My Industrial profitability keeps being low

[SanderVG]

Hi,

I don't understand the profitability of my industrial zoning. Atm it is at 36% but I feel like I'm doing everything to try to improve it but nothing happens. Does somebody know how I can improve it?

- My taxes are at 11%.
- Water and electricity fees are at 100% but if I change it to 0% nothing happens to my profitability.
- My production is alright. I have alot of surplus apart from wood and a little bit of oil. I have alot of rocks surplus and I checked on some industry and even industry that requires rocks are completely red in profitability.
- I have a cargo trainstation which stores alot of stuff but I feel like they are stil importing more products then exporting.
- Workers are completely filled. I even have 18% of unemployment rate because my industrial demand is really low which I guess is because of the low profitability of my industry.

 

[Kadeous]

This is something that I've also been looking into recently and there really isn't a clear answer yet except for possible bugs. I have 0 Electric and Water fees and that didn't help, I lowered taxes and that helped bring it up about 1-2%. I then tried with subsidies to the full industry paying out 10mill a month and that didn't even budge the profits so I put it back to a reasonable tax rate of 6% as the size of my city can handle it. I've put some images for you of how mine is currently sitting so you could perhaps have a comparison.

Edit: Lower taxes should help them level up buildings thus providing more profit from what I understand. So you might have to eat some cost while you give them a tax break to level up. I was able to get mine from 38% to it's current 56% by eating more of the taxes unless I'm planning an expansion that will require the funding.

 

[Fampa]

I have the same issue. Cant think of any explanation besides a bug

 

[Kadeous]

Honestly I feel it would help if you could select what buildings you need in industry, because you get let's say 20 producing 1 item, then the import on that item goes through the roof. So it needs some balancing for sure and that would be up to the developers to implement.

 

[AzyrFireblade]

This has got to be a bug with the new patch. My city's industries are completely broken after the patch. Immediately saw their weatlth take a nose dive.

I thought to try forcing out all old businesses by raising industrial tax to 30% until everyone vacated. then I deleted all my specialiazed industry since you can't evict those companies. Finally I fully subsidized industrial to -10% taxes to try to get them to start from zero in a positive way.

It didn't work. There's something new in the way that a company's profitability is being calculated that is either broken or overtuned.

The biggest problem I see is that there is nothing in the game that indicates what is making this happen. I can see with the expanded tooltip mod that practically every business is losing money, however some individual business' profitability is apparently high (100%) but they are also losing money over time.

 

[Fampa]

This has got to be a bug with the new patch. My city's industries are completely broken after the patch. Immediately saw their weatlth take a nose dive.

View attachment 1270717

I thought to try forcing out all old businesses by raising industrial tax to 30% until everyone vacated. then I deleted all my specialiazed industry since you can't evict those companies. Finally I fully subsidized industrial to -10% taxes to try to get them to start from zero in a positive way.

It didn't work. There's something new in the way that a company's profitability is being calculated that is either broken or overtuned.
View attachment 1270719

The biggest problem I see is that there is nothing in the game that indicates what is making this happen. I can see with the expanded tooltip mod that practically every business is losing money, however some individual business' profitability is apparently high (100%) but they are also losing money over time.

Yeah, there is something crazy going on

 

[campcreekdude]

Here are my city statistics.
It was noted that in Magnolia County by City Planner Plays prior to patch his industry was over producing. Then it made sense that imports started.
They tested the patch on that city.


Here is My profit tab

This is my Industry Wealth. It looks like a lot of Industry wealth disappeared with the patch. But it started to grow back and reorganize. Some are losing.

You can see the patch influenced trade. The one industry that I am over producing is Timber constantly. So I will look at that graph isolated. The rest are usually underproduced.

I guess my Timer production just stayed similar but paper has changed.

All wealth went down in the categories. Wood is in negative numbers.

My signature buildings that I unlocked are mid to low profit except for chemical plant. Chemicals is growing in wealth. But it also dropped at patch.

Looks like I am importing chemicals. But pre-patch I was exporting.

What can I say? I guess production went down, exports went down, and so did wealth. Also there was a reorganization of industry production. You can see below that number companies changed at patch but i zoned some more industry afterwards. City Planner Plays mentioned that warehouses are a thing now. Prior to patch no industrial warehouses spawned. When you click on profitability with warehouses they don't show a profitability in my city. SO I am unsure if they count as a industry business. If not that explains why number of industrial businesses went down.

Building level is also going up. First slide showed that wealth trend was going up as well slowly.

I went from an industrial powerhouse with lots of exports to an importing city. A conclusion is they changed Industry. Industry 4.0 patch.



