At the end of my rope! How do Taxes or RCI Demand work?

[Xen0nex]

Loving this game, but these 2 mechanics have got me completely stumped, and what little information I've been able to find online sometimes contradict each other. I've read the wiki, read the manual, checked all the in-game tooltips/Advisor, and looked around these forums / subreddit. How do Taxes and RCI Demand work?

Taxes

So far, the only thing I think I know for sure is:

• Raising tax rates decreases happiness for a Zone
• Zones with higher happiness will tolerate a higher tax rate setting in the Budget Panel

But, is this everything? Is tax affected by anything other than happiness? Also, are there any positive effects from lowering taxes, other than increasing Happiness?

What affects the Tax rate citizens are willing to pay?

For Residential, Commercial, and Industrial Zones, it is clear that if you keep increasing your Tax Rate %, at a certain point the zone becomes unhappy with the high tax rate. However, what determines what point makes the zone unhappy? Is it just the Happiness rating of the Zone, or other factors too?

In-game, the "Help" info window for the "Happiness" overlay says "They are happy and pay more taxes." Also, for the "Levels" overlay, it says, "Higher level buildings pay more taxes."
The way this is written, I'd been assuming that this simply means that for a given tax rate, say, 9%, a Level 1 House will give me $50 per week, and a Level 2 House will give me $60 per week. The same thing for unhappy and happy buildings. Basically thinking that the little Cims were getting a higher salary, and thus 9% of a higher salary means more money for me.

However, I came across this link where one of the creators seems to say it works differently:

How the areas evolve is based on the land value of the area. The higher the land value the fancier building the residents will build and are willing to pay more taxes.

- co_martsu

This seems to instead imply that a Level 1 house is willing to accept a 9% tax rate, and a Level 2 house is willing to accept a 10% tax rate setting in the Budget Panel? E.G. the little Cim's salary stays the same, they are just now willing to pay a higher tax rate. Which interpretation is correct? The current wording in-game is not very clear.

So, what determines how high a tax rate a citizen is willing to pay? Is it just Happiness, or Happiness & Building Level, or some other factors too? Is it different between residential, Commercial, or Industrial Zones? Overall the mechanics for how zones tolerate tax rates is unclear. For example, in my current city where the taxes for everything are at 12%, why are only the Level 3 Commercial zones complaining about taxes? (Screenshot)

What affects how much $ you get from a zone, without changing the Tax Rate?

And aside from all that, when you've decided on your Tax Rate % (such as 9%), it's not clear what things will increase the amount of $ you get from a certain zone. I assume that Level 3 buildings will give more $ at 9% tax rate, compared to Level 2 buildings at 9% taxes, but are there other factors which affect this as well?


RCI Demand

This is not explained clearly anywhere, and I see many people speculating online. The only help the manual gives is to say you need a "balance" between Residential, Commercial, and Industrial Zones. But if I have them all in balance, what then causes demand for certain zones? I see many people suggest that lowering taxes for a certain zone will increase demand for that zone, but I cannot find anything from the game which says this. Is this true?

Possible factors to increase demand for a zone:

• Having other zones complaining of a lack of Customers / Lack of Workers / Lack of Jobs (E.G. Industrial Zones complaining of Lack of Workers increases Demand for Residential zones)
• Lowering taxes for the zone

Are these correct, or are there other factors?

 

[InfidelKiller]

Good questions. There are a lot of game mechanics that need explanations from CO so we can better understand how to build our cities.
Of the demand bars I'd particularly like to know what drives residential demand. Is it lower taxes, higher happiness, more job vacancies? What's the formula?

 

[BlackViper.com]

I have found in my own cities that a 12% tax rate across the board is just fine, but raise it to 13% and people get angry. I have only made a couple beginning cities (and screwed things up rapidly) and one big one, but it looks to be the same at the start of the game and at 100k population. Someone with more experience in adjusting finances might help better, though, but I have not been able to get taxes above 12% no matter what I did, so I just put it there off the start and leave it.
This is also just "following" the demand of the people. More services when they complain, more parks, etc. I guess if you keep them happy, 12% is fine in my games.

