Hi, I love the game and the improvements (although I started with version 1.10, I read the posts for almost all versions). I just lost the 14th election in the starter city (alborina?).

Started strong — lowered wage and sales taxes a lot, good education pipeline, ended up with 50%+ bachelor graduates and a thriving IT/finance economy. City was doing great for decades, financing from the thriving economy with ~10% corporate tax and huge car license fees).

But gradually everything became unaffordable. Rents kept climbing and every tool I tried — lower taxes even more. better services, parks, healthcare — just ended up helping landlords rather than residents. Even social housing hit $7,500-8,000/month, which became the entrance barrier for population and new businesses. Eventually 80% of residents couldn't afford the city despite it being "successful".

Would love to see some direct market intervention tools — city-owned housing, buy subsiding, housing cooperatives, or maybe limit rent increase even more than the default 5%. The game brilliantly shows WHY these tools exist in real cities. Without them the landlord always wins eventually! (Does he?)

Hello, you're actually correct about this problem.  To mitigate this, we've  adjusted the fertility rate to OECD standards (instead of a global value) that correlates better with the rest of our simulation parameters that are very western-centric (for now, because we will be having mods that will change this ;)
 
What this means for your city is that the population replacement depends more on immigration, (rather than families having children) and immigration also depends also on affordability gate. So depending on the scale of your city you could see a cascading effect more true to real life economies: aging population that is not getting replaced, producing empty flats, producing more supply and better prices.

At the same time, the ever-rising prices and affordability crises can still happen, and actually, we do want it to happen as this is also a real world scenario. But it was totally off-balance.

We are still observing the problem and getting feedback from players doing different city builds so this is something that we will continue to improve upon.

Yes, there will be market intervention tools. I'm actually mega excited about this feature but I don't want to spoil the surprise 🙃

😱 I love surprises, specially is they bring market intervention tools with them. It's fortunate you are based in Germany, so nobody will "blame" you of being a communist / leftist or whatever label they use nowadays. Besides, you are just including the tools, the player basis will be the ones using them (or not) 😈.

I started a new game in Campara size. I've being building like crazy so occupancy remains <80% and raised property taxes to 40% right away (I guess it's the only way to tax the rich at the moment, since no tax progression on income is possible at the moment). The prices have being going up without interruption, but not so much as in my previous city (although I haven't compared the numbers exactly). Unemployment is still an issue, because so much people is moving in and somehow jobs aren't growing in parallel (and income is dropping, probably an offer/demand issue). So it seems I kind of slowed down the landlord trap while generating enough income to keep up servicea and shelters, but again somehow people get f**ed up because salaries go down and expense still go up. Pretty much like in reality!, so the simulation is working just as it should 😉.

Maybe focused help programs for new companies or start ups (reduced taxes for the first x-years, subvention possibilities for specific branches, tax return on investment, etc) could help keeping up work creation with population growth?

Hi explodi. I've been trying v.1.12 for 1-2 hours now. I  started developing differentiated income tax! great add! Did you change other parameters? Rent prices have been dropping dramatically since the new update, by a lot! Was there also a bug regarding tourist numbers? My city was showing 0 tourist for years but hotels were full, I noticed this number "exploded" after the update. Similarly with workers on factories. I tried factories at different times, but they failed every time, now they seem to develop gradually (same with supermarkets). I'll keep playing and give some feedback.

But I love the changes you made on the way graphs are shown, the new organisation in categories and sub-items, the new tools you added. I would love to see more of them in the future (e.g. tax cuts for certain businesses and or for employing certain groups -like long time unemployed, disabled or women (if there is any difference between them in the game?), differentiated auto fees for electric / combustion cars, etc).

Have a great week!

Hi , sorry for the late reply.

There was a lot of fine tuning in rent prices and also in the migration flow algorithm. I'm currently updating the docs but this page is already with new information about the changes: https://microlandia.city/docs/migration

Regarding tax cuts for certain businesses, and disabilities, it's a very interesting idea. I totally see it happening soon :) 
Regarding combustion/electric cars and other environmental aspects of the game, that's something that we're delaying for a mega-update in September that will be all about environmental factors of the game (pollution, carbon footprint, emissions, health problems due to air quality, etc.)

I'll keep you posted when I rewrite the section about rent of the website, and the section about economics, which hopefully should clear out all your questions.