My Industrial profitability keeps being low

[joewagner501]

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.

I actually tried zoning more commercial to see if it would "absorb" the excess industrial output. But that was taking way too long for any conclusions. Dezoning industrial areas was much quicker and allowed me to see faster results. At this point, I can only surmise that industry only needs to be zoned if there is a product that shows a lot is being imported. I haven't tested it yet but I would assume the newly zoned industrial area would result in businesses to fill that demand. The closest analogy I can think of is industry is not really an income powerhouse like in CS1. It currently behaves more like city services like water. If you need it, build it. If you overbuild, it will just generate additional supply that doesn't get used until the city grows enough to use it.

I am left wondering if the issue some people have with offices is similar. They have overbuilt office space leaving them unprofitable and therefore hiring less people over time. I don't have a lot of offices zoned so mine are doing great. But if someone has a lot of offices zoned and they aren't employing people or profitable, perhaps they can try dezoning some of it and report back on their findings.

 

[joewagner501]

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

I have found the demand for everything is high all the time. To the point that when I first started building out the city, I kept zoning residential because there was a demand for it. Then I noticed I had a really high homeless problem. After spending a ridiculous amount of time digging into what was happening I realized my unemployment was just shy of 50%. So, I dezoned a lot of residential and everything balanced itself back out. At that point, I kind of ignore the demand bars because I think they are currently broken. They show demand for zoning that shouldn't have a demand. I think CO have the demand bars tied to things that shouldn't be driving demand.

 

[Fampa]

I have found the demand for everything is high all the time. To the point that when I first started building out the city, I kept zoning residential because there was a demand for it. Then I noticed I had a really high homeless problem. After spending a ridiculous amount of time digging into what was happening I realized my unemployment was just shy of 50%. So, I dezoned a lot of residential and everything balanced itself back out. At that point, I kind of ignore the demand bars because I think they are currently broken. They show demand for zoning that shouldn't have a demand. I think CO have the demand bars tied to things that shouldn't be driving demand.

Than maybe the demand bar is a big problem as well the lack of information to what is actually going on in the city. Why should a industrial building come to my city if it is going to make it loose money? Demand bar should go down when proftability and balance are not looking so good.

EDIT: thinking about it, the demand bar should show demand for each type of product (eletronics, meals, cars etc.).

 

[PTOE Plays]

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.

At this point, I can only surmise that industry only needs to be zoned if there is a product that shows a lot is being imported. I haven't tested it yet but I would assume the newly zoned industrial area would result in businesses to fill that demand. The closest analogy I can think of is industry is not really an income powerhouse like in CS1. It currently behaves more like city services like water. If you need it, build it. If you overbuild, it will just generate additional supply that doesn't get used until the city grows enough to use it.

I completely ignore the demand bars and zone based on intuition. The demand bars are too simplistic to represent what is going on under the hood to fill the actual needs of the city.

 

[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

Yeah, I tested this. It didnt work for me and it caused a massive unemployement problem (40%). Game just seems broken at this point

 

[joewagner501]

I've been doing more testing for a few hours. I took note of what material goods my city was overproducing (and should be exporting for profit) and what it needed to meet demand. I then zoned small areas so no more than 6 industrial businesses would be created. I checked the new businesses against what there was demand for within my city. There was no correlation. It seemed pretty random as to what new business was created. I did this two more times and monitored the underlying demand/overproduction each time. Every time the same results. I then resorted to using the "Business Profitability" screen to find and demolish businesses that were unprofitable. No surprise they were businesses that my city already had an abundance of material production. Often times I would have to demolish them repeatedly until a business spawned that was one my city needed.

Based on that, I would say the game has a bug. I would expect that if I zone for industry, the business started would fill a demand need but that isn't the case.

I also ran into another issue with the simulation. As I stated yesterday, the "stock" on hand at a business will drop without any trucks or delivery vehicles making the supply magically transport to somewhere and income being earned from it. Today I saw something different. In the screenshot below is a delivery van that just "picked up" over 2 tons of electronics from a business. The business (in the second screenshot) didn't have it to give and never showed a drop in it's stock. I witnessed this happening several times.

So, not only does stock magically get sold. But delivery vehicles can pick up stock that doesn't exist. Does anyone know of a reason for this? Perhaps there is some secret storage for each business that isn't seen by us?

 

[Fenuu2014]

Currently experimenting and added a cargo station.

ZERO cargo is moved during the night. I was able to get 600 tons both importing and exporting during the day. My industrial profitability has gone between 42% to 47% in 1 day.

It appears some buildings are switching companies every few mins. One building has changed companies 3 times over the full day.

Day 2 has not much importing or exporting going on. Back at 42% profitability. Building has changed companies again.

 

[Otis85402]

It appears some buildings are switching companies every few mins. One building has changed companies 3 times over the full day.

I learned this when trying to balance my industries manually, i.e. by bulldozing companies until the industry I wanted would spawn. I would have way to much metal and paper production but no food production so just bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-ok-it-s-food-now.

And then I checked back later and saw that every single one of those changes was for nothing. Different industries subsumed those buildings with stuff I didn't need like more paper and more metal.

 

[joewagner501]

I learned this when trying to balance my industries manually, i.e. by bulldozing companies until the industry I wanted would spawn. I would have way to much metal and paper production but no food production so just bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-ok-it-s-food-now.

