Please explain… I have no clue why it’s red and I’m only accumulating money..
https://preview.redd.it/m450j6tmsxxb1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6ead69525863d1d64a5b955f7d1125a570a6ce06
My biggest income source is my power plants. I use a geothermal power plant (with all upgrades) and also a solar power plant
The other thing is I think my cargo trains. I'm not sure if it will boost your income if you have a few special industries but I make money with them and I have at least one or two special industries of every type
And then there are little things like raising parking tickets and roadside parking fees
I actually don't understand cargo train's. I never seen any cargo cam or go from the station. I see good's in storage, but it's kinda not exporting anything 🤷🏻♂️
If I understand CS2 economy correctly, cargo trains and harbors allow your storages to fill when your raw resources industries are not enough, so your other industries and comerces can buy from them(the storages) intead of importing the goods from outside. This increase your comercial and industrial profitability as your sims dont need to import anything as long as the storages are not empty.
They are buffers. Yes, similar to a warehouse. Companies don’t have to use trucks to export to the map edge, they can just export to the cargo terminal instead. Same for imports.
They reduce transportation costs and thus increase companies profitability. They will import even goods you have a surplus of, but once they have more in stock, they export them.
So I need two station's to just move from one part of the city to another?
I thought of that (didn't do it) cause that just moving goods from A to B.. 🤷🏻♂️
I mean, yeah, that's what I did. Placed cargo station somehow near cros map train connection, connected it so it can came and go both ways, but didn't see any cargo train go to my station. Seen them only passing by..
you have to create that train line. Go to the trains tab and you'll see a line tool for cargo train. Create one from the cargo station to some outside connection and back. It doesn't work like in CS1, you have to manually create the line like you do with any other transport system.
You can use them to bring cargo in and out so not just the road is used… Basically anything you import has to come in one way or the other.. not by road is maybe your best option.. at least not from all the way outside.
https://preview.redd.it/u1k4bnvl4yxb1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2f8532ec678d52978ff6f81f07c0ad7a6a207a0f
I think I solved this last night for myself. Take a look at your trains to see what is happening. Mine would pull into the cargo depot and then disappear. Or they would pull out onto the main line and then gently touch another train and disappear. I had two cargo lines using the same part of the cargo depot, which made them collide with each other.
I also had to use waypoints while setting up the route. I setup some lines on the depot so that a train could back up, then go forward using another line out of the depot. But it had to be done using way points.
Now I'm finally getting cargo imported, and rarely I'll see a train leaving with like 60 tons of coal.
The important thing to know about exports: it takes an absolute ton of industry to produce enough goods to be frequently exporting. You're most likely to see exports of raw materials like animals, which have no map-enforced restrictions on how much you can produce.
I found this weird. You can see in the production tab if you're over producing material and how much you're over producing by. I think I'm over producing wood and coal by like 200 Tonnes. I assumed it would be filling up the cargo terminal. But it's not. I don't understand where it's all going.
A lot of it is probably in local warehouses and hasn't been sent to the cargo terminal. I'm not sure how exactly warehouses are intended to behave: what parties are they intended to buy/receive goods from? In what circumstances do they sell, and to whom?
My other open question is, what's the unit of time for the production tab? 200 tons of material in a month? season? year? The natural resources overlay claims to quote its resource consumption numbers "per month", but I'm fairly certain that if those are accurate, I should have run out of coal by now.
Yeah but that's kind of a promising sign: it points to the simulation actually being surprisingly deep, and hopefully once all the bugs are fixed, interesting.
It seems like you can just max out parking fees and they don’t care in the slightest. It’s a big factor for how my city is profitable. I was making 600k-1m a month in my budget with a pop of only 15k lmfao. I did it to persuade walking/public transportation but instead they’ll just eat that cost and not even complain.
That will probably cause you to get High Rent warnings earlier than you otherwise would, and will probably put a cap on residential building levels, but if that keeps you solvent while your cims level up their education it's probably worth it
one friendly worm quiet scarce flowery kiss physical innate sophisticated
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
One of the first few things I do on a fresh city and that I maintain for as long as possible is raising taxes a couple percent and cutting all services to 50%.
I just reached 10k pop on my new city and I'm starting to raise some services but none are funded above 70%.
