Mall Tycoon 2 advice et chetera

Advice

The following is my advice to play Mall Tycoon 2. Further I'll mention how I got in the game. Of course the 1st advice is to refer to consult the strategy guide by soldyne. I'll add things from my own experience.
I've been playing in scenario mode picking what seem to be the easiest and if the 1st: to double the money in 100 years. I've had to abandon games multiples times and am trying to share my wisdom to play in that mode. If someone just want to have fun, s/he can use the Free Build mode and make it easy.

1. Depersonalize sims (if you did so). They're not your community, there's nothing to relate to them. Don't put business where you would have liked to see on the malls you spend time in, or is frequenting. Don't think of the businesses "owners" as struggling and needing a break, they're just investments; ie: you put 1000$ in, you make as much money with that 1K as you can and if you need make it go bankrupt, you can later put another 1K down for something else to be in the space of your mall.
2. Don't research something you don't need. Find out what it does and if you really need it, then research it. The most important is security. As soldyne, the author of the guide linked at the beginning of this page, mentioned "to get all the way to zero you must get the Engineer and then research electronic tags, metal detectors and security control room.". At the same time get a janitor, thus the research for it, as if things go to plan there will be so much garbage that it will cost the same, or perhaps more, to get cleaners to do the same. Get upgrades to reduce upkeep, including insulated walls & solar panels.
3. Be conservative with doors. More doors = more security cost or crime losses, the latter quite a bad option as criminals "upgrade" if left unchecked. I've noticed businesses near doors did better overall but I've seen businesses right next to it struggle and businesses further do pretty good (but not as much). I'm not sure what the door distance affect [see related point in footnote]. My goal is to get the highest security I can get, so the costlier per door; the reason for that high security is having a better one not only have them cover a greater area but, more importantly, does it tighter/stricter. I also have been using soldyne trick to use floors to use less doors, it's just 2000$, 1K for the floor & 1K for the stairs. Although soldyne also mentioned sims get "tired" traveling floors, I'm not sure how much of that is true and how much it is it's just further from the door (so the 3rd dimension is unaccounted being like everything off the floor is teleported to the ground floor, so the only extra distance is if the stairs are positioned so that it increase the 2D distance (so going up multiple floors on which the stairs are placed one next to the other the sim goes round & round))., from a new game I saw for myself it was true.
   
4. Be proactive. I tried a couple times to be frugal and hoping for progression, even slight. It doesn't work, all it is is a countdown to failure, 0$ = failure. If you need to take loans in order to have a better future, take them. Here's the top 12 loans by--total--interest (you're given compound interest rates) in ascending order labeled by their months amount: 3, 6, 9, 15, 12, 18, 21, 24, 75, 39, 78, 27; up to 24 months is as expected, the best IMO is 75 months, which is 16.85 total interest %. At least use publicity and do things to increase the mall rating. All this will come at a cost and a way to offset it is related to the point to research only what's needed, which includes a part about upkeep reduction.
5. Don't use department stores. Businesses, even of same type, vary a lot between them. See my point about depersonalizing sims, thus squeeze them out of money. This will mean some stores will leave the mall. Some stores will be so successful that by squeezing them enough the 3 other of the department will leave, this happened to me and the store had plenty money left to be squeezed out. I would have preferred that there was only 1 failed business that I needed to keep closed, since there was very little chance an opening business. Having an unoccupied slot has a consequence: less traffic; there should be a point about that.
6. Being fair isn't enough. Unless you know some way to do things that I have no idea about, you will need to use soldyne exploit to make useless stores just to increase traffic. I use the 4 cheapest restaurants, at 500$ each to fill up space, over have my mall are composed of such stores. This goes to the point that sims are not to be cared for beyond how to increase revenue. The failure is yours, the 17% interest or so each time you take out a loan comes from your added game-play time. This is related to the point about not using department stores as if you want to squeeze a really well off store, and you will want that, the price of that department store is having more space that doesn't have a store than needed.
7. Keep a space free next to sidewalk? At a point in his guide, soldyne mention the player area is only the black part and at another he mention to keep the sidewalk clean, those are contradicting (the sidewalk is not black). I'm not sure which it is but I'm sure for a mall that's right against the sidewalk when it gets traffic that trash gets accumulated on the sidewalk and everywhere there's a deep or department store against the sidewalk, it won't be able to get cleaned. To be on the safe side, ensure there's at least 1 space between the sidewalk and your mall so a cleaner can have his work area overlap the messy sidewalk. I'm not even sure if this works (in my game the area that a cleaner could have overlapped the sidewalk had no thrash there).

Thoughts

Opinion

With this game 1st campaign, it's basically a way to exploit as much as possible until there's sufficient income. Unless there's a better guide out there or I'm lacking some basic understanding, this game is hard thus take a good part of the fun out of it. I basically play in the hope I'll eventually manage to keep the mall afloat and be able to have a successful store of each type and have some of the features I'd like to see in my own local malls; I'm not sure I'll get to do that at the difficulty of the 1st campaign.

Introduction

I got interested in Mall Tycoon after I got interested in dead mall videos, I think my 1st subscription of such was This is Dan Bell, I'm not sure what was the chain but it got me to Retail Archaeology which I eventually found out its author has a Mall Tycoon stream on his 2nd channel, RA 2, called Welcome To Siesta Mall!, which has a twitter account; and after watching some of those streams of it decided to try some of my own. I then summarily research and thought its 2nd iteration was what I wanted to try 1st.

Information

soldyne mentioned it's better to have the doors in the middle of the property so all mode of transportation are as happy and are evenly tired. His technique is inexpensive but is time consuming; to make that easier I took screenshots of the middle of each side. The middle of the orange bar at the bottom of each side is its middle, which is marked by a blue dashed line. The image attached to this page is 21% of the original, this one is 35% (64% larger than for former), the latter is the largest resolution for a free image host I could find; I'd be glad to provide the original if contacted, as I'm writing this the contact form is in the footer.

Footnotes

• Door distance: From the experiment below, door distance definitively affect how much shopping is done. After the game from which I made the advice from, which I failed, I made another which I wanted to see if I'd get better results by placing doors in the middle of each side, to make it closer to each transportation method. I started building in the center something that had close to the proportion of the total mall space, but only taking ~1/5 of its area excluding the corridors to the doors near the edge. The corridors were just large enough for the doors. I'd say 1/2 the shoppers wouldn't even go halfway down the corridor (from the door to the 1st shop), and 3/4 never shopped. If I play this game again, I'd like to make an experiment of a narrow mall on the longest side with 2 doors, 1 at each end, and see how many shop all the way to the middle; if I did that and the middle was decently shopped at, I think my conclusion would be as long as excitement is kept from the door, that shoppers are willing to go further.