I just bought SC4 ,my small town is making losses ,how to make profits?
It won't develop and is running out of place to build residences.

One more thing ,how to sign contract with other cities?

get rid of all your schools, clinics and everything that costs a lot of money. raise the taxes a bit and on put in the schools, clinics etc when there is a high demand for them. it worked for me

start a new city, chalk that one up as a learning experience of what doesn't work.

cut the funding to schools, health care, and government buildings, build zones in blocks, especially at first.

how to make deals? make sure you have connections like roads, rail, pipes and water lines, and money to be able to buy the deal, or an excess to sell.

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If you have regular Sim City 4 then taxes are about 7% (?) when you start. Raise it to 9% or even more. Your city will still grow and it will give you a good budget. Put residential near commercial and mabye have a road that leads to the industrial and power. Place your water (which you actually do not have to have) near the residential because polloution will clog the pumps up!

Other than that just follow what the others have said!

Any more questions? Feel free to ask! :)

Oh ,thanks for the advice.

How can you develope a few cities as part of a huge mega metropolis?Just link them together?

Oh ,yes just remembered ,what should be an adequet ratio of residential:industrial when you first started a city?

And what should be the population before the first commercial skyscrapers start to rise?

Just connect them with road and other services you may want to share (power, water). Freeways (if used right) can really make a region work well. It is usually hard to use them right, lots of time needed to toy around with them.

cheat! ;)

Originally posted by redstone

Oh ,thanks for the advice.

How can you develope a few cities as part of a huge mega metropolis?Just link them together?

build along the borders to complement each other well. mostly residential on one side, commerical on the other, with plenty of links.

rail works really good for this, as do subways.

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I have rarely fell into trouble (some economic recessions) - but never into the red. The key first of all is to build wind turbines and water towers and build a mass of resi, com and far off or on another map connected with industrial. You dont need schools, or parks, or police stations or fire stations (when u get a fire build a fire station in the centre of your city). Start off using girds later when your making millions and milking ure sims of their hard earned cash - go for more realistic city like road networks (Ive found that although some haphazard road netowrks can lower the amount of building space, you can see a very high drop in traffic problems (AVOID 4 ROAD JUNCTIONS at all costs!!!! - go for T all the time and try out dead ends and cul-de-sacs). Dont put buses in - their a waste, railways are good - but dont forget to place them so that they connect commerical and residential and are placed effectively in places of poor traffic. Subways are excellent - but never put them in cities with popualtions lower than 300,000 - otherwise it will just be economically univiable. Try to get highway/motorway networks in asap to allow for mass-regional commuting. Being the owner of a 6.7million region (one city on 1.6million, 2 cities providing both 500,000+ industry jobs and one massive 2,000,000 commercial job city) - i know how the game works. I dont seem to have the problem most people seem to have here regarding getting the right balance between money, expenditure and good sims :). Maybe im naturally good at this macro and micro economic management :)

Some pics from my cities, one being a trial grid district - im testing to see commuting times between a grid area and on the other side of the map (seperated by mountains, hills, lakes and rivers) and a suburban sprawl area. Look at the insane people going on the train - dunno why - maybe its a bug :S. The other pic is of my commercial city - this is hard to believe but infact on the verges of the massive commercial city - it gets to dense and blurred the more central the city :(. I also liked the look of the mini roof golf course.

http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/alt2/sim-city-4/simcity04.JPG

http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/alt2/sim-city-4/simcity02.JPG

If they all work the city over the poor people probably just walk to the train station and take it over.