Guide to High Wealth Casino Cities

Mega Casino Cities
by UncivlEngineer

I've been playing around with what I'm calling "Casino Juggernaut Layouts", maps filled to the brim with Elegant Casinos. Each casino is maxed out with eight roulette houses, which allows you to make up to $800,000/day  per casino. Depending on the map, you can pull in a pretty steady stream of $500,000-$700,000/hour, which can net up to $11 Million a day in gambling profits. It's the ultimate Cash-Cow, or in this case perhaps we can call it a Cash Cowsino.

Yes, $700,000/hr is possible!

The highest income I've seen for one casino is $813,176/day

Selecting a Map
If you'd like to make a High Wealth Casino Juggernaut, first select a map with a long coastline that allows for at least five cruise ship terminals. Cruise ship terminals are the most efficient method for bringing in high wealth tourists. While airports can be used, they aren't very efficient, so I usually don't build them. To read more about who uses each type of mass transit, refer to the Mass Transit Guide.

Cities of Tomorrow

I'll tell you right up front that if you don't have Cities of Tomorrow, you're going to have trouble creating this type of city. I found that if I used traditional high density residential housing, my PC got overwhelmed by the calculations necessary to track the usual RCI demands as well as all of the individual tourists. Even at all of the lowest graphics settings, my PC just couldn't handle it.  So how do you get around this?  Solution: House all of your workers in Megatowers. I'm not sure if it's because there's fewer residents or if it handles the calculations differently, but the times I used megatowers the PC ran smoothly with no slow down.

In addition to the megatowers, Maglevs are incredibly useful for shuttling high wealth tourists around the City while not impacting traffic negatively.  In addition to those items, the education levels will be very useful because you can handle all of your education needs within the megatowers.

In summary, you'll want to use:

• Maglevs (research required)
• Skybridge (research required)
• Education Levels

The Tourist Draw

On the Gambling Tab you can find your tourist draw. In the example below, you can see that I have 189,549 tourists out of a total potential of 573,418.

You'll find that this number slowly increases over time. Keep in mind the numbers listed are inflated numbers.  Despite this fact, during the inital stages it can be used to gauge if your transportation system (cruise ship terminals, trains, airships) is keeping up with the tourist draw. You will notice that both numbers continue to climb non-stop, and eventually become completely meaningless.

How do you get the potential tourist number to go up faster? Build the casino add-ons that say they "Attract Tourists". The discos, clubs and concert halls are the items you'll want to plop early on to get your tourist draw up. Signs also bring in additional tourists. I've summarized the tourist draws for each of the casino add-ons in the table below.

Hotels
After spending money at the casino, tourists will look for a hotel, and if they can find one, they'll spend the night.  The next morning they'll head back to the casino to spend some more money.  In addition, you'll make money off of the Commercial taxes. Make sure that you zone commercial near your casinos at all times, so that you have a good chance of hotels sprouting. As you'll see later, hotels play a significant role in the success of a Juggernaut Casino city. Once you have a good number of hotels, you won't need to have any hotel rooms added on to your casinos. You can demolish them and make room for more gamblers.

A Day in the Life of a Gambling Sim Tourist
Arrive via cruise ship or airship
Walk or take taxi/limousine to casino
Spend your money at the casino, then stumble outside looking for a hotel
Spend the night at the hotel
Wake up and walk back to casino
Leave casino and walk to cruise ship terminal, heading home


The Tourist Wealth Ladder 
(Low/Medium->Low/Medium/High->Medium/High->High)

Step 1:
The goal will be to end up with nothing but high wealth tourists.  To get there, you're going to have to start off with lower end casinos and work your way up.  Slow growth is really the best method for climbing the tourist wealth ladder. Expand slowly, while keeping a reserve of funds so that you can ride out the peaks and valleys of tourists coming and going.

The Tourist Wealth Ladder At a Glance
Step 1: Low/Medium Wealth Tourists: Gambling Houses, Sci-Fi Casinos
Step 2: Low/Medium/High Casinos: Sleek Casinos
Step 3: Medium/High: Roman Casinos, Elegant Casino
Step 4: High: Elegant Casinos with no signs

I would advise sticking with the low end casinos and/or the Sci-Fi casino until you have over $300,000 in reserve.

You have to start somewhere: 3 Low End Casinos dot the coast

Step 2: Once you have a steady positive cash flow from your Casino Halls and Sci Fi Casino, you can go ahead and build a Sleek Casino. Once that gets stable and profitable, you'll want to demolish the low end casino halls. This is the first big step of the Tourist Wealth Ladder. If you think things are going a little slow, plop another Sleek Casino. But if your casinos are staying full, perhaps it's time for the "Gateway to the Elegant Casino": The Roman Casino.

Step 3:
Roman Casinos have a concert hall add-on that will bring in a good number of high wealth tourists.  If you're lacking on hotels, you can plop a pair of penthouses on the casino.  Otherwise you can stick with adding Baccarat rooms and let your guests stay in nearby hotels.  Once you have a pair of Roman Casinos, you should demolish all hotels of a lower class. This is the next step of the Tourist Wealth Ladder. Remove anything that brings in medium or lower wealth tourists: Trains, Bus Stations and Signs. By now you should have a lot of magenta tourists in your tourist view.