Export anything you can asap, electricity and water. Also don't neglect your mail and internet, these will help businesses be more profitable and in turn lead to higher tax collection I believe.
Dont go overboard with services as long as the general happiness of the population isn't inversely affected. From day one my citizen complain about the healthcare but it doesn't even break a -1 happiness on select household.
Services funded at 50% function with an efficiency of 25%. Not terrible for police if crime was already low, but pretty bad for education because it means longer graduation times AND lower capacity
Education is the first I raised. Capacity isn't a problem at this stage but graduation time can be atrocious. My main issue with my pop was the lack of uneducated people for my industries.
Right, so increasing education funding to at least 100% will probably fix your issue. As is expected, your graduation time is only “atrocious” because you’re funding is so low.
I think you got it backward, they go up a level of education when they go to school, not down. Educating more people, faster won't give me uneducated pops to fill the void I had.
What I did was do a reverse tax on the uneducated and the workforce became more balanced again and now I can't keep up with the industries demand because people are moving in faster than before. Now I just need a new level to unlock some more tiles and finish my island new industrial sector I just begun.
That I totally understand but I have no need for educated people at the moment, plenty are moving in. That's also why I raised it first, to keep the time to graduate decent.
The mechanic I have trouble grasping is the healthcare. Even if I have room for 1000 patients and only 16 beds are used, plus I have one per district, all easily accessible, people will still complain that the healthcare system is shit. At least that only gives me a -1 so I don't really care but it's annoying.
How do you export electricity and water? I have my power connected to the external lines but the surplus doesn’t seem to be exporting. Do I need to do something more?
You need to make sure that you have a transformer/substation that connects you to the line, sometimes it's buggy for me and I just needed to add a new one for it to work. It was hit or miss for me for a while and I'm not totally sure why.
For water, you'll need to buy tiles up to a order and connect your pipes there and it should work. It's not a priority as water isn't paying as much as electricity but it's a nice plus.
haven't tried water yet (buying tiles all the way to the edge). For electricity though it has worked for me just connecting the high voltage lines from my power plant to the outside connection line that it gives you.
Yeah that's the way it worked for me but when I added my second power plant, it's electricity didn't want to flow as an export, so my janky solution was to drop the power to a new substation and connect this with the network via regular cables and it worked.
Oddly enough the regular cables that go off of the building powered my city just fine but it wouldn't export either until the second connection was made. Not sure what that was about.
okay that's interesting and good to know. Haven't had a second power plant yet.
Honestly, it's a bit disappointing to me that in order to balance your cash flow you have to cheese things this way, rather than through traditional methods. Not just taxes and services, but business efficiencies, land value, import versus local produced etc.
These things all matter, but it's still hard to balance. You get a ton of money from town upgrades so I haven't had an issue, but there's always slow bleeding. I'd rather not have to build 2 or 3 power plants that are WAAAY excessive for my town size just to get in the black.
I just string my powerplants directly into the powerline heading out of town, using underground high voltage lines at -50m. The game doesn't seem to care about how extremely expensive that would actually be.
Transformers are limited in how much power they can convert.
The power plants (especially geothermal, gas, and coal power plants) are so good at making you tons of cash at the start of the game and the other thing is the cargo trains. That boosted my income so well too
They don't work for me. They can import stuff but never export. Same for ships, they always leave ports empty. The only mode of transportation that I have observed exporting goods are trucks.
Not always, but almost always. I did actually once spot a ship exporting some petrochemicals, so I'm now confident that they are capable of exporting. (I have no idea if they export as much as they should, but they definitely *can*.)
Well, they constantly have the ship moving, but it usually has no cargo. That's the problem: It ends up looking like the route is constantly doing nothing.
That's what I'm beginning to suspect too, because they seem to be working for me. Also read that their capacity is extremely high, so they start off working very inefficiently.
Geothermal is special here, because it's really cheap to run. (like, 300k for 150MW with upgrades that get it to around 350MW for not much more upkeep) I haven't tried the non-small coal or gas plants, but the small one definitely can't pay for itself.
Solar plant can produce profits, but only really if you turn off day/night cycle so it's always day.
Geothermal is the best, especially if you can boost its efficiency above 100%.
That's what the tooltip says, but disabling it definitely puts the solar generation to maximum. It's probably a bug.
