Previously I talked about setting up the economic policies that govern each city. Today I'd like to expand on how I've fleshed it out since then.
When setting up these policies I try to be as objective as possible while also making sure there's some variety and no two cities are too similar.
First off, we know people like to complain about the traffic in their local city. The question arises, how bad is it really compared to the rest of the world? This is where indices like the TomTom Traffic Index come into play.
From the above screenshot, I look at the average speed in rush hour to determine the offset from a baseline of 35km/h (the approximate average for all cities).
The results can be surprising! For example the average speed in New York is 40km/h while in London it's 26km/h. I would have thought they'd be similar but the data shows a clear difference between traffic speeds in US and UK cities.
Much like the traffic example above, I go through every policy currently in the game, look at the real world data and decide on an offset.
Some are harder to work out than others. Healthcare and education subsidies can be vastly different in each country in how they're administered which can obscure the true cost.
Some cities like San Jose in Silicon Valley are so completely lopsided that taking their true values would greatly distort the game mechanics. In these situations I remind myself that economies go through booms and busts. Instead of looking at things in their current state, we should decide on policy settings based on longer historical trends.
San Jose has been a tech and manufacturing powerhouse for a long time, but the city's current tech boom likely won't last the next hundred years, just as the oil/gold/railway rushes of the past didn't. In any case, TGL2's industry inflation mechanics will cause randomly generated booms and busts as you play the game.
Sources
TomTom Traffic Index https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/
Out-of-pocket expenditure per capita on healthcare https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/out-of-pocket-expenditure-per-capita-on-healthcare