Having problem with very low and stagnant RCI demand, Need help

[Homeless_Hobo 0]

I've got this strange problem with my city. It's been growing well, but there has always been a really really weird problem with demand.

When I started up the city, I did all the standard things. Provide good hospital+school coverage, get a good link to neighbors, etc.

The problem is that for some damn reason my Residential demand is set pretty low, and C$ is ALWAYS set to be really really high. I noticed early on that my city was nearly exclusively R$$, so I increased taxes for R$ and R$$$. Later on, I decreased for R$$$ so I have a few high wealth residents, but still no R$, so maybe this has something to do with it.

I noticed early on that my residential areas really failed to develop much. They did go into Medium Density condoes and such, but after that it was really hard to coax them into bigger buildings.

What I noticed that REALLY confused me however was that C$ demand was always really really high, and nearly everything else was low demand. What would usually happen is that I would build a new area of Commercial, a few shops would spring up, upgrade, and then my residential areas would in turn upgrade a little bit.

I got sick of doing this, so I just set up a large area of commercial so I could see some growth. However, demand for nearly everything just plummetted down and I have no clue what's up.

I'm not using and Mods, just NAM with Traffic Simulator Z (Which worked wonders on reducing commute times of nearly everything to short, although nobody uses busses anymore...)

The other thing that confused me was the behavior of CO$$ and CO$$$ in my city. I have plenty of R$$ and a good pool of R$$$ workers, but what happens CONSTANTLY is a few commercial offices develop, and then they are abandoned due to low demand! They just sit there abandoned for no reason, and I have no clue why demand for them isn't higher.

Anyways, here's a few pics of my cities. I don't think tax is the problem, but hopefully you guys can help me.

The reason C$ demand is down is due to the huge zone I just made, before that it was sky high. The strange thing is, I have nobody at all that actually GOES TO WORK at C$!!!

Limit the image size to 800x600 pixels

tungston

[Duke87 1,070]

Looks to me like you need more industry.

As for nobody working CS§... well, that's because you have no R§. Your 12% tax rate there might have something to do with that. Try cutting that down to 7 or 8, demand for it should pick up once the huge tax burden is removed. 

Playing with tax rates like that in a young region can really make things go wonky.

You could also just try going and playing one of the neighbor cities for a while. Cities seem to be more inclined to develop when they're not isolated.

[Homeless_Hobo 0]

I do have a neighbor above. Not too developed, maybe I'll work on more neighbors.

Could traffic simulator Z or the NAM have anything to do with it?

[shtyrayum 0]

I'm no expect by any means, but my guess is your problem is you have no low wealth population. You have to have poor sims to fill the jobs no other sim wants. Poor sims then get educated and move on to better jobs and other poor sims replace those. As was suggested earlier lower your R$ tax rate to increase demand and I bet your problem would disappear.

As for NAM and traffic simulator Z causing your problem, I would venture to guess no, unless you are dealing with eternal commuters (see NAM manual) but since you only have one not very developed neighbor I suspect that is not a problem Someone please correct me if I have that wrong.

[Homeless_Hobo 0]

Well, he's not that not developed, maybe ~100k population but nothing huge. Anyway, I'll lower the R$ tax and see what happens.

EDIT: I also don't have the latest SC4 version intsalled, is this a problem? I'm going to patch it up, I forgot to when I installed again, but is this really important? Does the patch do anything in particular in terms of improving pathfinding or whatever?