Cityscape#2
The Half Population Rule
After my first few days in dCity I started looking at how much Income the average city produces. Of course, that depends on factors like strategy and the size of the city. But in general, even with different types of strategies there is likely to be a certain average range of Income production for cities at different size tiers, right?
So after a casual survey of cities of various sizes, I came up with the Half Population Rule - the average city is producing Income (SIM) at about half the size of the population. If a city has 100 population, it should produce at least 50 SIM daily. If it's 1000 people, it should make 500 SIM daily, etc.
This is a very rough estimate and the real number for any city can vary widely. It doesn't take into account focusing more on Education production to produce Tech, or focusing on producing other tokens like BEER and WEED which might reduce Income production. And I would say that it's a bit of a lowball number, most cities produce a little bit more than that. If I had to guess, I would say the average is probably about 65% of population. But, even at different city size tiers that seems like a reasonable gauge of a city's performance.
And it does seem to hold up at all city size tiers. It's doable for small cities, medium cities, large cities (10,000+ Population) and even the megacities. I see a few big cities with 0 Income. I'll have to delve into what that's about someday.
If a city is producing less than half, it could probably be made more productive with a few changes or upgrades. I've looked at a number of cities with a low Income rate and it seems like they are just misallocating resources, but maybe they have different plans that I don't know about. Unless there is a specific strategy that disregards income, it is probably a better idea to at least maintain that minimum Half Population level of Income production.
Some cities produce even more Income than their population number, which is an ideal situation, but is it sustainable? Those cities are outliers and I'd like a closer look to see if that is a function more of smaller cities or maybe focusing on Income prooduction at the expense of other important factors. (And I know of one city that completely blows away this paradigm, producing Income at 20x population size. I guess I'll have to pay a visit to that city in a future post.)
As my city grows, maintaining an Income number between 50-100% of population has been consistently easy. Getting over that number at a low population is not too difficult, but as your city grows, there are increasing demands (or maybe they're temptations) to provide other types of services or resources. But of course, I am Mayor Newby McNoobface, so I'll likely discover new problems that start to arise with that growth.
See you down at the Social Aid Office!
