Making more money

[REvolverRPG 5]

Couldn't find this on any one post, but got some ideas already spread out amongst several posts

 

I want more money! I haven't really specialized on anything yet except education (just so I don't have Homer SImpsons working in my nuclear power plants and hordes of criminals on the streets), but I'm not sure if education should even be a specialization. I haven't seem to have found a way to make money of of it yet, but anyways, whats the most lucrative specialization?

 

I find my cities in the end-game phase to be slowly losing money (as I add more modules to services to keep up with demand) Is there something I can do to get more profit per hour rolling in?

 

 

[telekinetic 3]

I would work towards a city that focuses on making computers.  Try to save a couple million then make processors for a profit until you have enough to switch to selling Computers.  I try to keep a couple of processor factories import alloy and plastic, and build computers to sell for a hefty profit.

[cjuk88 4]

Computers are very good.

 

However, my new most profitable city, believe it or not, is my new gambling city.

 

Playing in the Grand Haven map in the Reflection Atoll region I have made a city that is currently running on 334k per hour in gambling & tourism profits.

 

I have 2 MW elite megatowers with Elite Tourism crowns making 44k an hour profit, and then the remaining 290k comes from a total of 6 maxed out Elegant casinos. My biggest challenge is making sure I have enough high wealth hotels so that tourists stay in the city and traffic doesn't go mental. 

 

Its become a bit unplayable on my laptop though as my high wealth tourist draw is up to 146k tourists, and so there are literally tens of thousands of them walking around...

[Griffon 19]

As what everyone else is saying, specialize in electronics, which eventually makes computers.  Specializing in electronics can leave your city still making a negative hourly loss, but as long as you're making a monthly profit your advisor will remain quite.  You get a monthly profit with an hourly loss if you sell more resources (coal, plastic, computers, etc.) than your hourly loss amounts to.

 

With the expansion if you want to make a ludicrous amount of money try using OmegaCo with an electronics specialization.  OmegaCo can make any city have a very profitable hourly profit.

 

And if you want to make even more money, produce your own plastic and alloy for your processors through refineries, smelting plants, and recycling.

 

By producing your own plastic and alloy you will also be importing all you need for OmegaCo (ore and oil) and you could also make your own processors for drones.  Plus if you have OmegaCo's commerce division you can add VTOL to your trade ports to import or export even more resources at a time.

 

I don't have any more ideas to make your city even more profitable that that.

 

if you want to learn about how to be profitable with OmegaCo, I explain a lot in this topic: 

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

Casinos are nice.  Just keep the mass transit chugging and your police presence high and your casinos will make tasty profits.

 

There's a point where you can have too much money in this game.  The most expensive item you can buy to place in your city (pre-expansion) is one of the $500,000 tourist draws, but other than that there isn't much of a gold sink in the game.  Your city is profitable, money rolling in, but not much to spend it on once your city is full.

[Griffon 19]

Casinos are nice.  Just keep the mass transit chugging and your police presence high and your casinos will make tasty profits.

 

There's a point where you can have too much money in this game.  The most expensive item you can buy to place in your city (pre-expansion) is one of the $500,000 tourist draws, but other than that there isn't much of a gold sink in the game.  Your city is profitable, money rolling in, but not much to spend it on once your city is full.

I think I seen this on the SimCity facebook page that there is a true ceiling limit to the amount of money you can have in one city.  It was around $100 billion or $200 billion.  It has to do with the limit in the computers not the game.  The computer can only hold so many didgets in it's memory and this one person reached the limit somehow.  I understand this because I've taken computer programming, but it's hard to explain if you don't know what I'm talking about.  I personally can't even imagine taking the time to reach that limit to begin with.

 

I was hoping that the expansion buildings would be worth millions of dollars so that we'd have to already have a successful city making millions of dollars to have futuristic buildings.  The most expensive thing in the expansion is the advanced fusion reactor module, it's $500,000 per module at a max of three per fusion reactor.  That would be $1.5mil total (not including the initial cost of the fusion power plant), but not many people would play long enough to even unlock it and if they did couldn't afford it.  It also costs $12,500/hour per advanced fusion reactor module.

 

You are right, tourism can really increase the profit of any city (if you know how to build it right), but it would be hard to do multiple specializations with tourism (I'm saying tourism specialization = casinos + culture specializations), because tourism buildings take up most the room in any city, especially if you have the amusement park DLC (I'd recommend getting that if you really want to attract tourists and make money with tourism) and the blimp DLC (not nearly as good as the amusement park DLC though).

[ad0ran 0]

Probably the easiest way is to get money is going Electronics. Then once you get an Arcology going, you can literally just have a city filled with computer factories and regional busses to bring in workers. I think Skye made a city raking in 30m monthly using this technique. 

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

 

You are right, tourism can really increase the profit of any city (if you know how to build it right), but it would be hard to do multiple specializations with tourism (I'm saying tourism specialization = casinos + culture specializations), because tourism buildings take up most the room in any city, especially if you have the amusement park DLC (I'd recommend getting that if you really want to attract tourists and make money with tourism) and the blimp DLC (not nearly as good as the amusement park DLC though).