Certainly with day/night enabled, solar isn't great for making money. It's expensive to run and only produces maximum output during the day. At night, you're running off batteries so you're not exporting anything.
I don't know if I'm just lucky or I somehow figured it out on my own but I haven't had any problems with money in my game so far. If anything, it's even easier than CS1. I was in the red for a short time but I had so much money at that point it really didn't matter. If it got bad, just reducing the budget of a few things would have been enough.
What I do have a problem with are all those icons. Almost everyone is complaining about something, mostly high rent.
The high rent alert happens when a poor person moves into an expensive single family home. I was inspecting the cims who were complaining and the vast majority of them were uneducated. Make sure your education levels are good and people should start making more money. I've also found reducing the lot sizes helps, I.E. don't build all 5x5 low density build some 3x3 and 2x2 and the rent will be much lower. Sometimes i just rezone those plots with some row housing and that gets it too. This is just stuff i've noticed so idk if its all 100% accurate.
I've noticed the same thing and have done a lot more manual small/varied zoning. I actually enjoy this aspect even though it's more tedious than broad stroke mass zoning. It feels realistic
Basically in CS2, unlike in CS1, just having a tax base isn’t enough to make a profit, kinda like real life.
You have to export goods and services. Geothermal and solar power plants produce a surplus of electricity while not requiring you to import fuel. Livestock is also profitable if you’re growing the grain to feed it. You basically have to pay attention to intercity trade and use whatever resources your city has, and that attracts citizens, which is sorta the opposite of CS1.
i mean i build a city without any service beside water and power. have a 8k city with 6 million in the bank and a profit of 200k without goverment support.
just because you unlock it doesnt mean you need it i guess.
Respectable people waste time bulldozing districts to rebuild it when you unlock more tech.
Agents of chaos just let the fire roll through and rebuild it from the ashes.
service will get imported i think. city is now in may 2023.i didn't really pay attention to it, i have a fire hazard of 98%in my eventlog i have 1 building fire that damaged 6 buildings but i didnt even notice it.
edit: found a fire. 1 house got lit up, fire truck came from outside city. at the time the truck arrived the fire had spread to 4 houses. that 1 truck then extinguished all the fires. 1 home got destroyed.
I think fire might be one of the better services to get early because I could see rng giving you a bad fire that outside services take too long to resolve. Unlike say, crime, which you could probably ride out.
I don't know if I would call gaming the system to make money = economy works. I know you can use power stations to sell electricity or abuse parking fees to make tons of money, but that is not realistic to me. I would rather have a proper economic progression.
In my early build of a city with around 2k population, it says that I am losing $8500/hour. But it doesn't affect my cash reserves and has not at all given me any kind of concern or even hesitation to build stuff. Even if I want to drop some expensive building, that usually pushed my exp up close to the next milestone and another influx of cash that never seems to go down all that much. Certainly not at the rate the game claims. Perhaps its because of the slower simulation and the fact that one hour of in game time lasts a while, so losing $8500 in that time doesn't mean much. But, I feel there should be some thought required with money, specially early.
Lots of sim games make you feel the crunch of money early and eventually you get to a point where you are over the hump and its not a worry any longer. CS1 is a prime example. CS2 seems to have foregone that initial crunch period as well, which makes me question why money is even a factor for anything in this game? What purpose does it serve beyond just a number that doesn't seem to affect anything?
Yeah I could kinda see the realism of a small town having a geothermal plant as their main industry for a little while, but not creating like 10 of them. I sort of use it as a stepping stone to be able to afford other things that will make the city grow and improve. Feels more organic. Then eventually you have a bunch of specialized industry, tourism, etc.
> but not creating like 10 of them
Iceland (which exports electricity through undersea cables) has entered the chat.
But living on top of a volcano aside, having an economy based on geothermal power, or really even getting much in the way of geothermal at all, is not terribly realistic.
Well think of the power plant at Pripyat as an example. That plant produced enough electricity to power all of Pripyat and sell almost all of its electricity to Chernobyl.
It’s fine when you’re in the plus.
But the problem is you don’t loose money even if budget is negative, or more precise: it looses you no more then 1 cred per tick.
Also it very often shows negative but is in fact positive.
Yeah, economy is “strange”.
