Region Experiment - Separating Wealth and Zone Types

[gtribe 0]

I'm experimenting with a region right now, where I only place 1 type of zone/wealth type in each tile.  What I am finding though is that now that I have filled 15 tiles, things are getting strange.

[EDIT] Things are moving much better now, I just needed to add more R$, and change some low density zones to medium and high. Below is a current image of the region.

I'm using the NAM on high capacity setting, so I have sims that have no problem commuting over 7 or 8 city tiles to get to industrial areas, although when I go into those tiles, it doesn't show any traffic.

I'm also noticing that job ratio in my region is about 1 sim to 3 jobs.  Is this normal?  I thought it should be a 1:1 ratio, but for some reason every sim works 3 jobs.

Another thing that is messed up is my R$$$ tile.  It has max demand, no negative effects, max land value, high education, fire, police, low commute time (<30) yet nothing is building.  Even when I place tons of parks, then place a low, medium or high density R$$$ zone near it, nothing happens.  It's a large tile, and was growing fine up until about 75,000 high wealth sims.  Is there a guideline of what a normal ratio of R$ vs. R$$ vs. R$$$ should be, or is it simply dependent on the jobs you provide them?

It seems that even with NAM on high (or ultra), long commuting is screwing up my development, even though it shows low values and short in the building query.  Has anyone else had issues like this, especially when trying to separate zone types?

[paulmc 391]

Hello gtribe, I always mix the zones up , I think the industrial and comercial zones help the growing of the residential zone providing jobs, maybe a city only residential don't grow by lacking of jobs if you don't have a good conection with your neighbor.In my humble opinion if you want grow a sucessful big city you need mixing up, each thing in your due place. About the traffic , maybe you can change the traffic settings in graphics settings to order a larger number of vehicles.

[gtribe 0]

Originally posted by: paulmc

Hello gtribe, I always mix the zones up , I think the industrial and comercial zones help the growing of the residential zone providing jobs, maybe a city only residential don't grow by lacking of jobs if you don't have a good conection with your neighbor.In my humble opinion if you want grow a sucessful big city you need mixing up, each thing in your due place. About the traffic , maybe you can change the traffic settings in graphics settings to order a larger number of vehicles.quote>

Thanks for the ideas!  What I meant by the traffic issue is that on the traffic data screen for industry tiles, it literally shows no traffic, other than freight trains and trucks.  Maybe because there are no residents on the tile it won't show workers commuting.  My Commercial tiles do, but that may be because there are customers as well as workers commuting.  Regarding connections, I don't have any high congestion, and I still see low commute times everywhere.  I'm using high speed rail, subway and highways to move them from city to city, depending on the distance.

I usually mix the zones up also, and never have these issues.  I was just was experimenting with this method trying to get some data on how the game mechanics works in regards to zone ratios.  I have charts set up in excel, and when I saw that there were 3X as many jobs as sims, I figured something was wrong.  Oh well, maybe I'm pushing the region aspect of the game too much and it's causing bugs.  I often need to go into every tile and let it run for a while to "remind" it of where all the neighbor connections are going.  I even have 1 tile that feeds all my other tiles with garbage removal and power plants so I'm always popping into different tiles and adjusting neighbor deals to get power and garbage distributed.   I posted a pic in the power plant thread of this ugly tile. All in all, it's sort of time consuming, but it's still interesting to me at this point so that is all that matters.

I did find out using this method that after a while the game requires every residential zone type, every commercial and most industrials (except for I agricultural) to have succesful development.   I thought I had built a whole region without R$ and I$ in the past, but I must have been mistaken.

Anyhow, I was able to solve 1 issue and spark development in my R$$$ today by increasing the zones in my R$.  Apparently, I had let the amount of low wealth sims get too low.  I'm hoping to figure out what a decent ratio of R$ to R$$ to R$$$ is by the time I finish this region.  I've seen people mention on this forum that CO$$$ even requires R$ to grow, albeit a small amount, yet I still tend to overlook this when building CO$$$ zones, thinking that R$$ and R$$$ are more important.

So I'll keep plugging away and see what else I can tweak in this region.  I might try a hybrid zone separation, where my R$$$ are with my CO$$$ and CO$$, my R$$ are with my CS$$$ and my R$ are with the C$$ and C$, and just leave the industry tiles by themselves, since the game doesn't seem to care about commute times to those.