But i am exporting. I just had a cargo ship export Electronics, Petro, Furniture, Food, Beverages, and Vehicles. Time to take a closer look at those industries.

I obviously have imports except for Petrochemicals sometimes. Its near equilibrium.

Huge surplus in Electronics.

I have a bottleneck at my Harbor Cargo Terminal. Its at 100% usage

.
I created a new cargo ship and its bringing in new beverages.

Then it exported away. But not completely full so I have enough Cargo ships now.

I am exporting Timber at Rail as I am overproducing that for sure.

Conclusion: Just like in CS1 you can't avoid exports or imports. Apparently there will be both. Even though I am exporting some.... I am definitely importing more now.
At the current moment i have no air cargo. You'd think something would come in by air. But I guess not for now.

 

[joewagner501]

I've seen the same thing in a brand new city I started. Seeing a lot of warehouses pop up around the industrial area while most of my industry, offices, and commercial are losing money.

Is it possible that warehouses are treated as an extension of the industries internal storage? If so, perhaps profits are depressed while the warehouses (including extensions to freight transport) are filled up? Industries, businesses, and transport buy supply from outside the city because most of the production in the city is going to storage with only a small amount available for local purchase or export? This would raise the cost of goods/services sold. Only when the warehouses are full will exporting begin but by then the deficit is so large, it takes a very very long time for companies to actually turn green for profit? Similar to CS1 where all the production went to any "storage" once it was placed. The difference being that CS1 industries started off producing crap loads of products. With CS2, everything seems to take a lot of time wo work its way through the simulation.

 

[Otis85402]

In a new city, my raw material industry can never level up beyond 1 and show vastly negative profit numbers when I mouse over the facility.

I also started having level 5 office buildings with only 5 employees.

Something is badly broken right now with the game.

 

[campcreekdude]

I am experiencing a lot of bugs that are reported. My city will change drastically when they release another patch.
5/5 office, Nerfed tourism, Ballooning Household Wealth, I do believe Somethings up with industry and some signature assets wont let residents move in.




I just got engaged in a different bug. I created a new outside road connection and my Imports/Exports changed significantly (for a short period of time).
This has been reported.

 

[campcreekdude]

I've seen the same thing in a brand new city I started. Seeing a lot of warehouses pop up around the industrial area while most of my industry, offices, and commercial are losing money.

Is it possible that warehouses are treated as an extension of the industries internal storage? If so, perhaps profits are depressed while the warehouses (including extensions to freight transport) are filled up? Industries, businesses, and transport buy supply from outside the city because most of the production in the city is going to storage with only a small amount available for local purchase or export? This would raise the cost of goods/services sold. Only when the warehouses are full will exporting begin but by then the deficit is so large, it takes a very very long time for companies to actually turn green for profit? Similar to CS1 where all the production went to any "storage" once it was placed. The difference being that CS1 industries started off producing crap loads of products. With CS2, everything seems to take a lot of time wo work its way through the simulation.

In CS1 I could never get grain to leave the grain silos. It seemed like they filled up and never left lol. I never used the warehouse system in CS1.

 

[CthulhuTactical]

I haven't checked or played yet[and probably wont play cs2 in near future] but you should check if your extracted resources aren't exported instead of funneled into your industry. Industries will be quite unprofitable unless you fuel them from your own resource gathering operations.

 

[widox8]

Hi,
I have the same problem. Since the last update my industry wealth is going down. I lowered industry taxes to 4% and it is not improving. And I tried to zone-dezone specialized industries and didn't find a solution.
The office wealth is behaving weird also. I have office taxes at 0%. Software and telecomunications companies are gaining wealth and finance and media are trending down. I particularly don't like this because I would love to have some office towers in the city's downtown. I think of big american banks office buildings in New York and this is what I envision for the finance companies in my CS2 city.
I hope Paradox finds a solution or gives us some explanation on the economy mechanics.

 

[Fenuu2014]

This explains my massive ups and downs with money. All of my raw material industries are deep in the negative no matter being huge via anarchy or a small vanilla size. I've noticed a few zoned industries are able to profit or stay afloat, but a lot are losing a lot of money too. My office demand has also disappeared and not returned since the patch.

Kinda odd they don't move out despite making no profit. Somehow my city is still managing to get by as well even when the monthly income keeps hopping from 50k-500k.

 

[CthulhuTactical]

This explains my massive ups and downs with money. All of my raw material industries are deep in the negative no matter being huge via anarchy or a small vanilla size. I've noticed a few zoned industries are able to profit or stay afloat, but a lot are losing a lot of money too. My office demand has also disappeared and not returned since the patch.