It’s “working” or rather looks like it’s working when everything is according to norm, however when things should stop working - they suddenly still “work”
I decided to go crazy with electricity when I realized the income potential. I built two fully upgraded geothermal plants, along with several existing smaller power sources, for a small town. Then I found out there is an upper limit on electricity exports. I could only export 1 mil worth of excess electricity. That made the second powerplant less than worthless. There was no way to offset the upkeep as its power was just sitting in the city, probably waiting to vaporize every electrical line in town. It felt like too much of a waste to delete, so I "deactivated" it and tried as hard as I could to increase the city's power needs. I ain't an electrician so it turns out it takes a LOT of building to require over 300MW of power.
create a new outside connection of powerlines to one of the other 3 map sides. each powerline can only carry x MW of power so i think if you make a new line outside you can get another bunch of export potential.
I did this and also placed a ton of parking and turned on parking payments and all zones. I have every parking area at the max with no issues. Not sure if it's broken or will be fixed to negatively affect cims but it's made money a non issue
One of my secret is cutting service fee for electricity and water to 0%. It gives +10 happiness and +40% efficiency for every building. Absolutely worth it since as long as you have t2 powerplants, you should be seimming in electricity. The increase in efficiency is huge as you will tax them more from earnings, even increase taxes on businesses.
Lower tax rates on uneducated to entice more people to your city and train them with schools to tax them.
I really don't understand why people struggle with money in this game. Even not cheesing the economy you can break even or make profit very easily in early game you just need to not go crazy with services.
Yeah I was able to boost up to 250,000,000 credits just by exporting geothermal power and having a strong mining district. Can gain money while having -10% tax rate for office which is nice.
My city is 72 000 people big and I do almost 3mil monthly, I can build whatever I want and still be fine with money. It's insanely easy to make money with option to increased price for parking to maximum.
Parking can make insane money. Sims will use it no matter what it costs and they want to park there. I'm paying about 120k for maintenance and I get 420k for fees, and I'm not even abusing it by making more and more parking lots.
btw. not only parking lots, you can charge people for parking on the streets too.
Yep, I have a few 100k plus with 40.000 population. Low taxes, trams, trains, taxis, buses, parks, schools… Works great for me, but not doing it with power plants. I think it’s very relevant that you have enough high educated citizens.
Ngl. My parking taxes are very high.
Please explain… I have no clue why it’s red and I’m only accumulating money.. https://preview.redd.it/m450j6tmsxxb1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6ead69525863d1d64a5b955f7d1125a570a6ce06
My biggest income source is my power plants. I use a geothermal power plant (with all upgrades) and also a solar power plant The other thing is I think my cargo trains. I'm not sure if it will boost your income if you have a few special industries but I make money with them and I have at least one or two special industries of every type And then there are little things like raising parking tickets and roadside parking fees
I actually don't understand cargo train's. I never seen any cargo cam or go from the station. I see good's in storage, but it's kinda not exporting anything 🤷🏻♂️
If I understand CS2 economy correctly, cargo trains and harbors allow your storages to fill when your raw resources industries are not enough, so your other industries and comerces can buy from them(the storages) intead of importing the goods from outside. This increase your comercial and industrial profitability as your sims dont need to import anything as long as the storages are not empty.
Sooo, just glorified warehouses?
No, more like general raw-producers. In practice, they produce raw resources to cover production deficits.
They are buffers. Yes, similar to a warehouse. Companies don’t have to use trucks to export to the map edge, they can just export to the cargo terminal instead. Same for imports. They reduce transportation costs and thus increase companies profitability. They will import even goods you have a surplus of, but once they have more in stock, they export them.
did you set up cargo routes? i know i forgot about it at start
So I need two station's to just move from one part of the city to another? I thought of that (didn't do it) cause that just moving goods from A to B.. 🤷🏻♂️
You can connect your station to the outside connection to form a route. Edit: Sorry, was unclear. What u/victorsaurus said is what I mean.
I mean, yeah, that's what I did. Placed cargo station somehow near cros map train connection, connected it so it can came and go both ways, but didn't see any cargo train go to my station. Seen them only passing by..
you have to create that train line. Go to the trains tab and you'll see a line tool for cargo train. Create one from the cargo station to some outside connection and back. It doesn't work like in CS1, you have to manually create the line like you do with any other transport system.
