Cash should be the driver for density not happiness.

[Toll 0]

This game has a terrible fundamental, but seemingly easy fix.

It is highlighted by 100% residential cities (with no other cities in the region).

 

At the moment a residence will survive and expand without any source of income, or at the very least very little city wide income. 100% resident cities develop by using parks which does add a very small amount of cash via a couple of job slots. It currently stand this is enough to sustain and build up to high density. Obviously this is obsurd.

 

The simple, yet far reaching fix to this is to require that residential buildings have to pay rent/mortgage per day/hour/whatever. Thus if the residential building does not receive enough cash from job buildings it decays. This would make 100% residential cities remain at very low density unless you had a supporting city nearby that had a high number of jobs to commute to and bring cash back.

 

It would also strengthen the I-C-R cycle. Resident buildings require cash, generally by Industrial buildings who need to make cash to give to residential buildings from sales to Commercial buildings, who need to get cash by selling stuff to resident buildings. So a cycle goes.

 

So industrail profit would be freights sales-resident payments-tax. This way, if your industry has no sales, it cant pay residents which forces population to move out of the city, commecial buildings would fail because there is no cash to buy stuff.

The entire system would be so much more dynamic and interesting and inter-city relationships would have far more meaning as basically a way to move cash around and gradually build up and densify a region.

 

Mining serves as a cash generator to kick start the region by injecting cash into the cycle, also to allow the simulation described above to function a little bit of cash is injected by each new building built.

The cash removed from the system is via importing goods and also dumped into the Mayors city building account via Taxes and cash destruction by services/utilities.

 

 

So in essence, Free Cash Flow should drive densification modulated by happniess. The happier your Sims the less cash required to increase density, converse being true too. (So you could have a very unhappy town, making A LOT of cash increasing density). Crime should also be a reflection on happiness, the less happy your citizens the more crime there is and vice versa.

At the moment it seems happiness is the driver of densifcation with available cash having little to do with anything other then shopping.

 

 

Please comment. Some of what I post above may actually be occuring however if it does, it needs serious tweaking as evident by 100% resident cities.