Making money in sim city to help other cities.

[Jons511 12]

I always have one city in my region clearing a few million a day in profit. I then use that city to fund my others through gifts. The gifts take awhile but they do work. Here's what I do:

Start a city in a region with high resource availability. I prefer oil for the power plants, and oil seems to be better initially from a profit standpoint than coal or ore. Keep city small while building up profit from oil. Don't worry about overdoing it with utilities or services if your city is under 1000 people. Use wind power at first then switch to oil or coal depending on which route you took.

Take out two bonds and build an oil drill and a trade depot to export. Wait for profit then expand your drill to the max. Each drill should have at least two delivery trucks as should your trade depot. Then once you make enough money, pay off your bonds and build a second oil drill. Max that one out. Buy an oil power plant.

Then in sequence: plop a drilling HQ and once you can, build refineries, and a second trade depot. Stop exporting oil and set it to local use, an start exporting plastic and fuel. Have 2 plastic makers and two fuel distillers at each refinery. Keep building til you have 3 to 4 refineries. In the meantime build a trade hq when you have enough money. Now you can plop small fire stations, small police, and clinics while keeping your city about 5-10k in size. You can max these out over time if your city needs them.

Expand your trade hq and petroleum hq. By now you should be making a couple hundred thousand a month. Build up your education with a community college. Have at least 7 industrial buildings, and they will increase slightly in tech level.

Build a processor factory and turn it off for now. Have a trade depot import alloy (expensive at first so build a reserve), then turn your processor factory on. Keep selling fuel and plastic til your processor factory is maxed out. Then flip that to local. Start replacing your trade depots with trade ports, and start building more processor factories.

Now you can upgrade your smaller fire, police and clinics to the bigger buildings.

Then build electronics hq, and upgrade to consumer electronics when you can. Then build tv and computer factories til you have about 6 or 7.

By now you should be about -35k an hour in debt but making millions in tv and computer sales. Build more cities and gift them money. Once you have 20 million start gifting them about 10 million at a time.

Do NOT close out of your current city til you see a banner that says "simoleon gift sent to..." Once you see that, open your new city and let it run for about 5 min real life time and your gift will arrive.

Even if your other cities run a loss, now you can experiment and keep gifting them money.

[MayorQuimbie 13]

If your only exporting from the depot you don't need the delivery trucks....

[Jons511 12]

The trucks will help out with delivering goods between other facilities.