Fixing Urban centeres

[Imperator1993]

Currently Urban centres become a massive problem late game with the fact they are massively unprofitable due to the overproduction of services. Thus all the pops working there tend to starve and become hot beds of radicals and you can't do anything about other then subsidies for Urban centres which can become a massive financial drain.

The solution to this issue imo is two fold, lower the amount of services produced and have urban centres make other goods for pop's to buy. Maybe things like advertising, sports events, stage plays and in the late game movie theatres, banking. Basically just give Urban centres more purpose so they don't just become massive money sinks and produce nothing but starving pops

 

[Notme1]

Well other things would work too:
Halve everything in urban center so one level is 2x smaller.
Or halve urbanization produced by all other buildings.
Maybe reduction by less than 50% would be fine too.

 

[Fawr]

In the meantime I've got services at -20%, have a massive transport and fine art industries, and I'm only using the 2nd technology for the market PM slot. Which is a sign of how broken it looks to me.

My solution would be to use services in some PMs in some industries. Many businesses would have purchased services from others, things like: lawyers, accountants, advertising, etc.

 

[TheHostName]

I see a few options.

-Reduce center output and input.
-Reduce center amount. Though this doesnt allways help since you can half half your centers not staffed at all and still have an overproduction.
-Create demand in buildings.
-Create demand in pops. Here i would suggest to reduce luxury goods use and give them more service needs (which cant be substituted by other goods) Though here we are trading more demand in services for less demand of Luxury items. One industry gets less money and the other more in a sense. Not helping really.

I think the solution should be a combination of Option 1 2 and 4.

 

[DukeLeto42]

There just seems to be a general late-game profitability crisis - when all the goods come near market value and use the most advanced PMs, there just isn't much profit going around.

 

[amocpower]

I nearly never upgrade UC. Service is at begin expensive, with industrialisation it get cheaper. But not so cheap and unprofitable. There are lots of buildings, that you should not change PM/upgrade immediatelay. You can save lots of resources, too.

 

[Secret Master]

other then subsidies for Urban centres

Wait, why would you waste a single pound sterling subsidizing the urban center? If it starts firing POPs, then let it fire them. Those POPs can go work somewhere else.

Hell, I think my urban center for my 46 million POP Stockholm was only half employed by the end of the game. And it was putting most of the the other urban centers out of work due to economies of scale and careful PM selection.

 

[Nominus]

I think exporting services is interesting. Only to neighboring countries, perhaps.

 

[Nirmara]

There just isn't enough demand for services, especially at higher SOL.

Having two PM boosting services production also seem overkill. My guess is that the street light PM will eventually be used to produce some kind of "public safely" whenel they introduce crime into the game.

 

[GrounchoVilla]

There just seems to be a general late-game profitability crisis - when all the goods come near market value and use the most advanced PMs, there just isn't much profit going around.

some obscure guy from Saxony wrote a book about that ...

im fine with low profits late game but it would be nice if there were ways to alleviate it other than expanding welfare

 

[GrounchoVilla]

my biggest issue is with the obscene amounts of glass my urban centers consume late game

 

[DukeLeto42]

my biggest issue is with the obscene amounts of glass my urban centers consume late game

Glass / porcelain seems to take the place of all kiln-made products, so both all glasswork and all ceramics. No bricks as a resource, after all.

 

[0watcherinthewater0]

Currently Urban centres become a massive problem late game with the fact they are massively unprofitable due to the overproduction of services. Thus all the pops working there tend to starve and become hot beds of radicals and you can't do anything about other then subsidies for Urban centres which can become a massive financial drain.

The solution to this issue imo is two fold, lower the amount of services produced and have urban centres make other goods for pop's to buy. Maybe things like advertising, sports events, stage plays and in the late game movie theatres, banking. Basically just give Urban centres more purpose so they don't just become massive money sinks and produce nothing but starving pops

The issue isn’t urban centers producing too many services, it’s pops demabding too few.

I see a few options.

-Reduce center output and input.
-Reduce center amount. Though this doesnt allways help since you can half half your centers not staffed at all and still have an overproduction.
-Create demand in buildings.
-Create demand in pops. Here i would suggest to reduce luxury goods use and give them more service needs (which cant be substituted by other goods) Though here we are trading more demand in services for less demand of Luxury items. One industry gets less money and the other more in a sense. Not helping really.

I think the solution should be a combination of Option 1 2 and 4.

Urban centers are automatically built as urbanization improves. Increasing demand for services and actually enabling centers to reach full employment means less construction for the same output. It’s not an equivalent situation to just having more luxury buildings.

 

[TheHostName]

Urban centers are automatically built as urbanization improves. Increasing demand for services and actually enabling centers to reach full employment means less construction for the same output. It’s not an equivalent situation to just having more luxury buildings.

Who here constructs specifically to get urban centers to spawn? Its happens on the sideline for me and i dont have to look at them simply because they are so frequent. So Output/construction isnt something i think we should consider when we want to fix them.

 

[Secret Master]

my biggest issue is with the obscene amounts of glass my urban centers consume late game

I rarely use higher PMs for urban centers if glass is in any way a problem.

Then again, because urban centers autobuild, and because they have high variability in both PMs and types of employment, I also like to manipulate urban centers to either "subsidize" railroads by artificially increasing transportation demand, or change their employment types to cut down on the actual labor they draw by making some of them super efficient.... which releases labor that could do something else.

I haven't yet been able to make one super-city that provides 100% of my services with no other urban centers having any employment, but I'm still trying. Why waste labor on piddly level 20 urban centers when a 50+ one has better througput?

 

[Blackthorn23]

There should be a significant, dramatic increase in pop services demand with higher SOL, in addition to and independent of their purchase of luxury goods.

The late Victorian era saw many of the most successful industrial economies begin transitioning to primarily service based economies. In addition to all the familiar types of modern services, Victorian Britain had the highest number of servants per household in history, with even middle class households having one to two servants, and upper class households having staff in some cases of more than a dozen.