We Don't Need No Education

[brianc1327 161]

I temporarily put my central producer/suburb region on hold.  As an aside, having "specialty" tiles (only industrial or only commercial/residential) seems to work quite well.  I decided to make a "No education" city.  Some time ago, I did an "education experiment" where I made a city with no educational facilities and let it run for 20 game years, I just let it run, and did not "play" it.  I got to wondering recently  how well I could make a "no education" city work, that is, would it make money, have a pretty big population, etc.

The "strategy" that I devised in my head for making the city did not work very well, and I had to adjust it along the way to make it work.  Since I wanted to see if I could make it profitable, I did not use any money cheats such as the extra_cheats.dll moolah command, the, as I now call it, "contorversial 9.2x10¹⁸ simoleon park" (at least it seemed to generate quite a bit of controversy), the marijuana farm, or any others. I used a neighborhood design that I explained back in a post I made some time ago in a post called "new neighborhood design," with modifications based on what the RCI demand chart told me I needed.  In a 2X2 city, which is what I used, 9 of my neighborhoods(at least the way I am making them now, I may have modified them some since my original description) will fit, and I developed them neighborhood by neighborhood.

At first I used low-density residential, hoping that I could grow the city slowly keeping medical expenses down and grow the medical expense slowly so the medical expenses would not kill the profits, however, since I had not school expenses, I actually had quite a bit to spend on health care.  Using low-density residential did not bring in enough people to make my city profitable, so I had to upgrade to mid-density, that did not bring in enough people, so I had to upgrade to  high-density, that did bring in enough people, but I had to upgrade to the MattB Harbor clinic for healthcare.  To keep my city profitable, I of course had to set the funding so it was just barely over the number of patients.

I put in a bus system, that according to the traffic "data views" map, got quite a bit of use, and at least appeared to be profitable (fares - $2082, building maintenance - $500).  Not a major money maker compared with the amount from taxes, but at least it did not drain from city treasury.

I think overall I did pretty well. Here are a few relevant numbers(some of them are estimates based on the in-game graphs):

1. Population: 468,418; R$ -~500k (most of them) R$$-~5,000(.1%) R$$$-~1,000(.02%, I did get offered the first of the private schools).
2. Revenue: $54,648; R - $33,192 C - $6409 I - $12965, with the rest being made by mass trasit fares, I suppose.
3. Expenses: $51,550, so at the time I took these number, I was netting about $3,000 a year.
4. Funds:  $4,896,648, if I had let the game run until I had $10M, I would have put in a hyperspace gabage dump and reclaimed the space I used for incerators (I ended up needing 4) as more space for industrial zoning.

Brian Christiansen

 

[CorinaMarie 29,571]

Sounds intriguing and somewhat similar to what I used to do prior to making my own farm field income cheat. One thing I would do is set the Ambulance funding of any clinic to zero and simply place more of them to get 100% health care coverage without the astronomical expense of chauffeured service. I'd get life spans in the 90+ category and they'd all be dumber than a box of rocks. Then, should I want some education, I'd drop in a single Museum and let the game run for a century. This would get the overall EQ up to 120ish. You have to watch the funding for the Museum as the Sims reach old age and then set the tickets a wee bit more than the number of visitors, but it doesn't need full funding unless the population is large. In that case add a second one and adjust funding as needed.