As for RCI demand, if your city is "nice and happy", residents go up because people want to move there. The other two change due to people wanting work and places to shop. This is just a theory, however, I don't have anything to back it up. But I built industry and had mass abandonment due to not enough workers, even though my "R" demand was nothing. This is just me poorly remembering what happened over a week with my 100k pop city, but I build residential anyway and they filled up without demand. I don't understand why, either. My observation could be off base, but that is how I connected the two.

 

[EvilTom]

I'll have to put my notes in here from what I've observed.

Taxes
The more you tax people the unhappier they are, but the more money you get. I don't believe taxes change RCI at all.
this means that happier people will tolerate higher taxes, so providing commercial and parks will improve this situation (and other services of course).
Higher land values do not CAUSE increased tax directly. They merely are a requirement for buildings to get to the highest levels. Higher levels do pay more tax (as there are more households). "Wealth" itself is not measured in the game and other things are a proxy for it (education being the main one), being as there are no ill effects of a highly educated level 5 household working in a level 1 factory. It will show them as over-educated, but there are no problems with it, as they don't actually transfer money or get paid.

RCI -
Industrial Demand just appears to be a measure of how many jobs are needed. Remember Industrial is just workplaces and includes Offices, which would've been Commercial in SimCity games.
Commercial Demand - remember you don't actually need shops. they improve happiness and also get you more taxes by existing and sales of goods. I believe that Commercial demand appears to be when CIMs cannot get their happiness increased by visiting a park, unique building or commercial building. This is why parks reduce commercial demand as CIMs might visit them instead of shops and therefore satisfy their demand for 'happiness'.
Residential Demand - this is a little harder to observe and I've not seen anything concrete. the closest thing I've seen is when there aren't enough workers, but I believe there are other factors at play.

Goods are not a feature of RCI. This is because you can get an infinite supply of goods from the outside world connections. Also a surplus can always be sold. So good and the demand/excess of them is not really a factor in a game. Industries will NEVER have trouble selling goods as long as they can get them to the outside world. Commercial will NEVER have trouble getting goods as long as they can get them from the market.
Remember that industry and commercial will get you tax by the sale of goods. So if you sell your industrial goods to export they won't produce as much tax. It's better to sell the industrial goods internally to your commercial businesses. These commercial business will then sell consumer goods to visiting tourists and CIMs, producing more taxes.

You could ideally ignore most of the RCI as a measure of demand. I find concentrating on happiness as a measure of how much commercial I need to zone (or place parks) or unemployment as a measure of how much industry I need to zone. I try to keep unemployment around 10%. It is not desirable to have employment lower in this game in my experience. This is because I've never got it below 3% even with tonnes of unfilled jobs, so it's not a very good measure. To view employment figures quickly use the population overlay on the top left hand menu, rather than the city statistics in the ESC menu.

 

[Arandur87]

My observation to RCI is the following:

The demand has nothing to do with "jobs needed" or "jobs available". I think it's more of an economic thing.

I for example sometimes have tremendous demand of industrie. I than check my population, so unemployment rate and education. Realize that i have 2% unemployed and mostly fully educated peaople --> setting one block of offices would be enough. But the deman for industrie is far higher than one block could ever fullfill!

So I think it's more like:
"Enough stuff to sell!" --> High demand of commercial.
"Too less stuff to sell!" --> High demand of industrie.
"The stuff to sell is just right!" --> High demand of residential.

As offices count as industry but produce nothing but jobs, I think it's more like a "job-buffer" to employ people and make them happy, without the need of further industry and overflodding the market with goods.

I can be wrong, but I think that's the way it works.

 

[nephilim2k]

How do taxes work?
Taxes work based on the happiness and land value of the area. This is why it is a good thing to have districts set up, as no 1 tax bracket will fit all. Also land value is affected by noise pollution, land pollution etc, so if you have heavy traffic or garbage in a suburb or urban area, land value will plummet. End result should be no heavy traffic or garbage where people live.

