Exactly. Most of us didn't really progress very far (I only had ~5k people), and most of the buildings were disabled for beta, so it's understandable we were running big profits. Consider education; all we had in this test was the basic grade school, and for small towns that's fine, but in the long term you'll need to have grade schools, high schools, colleges, libraries, museums... all of which will have maintenance costs. Your profit margins will disappear fast once you have to cover all of the bases for a large city, because if you don't, upgrade education, you'll never get the high tech industries (which give you more money from taxes AND pollute less). Or consider health care; even though the clinic has the full medical functionality, it just doesn't have much capacity (even with all the upgrades). For a few thousand people in low-density buildings it's fine, but what happens once most of your city is medium- or high-density? More people, which means you'd need more hospitals to cover the same area. The same goes for police; you won't be able to get away with a single small station for very long.
And then there's a fewtough choices that we just didn't have to make at all. When your town is small you could get away with having a polluting power plant, dumping sewage out of a pipe, and dumping your trash in a landfill. But when the city grows, what happens? Wind farms just take up too much land for he power they produce, trash burners pollute a ton, and recycling centers are expensive. So, do you let your town pollute a lot, do you pay a lot of money to go clean, or do you let one of the other towns in the region handle the messy bits? Any way you cut it, you're losing money.
Indeed, the gameplay looks very promising and this is why we have small tilles because you need to make choices. I'm looking foreward for it