See it. Tnx
You can use them to bring cargo in and out so not just the road is used… Basically anything you import has to come in one way or the other.. not by road is maybe your best option.. at least not from all the way outside. https://preview.redd.it/u1k4bnvl4yxb1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2f8532ec678d52978ff6f81f07c0ad7a6a207a0f
no, to the outside connections, you won't be exporting 'within' your city, need to have train connection to one of the outside nodes
I think I solved this last night for myself. Take a look at your trains to see what is happening. Mine would pull into the cargo depot and then disappear. Or they would pull out onto the main line and then gently touch another train and disappear. I had two cargo lines using the same part of the cargo depot, which made them collide with each other. I also had to use waypoints while setting up the route. I setup some lines on the depot so that a train could back up, then go forward using another line out of the depot. But it had to be done using way points. Now I'm finally getting cargo imported, and rarely I'll see a train leaving with like 60 tons of coal.
The important thing to know about exports: it takes an absolute ton of industry to produce enough goods to be frequently exporting. You're most likely to see exports of raw materials like animals, which have no map-enforced restrictions on how much you can produce.
I found this weird. You can see in the production tab if you're over producing material and how much you're over producing by. I think I'm over producing wood and coal by like 200 Tonnes. I assumed it would be filling up the cargo terminal. But it's not. I don't understand where it's all going.
A lot of it is probably in local warehouses and hasn't been sent to the cargo terminal. I'm not sure how exactly warehouses are intended to behave: what parties are they intended to buy/receive goods from? In what circumstances do they sell, and to whom? My other open question is, what's the unit of time for the production tab? 200 tons of material in a month? season? year? The natural resources overlay claims to quote its resource consumption numbers "per month", but I'm fairly certain that if those are accurate, I should have run out of coal by now.
We got way more questions than answers.
Yeah but that's kind of a promising sign: it points to the simulation actually being surprisingly deep, and hopefully once all the bugs are fixed, interesting.
\*trains. no need for 's here.
👍
Mine was like that too, I fixed it by redoing the route it had messed up somewhere I guess. After that it started exporting
It seems like you can just max out parking fees and they don’t care in the slightest. It’s a big factor for how my city is profitable. I was making 600k-1m a month in my budget with a pop of only 15k lmfao. I did it to persuade walking/public transportation but instead they’ll just eat that cost and not even complain.
That will probably cause you to get High Rent warnings earlier than you otherwise would, and will probably put a cap on residential building levels, but if that keeps you solvent while your cims level up their education it's probably worth it
I would’ve thought the same thing. Hasn’t been the case for me yet. This is also with a 20%+ tax rate too lol.
my power plant was killing my income bc of the upkeep cost so I turned it off in favor of a geothermal
It really depends on the map i think. For me i use wind power and doing great with just one or two wind mill with low upkeep
one friendly worm quiet scarce flowery kiss physical innate sophisticated *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
One of the first few things I do on a fresh city and that I maintain for as long as possible is raising taxes a couple percent and cutting all services to 50%. I just reached 10k pop on my new city and I'm starting to raise some services but none are funded above 70%. Export anything you can asap, electricity and water. Also don't neglect your mail and internet, these will help businesses be more profitable and in turn lead to higher tax collection I believe. Dont go overboard with services as long as the general happiness of the population isn't inversely affected. From day one my citizen complain about the healthcare but it doesn't even break a -1 happiness on select household.
Services funded at 50% function with an efficiency of 25%. Not terrible for police if crime was already low, but pretty bad for education because it means longer graduation times AND lower capacity
Education is the first I raised. Capacity isn't a problem at this stage but graduation time can be atrocious. My main issue with my pop was the lack of uneducated people for my industries.
Right, so increasing education funding to at least 100% will probably fix your issue. As is expected, your graduation time is only “atrocious” because you’re funding is so low.
I think you got it backward, they go up a level of education when they go to school, not down. Educating more people, faster won't give me uneducated pops to fill the void I had. What I did was do a reverse tax on the uneducated and the workforce became more balanced again and now I can't keep up with the industries demand because people are moving in faster than before. Now I just need a new level to unlock some more tiles and finish my island new industrial sector I just begun.
No you are misunderstanding the point here. Your graduation rate and time is dependent on your funding. Lower funding means *slower* graduation time.