Land value.
To increase land value, you need the following in this order (from my experience).
Small Police station – 1 per 7 square block grid is sufficient.
Large Police station – 1 per 12 square block grid is sufficient.
Small fire station – 1 per 7 square block grid is sufficient.
Large fire station – 1 per 12 square block grid is sufficient.
Elementary School – 1 per 5 square block grid is sufficient.
High school – 1 per 7 square block grid is sufficient.
University – 1 per 15 square block grid is sufficient.
Park – 1 per 5 square block grid is sufficient.
Bus stop - 1 per 2 square block grid is sufficient.
Garbage – Have the garbage far away from any urban or industrial areas. It needs its own space. Incinterators are best when you can get them.
Cemetaries – 1 per 8 square block grid is sufficient.
Crematorium – 1 per 6 square block grid is sufficient.
Smoke Detectors and Public transport – if you hand these out for free, you will find land value increases substantially (in my experience). Reason being there is reduced traffic, and reduced fires, which aids in land value going up.
Power Plants - These should be a zone all by themselves, and away from the city. They generate pollution, be it air, ground or noise, and do not help land value increase.

With this in mind, you should design your city.

Industry
Specialised industry is a must in this game to prevent you from importing loads, however, do not over produce in an area, as you will run out of resources very quickly. For oil and ore, you should have 1 4x4 factory per 10 blocks of resource. Forestry should be done in forest lands, so that they replenish constantly and farming should be placed on fertile land or you will be importing like crazy.

Offices
Offices should only be built when you have a university. Otherwise you will have constant demand for highly educated workers. Offices generally can have the tax set to 13% without issue, and if you set up a district for the offices and have specifics that help them

Commercial
Low density commercial should be built in low density residential areas and with a little bit in the industrial areas.
High density commercial should be built in high density residential areas and with a little bit in the office areas.

 

[EvilTom]

My observation to RCI is the following:

The demand has nothing to do with "jobs needed" or "jobs available". I think it's more of an economic thing.

I for example sometimes have tremendous demand of industrie. I than check my population, so unemployment rate and education. Realize that i have 2% unemployed and mostly fully educated peaople --> setting one block of offices would be enough. But the deman for industrie is far higher than one block could ever fullfill!

So I think it's more like:
"Enough stuff to sell!" --> High demand of commercial.
"Too less stuff to sell!" --> High demand of industrie.
"The stuff to sell is just right!" --> High demand of residential.

As offices count as industry but produce nothing but jobs, I think it's more like a "job-buffer" to employ people and make them happy, without the need of further industry and overflodding the market with goods.

I can be wrong, but I think that's the way it works.

I can understand how you've come to this conclusion. We probably need more testing.

I would kindly suggest you reconsider the 'stuff to sell/buy' thing. I'm not saying you're completely wrong, or I'm completely right. Only because demand for goods is nearly irrelevant as there is always infinite supply and demand for goods from the 'world market'. As long as you have outside connections and you have the transport capacity commercial will buy as much as they require either internally or from the outside world, or industrial buildings can always sell their goods outside!
If CO made the demand a measure of the RCI a function of 'goods' then that would be pointless as you can get goods and sell goods anywhere any time.

I might say this in a different way. You could build a city with no industrial at all. The commercial will just buy goods from the outside world. With this city you will struggle to get enough jobs for your people unless you very carefully manage them. Commercial of course provides jobs too but there is an infinite supply of goods from the world market.
Conversely you could set up a city with no commercial and just parks for happiness and industry for jobs. In this case the industry will just ship their goods to the outside connections. ALL of them, so there is no actual 'demand' for goods/stuff as it's infinite.

 

[EvilTom]

How do taxes work?
Taxes work based on the happiness and land value of the area. This is why it is a good thing to have districts set up, as no 1 tax bracket will fit all. Also land value is affected by noise pollution, land pollution etc, so if you have heavy traffic or garbage in a suburb or urban area, land value will plummet. End result should be no heavy traffic or garbage where people live.

