Spac3y wrote:Its amazing how you start out with a clear idea of where you see you town Elezza, then you suddenly loose a little focus and it mushrooms !
It's me, I am too OCD to let small details go, but also too attached to my precious townsfolk, and don't have the heart to tear down their homes once I built for them. And damn with the city budget, they serve the people, not people serve them
Spac3y wrote:
The big problem as I realised is that in the in the short term it is very difficulty to sustain a retail business. So what I though would make sense, was to let the Mayor take alot of the work (and cost out of it by using its capital for the apartments).
Apartments are very lucrative, and in the very start rent income is somewhat important for the city budget before enough bonus cash come in to build media firms. But I guess I can always issue bonds for cash, however I don't issue them unless absolutely necessary. I don't like borrowing people's life saving with the possibility of all go down the drain (I failed a couple of times, really sorry
). And I don't issue new shares for my corporation either, just stay as private company till the end, kind of a principle of my own (don't like other shareholders' finger in my pie).
Spac3y wrote:
Commercial just doesnt make the money, so, once the mayor (me) has bough the apartments, and plenty of as lets face it, the biggest tax payer is the residents of the city, once they were profitable, I got my company to start buying them.
I see your save is still 4.2.03 (which got me confused at first, why can't I find your save, once I extract it. Then I realise I cannot see my old 510% saves either, so yours must be using older version as well). The commercial building demand is bugged at this version, it got fixed in 4.2.04. But even if in 4.2.03, as long as the supply/demand value in city graph is in the negative, it still make money (however sometimes, the pesky AI corporation will sneak a commercial somewhere far away, and push it to positive). And commercial building is all about distance to CBD, it has to be quite close to CBD area to be lucrative. They are very different from apartments which hey can be placed anywhere (although apartments closer to high land value area, still make a lot more rent income though, like above 100k+ a month, compare to just 50K in remote location for the largest apartment)
Spac3y wrote:
Upto 20+m now which in Cap Lab wise is a walk in the park, but at 579% difficulty, makes such a difference
I have attached the save below so you can see/play where Ive gotten to and let me know your thoughts
I attached what I've improved on your city below as well, with much higher QoL, better coverage, and over 1 million population after several years. But at the cost of not doing any retail or manufacturing. And since you didn't zone the commercial/residential area in the beginning, AIs already built factories close to people's houses, causing pollution issue later on. And since in 4.2.03 relocating buildings are still bugged so there's nothing I can do about it.
Spac3y wrote:
Weirdly, some of the sports sliders now work, some dont, although this is still only physical on the slider movement, not on the monetary funding as that does work.
Well, the slider is also a bug in 4.2.03, but I don't know if it got fixed in 4.2.04. I don't think it is. Maybe you can check in out once update to 4.2.04. The saves aren't compatible though.
Spac3y wrote:
Would love to see your feedback on the city and possibly where it goes from there with regards to production.
Once I loaded your save, I kinda feel sorry for those poor townspeople. Most of them don't have police or fire department service, no schools, little hospitals, and no sports facilities. And then I realize your QoL is still above 50, and people still move in the city. So it is as I suspected before, immigration seems only concern unemployment rate and where there's job opening, as long as there's no emigrant issues, QoL only needs to be maintained at the minimum. I always treat my citizens more than generous, thus spending too much on educations, and unemployment benefit, etc. I see now the success of budget balancing at this difficulty is to be cruel to your people
. This really is Capitalism game, cold hard cut throat jungles everywhere.
Spac3y wrote:
My other thought, and it didnt work, was that whilist retail sales in the early days would lead me to a loss situtation just down to size of the city, I thought Id buy blocks of land and thus increase the balance sheet value, increasing the loans available I could take and thus just buy more.
Lets just say, by the time I needed to call on capital because I had maxed loaned, the land value had dropped lol.
So my plan there did not work at all. It does seem that in the early stages, its best to just buyh your company 100% then just manage and build the city before even thinking about anything else.
Im trying to think where the threshold is for actually starting production / retail.
It might just be at 500K people, but Im thinking probably a million is more realistic ? Mindu, I have also ramped up personal tax in the save above as that is just what makes money. Equally, for 5-% on QOS, the unemployment benefit needs to be set to 25....I was being cheap at 10$
I think if you lower the consumer tax rate, the demand for goods increases a lot. In my game I usually set it to a token 1%, since the tax income lost is small, but the benefit for my corporation is huge. The corporate profit tax doesn't matter much, since most will have tax deduction (there's a typo in the game - deduction not "deducation"). I think profit tax is actually coming from like a fixed 30% portion of the aggregated "local companies" (those companies not of your own, or AIs, but all the necessary invisible services/industries, etc, equal to GDP consumption minus import goods as goods produced locally). Also since the inverse inflation is ON, so another side effect of deducing purchasing power is due to high inflation rate. I think it's a trade off. In my game, I found out that unemployment sometimes isn't a bad thing, once the city reaches 100k pop, there's no need to push the population up too fast. And let unemployment rate a little higher, inflation rate will go down (I even once going into deflation), and let the purchasing power stay strong near 100%. The trade off is ofc the city population will grow very slowly though. I am still not sure whether it's best to have high population and low purchasing power, or smaller population but higher purchasing power. For me the smaller population option since to work ok, and make decent income for even just 200k citizen.