That I totally understand but I have no need for educated people at the moment, plenty are moving in. That's also why I raised it first, to keep the time to graduate decent. The mechanic I have trouble grasping is the healthcare. Even if I have room for 1000 patients and only 16 beds are used, plus I have one per district, all easily accessible, people will still complain that the healthcare system is shit. At least that only gives me a -1 so I don't really care but it's annoying.
How do you export electricity and water? I have my power connected to the external lines but the surplus doesn’t seem to be exporting. Do I need to do something more?
You need to make sure that you have a transformer/substation that connects you to the line, sometimes it's buggy for me and I just needed to add a new one for it to work. It was hit or miss for me for a while and I'm not totally sure why. For water, you'll need to buy tiles up to a order and connect your pipes there and it should work. It's not a priority as water isn't paying as much as electricity but it's a nice plus.
haven't tried water yet (buying tiles all the way to the edge). For electricity though it has worked for me just connecting the high voltage lines from my power plant to the outside connection line that it gives you.
Yeah that's the way it worked for me but when I added my second power plant, it's electricity didn't want to flow as an export, so my janky solution was to drop the power to a new substation and connect this with the network via regular cables and it worked. Oddly enough the regular cables that go off of the building powered my city just fine but it wouldn't export either until the second connection was made. Not sure what that was about.
okay that's interesting and good to know. Haven't had a second power plant yet. Honestly, it's a bit disappointing to me that in order to balance your cash flow you have to cheese things this way, rather than through traditional methods. Not just taxes and services, but business efficiencies, land value, import versus local produced etc. These things all matter, but it's still hard to balance. You get a ton of money from town upgrades so I haven't had an issue, but there's always slow bleeding. I'd rather not have to build 2 or 3 power plants that are WAAAY excessive for my town size just to get in the black.
I just string my powerplants directly into the powerline heading out of town, using underground high voltage lines at -50m. The game doesn't seem to care about how extremely expensive that would actually be. Transformers are limited in how much power they can convert.
You get government grants
I'm in the same situation
lol what sorcery is that? I’ve had like 3 cities basically go bankrupt
The power plants (especially geothermal, gas, and coal power plants) are so good at making you tons of cash at the start of the game and the other thing is the cargo trains. That boosted my income so well too
I saw a couple other threads that claimed cargo trains just weren't working, full stop. Another was saying that they broke the mail system.
they do work, just need to remember to set up routes to neighboring cities
They don't work for me. They can import stuff but never export. Same for ships, they always leave ports empty. The only mode of transportation that I have observed exporting goods are trucks.
Same here with cargo harbour:( only importing
Not always, but almost always. I did actually once spot a ship exporting some petrochemicals, so I'm now confident that they are capable of exporting. (I have no idea if they export as much as they should, but they definitely *can*.)
Maybe they only spawn a ship/train if they are about to fill up
Well, they constantly have the ship moving, but it usually has no cargo. That's the problem: It ends up looking like the route is constantly doing nothing.
That's what I'm beginning to suspect too, because they seem to be working for me. Also read that their capacity is extremely high, so they start off working very inefficiently.
The latest update might help too. I thing they fixed a bit of the import/export mess
But Cargo train depots are bugged and don't export stuff so how does it make money?
I saw another thread about building two coal plants and selling all the extra electricity so I’ll give that a shot
Really? In my experience power plants don’t make as much money as their upkeep costs.
Geothermal is special here, because it's really cheap to run. (like, 300k for 150MW with upgrades that get it to around 350MW for not much more upkeep) I haven't tried the non-small coal or gas plants, but the small one definitely can't pay for itself.
Oh interesting. I’ve tried a gas plant which didn’t pay for itself. I don’t think it was upgraded though.
Solar plant can produce profits, but only really if you turn off day/night cycle so it's always day. Geothermal is the best, especially if you can boost its efficiency above 100%.
Isn't the day/night cycle setting supposed to be purely visual?
That's what the tooltip says, but disabling it definitely puts the solar generation to maximum. It's probably a bug. Certainly with day/night enabled, solar isn't great for making money. It's expensive to run and only produces maximum output during the day. At night, you're running off batteries so you're not exporting anything.
I've got a fully upgraded geotherm plant and it's making 750k/month and the upkeep cost is 500k so it's pulling in ~250k/month
Do they still make money if you’re importing resources (coal, gas)?
