Darvin: Tell me about it. I've made it pretty far, but all the little things keep screwing me up. The nastiest is the brick wall I hit in the 80's and my RCI demand just
plummeted. I'm currently treading water with a tax rate around 2% and can barely afford to build anything, and if I raise taxes then demand just dives deep into the negatives again!
Everyone is telling me I "need to attract high tech industries" but I have no idea how to do that. I have superb education (due to the population having actually shrunk from my peak in the 70's I have
too many schools and colleges), I have excellent police coverage, pollution is contained to a few industrial areas, traffic is excellent thanks to my subway system, I've activated every ordinance that supposedly attracts high-tech industries... but they just aren't coming :-(
Generally, lowering your taxes below 5% doesn't make enough of a difference to be worth the lost revenue.
It sounds like you've hit the great depression, which is triggered when our workforce falls below 50% of your population. Because of a design flaw, this can happen when your sims live too long, which leads to your having too many retirees. You need to manage your healthcare to avoid the ageing population problem. Just keep an eye on your demographics and induce a shortage of doctors when your residents start living too long. Just like they do in real cities.
tinyE: Every Wiki I've read says take the garbage deal and screw everything else because they are just too big of a hassle. Evidently the game has a habit of telling you about surplus and then all of a sudden telling you everything is empty. leaving you shit out of luck. :P
Power deals are rarely worth it, but water deals can be.
A power or water connection costs $2,000. To generate enough cash flow to pay back your loan, which you pay back at 12% a year for 10 years, you need to generate $240 a year from your neighbour deal, or $20 a month. But if instead you spend that $2,000 improving your own city, you can usually increase your tax revenue by more than $240 a year. And once you no longer have cash flow problems, you still have to compare the neighbour deal with other, more profitable spending.
The economics becomes clearer once we look at the cost of providing the utility. The coal power plant is the most cost-effective power plant, at a cost of $5,000 to provide 6,000 MWh a month for about 60 years. That's about $833 per 1,000 MWh. You can sell 1,000 MWh for up to $12, which is about a 17% annual on the portion of your power plants that your neighbour uses. This hardly inspires action even when you already have a connection, so when you throw into the equation the $2,000 for the first connection, you'll struggle to generate the cash flow for your bond even with a large neighbour who wants a lot of juice. Bear in mind that you must be generating a significant amount of excess power for your neighbour to offer a deal. That first connection will simply never get built.
Water is a similar story with a happier ending because water pumps are much cheaper than power plants. Once you have a neighbour who wants to buy about 5,000 cubic-metres of water a month for $60, you can get a 22% return including the cost of the first connection. That's assuming you already have pipes near the right border; otherwise, the cost of pipework may make it unprofitable. What makes this really worth considering, though, is that once the connection has been made, each pump can generate an annual return of up to 72% if you manage to score a deal where you're paid $12 per 1,000 cubic-metres. Generating the excess water to trigger the deal offer is also cheap and easy because of the water pump's low cost.
A problem with both the water and power deals, though, is that if your neighbour's supply is ever interrupted, you're hit with a penalty that wipes out years' worth of the revenue you would get from the deal. There's also a bug that limits the number of tiles over which power and water can be transmitted, so if you build your pumps too far from the connection, you'll default on the deal without knowing why. An easy solution is to build your pumps near the connection.
And as you already know, garbage deals are easily worth it once your city has grown a bit. Road connections cost $2,500, but because you need to build them anyway, as long as you wait until you need them for your population cap, you don't need to worry about earning that money back from your garbage imports. One landfill zone costs $50 and can hold 3,200 tons. At $12 per 100 ton, that's $384 over 32 months, or an annual return of 188% for two and a half years. No cash flow problem there. Unlike buildings, though, once the landfill is full, it's full. But even if you annualise it over 20 years, that $384 still represents an annual return of 38% on your initial $50 expenditure. By then, you should have already switched to incinerators, which--believe it or not--provide a better return than water pumps. It's because water is sold per 1,000 cubic-metres but garbage is imported by the 100-ton.
A major benefit of the garbage deal is that most players can avoid the penalty without making any special effort. Most players probably dislike power and water deals because it's very easy to get an interrupted power or water connection, and it only needs to happen once to sour a player on the idea entirely.
macAilpin: Those water deals are one big pain. Thinking switching to energy. Question: If I build a second Coal Plant would a forest of trees help in minimizing the pollution issue?
Bob
I might be mixing up Simcity 3000 and Simcity 4, but I think that trees do help in both games. In any case, you should build your power plants on the corners and edges of the map.
