Corruption and Bulldozing Costs

[Eusebio Ptolomeu 24]

Once you get to know SimCity 4, it gets easy to build a city. A little too easy sometimes, so I would like to add two little mechanics in order to increase the difficulty a little, and would like to know if they are possible to achieve with mods.

CORRUPTION
In Civilization, there's a little mechanic called "corruption" which basically ammount to take a portio of your proffit and throw it away. Could something like that work in SC4? The idea would basically be a constant extra rate of expenses in the budget, proportional to your current income rate. For example, suppose you should have an income of 500 simoleons this month; however, due to a corruption rate of 50%, an extra 250 simoleons would be added to your expense, in order to simulate this portion of your income being wasted away due to corruption (this being added, naturally, to the other usual expenses of services, maitenaince, etc.). In order to make this system a little more flexible, maybe we could control the rate of corruption by the plopping of certain buildings, in case you want to worldbuild your city passing trough different periods of corruption.
A simpler way to view this idea? Imagine a bizarro money-tree mod, but instead of giving you a fixed amount of money, it gives you a proportional amount of expenses. Given the existence of the money tree mod, the basic principles of this idea seems doable, but my question is if this proportionality can be used; can I make the cost fluctuate with the fluctuations of your income, or does it need to be always a fixed amount and that's it?

BULLDOZING COSTS
Life as a SimCity mayor can be easy sometimes: you want to build a highway trough this poor neighborhood? Do it, you can bulldoze all of these people's homes for chickenfeed; hell, it doesn't seem that expensive even if you're bulldozing the wealthiest and talles of office towers! Is there a way to increase these costs generally? If I'm not mkstaken, I guess that each RCI building has an specific cost in its data, but is that the only way to tackle this? By going building by building and doing it manually? Or is there a more "global" way of telling the code to increase the costs for the whole catalogue of RCI buildings at once?

[Null 45 3,131]

13 hours ago, Eusebio Ptolomeu said:

Imagine a bizarro money-tree mod, but instead of giving you a fixed amount of money, it gives you a proportional amount of expenses. Given the existence of the money tree mod, the basic principles of this idea seems doable, but my question is if this proportionality can be used; can I make the cost fluctuate with the fluctuations of your income, or does it need to be always a fixed amount and that's it?

The money tree mod works by acting as an income generating business deal prop, similar to the Army Base, Casino, etc. Based on the values in Ingred.ini, it doesn't appear that Maxis added a business deal expense value that props could use. But it may be possible to implement from a DLL, as the DLL could directly interact with the game's budget simulator.

13 hours ago, Eusebio Ptolomeu said:

If I'm not mkstaken, I guess that each RCI building has an specific cost in its data

Correct, the building exemplars have a 'Bulldoze Cost' value that the game queries when demolishing a building. I am not sure if it is possible to globally modify that value, the game most likely only loads the building exemplar from disk when it need to read the properties.

[rsc204 21,869]

The corruption part is simply an additional monthly expense. This could be easily done by ploppable buildings, although I think using LUA code you could even calculate it’s cost based on a percentage of monthly expenses overall.

Bulldoze cost is set for each individual Buildings Exemplar, so yeah no easy global change. But you could modify each exemplar to increase the value by whatever percentage you deemed preferable. 

[Eusebio Ptolomeu 24]

Hmmm, this bulldozing specificity could be a little of a problem: not only is is tedious to go around each exemplar, I assume it would have to be redone for every mod which attempts to add exemplars as well, such as CAM? Is that a completely global level of bulldozing costs, changing everything, not only RCI bildings, but civic buildings and infrastructure as well? Or the only way is to really go after every specific component and changing it individually?

[Null 45 3,131]

43 minutes ago, Eusebio Ptolomeu said:

Or the only way is to really go after every specific component and changing it individually?

That is the only way I know of.