Have you tested and proven this (not an accusation, just curious)? Does land value actually improve taxes? Will a high land value level 1 house with 1 household produce the same tax as a low land value comparable level 1 house?
You could be confusing what is actually the root cause and they're hard to seperate. It could be that high land values ALLOW high level houses, so with the increases household count and higher level they produce more tax. therefore in this situation is just housing level

Also do happier CIMs pay more tax than unhappy CIMs if you set the rate the same? Or is it that happier CIMs again tend to be living in higher level houses? I would venture a guess (and happily be proven wrong - I'll have to test this out) that you're seeing proxy results for happiness affect tax rates, such as level houses and higher densities.

 

[nephilim2k]

Have you tested and proven this (not an accusation, just curious)? Does land value actually improve taxes? Will a high land value level 1 house with 1 household produce the same tax as a low land value comparable level 1 house?
You could be confusing what is actually the root cause and they're hard to seperate. It could be that high land values ALLOW high level houses, so with the increases household count and higher level they produce more tax. therefore in this situation is just housing level

Also do happier CIMs pay more tax than unhappy CIMs if you set the rate the same? Or is it that happier CIMs again tend to be living in higher level houses? I would venture a guess (and happily be proven wrong - I'll have to test this out) that you're seeing proxy results for happiness affect tax rates, such as level houses and higher densities.

I tested it on 3 different maps, with the unlimited money and unlock mods to get set up quickly, then turned them off and let the city carry on as normal. It seemed to be the more services and parks the faster the land value went up, the faster the land value went up, the happier the cims were. The happier the cims were the more taxes they were willing to pay. 1 district had cims with 95% happiness and a very high land value and they were happy to pay 17% tax, compared to cims with low land value and 74% happiness who were begrudgingly paying 9%.

 

[Cymsdale]

I'd love to be able to view per-building statistics relating to tax income and goods needed/produced/imported/exported. It would reduce a lot of the mystery of the system, and would be fun to click around and see how things are impacted by various policies and what not.

 

[Arandur87]

I can understand how you've come to this conclusion. We probably need more testing.

I would kindly suggest you reconsider the 'stuff to sell/buy' thing. I'm not saying you're completely wrong, or I'm completely right. Only because demand for goods is nearly irrelevant as there is always infinite supply and demand for goods from the 'world market'. As long as you have outside connections and you have the transport capacity commercial will buy as much as they require either internally or from the outside world, or industrial buildings can always sell their goods outside!
If CO made the demand a measure of the RCI a function of 'goods' then that would be pointless as you can get goods and sell goods anywhere any time.

I might say this in a different way. You could build a city with no industrial at all. The commercial will just buy goods from the outside world. With this city you will struggle to get enough jobs for your people unless you very carefully manage them. Commercial of course provides jobs too but there is an infinite supply of goods from the world market.
Conversely you could set up a city with no commercial and just parks for happiness and industry for jobs. In this case the industry will just ship their goods to the outside connections. ALL of them, so there is no actual 'demand' for goods/stuff as it's infinite.

I understand, why you come to your conclusion, but thats just wrong, sorry to say.

I had issues delivering goods to my commercial in one city, cause i only build specialized industry (forestry und agriculture to prevent pollution) and the commercial district got wildly spread alarms of missing goods!
The import wasn't enough, although i did set up 4 cargo-train-stations and 2 cargo-harbours for a city of 100k citizens! So there basically aren't infinite goods, because you can't just spam 20 harbours and 20 trainstation to supply your commercial!

Another thing is:

How would you explain following than:

I had at some point an unemployment rate of 8% but had 0 (!!) demand for industry and commercial but i had medium demand of residential.
When it is like you said "need more workers: residantial demand" than clearly my game has to be programmed by another studio or something^^

 

[Person012345]

I understand, why you come to your conclusion, but thats just wrong, sorry to say.

I had issues delivering goods to my commercial in one city, cause i only build specialized industry (forestry und agriculture to prevent pollution) and the commercial district got wildly spread alarms of missing goods!
The import wasn't enough, although i did set up 4 cargo-train-stations and 2 cargo-harbours for a city of 100k citizens! So there basically aren't infinite goods, because you can't just spam 20 harbours and 20 trainstation to supply your commercial!

Unless they've fixed it, all this is going to do is create a gigantic traffic jam at one of the train stations. You sure they weren't missing goods because of that?

