No jobs and abandonment due to commute time
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acec, in SimCity 4 General Discussion
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There are many potential methods to deal with this problem. Some people think of this issue as a bug, but I'm more inclined to see it as one of the game's challenges. It's totally possible to have demand and have that turn into growth, despite such a building not being able to be serviced by the current conditions. Here's an example of what I mean: Demand for R$$$ is NOT absolutely connected with the number of R$$$ jobs, only loosely. Demand Created for R$$$ does come mostly from those buildings which are in your city/region though. However just because you have demand for R$$$ buildings, does not necessarily mean you will have jobs suitable for such sims. Demands work such that the game is not simply reflecting current conditions, but can also exist to handle predicted future or longer-term growth. Likewise, just because you have a location where desirability is good for R$$$ sims, so that R$$$ demand gets converted into buildings/sims, doesn't mean that same location is within commuting distance of a suitable job. The game only looks for jobs/commutes after buildings have been occupied. Since by default the game will always try to build the highest-wealth/density buildings if sufficient demand exists, left to its own devices, assuming the conditions are suitable, buildings will grow in places you don't want them.
The overall point being, whilst the game will allow things to grow, it doesn't mean your city/region or the specific location is ready or suitable for such growth. In truth, I think this is one of the hardest parts of the simulation to keep in check, it's pretty complex and can cause big problems if not considered as part of how you play. Think of this as the big challenge to turn a thriving region into a rich, high-tech one.
If you take the advice given during the Big City & Making Money in-game tutorials though, there are many good tips and even hints as to why things work like this. The simplest method of dealing with the problem is to keep desirability in-check and a healthy population of R$ sims in your region. R$$ and more so, R$$$ sims are far more selective about where they want to live, by being selective about which areas support such desirability, you can better control things.
Useful (technical) information regarding Demand, it helps to explain what's going on in the simulator. But I hope here I will be able to clarify how that works in practise during play.
Both these tips are perfect examples of how to intervene and prevent R$$ and especially R$$$ sims from coming to your city too early. If they replace too much of the R$ population, another unexpected problem can occur. Let's look at the I-HT fix a moment, since this is a great example to not only explain how that works, but emphasise too the importance of a healthy mix of R$ / R$$ / R$$$ sims.
Each of the zoning types has a set of properties that define what percentage of the jobs available for a given building for each wealth will be. The reason I-HT was broken, is because the original setting was 10, 80, 10 (R$, R$$, R$$$). A bug in the code means when two of the three values are identical, it doesn't process things correctly. By setting that to 10, 78, 12 (as the I-HT fix does), things now work properly. If every job in your region was in I-HT, you'd need 10% R$, 78% R$$ and 12 R$$$ sims to balance your region. However, the game controls the wealth distribution through the various stages, by using a combination of factors like demand. These are carefully designed to go through the three "stages" I mentioned in this post. Even with the highest amount of I-HT and CO jobs possible, you will probably still have plenty of CS jobs, if not the other Ind types too. In the earlier stages of the game you can only grow I-D, I-AG and CS$, which won't support anything other than and R$ population. In fact, I-HT is by far supporting the highest number of higher wealth jobs of any type. Although CO$$$ does support slightly more R$$$ workers, overall you'll need 20% of a given buildings jobs from R$. Until you can afford to educate and improve your sims lives, you won't have demand for anything that brings higher wealth worker to live in your region. That's the transition between stage 1 and 2, but it's pretty easy to make this work, just educate your sims for the most part and add something with YIMBY effects. But from stage 2 to stage 3, what we're talking about here, you really have to manage the process by understanding your region and it's needs.
Note too, for the sake of clarity, I'm simplifying many of these systems, they are much more complex behind the scenes. Many other factors all come together to make all this work, not least the Education Quotient level. Each sim will have an EQ level between 1 and 4, an EQ1 sim of any wealth, could not work somewhere requiring an EQ2 worker. So it's not only about having the right wealth sims in the right place, but also having them suitably educated. If you want sims to work in I-HT or CO$$$, you'll need to keep on top of a well-integrated education system with good funding. See how progressive this becomes, because until you can grow and afford these services, you won't have the pieces in place to generate demand for them.
Let's go back to the Maxis tutorials a second and how does this information relate to the tips it's offers? Well, the tutorials are very clear about building slowly and not giving the sims everything they ask for, at least right away. In order to make money when starting out, you should not bother to provide anything. To start development needs power, streets to connect jobs to residents and zoning for both jobs (I-D/I-AG and very few CS$) along with res. Grow your city outwards before you grow it upwards, it's cheaper if nothing else. The game really prefers to upgrade things, new zoning in undeveloped areas will often be neglected or take time before any growth occurs. There are many factors in the design that pretty much always make zoning in proximity to existing buildings more desirable.
