will work out. The casino is the trickest I have found so far, talk about rollercoaster on income!