Hello! So I've recently made some calculations and I got to the below conclusion:
You don’t need any other income source in this game aside from upgrades and taxes.
Sounds crazy or bull* right? I'll explain.
Assuming that you will go for a city with 225 to 275 residences. That is, on a rough average, 2 to 2.5 million (M) Simoleons.
Each residence has 6 upgrades (around +50, +100, +150, +300, +700 and +1800).
Upgrades start at 700 Simeleon and can go up to 2500. I've used 1500 as an average value of upgrades in the long run.
225 * 6 * 1500 = 2025000
275 * 6 * 1500 = 2475000
In addition to that, you will get around 2 to 3M Simoleon in taxes.
It took me 2 months, maybe 2 months and a half to reach the 1M taxes mark. Now I'm getting ~20k taxes daily, so that's 600k monthly. I still believe that I'll play for around 3 months so that's 3M in taxes since my tax revenue growths daily.
Summing up those values, you get yourself 4 to 5.5M Simoleons until the city is ready.
Now the services:
- 835k to 955k for capacity services (power, water, sewage, waste);
- 800k for deluxes sets (fire, police, health);
- 240k for parks;
- 500k to 1M for streets;
- 500k to 700k for factories;
- ~700k for expansion and storage items.
That’s less than you will earn by following either method (225 or 275).
If you focus on upgrades and Vu and use Lean method Just In Time, producing only what you need, you'll have your stores always ready for your upgrades and disasters, speeding up the population growth.
You can throw in some selling or accept NPC offers/requests if you feel like it, just to speed up the process or to buy some resources you need, but money is certainly not an issue in this game. How fast you earn the money, that may be a little issue, but time is free so if you are a bit patient, you'll be fine.
I only keep a small stock of building and hardware materials (and some farmer ones) since they are used in other high end products.
It's been working very well and my city is grwoing much faster now.
