nbr1rbl

Going slow to start out really is the best way to stay out of the red......Build slowly, only giving your sims luxuries such as schools, hospitals, parks ect. as you can afford them...Also when you do grant them these gifts make sure your funding is adjusted to the levels you need. There is no reason to have room for 500 students in a school if only 150 are attending, try to keep power funding so your plants are pumping out about 80%. Never ever lower water funding as this leads to busted pipes all over your city, and its a royal pain in the butt to constantly fix them......generally i build water plants when usage gets to about 95% of current availability(assuming the plants you have are all fully functional). Depending on map size i use the paying rewards, army base, missle range, casino etc to help finance early cities...on large tiles its very easy to place them far far away from people who don't like living near them. However try to never place a toxic waste dump because its causes riots. If you must take out a loan, then try to make sure you are taking it out to create things that will pay you back....If I use loans I use them to create new zones which will in turn create tax revenue, taking out loans to pay for infastructure like power plants, and highways only digs you farther in the hole. If i want a highway and I decide to use a loan, what i will do is take out a loan and use that money to build money making zones then use the increase in tax revenue to build the highway or seaport or whatever it is I want

The easiest fix for this is also the simplest one.......plan ahead. Build all of your farmland before your city hits 10,000 or so. Its much much harder to add farmland after you have already established your city, and at some point, I believe its around 30,000 residents the game shuts off demand for AG completely, at that point the only way to get farms to grow is to kick thousands of people and companies out of your city and try to get R$ with no education to move in who are willing to work at farms. Errrr Nonny Moose beat me to it.....just do what he said

I suppose its possible to make money, however as Jasoncw pointed out the real reason for mass transit is to ease congestion and keep commute times low. Generally if i can keep it so that i make about 70-80% of the money i spend on mass transit back thru fares I am happy. Some things you might try to improve ridership are making sure there are enough stops in places people want to go, sims are lazy and if they have to walk too far to catch a bus or ride the subway then they will just drive instead. Also R$ sims will use much much more mass transit than R$$$ sims will. Placing many more mass transit stops in the poorer areas of your city, should improve ridership thus improving the amount of money you make from fares

Ugh.........thats what i was afraid of.....thanks though

Couldn't find an answer to this exact question, so forgive me if its been answered and I was not smart enough to find it. Is "Major International Airport" the largest stage of the stock maxis airports?? I have a city with about 280k residents(1/3 of a large tile or so), the airport has already been upgraded to "major international" and no matter how high i make the funding its effectivness is 0. Is there another stage it will grow too or am i stuck with simply building another airport on the tile, which I am trying to avoid at all costs. I know there are probably some on STEX but thats not an option for me, SC4 is on a different computer without internet access, just wondering if I am now stuck with a dilapitated looking airport in the city for the forseeable future

Originally posted by: joshriddle I have a decent city, 36,000 residents. And what I did was made most of it low wealth, up until about the first 20,000 came by. Both commerical and residental is low wealth. I read the little booklet thingy that comes with the game to see if I can't find an answer there and it said you could start zoning for high wealth residental at around 26,000 residents. So at around 30,000 I zone over my medium wealth zones with high wealth, and I zone medium wealth over low. Next thing that happens is I get my first highrise apartment. Diplidation literally runs over it and then it is abandoned. And then after that I check desirability, and kinda patch everything up, upgrade the road networks, transit, and all those what-nots. And medium wealth stays, and then high wealth still abandons. So next I check the transit query, and the roads running through the sector where I am trying to get hirise residental are all oneway roads, I think they were up around 7-800 cars, around 60 or 70 buses. quote> Maybe I am reading it wrong but when you are talking "high wealth, medium wealth, etc" I assume you are referring too High density, Medium density, etc. In SC4 unlike SC3K density has nothing to do with wealth.....rich people will move into any density, likewise poor people will move into high density if the demand is high enough for them. You can just as easily zone purely low density and have a ton of rich sims show up. So if thats what you mean then zoning higher or lower density is not the problem. My guess would be you have the same problem I tend to at that medium stage......buisness will hire alot of different sims, a CO$$$ building will only hire something like 15% of R$$$ sims, with the rest of its employment comming from R$$ and R$ sims(someone has to do the menial jobs of cleaning the bathrooms and the like), not positive on the percentage numbers someone like Moose problably knows them off the top of his head. More than likely its a case of not having enough jobs for the R$$$ sims once they move in. They show up in large numbers all at once because the area you zone is suddenly desirable for them(low polution, high land value) only for them to suddenly find themselves unemployed so they move out and some poor people end up running over thier old homes. If thats actually what is happening one soulution is to zone a little for a little, ie zone some residential and commercial and industrial all at the same time so that the sims moving to your town have jobs when they get there.