 

 

Yeah, some tourism buildings are far too big for the benefit they provide.  It makes more sense to plunk cash down on the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it has a small footprint instead of one of those huge buildings with only medium-level attraction.  What they should have done is limit the landmarks to one per region - someone builds the Empire State and no one else can.  Then people would have to try out the other buildings.

[Cob92 360]

Electronics is the best moneymaking specialization. Education doesn't produce money by itself; you have to use the gains from education to grow your high tech industry to make money. Really, the point of the education city is to research technologies for the region.

[REvolverRPG 5]

I plan on taking the Desolation region and making 7 different cities. So far, that isn't working. I started to pay more attention to the monthly transactions and less to the hourly profit, and for a while there, I was raking in the money, but I've now learned a hard lesson about how important it is to keep a constant eye on your production, or face failure.

 

I think I have computers down, since it is fairly simple, but I definitely don't have tourism down yet. That is still a mystery to me, but I want to learn it because I dont want to have 7 cites that all make money off of computers. I mean I'm a computer nerd and all, but that is just way out of hand!

 

I also dont know much about specializing in trading, mining or drilling. To me, those would be things that you use to supply another specialization, but maybe you can make money with them?

 

And should I aim for zero taxes, or keep them at a level that still generates a lot of profit/hour?

[Griffon 19]

I plan on taking the Desolation region and making 7 different cities. So far, that isn't working. I started to pay more attention to the monthly transactions and less to the hourly profit, and for a while there, I was raking in the money, but I've now learned a hard lesson about how important it is to keep a constant eye on your production, or face failure.

 

I think I have computers down, since it is fairly simple, but I definitely don't have tourism down yet. That is still a mystery to me, but I want to learn it because I dont want to have 7 cites that all make money off of computers. I mean I'm a computer nerd and all, but that is just way out of hand!

 

I also dont know much about specializing in trading, mining or drilling. To me, those would be things that you use to supply another specialization, but maybe you can make money with them?

 

Mining and drilling is even easier than electronics.  Trade as a solo specialization would be hard to do.  You use trade in coal/ore, oil, and electronic specialization.  I build the trade HQ and unlock the commerce division to whatever other specialization I'm building in that city so I can unlock the factories in the other HQs and still use the trade ports to import and export resources.

 

I haven't done a trade specialization by itself.  I assume it would be similar to day trading stocks but takes longer instead.  The global market changes once every one hour in real life I think and it goes up or down depending on weather or not the resources was sold or bought more.  Basically from what I understand, the price goes up if most of the people playing that server buy that particular resource and down if most of the people playing that server sells that particular resource, but what it goes up or down by varies.  You will need to import a resource and store it until the price increases then sell it again.  I assume that you will have to constantly bulldoze and rebuild different resource lots depending on which resource is the cheapest and constantly check the global market prices, which you can only view from the menu (if there is another way to look at it while playing cities I don't know how to).  That is why I try to stay away from trade specialization as a solo specialization.

 

Tourism is fairly easy.  I make the city around 1/3 to 1/2 residential, 1/3 to 1/2 commercial, and about 1/8 industry (because you need some industry to make commercial more profitable now).  Start out by building a casino (as long as it's not an elite casino if they're unlocked).  Next build an amusement park (max it out for that level when you can) and build expo center.  After that start an event and start building different transportation options (buses, train, boats, etc.) and upgrade the amusement park as it becomes available.  You will probably need to build another casino at this point if the low wealth casino is the only one unlocked to get the Gambling HQ unlocked (and build it as soon as it's unlocked), otherwise you still need to build another casino if the first one is profitable.  At this point build an airport and a sleek casino (if you haven't already done those already).  You should have a successful tourism city by now and all you need to do is continue building more casinos and add a few landmarks too if you haven't already added any by this time and if you have already built landmarks replace them for better ones (empire state building, statue of liberty, etc.).  If you don't have a successful tourism city after following that guide then I'm sorry, because that's exactly how I build my tourism cities and that usually works for me.  The hardest thing about building tourism cities is getting the money to build everything so I usually gift myself money from another very profitable city I made.

 

Btw OmegaCo can be added to any city to bring the red hourly profit/loss back to the green (even tourism).

[REvolverRPG 5]

Awesome advice. I'm sure this will do the trick, but yes, it seems like money at the beginning would be the trick. I would just make one city that makes a lot of money the gift that money to other cities  and not even worry about them being profitable as long as they serve the region a purpose, but here lately I have not been getting the gifts I send. Gotta love these bugs right?  

 

Do I need to build a tourism/gambling city on the water?

 

And as far as using processors to make a profit, the biggest issue I have doing that is getting 5 or more medium-tech industrial to pop up. I got plenty of low-tech and even high-tech, but no medium. Seems to happen everytime!

