What is the best way to create growth and cashflow in Kairosoft's Venture Towns?

Question

This game is not very rewarding because it is seemingly impossible to grow your town in any way because it is SO difficult to get the cash to do so. How do you grow in this game? You never have enough money, keeping your cashflow in the positive is extremely difficult and I don't understand how to play this game so that I am not cash starved.

It costs LOTS money to build and maintain an office for your citizens to work at, then you have I place businesses literally NEXT to it to discover new jobs. That makes the space very limited around these towers, so your placement is important to maximize job discovery, but there doesn't seem to be any successful strategy to business placement, even with combos double stacked it doesn't help profitability much. Moreover, there is pressure to bulldoze existing buildings, so you can use that spot for a new business in order to discover jobs.

When you find jobs it costs money to retrain EACH your citizens to the new jobs, one at a time. Then, you need stacks of cash and resources to research the new buildings in the game. Then, you have to build them, more cost. Then, they probably fail, so you have to bullzode and try something else, more cash. And you have to research new building styles to replace the old ones. More cash. And expenses each month. More cash....

I can't figure this title out, it's either broken or I just don't get it. How do you build to succeed in this game (to have enough money to afford successful growing, while researching all my available options and having the cash to build them afterwards).

Answer 1

Yeah I had this problem too. There is a secret to building in this game, or an understanding that you need in order to succeed, but unfortunately the game never makes this information available to you.

Important: The range from which an office building can discover jobs from closeby businesses is 5 tiles. The mega large office you get way late in the game has range 10.

Important: To successfully combo, the three buildings in the combo have to have AT LEAST 1 SQUARE of their territory inside what I could call a combo-window. Remember this when you are comboing with buildings that are 2x2. The window is a 3x3 grid like this:

X X X
X X X
X X X

So you can still qualify for a combo by placing buildings at the following 'O' locations:

O X O
X X X
X O X

This is very important, and turns out to be the secret to succeed. What you need to do is spread out the scaling benefits of combos to as wide an area as possible in order to raise land values, INCLUDING land values of the resident's homes. When you do this, and they upgrade their properties, they end up paying loads of tax and this is the solution to your money problem. Therefore I recommend building like this, where 'R' is a road, '#' and '*' are business combos, and 'X' are houses where people live:

  # X #  
R R R R R
  X # X
  * X *
R R R R R
  X * X

There you have it, do this and you will be rocking in this game. Also, try this combo: Office, City hotel, Office (yes a second one). Although it sounds crazy and limiting to have two offices within a couple squares of each other, this is potentially the best combo in the game.

Answer 2

What you do in the beginning of the game is very important in these city simulation games. You probably don't notice but all you talk about is build build build - which is the worse thing you can do when starting up this game.

The game gives you more than enough money to get you started. At the beginning of the game, all I did was buy about 8 vacant spaces all in a nice little compact block surrounded by road. Next to this block (or across the street) I have the office (to discover more types of jobs), Chinese restaurant, steak house, bakery, florist, a park and a deli (a bit later on). This will become your town center! And anything you build in the next couple of hours should be around this area. I place the houses and the business as close as I can because the little sprites can't travel very far at the beginning. And that's all you need for a while! Watch it grow. People move in (more income), business starts growing (more income). Remember, the only real expense at the very beginning of the game is the monthly $2000 you have from the office building. So if you can make more than that at the beginning, that means you're making dough.

Next step, just let the game sit for about one game year. If you do EXACTLY as i say you WILL exceed the $300,000 mark the game starts you off with. If your secretary says more people want to move in, make another small block of housing units close to the town center. When your office building discovers new higher paying jobs, switch your population over. By now you should have just about 12 - 18 people at MOST. Switching all these people to the higher paying job will NOT even dent your $300,000.

From then you'll start seeing a snowball effect. People getting richer, upgrading their houses, an spending more. The more they spend, the more you get tax.

Baby the game...be patient. Rome wasn't built in a day.

I have more 8.5 million in this game. Trust me