How Much Simolean in US Dollars?

[Propfam 2,289]

Hello,

You might have cities with a million, tens of millions, or even hundred of millions, or even more than those. The question is, how much SC4 simolean in US dollars?

Thanks.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Try $1 million. However, remember that simoleons are honest money, meaning that there's never any inflation (erosion of value). So the conversion rate for a new region modeling 1950 would be about a tenth of today's rate (maybe $100,000 per simoleon), and a simoleon in 1900 might be a quarter of that (perhaps $25,000 ).

[twalsh102 1,601]

@jeffryfisher, extreme curiosity compels me to ask how you were able to derive this answer! Or was this simply a SWAG in response to a SWAQ?

[CorinaMarie 29,615]

@chfzdn

There are some somewhat scientific estimates in @brianc1327's Value of Simoleon thread.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

I don't know exactly how much they're worth, but I do know that you can get a pretty good sized city going with hard mode(100S) in any sized tile, if you spend wisely.

 

[twalsh102 1,601]

The thing is that things are not consistent across the game.

I found a document created by the Ohio Department of Transportation in 1998 reference estimating road construction costs. It quotes a cost of $120,000 per lane-mile for 1 mile of  2-lane roadway (so $240,000 for 1 mile of 2-lane road. Adjusted for 2020 dollars, this is equal to $377,513).

1 mile is conveniently just over 1,600m (1,609), so just slightly over 100 tiles in SC4. Cost for a 2-lane road is 10 Simoleans per square or 1,000 Simoleans for 1,600m of roadway. This would suggest that 1 Simoleon = only $377

Schools - SimCity High School has a capacity of 750 Sims with a monthly cost of 750 Simoleons or 1 Simoleon per Sim per month or 12 Simoleons a year. Average yearly cost (averaged across all states) per student in public education is $11,762. So 1 Simoleon = approximately $1,000.

Can we equate plop cost of a building to be the cost to build the building? @brianc1327does so in his Tennis Court example. So let's use a couple of real life buildings that are also LM in SC4:

    John Hancock Center, completed in 1969 cost $675,000,000 in 2019 dollars to build. Cost to plop in SC4 is 165,000 Simoleons. So 1 Simoleon = $4,090

    Seafirst Tower (now Columbia Center) in Seattle, completed in 1985, cost $475,000,000 in 2019 dollars to build. Cost to plop in SC4 is 110,000 Simoleons. So 1 Simoleon = $4,318

    Gateway Arch in St. Louis, completed in 1965, cost $80,600,000 in 2018 dollars to build. Plop cost in SC4 is 90,000 Simoleons. So 1 Simoleon = $896

Cost to generate Power (including several assumptions) using Nuclear Power as the basis: 

    The standard unit of measure used to describe the amount of power generated is either the kilowatt hour (kWh) or megawatt hour (mWh). Since power generation sources are usually rated in MW. we'll use that in our calculations. Most Reactors are run 24/7 unless they are down for maintenance.  However, they may not always be run at peak-rated power. Assuming 24/7 operation, there are 720 mWh in a 30-day month.

    Units of power used in SimCity are very vague. The Nuclear Power Plant stats say the amount of power generated is 16,000 "units" per month. If we assume a "unit" is a mWh, that would mean the SimCity Nuc plant has a max power rating of 22.2 MW ( a very, very small Nuc plant indeed - as a matter of comparison, the smallest Plant currently operating in the US is rated at 519 MW). The monthly budget cost (which we can only assume to mean the cost to generate 16,000 "units" of power) is 3,000 Simoleons or 5.3 Simoleons per unit. As of 2018, the average cost to generate a REAL mWh in the US was $23.86. So 1 Simoleon = $4.50. Projected costs in 2008 to build new Power Plants in the States were between $5.5 million and $8.1 million / MW.  The SimCity plop cost is 50 Simoleons  or 2.25 Simoleons / MW.  So 1 Simoleon = $2.5 million - $3.7 million

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

12 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

curiosity compels me to ask how you were able to derive this answer!

If there's a commodity driving the whole SimCity economy, it is electricity, so I did a rough conversion from power-plant construction (still highly variable) to come up with my nice round number.

As TWalsh explained, other measures vary widely.