[cjuk88 4]

Do I need to build a tourism/gambling city on the water?

 

You don't but it helps because cruise ship docks bring in medium & high wealth tourists, and you can have as many as you like, which means you can manage traffic well.

 

Tourism is still a little bugged. my big tourism city basically seems to have an unlimited tourist draw now. Almost like having x number of high wealth tourists has attracted more, and it snowballs. Its got to the point that if I load the city and play for a game year, I have to quit because I have 2 avenues, the length of the entire map full of cars trying to leave the city. This is because more tourists come than there are things to do, and after a while they just leave. Building more attractions worsens the problem because it causes even more tourists to arrive. 

If I demolish the city and leave it for a game year with nothing built, the tourist drive doesn't fall away.

 

However, this is better than the v1 tourism which was completely unpredictable...

 

My top tips for casino cities:

1) Make sure you target the type of tourist you want. If you want only high wealth, don't attract too many med/low wealth

2) Use commercial zones to make hotels. Make sure you create enough hotel beds for your casino patrons.

3) Use ferry docks and airships to bring in the med/high wealth, and position them close so that tourists walk (so as not to create too much traffic)

4) Try to have as little population as you can get away with to staff your buildings. Gambling cities will generate traffic, so you want to minimise the amount of other traffic that you might generate

[Griffon 19]

@cjuk88 is right about tourism too.  In the best tourism city I made I had at least 5 docks with cruise ships, an airship dock and all the other types of transportation.  I had 3 low wealth tourism crowns and one elite tourism crown on my megatowers.  I also had one low wealth casino (the original), a Sci-Fi casino, and two Sleek casinos (as well as everything I mentoned in my above post).  The tourists used the skybridges as another form of mass transit in the city which really helped the road traffic.  I got the Gambling HQ fully upgraded (that was a first for me) and in either the culture or gambling specialization tab it said I was attracting 70k tourists/day (even I couldn't believe it), but I probably wasn't getting that many in my city due to traffic.

 

I still kinda wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that it was an abandoned tourism city before I reclaimed it.  The first thing I did was bulldoze everything (except the dump because I didn't want ground pollution) in the city and followed my guide from above.  If the attractiveness of a city doesn't go down like @cjuk88 said (if I understood correctly) then by my rebuilding the city, it doubled the attractiveness of the city.

 

Also in @cjuk88 top tips for #1, I usually try to target medium wealth tourists in my cities.  There is only one casino that is low wealth and you can't make too much money off it.  The Sci-Fi casino does attract low wealth tourists but you can't make money off it unless you get medium wealth tourists in it.  The Sleek casino is the only casino with all three wealths and you can increase the amount of low and medium wealth tourists that can visit it.  The next two are elite casinos, although they can hold more people than the previous casinos they need high wealth tourists to really make money (kinda like the Sci-Fi casino with medium wealth tourists).  By attracting medium wealth tourists you also attract low wealth and some high wealth tourists.  Most my low wealth tourist visit the amusement park or commercial buildings and my high wealth tourists mostly visit the landmarks (don't know why that it) leaving the medium wealth tourists mainly interested in the casinos.  So by attracting medium wealth tourists you get a balance of tourists in your city (in my opinion).

 

If you want to attract high wealth tourists through stadium events there is only one stadium event that attracts them.  It is the soccer game at the pro stadium, but it is so hard to get all the people required to make money off it, so I don't mess with it.  You can also make more money for what you put in at the expo center.  At the expo center you get about 3 times the money back as what the event cost (if it's full) at the pro stadium you get about double of what you put in back (if it's full), but it's a lot harder to get enough people to pro stadium as you need, not to mention the traffic problems it causes before and after it's over.  Also with stadiums I would not attach any other roads to it, because other cars that don't even want to use it use the stadium's road so that it blocks traffic to the stadium.  Although some cars do this anyways it's a lot worse with other roads connecting to it.

[REvolverRPG 5]

Ok cool, I will give that a try now. I tried the computers last night, on sandbox, and eventually had a monthly income of nearly 2 milion, without cheats (that month at least). So since I took advice from this forum about that and it worked, I'm sure I'll have success here too.

 

Thanks guys

[REvolverRPG 5]

Hey Griffon, do you build rooms onto your casino or do you just let the commercial zones make the hotels to keep the tourists longer?

[Griffon 19]

Hey Griffon, do you build rooms onto your casino or do you just let the commercial zones make the hotels to keep the tourists longer?

Both.  I don't build hotels until the 2nd or 3rd casino HQ upgrade and hopefully there are plenty of hotels in the city by that time already.  On my first casino however I add a low wealth hotel, medium wealth hotel, a low wealth tourist attraction room, and a medium wealth tourist attraction room because I want to get more tourists in my city at that time and on the low wealth casino everything is already unlocked.  On all other hotels I add one low wealth hotel then build the medium and high wealth hotels later on when they're unlocked.  I also don't add more than four hotel rooms to one casino.