And then I checked back later and saw that every single one of those changes was for nothing. Different industries subsumed those buildings with stuff I didn't need like more paper and more metal.

I've noticed this as well. It's an odd thing to happen. I think the devs have more work to do on the economy to get it working the way anyone would expect. Right now it just appears to be completely random and businesses don't export surplus. The surplus is only there for the charts to give us warm fuzzies.

 

[joewagner501]

Currently experimenting and added a cargo station.

ZERO cargo is moved during the night. I was able to get 600 tons both importing and exporting during the day. My industrial profitability has gone between 42% to 47% in 1 day.

It appears some buildings are switching companies every few mins. One building has changed companies 3 times over the full day.

Day 2 has not much importing or exporting going on. Back at 42% profitability. Building has changed companies again.

That's disheartening. I was hoping industries were just not exporting because the cost of road shipments was too high. But it appears there is something broken with the game itself.....

 

[Fenuu2014]

I learned this when trying to balance my industries manually, i.e. by bulldozing companies until the industry I wanted would spawn. I would have way to much metal and paper production but no food production so just bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-bulldoze-ok-it-s-food-now.

And then I checked back later and saw that every single one of those changes was for nothing. Different industries subsumed those buildings with stuff I didn't need like more paper and more metal.

It's also odd because it never shows them as vacant. A new company instantly moves in.

I'll try adding an extreme amount of commercial next. I did add some new commercial and they were able to profit. Offices are beyond screwed with a negative balance over 1 million constantly.

 

[joewagner501]

At this point, most of my industry is in the green. Almost all of my commercial are making a profit with the exception of the newest ones and they will turn a profit soon enough. My offices are all making bank and are the most profitable out of the three.

I can surmise that I over-built industry from the start causing them to be in the red the entire time. It seems the export function isn't working as expected. All but two of my resource industries are in the red and continuing to lose money. Two of them (small ones) are profitable. Still an overall red but they will flip that in time.

Because nothing (or very little) gets exported, it doesn't take much to fulfill the cities demand so zoning industrial and offices needs to be done really, really slowly. Nothing like CS1.

 

[widox8]

Good job. What is the unemployment rate now?

 

[joewagner501]

Good job. What is the unemployment rate now?

Just over 8% and dropping. I've been zoning a lot more commercial to absorb the unemployed. Went so far as to convert some previous residential to commercial reducing my population. Interestingly, my income from taxes (8% on everything but residential which is 10%) kept growing. I even started spending a lot of money on city services and parks that I had avoided previously because I was trying to maintain a good income. But with industry making a profit, my tax revenues have shot up. Makes sense, but so does exporting excess production......

 

[Fenuu2014]

Another update, it looks like you can't just add commercial as an easy fix. I've added about 15 new buildings and industrial profits are still not improved. The new commercial do come in with a profit after a few minutes, but I don't see it effecting my income. Offices are extremely bad, but at least it's not showing a demand for them.

So possibly you need an INSANE amount of commercial to help or I need to actually delete some industrial zoning as suggested by others.

 

[joewagner501]

Another update, it looks like you can't just add commercial as an easy fix. I've added about 15 new buildings and industrial profits are still not improved. The new commercial do come in with a profit after a few minutes, but I don't see it effecting my income. Offices are extremely bad, but at least it's not showing a demand for them.

So possibly you need an INSANE amount of commercial to help or I need to actually delete some industrial zoning as suggested by others.

I had to delete a LOT of my industrial zoning (mentioned earlier in the thread). That was the only way to get it to work. Trying to zone additional commercial to absorb the production was taking wayyyyyyy too long.

Another note, I added a train freight terminal and monitored it. It has been interesting. The storage of the freight terminal was immediately used by all business types (industry, commercial, office) as a warehouse to store and buy from. Businesses don't make money when product goes into storage so keep that in mind because profits will initially drop as the warehouse fills up. Trains will also bring in product from outside connections. Exporting goods takes a lot of time. From what I saw, products were only exported when the stored amount was over 200t. It's not a hard number but it seemed to happen around that point. So, unless you have a lot of businesses producing that product, it will take a long time for the export trigger and resulting income for businesses. Not sure how it distributes the profits to the businesses but there seems to be some mechanism involved. Maybe I have since started zoning more industry than what my city needs so I can fill the warehouse faster and trigger the export of goods via rail.

I've noticed some other oddities as well:
- Businesses receiving wood planks and concrete that have nothing to do with selling or using those in their production. Not sure why this is. Maybe they are used in the "maintenance" of the businesses? Does anyone know about it?
- When looking at a delivery van that picked up product from a warehouse (including train station) or business and selecting the link for the business it's going to from the window that opens, I often noticed one or more products the business didn't use or sell. I am guessing it's product left over when the business switched from one type to another. It doesn't seem to impact how much storage is available for the current business and only showed up if I selected the link from the delivery van that was returning with a load of goods. Again, does anyone have more information on this?

 

[Civ5rako]

I've noticed some other oddities as well:
- Businesses receiving wood planks and concrete that have nothing to do with selling or using those in their production. Not sure why this is. Maybe they are used in the "maintenance" of the businesses? Does anyone know about it?

I am pretty sure exactly that reason was mentioned in one of the developer diaries.