Step 4:
When you're comfortable that you have a steady income and you have enough money saved up, plop an Elegant Casino. You'll want to build Exclusive Clubs early on which help increase the draw of high wealth tourists. I would advise to be careful when expanding with roulette houses. Wait until the casino fills up before adding additional roulette houses, which in turn raises the gambler capacity.

Step 5:
The final step is do away with the signs on your Elegant Casinos, thus ensuring that the medium wealth tourists won't overrun the hotels.

A Closer Look at the Elegant Casino

In order to maximize the profit potential for your Elegant Casinos, I recommend you use all eight expansion slots on roulette houses. As you can see in the chart above, with eight roulette houses the capacity is 100 Medium Wealth Tourists and 940 High Wealth Tourists.  Since each roulette house costs $1,875/hr to run, you'll want to be mindful as you build to get each roulette house maxed out before building another. Any casino city will see peaks and valleys in the tourist numbers. If you don't have enough money in the bank to ride out the valleys, you may want to turn off roulette houses as needed to soften the blows of the downturns.

My Casino Juggernaut layout

 In a quest to find a layout that can be repeated over and over, I came up with the layout shown above. The numbers indicated are the dirt road cost of a typical 2-Casino cluster. I found that avenues on the four sides handled traffic much better than if done with roads. I also tried back-to-back high density commercial, but that didn't work out as well.  One thing to note is that this layout provides space to include small parks, which are needed to  increase the land value thus ensuring that high wealth hotels will sprout.  You may get some office buildings in the commercial block, but you'll find that you'll get predominately high end hotels.

Handling Crime
As Skyestorme says: Education, Education, Education. As you've probably heard, casino cities can get a lot of crime. The best method of fighting crime is education.  As soon as possible, lay down two community colleges on opposite sides of the maps. Keep adding on or build additional colleges so that you keep the education meter maxed out or close to it.  If you do this from the very beginning of your city, you'll find that crime stays at a very reasonable rate. By the end, you'll probably only need one precinct.

Landmarks
Landmarks are another way to increase your tourist draw. All landmarks are classified as either a High or Medium draw. I've summmarized the capacity of each in the table below. Considering you want as many tourists as possible coming in, yet you want them to spend their time at the casino, I suggest you use the landmarks with High Draw/Low Capacity. I've ordered the list by these two factors. As you can see the Empire State Building, Leaning Tower of Pisa and Arc de Triomphe are the top three choices.

Megatowers
As I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend you house your residents in megatowers. Although you can probably use Standard Megatowers, I prefer to use the Elite Megatowers to take advantage of the Elite Tourism Crowns which can make an extra $300,000 to $400,000/day each.

Typical Elite Megatower at a Glance
Crown: Elite Tourism Crown
Level 8: Skybridge
Level 7: Medium Wealth Mall or Education Level
Level 6: Medium Wealth Residential
Level 5: Medium Wealth Residential
Level 4: Medium Wealth Residential
Level 3: Medium Wealth Residential
Level 2: Medium Wealth Residential
Level 1: Medium Wealth Residential

For level 7, I alternate between mall levels and education levels. By using the education level, you can demolish the community colleges. Just make sure you are providing enough desks for your students. I recommend you build at least five megatowers so that you get the maximum Elite Tourism Crown bonus.

Finished Examples

Would you like to see more photos from other Casino Juggernaut Layout Builds? You can check out my photos from
Juggernaut 1.0
Juggernaut 2.0
Juggernaut 3.0

Leaderboards
If you follow this guide when creating one of these mega casino cities, you will probably make it into the top 10 on the global leaderboard. However, there are a few things I've learned about the leaderboards while working on these cities.

1. You probably won't show up on the global leaderboard for 48-72 hours after you've started playing.
By the time I show up, I've usually already given up and am working on another city. One time it took about a week for my city to finally show up.

2. The "Friends" and "My Cities" leaderboard update more frequently than the "Global" leaderboard. I've tracked the timing, and it looks like the "Friends"/"My Cities" leaderboard updates every half hour.

3. The Global Leaderboards don't calculate what you think they do.
Sure it says they are "Ranked by City - Past 12 Months of City History", but it's definitely not. I've had over $100 Million of gambling income during a 12 month period, yet the leaderboard never went over $38 Million. I kept a spreadsheet with my daily incomes to verify this fact.  I think it's taking a sampling of your gambling income for one day and applying a multiplier of somewhere in the 2.5-3.5 range.

The leaderboard says I made $38M but I never went under $55M in a 12 month period

4. If your city doesn't show up on the global leaderboard, you can try using another server and switching back. The one time I did this, it worked.

5.  If you are inactive, your city will be taken off the leaderboard.

More Info

Looking for additional tips with High Wealth Casino Cities? Watch Skye's Guide to High Wealth Tourism and Casino Cities. I learned the importance of education, how hotels can benefit the casinos and a whole lot more by watching his videos.