I am stumped as to how to successfully and righteously make a large prosperous city. It appears I always end up in debt and have to input cheat codes. How should you set up a city so that you have a large population in a short amount of time. I am shooting for a population of 1 million citizens in under 50 years (from 1950-2000) but it seems I’ll just end up with abut 5 thousand people and $200,000.00 in debt. The taxes don’t bring in much revenue and the expenses are overwhelming.
Moved to CS.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
The answer is the same in all incarnations of SimCity I’ve ever played:
Build a slum. A big huge slum. A big huge beautifully designed slum. Let the sims suffer, they’ll pay their taxes anyway.
Do not fund anything other than roads, esp. do not fund police or education. Those two can suck up a HUGE amount of revenue alone.
Do build everything so that when you DO finally start funding, you have an effective city plan. By this I mean add parks and police stations and schools and hospitals. Just don’t fund any of them. The buildings will still be there when you’re ready for them.
Do Not buy energy from your neighbors. Build a bunch of coal stations and let 'em pollute. Build a ‘pollution sector’ for those, waste disposal, airport, etc.
Do keep the pollution down with recycling etc. The cost will be overcome easily with increased land value.
Start small but plan ahead. Let time pass. Don’t spend money unless you have to, and make sure you get the population high enough to pay to build more areas to increase your population. Pull your city up by its bootstraps, especially at first.
Don’t mess with the tax rate, no matter what the ticker says. People will always complain. If you have to raise taxes, 7-8 % or so is plenty… 10% will cost you population. You can drop it to 2% and they will still complain that it’s too high.
Do all this and you’ll have a small city with fairly high population, a decent income, incredibly high crime rate, moderate land value and low pollution.
There’s a sort of population plateau thing, kinda hard to describe if you don’t know the game. Until you have enough people living there, you won’t have enough income to actually build anything. Once the population reaches the level that matches your tax rate, expenditures, and rate-of-building-new-stuff, you can expand the city as fast as you can click. The goal is to reach this as quickly as possible.
When you’re done, go back and turn on the police/fire/education/etc funding, and watch your city blossom!
Oh, and NEVER borrow money! The payments can kill a small town faster than you can blink!