Its been noted by many players and been a long standing issue with this game is that the more money you have in your treasury, the game automatically reduces how much tax income you get.
For lack of a better term for this mechanic I will refer to it as "Inflation".
I don't know the exact threshold or formula for it, but someone else said it usually kicks in when you have more than 10 million in the treasury, and it seems to progressively get worse as you get more money.
For instance I noticed when I had only $5 million and a town with 40,000 people my tax revenue for residential and commercial buildings was in the high 70K-90K range, industrial revenue was around 15K-30K. I was having a budget surplus of 35K. I then doubled the size of my town to 90K people and I noticed all that my budget surplus began to drop to the low 10K range despite the fact that I barely added any expenses (like 15% increase) while my population, zoned buildings, and number of cims employed increased by like 210% when I was sitting on $37 million in. Which means I should be rolling in the cash from tax revenue and have a huge surplus.
But instead my tax revenue for residential and commercial zones seemed to halved themselves rather than double. Instead of being 140K - 180K as expected, residential tax revenue dropped to 40K and seems to have a soft cap of around 40K-50K. My commercial tax revenue seemed to drop to only 15K, and seemed to have like a soft cap of like 20K until I implemented the "Big Business Benefactor policy" which made the tax revenue then jump back up to 40K-50K. My industrial tax revenue dropped to like 2K.
I have known about this "inflation" mechanic for a while but didn't know how significant it was till recently. I have the "Auto money mod" that allows you to give and take away at anytime. So I decided to basically take away all my money and drop myself back down to $100K in the treasury to see how much tax revenue I should be getting. Even after I reduced my tax rates from 9% to 4% my tax revenue for residential and commercial jumped from the 50K soft cap to like 100k, my industry tax revenue jumped from 2K-3K to around 30K.
So as you can see this is not me looking at the net budget value and seeing my surplus declining from excessive spending, it is the game artificially decreasing raw tax revenue.
I honestly can't think of any legitimate reason why this mechanic should exist in the game, especially when it invalidates and contradicts so many of the games features.
For instance what is the point of having a budget panel to set taxes if the game completely ignores the values you set and drops your taxes to some arbitrary hidden number? What is the point of having specialized districts, buildings, and policies that increase tax revenue if the game penalizes you for having a efficient and profitable city. Why even have charts to measure statistics related to the treasury and taxes, in game if the game complete invalidates them by messing up their natural projection values.
I am an IT person, I understand the basic concept of integer overflow, like something being 16 bit has range limit of 65,536 or 32 bit having a range limit of 4,294,967,296, etc... where the game might crash if you have too much beyond that limit. And I assume the reason why the "inflation" mechanic was implemented is to delay reaching some bit or byte limit. But this is terrible method of addressing the issue because it destroys the functionality of many other parts of the game.
An easy and efficient solution is just to have a carry over value to handle any overflow. For instance if the game can only have a 32 bit data values, which means data ranging 1 - 4,294,967,295, then add a second value that represents large units of like 1 or 2 billion.
Lets say the money value is limited to a 32 bit value, which means the max amount of money you can have is $4,294,967,296. Then why not whenever the money value reaches 1 billion, have the game deduct that value then add it to a second 32 bit carry over value. This gives you a huge buffer and easily prevents you from ever reaching the integer overflow value of a single 32 bit value, and this effectively increases the money cap from a low measly $4.294 billion to like $18.438 quintillion. Then have the money display stop displaying the money in units of 1s and swap over to units of billions once you exceed 1 billion dollars in the treasury.
For lack of a better term for this mechanic I will refer to it as "Inflation".
I don't know the exact threshold or formula for it, but someone else said it usually kicks in when you have more than 10 million in the treasury, and it seems to progressively get worse as you get more money.
For instance I noticed when I had only $5 million and a town with 40,000 people my tax revenue for residential and commercial buildings was in the high 70K-90K range, industrial revenue was around 15K-30K. I was having a budget surplus of 35K. I then doubled the size of my town to 90K people and I noticed all that my budget surplus began to drop to the low 10K range despite the fact that I barely added any expenses (like 15% increase) while my population, zoned buildings, and number of cims employed increased by like 210% when I was sitting on $37 million in. Which means I should be rolling in the cash from tax revenue and have a huge surplus.
But instead my tax revenue for residential and commercial zones seemed to halved themselves rather than double. Instead of being 140K - 180K as expected, residential tax revenue dropped to 40K and seems to have a soft cap of around 40K-50K. My commercial tax revenue seemed to drop to only 15K, and seemed to have like a soft cap of like 20K until I implemented the "Big Business Benefactor policy" which made the tax revenue then jump back up to 40K-50K. My industrial tax revenue dropped to like 2K.
I have known about this "inflation" mechanic for a while but didn't know how significant it was till recently. I have the "Auto money mod" that allows you to give and take away at anytime. So I decided to basically take away all my money and drop myself back down to $100K in the treasury to see how much tax revenue I should be getting. Even after I reduced my tax rates from 9% to 4% my tax revenue for residential and commercial jumped from the 50K soft cap to like 100k, my industry tax revenue jumped from 2K-3K to around 30K.
So as you can see this is not me looking at the net budget value and seeing my surplus declining from excessive spending, it is the game artificially decreasing raw tax revenue.
I honestly can't think of any legitimate reason why this mechanic should exist in the game, especially when it invalidates and contradicts so many of the games features.
For instance what is the point of having a budget panel to set taxes if the game completely ignores the values you set and drops your taxes to some arbitrary hidden number? What is the point of having specialized districts, buildings, and policies that increase tax revenue if the game penalizes you for having a efficient and profitable city. Why even have charts to measure statistics related to the treasury and taxes, in game if the game complete invalidates them by messing up their natural projection values.
I am an IT person, I understand the basic concept of integer overflow, like something being 16 bit has range limit of 65,536 or 32 bit having a range limit of 4,294,967,296, etc... where the game might crash if you have too much beyond that limit. And I assume the reason why the "inflation" mechanic was implemented is to delay reaching some bit or byte limit. But this is terrible method of addressing the issue because it destroys the functionality of many other parts of the game.
An easy and efficient solution is just to have a carry over value to handle any overflow. For instance if the game can only have a 32 bit data values, which means data ranging 1 - 4,294,967,295, then add a second value that represents large units of like 1 or 2 billion.
Lets say the money value is limited to a 32 bit value, which means the max amount of money you can have is $4,294,967,296. Then why not whenever the money value reaches 1 billion, have the game deduct that value then add it to a second 32 bit carry over value. This gives you a huge buffer and easily prevents you from ever reaching the integer overflow value of a single 32 bit value, and this effectively increases the money cap from a low measly $4.294 billion to like $18.438 quintillion. Then have the money display stop displaying the money in units of 1s and swap over to units of billions once you exceed 1 billion dollars in the treasury.
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