Kinda odd they don't move out despite making no profit. Somehow my city is still managing to get by as well even when the monthly income keeps hopping from 50k-500k.

That's pretty much situation since econ 2.0, so i see nothing has changed. The earnings/economy simulation is still broken

 

[joewagner501]

I got a crazy idea that maybe..... just maybe..... we were overbuilding the industrial zones of our cities, and because there were so many of them, none were making money even when they showed being profitable. I decided to test the theory and removed 3/4'ths of my industrial zones. Then I monitored several of the remaining ones to see what would happen. What I noticed was the businesses started making money. They would add stock until it got over 2 tons. The stock would disappear and the negative balance would go down. This continued until the businesses were showing a profit. The whole time the "Level" dollar amount kept going up by 80 simoleons each time this happened. No trucks picked up or left the factories. The inventory (stock) magically disappeared and money flowed in. (see screenshot)

It appears that industry does make money but not when there is more of it than what is needed to support the city's commercial businesses and residences. It would appear the mechanism for exporting and making a profit isn't working. I don't have a town large enough to justify the expense of a freight train yard or freight shipping yard. I would be curious if having one of them makes a difference in the profitability for exports if someone can test that aspect.

But for now, if you want your industry to be profitable, you have to trim it way, way down. Unfortunately that also means you will lose those jobs so there will need to be a balancing out of residential unless you want to throw up a crapload of commercial to absorb the newly unemployed.

 

[Fenuu2014]

I got a crazy idea that maybe..... just maybe..... we were overbuilding the industrial zones of our cities, and because there were so many of them, none were making money even when they showed being profitable. I decided to test the theory and removed 3/4'ths of my industrial zones. Then I monitored several of the remaining ones to see what would happen. What I noticed was the businesses started making money. They would add stock until it got over 2 tons. The stock would disappear and the negative balance would go down. This continued until the businesses were showing a profit. The whole time the "Level" dollar amount kept going up by 80 simoleons each time this happened. No trucks picked up or left the factories. The inventory (stock) magically disappeared and money flowed in. (see screenshot)

It appears that industry does make money but not when there is more of it than what is needed to support the city's commercial businesses and residences. It would appear the mechanism for exporting and making a profit isn't working. I don't have a town large enough to justify the expense of a freight train yard or freight shipping yard. I would be curious if having one of them makes a difference in the profitability for exports if someone can test that aspect.

But for now, if you want your industry to be profitable, you have to trim it way, way down. Unfortunately that also means you will lose those jobs so there will need to be a balancing out of residential unless you want to throw up a crapload of commercial to absorb the newly unemployed.

View attachment 1279256

Very interesting. Did you also try doing more commercial so more products can be locally used?

I might try adding a train cargo station. I did have lots of surplus when I looked. I guess it's not being exported via roads. Very interesting and informative, thanks.

 

[PTOE Plays]

@joewagner501 that’s great info. There really needs to be a guide or in game tutorial to provide best practices of running a city. I know CO doesn’t want the player to worry about the details of the simulation, but I don’t see how the player can build a successful city without understanding the basics of how the systems interact.

 

[CthulhuTactical]

A guide with workarounds that leave you with high unfulfilled demand wouldn't be needed if game mechanics were working properly. As it stands now, it's obvious that things are broken -either the export/import simulation or population work demand.

 

[Fampa]

I got a crazy idea that maybe..... just maybe..... we were overbuilding the industrial zones of our cities, and because there were so many of them, none were making money even when they showed being profitable. I decided to test the theory and removed 3/4'ths of my industrial zones. Then I monitored several of the remaining ones to see what would happen. What I noticed was the businesses started making money. They would add stock until it got over 2 tons. The stock would disappear and the negative balance would go down. This continued until the businesses were showing a profit. The whole time the "Level" dollar amount kept going up by 80 simoleons each time this happened. No trucks picked up or left the factories. The inventory (stock) magically disappeared and money flowed in. (see screenshot)

It appears that industry does make money but not when there is more of it than what is needed to support the city's commercial businesses and residences. It would appear the mechanism for exporting and making a profit isn't working. I don't have a town large enough to justify the expense of a freight train yard or freight shipping yard. I would be curious if having one of them makes a difference in the profitability for exports if someone can test that aspect.

But for now, if you want your industry to be profitable, you have to trim it way, way down. Unfortunately that also means you will lose those jobs so there will need to be a balancing out of residential unless you want to throw up a crapload of commercial to absorb the newly unemployed.

View attachment 1279256

Very interesting. But why the demand bar for industry is allways hungry?