Keeping Your Income Positive While Starting

Keeping Your Income Positive While Starting

1) Start with wind power (only what you need), your water supply, and sewerage.
2) Start zoning your residential, commercial and industrial areas as the demand rises.
3) Focus only on increasing your city size with roads and more zoned areas only. Let your citizens complain.
4) Compensate when you need more wind power, add it. Until you have enough residential, commercial and industrial zoned areas to meet your demands and turn your income positive.
4) In the bottom right, hover your mouse over the happiness, you will see what is drastically dropping citizen happiness.
5) When you have enough positive income to stay positive; Add whatever citizens are complaining about not having the most.

GOAL:
Use this method for city growth until your income becomes positive, by having enough residential, commercial and industrial zones to cover the costs of your electricity, water and sewerage only. Once you outpace by +1k to +2k income, consider medical or education next perhaps.

TIPS:
*You need all of your roads nearly bright green to remove the negative citizen happiness for healthcare.
*Consider messing slightly with taxes to help you earn more income. Reducing residential taxes from 10% to 9% gives +1 happiness. Reducing it from 9% to 8% is still only +1 happiness, next is 7% with +2 happiness, so pay attention.

I hope this helps you, I don’t have an answer for commercially zoned areas in constant demand yet always lacking customers. I did notice, when my electricity supply is not enough, suddenly my commercial areas are plagued with not enough customers for a while, never truly resolving it seems.