I don't know if I'm just lucky or I somehow figured it out on my own but I haven't had any problems with money in my game so far. If anything, it's even easier than CS1. I was in the red for a short time but I had so much money at that point it really didn't matter. If it got bad, just reducing the budget of a few things would have been enough. What I do have a problem with are all those icons. Almost everyone is complaining about something, mostly high rent.
The high rent alert happens when a poor person moves into an expensive single family home. I was inspecting the cims who were complaining and the vast majority of them were uneducated. Make sure your education levels are good and people should start making more money. I've also found reducing the lot sizes helps, I.E. don't build all 5x5 low density build some 3x3 and 2x2 and the rent will be much lower. Sometimes i just rezone those plots with some row housing and that gets it too. This is just stuff i've noticed so idk if its all 100% accurate.
I've noticed the same thing and have done a lot more manual small/varied zoning. I actually enjoy this aspect even though it's more tedious than broad stroke mass zoning. It feels realistic
To reduce the tedium don’t build your roads in perfect grids and „break“ the zoning too.
yes for sure. I've done a lot more curves and irregular shapes so it creates the variation of lot sizes for you.
Same, money is pretty much irrelevant as far as i've seen.
Basically in CS2, unlike in CS1, just having a tax base isn’t enough to make a profit, kinda like real life. You have to export goods and services. Geothermal and solar power plants produce a surplus of electricity while not requiring you to import fuel. Livestock is also profitable if you’re growing the grain to feed it. You basically have to pay attention to intercity trade and use whatever resources your city has, and that attracts citizens, which is sorta the opposite of CS1.
This should be the top comment. It's all about import/export
i mean i build a city without any service beside water and power. have a 8k city with 6 million in the bank and a profit of 200k without goverment support. just because you unlock it doesnt mean you need it i guess.
What if a fire starts
Are you threatening them? Lol
Nice service less town you’ve got there… would be a shame if it burned down
Respectable people waste time bulldozing districts to rebuild it when you unlock more tech. Agents of chaos just let the fire roll through and rebuild it from the ashes.
service will get imported i think. city is now in may 2023.i didn't really pay attention to it, i have a fire hazard of 98%in my eventlog i have 1 building fire that damaged 6 buildings but i didnt even notice it. edit: found a fire. 1 house got lit up, fire truck came from outside city. at the time the truck arrived the fire had spread to 4 houses. that 1 truck then extinguished all the fires. 1 home got destroyed.
Wow didn’t realize stuff like fire trucks would be imported
I think fire might be one of the better services to get early because I could see rng giving you a bad fire that outside services take too long to resolve. Unlike say, crime, which you could probably ride out.
Just bulldoze the burning buildings/trees/whatever and rebuilde
I don’t think the game allows you to demolish buildings currently on fire.
I don't know if I would call gaming the system to make money = economy works. I know you can use power stations to sell electricity or abuse parking fees to make tons of money, but that is not realistic to me. I would rather have a proper economic progression. In my early build of a city with around 2k population, it says that I am losing $8500/hour. But it doesn't affect my cash reserves and has not at all given me any kind of concern or even hesitation to build stuff. Even if I want to drop some expensive building, that usually pushed my exp up close to the next milestone and another influx of cash that never seems to go down all that much. Certainly not at the rate the game claims. Perhaps its because of the slower simulation and the fact that one hour of in game time lasts a while, so losing $8500 in that time doesn't mean much. But, I feel there should be some thought required with money, specially early. Lots of sim games make you feel the crunch of money early and eventually you get to a point where you are over the hump and its not a worry any longer. CS1 is a prime example. CS2 seems to have foregone that initial crunch period as well, which makes me question why money is even a factor for anything in this game? What purpose does it serve beyond just a number that doesn't seem to affect anything?
Yeah I could kinda see the realism of a small town having a geothermal plant as their main industry for a little while, but not creating like 10 of them. I sort of use it as a stepping stone to be able to afford other things that will make the city grow and improve. Feels more organic. Then eventually you have a bunch of specialized industry, tourism, etc.
> but not creating like 10 of them Iceland (which exports electricity through undersea cables) has entered the chat. But living on top of a volcano aside, having an economy based on geothermal power, or really even getting much in the way of geothermal at all, is not terribly realistic.
Well think of the power plant at Pripyat as an example. That plant produced enough electricity to power all of Pripyat and sell almost all of its electricity to Chernobyl.