 

[EvilTom]

I understand, why you come to your conclusion, but thats just wrong, sorry to say.

I had issues delivering goods to my commercial in one city, cause i only build specialized industry (forestry und agriculture to prevent pollution) and the commercial district got wildly spread alarms of missing goods!
The import wasn't enough, although i did set up 4 cargo-train-stations and 2 cargo-harbours for a city of 100k citizens! So there basically aren't infinite goods, because you can't just spam 20 harbours and 20 trainstation to supply your commercial!

Another thing is:

How would you explain following than:

I had at some point an unemployment rate of 8% but had 0 (!!) demand for industry and commercial but i had medium demand of residential.
When it is like you said "need more workers: residantial demand" than clearly my game has to be programmed by another studio or something^^

I can agree with your final point. I said I was fuzzy with residential demand.

I've noticed that unemployment rates under 10% do not appear to affect RCI. It's not until you get to 10% or more that Industrial demand will go up. I have never got under 3% unemployment, even with many extra jobs, so I'm not sure if the game allows for 100% employment. This leads me to treat employment % with a little bit of suspicion. This is unless CO have actually put in the fact that you will never ever employ 100% of people in real life for various reasons (lack of education, too far to travel, disability, etc etc etc).


I can however concretely say that there is infinite supply and demand of goods and consumer goods from the 'outside' connections. This has been said on a couple of dev interviews. I believe it was said during the PDX cast with Quill too. They say that this is not desirable as you will want the extra tax you get from internal trade and reduced traffic, but it's possible to entirely subsist off of the outside world for your goods. Therefore I reiterate my argument that why bother have goods surplus and demand as a cause of RCI if it's always infinite? How do you gauge it. This, to me, would be illogical, unless they have separated the external demand from internal demand, but there is no suggestion of this.

What we could do is for the devs to actually state what drives the RCI demand actually. Even if it is a complicated set of numbers it'll put this to rest. It could be both couldn't it (I can admit I'm wrong about the goods being infinite things if that's the case).
for example. For industrial demand it could both be demand for jobs and demand for goods. I concede that that may be a possibility and it's more complex for us to separate one from the other in a 'lab' city. But please also remember that "I" includes Offices which neither produce nor consume goods. All they do is create jobs and tax. Why would there ever be a demand for this? "I" is the measure of workplaces, and therefore that's why I put my argument that "demand for jobs" is why I came to my conclusion about the "I" indicator.

I wonder if we can test it by building 1 house and 1 commercial and see what that does to the industrial demand. The person will work, the goods will be imported. I don't know if that will work or not in a lab city.

 

[AmpsterMan]

I understand, why you come to your conclusion, but thats just wrong, sorry to say.

I had issues delivering goods to my commercial in one city, cause i only build specialized industry (forestry und agriculture to prevent pollution) and the commercial district got wildly spread alarms of missing goods!
The import wasn't enough, although i did set up 4 cargo-train-stations and 2 cargo-harbours for a city of 100k citizens! So there basically aren't infinite goods, because you can't just spam 20 harbours and 20 trainstation to supply your commercial!

Another thing is:

How would you explain following than:

I had at some point an unemployment rate of 8% but had 0 (!!) demand for industry and commercial but i had medium demand of residential.
When it is like you said "need more workers: residantial demand" than clearly my game has to be programmed by another studio or something^^

My experience coincides with EvilTom's here. As long as my transportation system is relatively clog free, i have had every good imported and every resource exported regardless of Demand. The only explanation I can think your case is a congested system despawning supply trucks/vans.

As for residential, i think that one is far more enigmatic. My hypothesis, however, is similar EvilTom's in this case too. My diagnosis in your specific scenario would be a mismatch of skill levels and jobs. I.E. Structural Unemployment due to a skills gap.

 

[Arandur87]

My experience coincides with EvilTom's here. As long as my transportation system is relatively clog free, i have had every good imported and every resource exported regardless of Demand. The only explanation I can think your case is a congested system despawning supply trucks/vans.

