How do I make money?

[rovas117 6]

CONTEXT:

• I play on Hard Mode.
• No Loans.
• No Kickout Mod by Corri is installed.
• NAM mod is installed.

How do I make money in this game?

I know that sounds like a stupid question to ask but I seem to struggle to balance the books properly whenever I'm playing. I've perused through countless tutorials, watched every video I could find, read up on forum posts and whatnot, but there seems to be a point where I keep making a mistake that I don't quite see.

I understand that I need to make sure that I shouldn't overspend on civic services and whatnot and I'm almost micromanaging everything now to make sure I'm now going over my expenses. But I can't seem to make a profit.

Or if I am, the profit I'm making is barely negligible at like a paltry $5 or something so small like that.

It's important to note that I don't want to play with cheats.

Can anyone give me like a flow chart or a template I can follow along to make sure that my city isn't going to fall apart at the seams at any given moment? It's always the start that's the hardest for me.

[matias93 7,535]

It's the No Kickout mod. Let me explain.

The city revenue in the game is produced by transportation fares, land taxes and specific deals, but the land taxes are by far the most important component. You can increase them by zoning more land to be built and getting it effectively built, and by getting old, low-revenue grown lots replaced by newer and more rentable ones, which more or less means densifying built areas.

SimCity 4 growable lots are differentiated by the following factors: type (RCI), density (low, mid, high), wealth (low, mid, high) and growth stage, which more or less reflects how fully utilised the volume of the lot is, and in the base game this results in 8 successive stages for both residential and commercial lots. The base game, given favourable conditions, automatically allows grown lots to be replaced by lots of the same type and higher density (if zoned that way), or higher wealth, or higher growth stage.

The No Kickout mod is the in-game equivalent of an anti-gentrification ordinance, blocking the redevelopment of existing lots into higher wealth ones, which means that grown lots can only be replaced by higher density ones (if the zoning allows it) or by higher growth stage (if the city stats justify it). The problem is that the rest of the game simulation is done based on the assumption that such gentrification will be happening spontaneously, so when it doesn't happen, it affects the growth of the city, making it slower and, in an extreme case, stalling it. This also means that the main source of city revenue stops growing.

Theoretically, you could build a city that grows very gradually and only has enough infrastructure and services to serve its current population (which is a very realistic way to play, by the way), but this is quite restrictive and most players prefer to build infrastructure first and then recover the costs with the tax revenue allowed by it (this also has been done in real life, but usually with poor results). An option, when you already have some built area and the conditions (mainly good educational services) to produce demand for it, is to let the city gentrify, increasing the tax revenue with the same lots, but for that you would need to ditch the No Kickout mod, or alternatively, to manually demolish inhabited low and mid-wealth lots to make space for high-wealth ones, effectively evicting those sims elsewhere.

The problem with this approach, and the reason why the No Kickout mod exists, is that many times the demand for high-wealth lots is quite transitory, and as such, the newly grown high-wealth lots get rapidly dilapidated or even abandoned, reducing the tax revenue and looking bad as well. (Again, this also has happened in many places, this game is full of realism).

* * *

Now, going back to the first part, there's another source of revenue that most players don't even tap into, which is installing toll booths in their more congested roads. Without the NAM Traffic Simulator, this can produce ridiculously effective results, because the base game traffic simulator determines the routes based on the shortest distance, so installing a toll booth will only increase the congestion but not disincentivise any of those commuters from going through it. The NAM Traffic Simulator, being instead based on the shortest travel time will respond to toll booths by making the commuting sims look for alternative routes, but the booths will still produce some significant revenue, specially if they are located in the entrances and exits of the fastest roadways. Obviously, sims that commute by transit also pay their fares, so providing them with good transit services in strategic points can also result in profit for the city, but this is quite harder to achieve than just taxing car usage with toll booths.