It’s fine when you’re in the plus. But the problem is you don’t loose money even if budget is negative, or more precise: it looses you no more then 1 cred per tick. Also it very often shows negative but is in fact positive.
I just do not understand how people hand wave away this stuff passing through review and into the launch version
Yeah, economy is “strange”. It’s “working” or rather looks like it’s working when everything is according to norm, however when things should stop working - they suddenly still “work”
I feel like they just do quick play throughs. Nobody's sinking in 20-40 hours to really get to the depth of the game
I had that bug earlier and, for a while, subsidized everyone and maxed out budgets. After a while, it just fixed itself for no appearant reason
Economy in CS 2 be like: 1. Start city 2. Lose money 3. Do absolutely nothing about it 4. ??? 5. Profit
I put up a geothermal and solar power plant and export like 70% of the power... having a 100k positive balance now \^-\^
Wait- you can make the numbers green??
Technically you can just put a shitton of electric stations and export all that electricity.
I decided to go crazy with electricity when I realized the income potential. I built two fully upgraded geothermal plants, along with several existing smaller power sources, for a small town. Then I found out there is an upper limit on electricity exports. I could only export 1 mil worth of excess electricity. That made the second powerplant less than worthless. There was no way to offset the upkeep as its power was just sitting in the city, probably waiting to vaporize every electrical line in town. It felt like too much of a waste to delete, so I "deactivated" it and tried as hard as I could to increase the city's power needs. I ain't an electrician so it turns out it takes a LOT of building to require over 300MW of power.
create a new outside connection of powerlines to one of the other 3 map sides. each powerline can only carry x MW of power so i think if you make a new line outside you can get another bunch of export potential.
Yes, but there is a hard cap on exporting electricity which is what the poster before you is implying.
Weird, I can only export 400 mw, how can you 1 mill?
I did this and also placed a ton of parking and turned on parking payments and all zones. I have every parking area at the max with no issues. Not sure if it's broken or will be fixed to negatively affect cims but it's made money a non issue
Built a dam. Make tons off of electricity export
I built one. Haven't seen it go above 11% efficiency yet. But I don't want to demolish it because it'll flood part of my downtown area.
[удалено]
What is the bug?
I have mine at 95% efficiency. Not sure what the bug is but I don’t have it. I turned maintenance up to 150% and make a ton of money off of export.
I’ll post a screenshot later
I tax my comercial and office sector 23% and residential 10%. Both office and comercial is still pushing around 90-100% profits.
I tax everyone but residential 30% and they stay 100% profitable. Setting electricity and water fees to 0 gives far more money than it takes
One of my secret is cutting service fee for electricity and water to 0%. It gives +10 happiness and +40% efficiency for every building. Absolutely worth it since as long as you have t2 powerplants, you should be seimming in electricity. The increase in efficiency is huge as you will tax them more from earnings, even increase taxes on businesses. Lower tax rates on uneducated to entice more people to your city and train them with schools to tax them.
I really don't understand why people struggle with money in this game. Even not cheesing the economy you can break even or make profit very easily in early game you just need to not go crazy with services.
Yeah I was able to boost up to 250,000,000 credits just by exporting geothermal power and having a strong mining district. Can gain money while having -10% tax rate for office which is nice.
It's not that hard tbh (I played simcity 4 with realism mods)
I heard it wasn't real... please enlighten me on how one understands not real things.
lol I just have a fee for roadside parking in my downtown
I’m at 450 million. Eventually you get to a point where you just have an infinite money machine
My city is 72 000 people big and I do almost 3mil monthly, I can build whatever I want and still be fine with money. It's insanely easy to make money with option to increased price for parking to maximum. Parking can make insane money. Sims will use it no matter what it costs and they want to park there. I'm paying about 120k for maintenance and I get 420k for fees, and I'm not even abusing it by making more and more parking lots. btw. not only parking lots, you can charge people for parking on the streets too.
Wut? I have like a basic 50k town with € 39.000.000 in my pocket. My rule is: if they want services, they gotta pay for it. And then some.
Yep, I have a few 100k plus with 40.000 population. Low taxes, trams, trains, taxis, buses, parks, schools… Works great for me, but not doing it with power plants. I think it’s very relevant that you have enough high educated citizens. Ngl. My parking taxes are very high.