Keeping desirability low, at least in designated areas, is in reality not that hard and saves you money! Don't build health, parks, civic or utilities in areas where you want to retain R$ populations. Even with a healthy amount of CO and I-HT in your region, you're likely to need at least 50% of your population to remain R$. But, if you make every nook and cranny of your cities really nice, you'll squeeze out too many R$ sims, needed for your economy to work, in the process. Using the make historical or mods to prevent this upgrading will help, but actually somewhat ignore how the game was designed to work. Which is to say, the game can naturally transition between stage 2 and 3, if you control and keep the conditions right for it to do so. Insomuch as SC4 has a goal, having the highest amount of high wealth sims and CO / I-HT would be it, so it makes sense that creating the conditions for that to happen, requires a good understanding of the fundamentals of the simulation. By simply waiting to improve areas, R$ sims will not be kicked out en-mass without your input.
Lots of players will add far too many NIMBY items, ratcheting up the land values and desirability over large areas. It's fine when R$ sims live in such an area, it was cheap when they moved in. But, R$ buildings aren't likely to grow where the land values are too high, combined again with the simulator wanting to prioritise higher wealth development, you can make it very hard for new R$ buildings to grow. Of course, the game upgrading all your R$ high-rises doesn't help, but that's not really the core problem either. Because if those areas with zoning were not all so desirable, then this wouldn't happen.
Note this issue can be exacerbated by mods with poor modding with out of whack stats. Similarly, imagine a modular park set, you place 100 park pieces, each providing a desirability boost, that can really stack up. By contrast, Paeng's Parks 205 set only adds Park Effects to select larger pieces, helping to prevent Park Effects from getting out of hand. Of course, these can be desirable if we want to improve desirability in an area, it's just another thing to consider.
Every city has slums or poorer areas, cities can't function without poorer people and SC4's design simply reflects this. It doesn't hurt If you have a few R$ Highrises, to set them historical and in a few clicks you've say 10k stable R$ sims that aren't going anywhere. It's much quicker than doing the same for hundreds of small buildings. Likewise using taxation to help control the problem is also going to make your life easier. Moreover though, plan areas for R$ sims, large numbers of them too if you're building big. This doesn't have to be in each city either, you can keep separate less desirable cities full of R$ sims, which commute to other cities for work. It just requires that routes for them to get to work are in place. Coming back to the region-play tutorial I am fond of recommending, this kind of logic is expanded upon there. Planning areas or cities that are specialist or more pleasant and creating a working inter-connected region, is a pretty good way to tackle these issues.
There are two ways to play SC4, to follow how it was designed or to modify how the game works, so it better suits how you want to play. All this here is just to explain how the game works by default. It's perfectly valid if you prefer to use mods, to make life easier or what-not. The problem is that the whole simulator is extremely complex with many inter-connected properties and systems. If you choose to mod your way round these problems, you need to be confident any such mods you use have been well modded, by someone who understood the whole, not just a simply property that looked like the one to change. Otherwise you actually make your life harder, because modding these things essentially changes how the game works. Should a mod do unexpected things or simply that as a user you are not clear on how to alter playing to suit, it will be a hindrance.
An excellent detailed post explaining about growth factors.
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So, that thorough extra testing we did was us concentrating on the hotspots phenomenon and I overlooked the smaller buildings not being highlighted.
I've tweaked again and feel I've reached the best compromise of preventing false positives on non-reinhabited lots as well as keeping the Coal Power Plant from getting flagged as abandoned. There are three things in this new version I've tweaked:
Abandonment multiplier set to 255. This insures that any non-zero flammability building will get set to 255 when abandoned. However, as I showed a few posts ago when the building to land ratio is too small it will never increase the entire lot's flammability enough to show highlighted in red.
There are some industrial out lots which have flammability of 100 so I've set the threshold for the red highlight at 110 to prevent false positives for those.
Item 2 is not sufficient to prevent the Coal Power Plant from getting falsely accused, but I realized I could set the Quantize lots property to only show R, C, and I lots and that fixes this part.
I believe there's no way I can highlight abandoned lots when the land to building ratio is too low. Like these:
Here's the new (maybe final) version: DataView - Abandoned Buildings by Cori - v0.46 beta.dat
View details and download a beta release of Cori's mod to represent abandoned buildings in a dedicated Data View. Feedback is appreciated! :)
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It's official now:
https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/33412-coris-parks-aura/
https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/33412-coris-parks-aura/
It's here! The release of Cori's Parks Aura mod is now available on the STEX!
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