SimCity 4 and Good Financing

[Blake]

One final city hint. build a very comprehensive bus network, to be effective you need a bus stop every 6-8 tiles, such that a sim never has to walk more than 3-4 tiles to get to a bus stop. By doing this they can take busses from anywhere to anywhere.
Busses are good for two reasons:
1) They greatly reduce congestion. Bus traffic actually causes no congestion at all.
2) You get a very healthy income, greatly exceeding the cost to run the bus system.

[MrFun]

Wow -- thanks for the awesome tips, Blake. I never thought about drastically lowering funding for service buildings and just building more of them.


Although won't all of those extra service buildings become an eysore -- purely ascestics, I guess.




And thank you for your input, Ninot.

[Ninot]

Originally posted by Blake
One final city hint. build a very comprehensive bus network, to be effective you need a bus stop every 6-8 tiles, such that a sim never has to walk more than 3-4 tiles to get to a bus stop. By doing this they can take busses from anywhere to anywhere.

I recall that sims walk up to 8 tiles, making it only neccesary to space them out by 16 or so. I might be off though.

[Blake]

Oh, they'll walk up to 8 or maybe even 10. But 90% of them are lazy. It's like 80% are willing to walk 3 tiles, 50% 4 tiles, 30% 5 tiles, 20% 6+ tiles...

edit: The target should be 80% bus usage. Since busses don't cause congestion, that cuts congestion to 1/5th, or basically giving roads the carrying capacity of highways...

[MrFun]

In playing SimCity 4, what have you found to be the best tax rates for residents, commerce, and industry??

[Blake]

9% for all ind and comm.
R$: 9%
R$$: 9.5%
R$$$: 10.5%

It is actually nessecary to raise the taxes on R$$$, otherwise too many of them move in and then half of them can't find work, then you get the no-job-zots and their house abandon, and it's ugly and messy. So tax the rich higher for their own darn good!

Make sure to be pretty generous with the parks and other land-value raising stuff too, land value is pretty important. You want to raise the wealth of your city, because the wealthy pay soooo much more in taxes. (land value by itself doesn't actually cause wealthy to move in, it only allows them to if the demand is there)

[MrFun]

thanks, Blake

[The Mad Monk]

I get 90% of my city funding for the first twenty years or so from the good Dr. Vu.

He's a cool guy.