As for residential, i think that one is far more enigmatic. My hypothesis, however, is similar EvilTom's in this case too. My diagnosis in your specific scenario would be a mismatch of skill levels and jobs. I.E. Structural Unemployment due to a skills gap.

I can answer both your hypothesis with a clear no, sorry.

My traffic was absolutely fine, very rare red spots, no major traffic jams (6-10 vehicles at a red light is no jam...) and no train-jams at all!
I also set up a crago-station near my commercials, wich had issues with missing goods, nothing helped with that! And my industrial demand was sky-high in this particular scenario, although i just had an unemployment rate of about 3% there.

Also, if I set up offices/industry and my unemployment rate is high, the jobs get done, no problems there, but i rather have demand for industry with high unemployment-rates.
If i have 8% unemploeyd with 100k citizens, i would have to build up at least ~5k Jobs to reduce the unemployment-rate to about 3%. But in many cases, i just have 0 demand of industry with unemployment rates of 8%, so i don't think the industry-demand-bar is purely job-related.

Maybe it's amixture of produces goods and available workforce, i don't know. But it's definitely not just available jobs/workers.

 

[EvilTom]

I can answer both your hypothesis with a clear no, sorry.

My traffic was absolutely fine, very rare red spots, no major traffic jams (6-10 vehicles at a red light is no jam...) and no train-jams at all!
I also set up a crago-station near my commercials, wich had issues with missing goods, nothing helped with that! And my industrial demand was sky-high in this particular scenario, although i just had an unemployment rate of about 3% there.

Also, if I set up offices/industry and my unemployment rate is high, the jobs get done, no problems there, but i rather have demand for industry with high unemployment-rates.
If i have 8% unemploeyd with 100k citizens, i would have to build up at least ~5k Jobs to reduce the unemployment-rate to about 3%. But in many cases, i just have 0 demand of industry with unemployment rates of 8%, so i don't think the industry-demand-bar is purely job-related.

Maybe it's amixture of produces goods and available workforce, i don't know. But it's definitely not just available jobs/workers.

I can entirely accept your version.

I am not going to argue against you as we need more empirical evidence. If many people are seeing many different results it's easy to interpret this in many different wants. This is essentially what the OP had trouble with and we as a collective are struggling to find the reasonable explanation.

It would be nice if we had more indication of what influenced RCI from CO or in a manual. I think, at least I did initially, that we may be using hang overs from SimCity to use as a reference and this might not be the correct, or the whole picture of what is going on with RCI in Cities: Skylines. An example of this is many people still forget the Offices are counted as Industry and are not Commercial.

 

[AmpsterMan]

Can you share your save? This is a question that intrigues me and i would love do some science on it . Will look when i get home.

 

[Simcity5]

RCI has me a bit stumped.

It seems R creates a demand for I,
I then creates a demand for C,
and C creates a demand for R.

It seems to me you are satisfying the needs in reverse to what makes sense.

People move in to the city, so industry wants to open up for the worker resources.
And then shops want to open up because industry want to offload their resources.
Then residents move in because shops want someone to sell their goods to.

It would make more sense if industry created a demand for residential, and then residential create a demand for Commercial, which creates a demand for industrial.

 

[Baro]

As a bit of an accidental test I managed to lose about 90% of my residential buildings in a city of about 20k. You'd think if R was tied in any way to actual demand for workers my demand would spike? Nope, it didn't go up at all. Slowly all my commercial and industrial buildings reported a lack of workers and eventually abandoned, but during this time residential demand was just a sliver, as it was before I lost all my R buildings. I simply had to wait for the residential to slowly re-build its self, but it did this at a rate absolutely independent of the demand for workers. Demand for R seems to just exist on its own but also seems to build up over time. I've left a city that had only slivers of demand for RCI sit for a while. The population wasn't going up, buildings were not levelling up, people were already educated, yet over time the bars crept up and up. It's almost like some aspects of demand is simply based on time, or maybe large changes in demand can only trickle in over time? I have no idea. I've had no industrial demand while my population sat at 20% unemployment and I've had no residential demand as my workplaces were all short on workers and unemployment was at 0%. It makes little sense and I wish CO would let us know more about this, either here on the forums or with a better interface/more stats.