@OcramSeattle really liked your post and think of offices as commercial that people don't shop at. They're not making or selling any products, just making money more efficiently than malls (probably by collecting rent on offices in the levels). Like I said before I think the megatowers are based off SimTower. I don't know if you played it before, but SimTower made money off mainly office rents. The people living in your tower worked in the offices in your tower and people outside the tower shopped at the shopping levels. You even had tourists visit your hotel levels. So in SimTower you had residential, office, malls, tourism, service levels(security, hospitals, and garbage), transportation (underground metro station), and crowns (the Cathedral). Sounds a lot like megatowers with a few differences.
@Froudini good ideas too, although I don't try to make a profit from megatowers anymore. I did at first, but with OmegaCo in my cities that usually covers all my costs and more. Your megatower increases the wealth of the area around them. Regular megatowers increase medium wealth and elite increases high wealth land value (especially if you add a park to them). Parks really help keep them happy (if I don't put a park level I add a park crown). I haven't thought about not mixing wealth in towes before, I'll start doing that now.
I don't like placing nuclear power levels in the towers because they'll leak radiation if there isn't enough education which isn't really as bad as the nuclear plants. I've come to really dislike fusion reactors because if they fail to ignite, your whole city has a blackout but if they do your whole city gets full power. The tower fusion reactors are harder to ignite for some reason and if you they run out of ControlNet you have to reignite them to get them to start working again. Its just a pain to do, but I have tried to put a fully upgraded oil power plant right in front of them to help them ignite better.
Again with the power crowns, they are the best way to power your city, but it really hurts you if you (or someone else) bulldozes them, because not only do you lose the power that crown is producing it also decreases the amount the other crowns are producing. This happened to me, I had two and a neighbor had one, so we had a three bonus level. They got rid of theirs for some reason so I lost about 160MW and went negative. Also if you're having problems with keeping your megatowers full of power, try placing at least one solar crown. Even if you don't need the power, it really helps since power also flows along skybridges and it's at the very top of your towers instead of somewhere else in the city.
FYI: The regular megatower solar crowns produce 200MW plus 40MW per crown per bonus level and elite megatower solar crowns produce 400MW plus 80MW per crown per bonus level and the bonuses really add up if you have more than one per city. Example for elite crowns: one produces 480MW, two produces 1,120MW, and three produces 1,920MW, etc.
In my last OmegaCo City, someone finally unlocked the ground scrubber (I'm usually too impatient to unlock them). They slowly remove all the ground pollution no matter how dirty it is and keeps it clean. I had two air scrubber crowns near the ground scrubbers and the combination kept the city nearly pollution free (still some air pollution probably because they were regular air scrubbers and not maxed bonus) while providing a ton of ground water (all clean due to the ground scrubbers).
One more thing, I've found that the least any residential level can have is 6 sims for some reason. If you only have those 6 people and you can't solve their problem to get more people to move back in (try to solve problem before this point if you can though), try turning that level off long enough for them to move out. When you turn it back on people usually start moving back in like you just placed that level, but this doesn't always work. Sometimes when I turn it back on there is a different problem they're complaining about. Like if they were complaining about work, now they're complaining about health for example.
I'd like to know if anyone did the achievements that require all 8 levels of the same levels (all 8 residential, all 8 mall, or all 8 offices) and make a profit off all of them. I'd think residential would be the easiest.
