What's up with this?

[Andromeda1 0]

Here are some hopefully relevant details for my issue:

NORMALLY dirty industry and manufacturing flock to my cities until I raise taxes way high on them. It usually takes some effort to scare them away for me. Even enacting the Clean Air Act and not putting police or fire in industrial zones doesn't kill demand. Until NOW that's how it always was for me.

I just started playing again after a while and loaded a region I made. I destroyed the few cities that were there and started over. But now, dirty industry and manufacturing demand is really, really low for the whole region. Dirty industry is consistently lower than manufacturing, which goes positive occasionally -- but only slightly. Education, health and taxes don't seem to make a real difference. Lowering taxes regionally and lowering taxes while raising them in different cities didn't seem to help either. And this is for newly-started cities with badly-educated Sims!!

So what am I not thinking of? What factors am I forgetting affect industrial demand? (excluding high tech) The topography of the region isn't hilly or anything, but that didn't seem to stop industry before. What's going on? Any advice will be greatly appreciated 

[Wiecher 192]

hmm, I had something like that too... I once built a new city and all of a sudden the residential demand was minus infinite in my whole region, and then I deleted that city and the demand was normal again... but the city was just a regular suburb... and afterwards I tried to rebuilt that city and nothing odd happened. I have no idea what causes this demand tricks, maybe it's just a bug in the game.... Probably.... The game does weird stuff all the time...

[SC4BOY 20]

A problem in using this approach is that you must be patient. Changing tax rates more often then every 2 or 3 months will not allow the varioius simulators to balance out to give the desired feedback. If you rush it, you simply end up chasing your tail. With respect to wiping and restarting a city, I can't say. I know the city savegames contain a history of the region (as do the region data) I am not sure how this resets. I would suggest that you be sure to god-mode-demolish EVERY CITY in the region before you rebuild any city. Even then I am not sure to what degree ALL history is deleted.

[uzzie 1]

I think that your problems started when you deleted the surrounding cities.

Maybe that the amount of people living there effected the demand for industrial zoning in your other city, if you know what you mean:

Citizens live in city 1 and work in city 2.

Then you delete city 1 which was your workers home.

In city 2 are now more working spaces then there are workers available so demand will be lower.

In this case the sollution should be to zone more residential zones.

Sorry for my bad English, i'm from Holland

[Andromeda1 0]

I think it might be a bug, like wiecher said. Demand was normal before I destroyed all the cities and restarted. Then, starting with the very first city, demand was suddenly all messed up. In a newly started city that has no neighbors, shouldn't demand for dirty industry reflect the need for jobs given the amount of education and health in an early population?? 

I tried to increase demand by raising the population and I even tried to grow the R$ population, but that didn't seem to help. Agricultural demand was way up but that doesn't provide very many jobs and not much tax revenue  

I could try zoning a ton of residential and see what happens, but I was having trouble with unemployment anyway...but maybe that'll force demand to go up?

If that doesn't work, I'll demolish the first city and see what happens in the other surrounding cities. If I can't balance it out after a while, I guess I'll just have to wipe them all and start over again XD

[Spinmaster 75]

In a brand-spanking-new region, IA demand is modest, ID and R$ will be low, CS$ is "just barely", and IM is non-existent (requires at least a little education and wealth, for one). But I agree there's probably a bug at work.

I've experienced it myself once before, in a region that was empty to start - good little ol' Fairview. Problem was, I had built up a massive infrastructure, zoned the daylights out of it, basically it was a completely stenciled city right from the start, as of day one of the city, paused the whole time while building. Soon as I unpaused it, about 80 sims moved in... then instant negative demand across the board. No jobs built. No more residents. The 80 that had moved in were unemployed and quickly abandoned. I hadn't touched taxes, hadn't obliterated anything, just started with the original virgin region, no content I hadn't used before or ever had a problem with before, nothing out of the ordinary. It was as if I'd named the city Prypiat. I even checked the radiation data view out of a whim, but of course that showed nothing. But it really did seem like the simulator "thought" the whole city was blanketed or something, same essential effect anyway. It's very rare to see negative R$ or ID demand without jacking up taxes, they'll pretty much build anywhere you let them, if the higher-wealths don't take over first. They'll live under red air pollution, they'll build next to a landfill. They might riot but even crime doesn't seem to send them packing. Radiation is about the only thing that really drives them away (again, aside from ridiculous taxes).

I obliterated it of course. Reloaded the city, and sure enough - everything was "normal". Even let the simulator run with the empty city for a couple months just to be sure. Then I paused and proceeded to rebuild everything as before, same general layout and all. Everything was fine this time. I didn't even restart the game, just obliterated and restarted the city itself. "Bug" doesn't seem to really describe it. A "bug" is normally reproducible under unusual circumstances (even if nobody can figure out what those circumstances are). This was more like a "random feature" I suppose.

Needless to say I learned the hard way, don't pause-and-build instantly when starting a new city, let the simulator run a bit. Build or don't build meanwhile, but let the simulator "prime" itself early on one way or another.

[Andromeda1 0]

In case anyone's interested, here's an update on this

Well, it looks like at least in the first city demand is basically back to normal. I can actually develop it now without having mass unemployment! I'm not sure what I did (if I even did anything) to make it go back to normal though. I noticed when I loaded the city after reading you guys' suggestions that demand was positive again so I zoned for a bunch of residential to see what would happen. Demand responded accordingly so I was really happy I didn't have to obliterate the city after all   Even after installing the handy Industry Quadrupler, demand wasn't killed so it's all good now

After reading Spinmaster's post I wondered if pause-and-build might've been responsible for this since I do that all the time...but sometimes I don't, and I can't actually remember if I did that for this region.   But it's definitely possible so I'll have to keep that in mind from now on.

Thanks everyone for the helpful suggestions and advice!! I really appreciate it!