[Propfam 2,289]

In this reply, I'll use @brianc1327 convertion to calculate average residential income in SimCity 4. Using the value shared by @CorinaMarie in this excellent reply in my topic, it turns out that the lowest average income is about $8,500 (the salary is probably counted in millisimolean, it is equal to 1 simolean). Assuming that's yearly income (which is mostly used in the West), that's pretty decent. For comparison, Thailand has (in 2019 IMF data) $7,791 of GDP per capita, Turkey has $8,957, Brazil has $8,796, and Serbia has $7,397. That's 2 times of GDP per capita of Indonesia, independent country of Georgia, Jordan, and Mongolia and only $1,598 short from China and $2,636 short from Malaysia and Russia.

If we look at lowly educated middle-class, the income is $12,500. That's barely more than average world GDP per capita and it's on par with Russia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Costa Rica, and Romania. The slightly more educated middle-class earns $18,750. That's on par with Caribbean nations, Latvia, and Greece and can be considered as advanced economy. The Finland-class of education middle-class earns $25,000. That's literally the GDP per capita of Bahrain, Taiwan, and Slovenia and just $2,781 short from Brunei and Cyprus.

The lowly educated rich earns $22,500, which sits alongside Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Estonia, and just $2,526 more than Greece. The slightly more educated rich earns $86,250, which is just below Luxembourg and above Switzerland in terms of ranking. The highly educated rich earns $150,000 which is no nation has that amount of nominal GDP per capita and above Luxembourg. The closest is $138,910 PPP-adjusted GDP per capita Qatar.

Surprisingly, the highly educated rich only goes on that amount, not let's say $1 million dollar. But still, $150,000 is large by majority of people. That's the amount of fortunate people working in Silicon Valley. In my country, that's the highest wage for civil servant and leading companies executives and other high-end pros. As far as I know, that can be classified as upper-middle class people. Although UMC folks do have the almost same financial freedom as the truly rich, it's still lower than the rich. What makes me wonder is how can they buy luxury sedans or premium sports car while having mansions, spending millions of dollars on yachts and the fee of parking in the marina, participating the country club, attending their children to elite private schools and Ivy League-class unis, travelling around the world, and spending their money on high-end malls with such income? Is their income is actually enough to buy all such thing? Or maybe, is the living cost much lower than let's say, San Francisco?

What do you think? Thanks.

[Lucario Boricua 7,029]

My rule of thumb is to treat the game budget simoleons as equivalent to $1,000 USD from the early 2000s. The game is built to represent this context, rather than meant to be a representative content for the world at large. To give some examples:

• Small parks cost around §40 to §70 to build, it would make sense to pay from USD $40,000 to $70,000 for small park facilities.
   
• Average income of sims in a newly settled city, before education, health and gentrification gains happen, is around §20, which can correspond to an annual income of USD $20,000, equivalent to an hourly wage of USD $10 when working 40 hours each week and 50 weeks per year. This is pretty close to the prevailing entry and low level wages seen throughout the United States of the 2000s and to typical minimum wages of the states in the 2010s.
   
• Prestigious buildings (the Landmark menu) have costs in the order of tens to hundreds of thousands of simoleons. It would be logical that building these things would cost in the order of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
   
• Transportation infrastructure is trickier because it's so simplified and abstracted. Take the bus stop as an example. It costs §150 to build and §5 to run, serving 1,000 passengers. The bus shelter itself cannot cost upwards to $150,000 (maybe $1,500 if we're being reasonable), but paying for the bus fleet (let's say 2 transit buses) to service the 1,000 daily passengers would. Roads, per game cell (a square with a side of 16 meters), cost §10 to build, which is well-below the cost of a real two-lane road when scaled up (around $2 million per km for the United States for the mid-2010s). Doing the scaling up in simoleons gives us roughly 64 cells per kilometer (size of a small city district / tile), which costs §640 if the terrain were perfectly flat and the road perfectly straight. This would be equivalent to $640,000, still well-below today's costs. But if we were to buiild the road realistically, we need to do earthworks along the right-of-way, which would amount to doing it for the road itself and clear zones to the sides (3 cell width). If we multiply the road cost by 3, we get §1,920 simoleons / $1.92 million for that 1 km, which is in line with the $2 million estimate.