residential population discrepancy

[grudy 0]

I recently downloaded the residential halving mod from the ST exchange, and applied it to an existing city with 360,000 residents, hoping the population would be halved.  Indeed, my structures now hold half what they used to, and the population graph shows a drop by 50%.  Weirdly, however, the population shown on the menu bar still shows 360,000, and

RCI demand has not changed.  What's this about?

[iamihop11 19]

how long have you let it run?

Sometimes it takes a while, especially with a city that size

[grudy 0]

Weird.  Even if I run an existing city of 5,000 for 20 years, the population stats at the bottom of the screen don't change.  If I start a new city, the people add up just fine.

[RippleJet 36]

Halving the existing residential capacity in a large city will certainly screw up your supply/demand simulation.

The total residential capacity is saved with each city. This capacity can consist of actual residential buildings within the city and commuters living elsewhere in the region, but working in this city.

When the city develops, one or a few buildings might get torn down (due to development or by the mayor's planning). In those cases the simulator copes with the situation, since there is always enough spare capacity in the remaining buildings in the city.

Removing 50% of the city's residential capacity means that your city will instead get commuters from your neighbouring cities or elsewhere from SimNation coming to take the jobs.

Since commuters are dealt with one city at a time (the one you are playing), the simulator cannot check from where in your region those commuters would actually be coming from, so you won't even notice any increased traffic across the borders.

However, the commuters will always be saved with the city, and the way SC4 handles commuters, they will never decrease in numbers, only increase.

Thus, once you've converted half your city population into commuters, you will never get rid of them again. In a way, the same problem as with eternal commuters going around city corners.