that sounds fairly low to me......In one of my cities demand is at 0 and if i destroy a farm, it takes forever to get another one to grow, now that i think of it there are even a couple of spots where i have zoned for farms and nothing grew. maybe try seeing why demand is at negative (ie, long freight trips, polution, land value) and try fixing that, maybe they will stop turning dark on you then

could education be the problem? If you make your sims smart they wont want to do low level farm work for a living anymore. If farms cant get any workers they will rot away. Generally when i make a farm town, elementary schools are the highest form of education for my citizens that i allow. Also sometimes when the sims in my little towns start to get smart i will go off on another section near the farms but far away from schools and zone some low density residential so the farmhands have somewhere to live without getting smarter. Not sure how to check if thats actually the problem or not, my guess would be look at the RCI chart, if AG demand is really low then that might be the problem

Originally posted by: joshriddle Originally posted by A Nonny Moose You've got that right. The Sims are just an extension of the Advisors, whose private agendas are designed to bankrupt you. (or throw your city into the mudpit)quote> Originally posted by nbr1rbl I've noticed that even though your rich sims beg and whine for a country club they dont actually like living near it. quote> See what we all mean, nbr1lb1? quote> ya I am learning that the hard way, Getting to the point that i just make the city look and act like I want, and if they dont like it they can move . Still not sure why he is having so much trouble with mayor rating though, even in some of my densly packed cities, that are not much more than rat warrens, mayor rating hovers around 80 or so. I only brought up the rewards wondering if he might have some rich people living near things they dont like and if thats whats keeping it down

Just a random thought........you said you had placed almost all the rewards, some rewards people dont like living near, any chance you might have placed a reward/money making reward(ie, golf course, casino, etc) near citizens that dont like living near them? I've noticed that even though your rich sims beg and whine for a country club they dont actually like living near it.

Glad someone caught the reference Moose, no i dont speak a word of French, and Its probably a good thing the sims cant storm my house. While in real life Governing like that is an all bad idea, I have found in SC4 it works wonders. Jdenm8- No i don't have any trouble funding my cities, for the most part(a couple have failed spectacularly), Just tossing around ideas of not paying for things unless they pay for themselves, And I did that to one of my sims also....complained, complained, complained...finally when i annoyed enough i chased him around the whole city with a bulldozer, cost me 3200 residents before he took the hint and moved out, but I thought it was hilarious. Glad I'm not the only one who punishes their more annoying citizens.

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose You've got that right. The Sims are just an extension of the Advisors, whose private agendas are designed to bankrupt you. quote> Hahahahaha, I couldnt agree more.....it's basically gotten to the point that i tend to ignore them almost constantly. I am almost postive the Health Advisor wants my job, why else would he cry about funding at Hospital X when there is still room for 150 people in it???? The only Advisor I generally listen to is the Budget Advisor as they tell me how easy i make thier job by bringing in tons of money every month, mostly by choosing to behave like a Aristocrat and only funding things that end up paying for themselves.......For the rest of them "Let them eat cake!"

I almost never pay for anything for towns that does not end up leading to making more money than it costs, unless its something I want to place purely for looks......most of the city ordinances I find redundant.........Free clinics for the poor, bah, screw the poor thats why i payed all this money for a hospital so get your cheap free wanting self over there instead.......pro reading campain, bah!, why would i build all these pretty libraries and then pay you to go use them???......they should just be happy i bothered to pay for them in the first place. As to keeping my city in the black with what social things i will bother to pay for, i have found as a general rule of thumb that If i only place them when my profit margin is large enough to pay for them fully funded(even though the funding will end up being lowered to whats actually needed) that i almost never end up suddenly finding myself bleeding cash. Which is to say if they are constantly whining about schools I do the math and if a maxed elementary school costs 500 or so a month and my profit is only 350 then they dont get one yet. Which i guess is kind of a messed up thing to do with my poor sims, but giving into their every whim is a quick way to go straight to the poor house.

Glad to see others do this also.......I always rename fairly static buildings, airports, ports, courthouse's and the like. I especially like to do the casino and resorts, I think it adds a neat touch to my towns....... and things like "Rookwood Beach Resort" always looks nicer than plain old "resort" when i scroll through the town with query