There is always something to keep me tinkering with this old game

[eggman111 8]

I think what's happening in your industrial tiles is that nobody is actually working there. When you query a building, it tells you the number of jobs available (based on desirability) and then the maximum number of jobs available (in a perfect world, which never happens). The actual number of people working in a building can be found by using the route query. For example, you can have a factory with 5 people working at it, 75 jobs available based on desirability, and 100 potential jobs if the desirability is perfect. Sims will just travel to the closest job that suits them, so it may be that your industrial tile is further away from the residential tile than other jobs are. Sometimes I get this even within a city.

You're correct about CO$$$ requiring R$. In fact, the number of actual CO$$$ jobs in a CO$$$ building is pretty low (not even close to 100%). I find I usually have to put limits on R$$$ growth in my cities I usually tax around 11.5-12.5% for R$$$).

In a region like that, watch out for the eternal commuter bug - do a quick Google search if you haven't heard of it.

[gtribe 0]

Originally posted by: eggman111

I think what's happening in your industrial tiles is that nobody is actually working there. When you query a building, it tells you the number of jobs available (based on desirability) and then the maximum number of jobs available (in a perfect world, which never happens). The actual number of people working in a building can be found by using the route query. For example, you can have a factory with 5 people working at it, 75 jobs available based on desirability, and 100 potential jobs if the desirability is perfect. Sims will just travel to the closest job that suits them, so it may be that your industrial tile is further away from the residential tile than other jobs are. Sometimes I get this even within a city.

You're correct about CO$$$ requiring R$. In fact, the number of actual CO$$$ jobs in a CO$$$ building is pretty low (not even close to 100%). I find I usually have to put limits on R$$$ growth in my cities I usually tax around 11.5-12.5% for R$$$).

In a region like that, watch out for the eternal commuter bug - do a quick Google search if you haven't heard of it.quote>

I bet that is the case also.  I didn't realize that the lower number in the query was just the current available jobs, not the actual workers.  Thanks for that info, that explains exactly what my issue is, with the 3x jobs/sims.  That will help me out a lot. I don't know how I never realized that before, I just thought the queries weren't accurate or something.

Time to rethink my routing.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The ratio of Sims to jobs is actually somewhere around 3.2:1.  Sims come in family units based on US census figures at the time of the program design, so mommy Sim stays home with the kids, usually.  Dinks are not common in the game.

You cannot do something in your cities that the program won't allow.  You must have a mix of all three levels of Sims because you need top managers, technical people, and gofers in all businesses.  The game foursquare insists on this.  If you go against it, you just get hassled.

I have tried the isolated zoning thing in the past, but you have to realize that zoning has nothing to do with wealth levels.  You can have a CO$$$ all on one floor on a single occupancy commercial lot.  The same applies to industrial and especially to residential.  R$ Sims like to live in high-rises near public transit.  This public transit is the thing that can give rise to the great inter city ride around (loop) where the Sims get on the network and never get off.

I've spent the last couple of weeks fighting the great loop.  My posts are over in the Modding - Transit Networks threads because I thought I was tracking a bug, but it turns out that the improved transit capabilities of the NAM just help the Sims ride around faster and easier.  The answer to the great loop is to break it and dead end it into go-nowhere end points.

I use mixed cities.  In fact, I use pods of mixes throughout my cities depending on what is needed.  I like seaports so I generally start with a port with commercial and industrial mixed, with a residential section forced to commute through the commercial to get to the jobs in the industrial.  I keep creating residential lots until all the employers have some people working for them (use the route query for this.)  I often hum "Where do you work-a, John" when I am looking at this.  You probably don't know that old railroading song.  This set up gives me my initial pod.  Other pods have other centers.  The university, a transportation junction, etc.  The secret to all this is balance.  Keep the Sims happy, keep the comm lots busy (lots of traffic), and keep the industries employed and with a sink for freight (freight goes to the big bit bucket in the sky).

Oh, one thought.  If you use a neighbor road/rail connection as your freight sink, watch that it doesn't start getting non-freight traffic.  The Sims will find it, and if possible will start a loop using it.

[gtribe 0]

Strange, my thread got bumped to general, oh well, I guess it isn't really considered a city building concept.  I just hope it doesn't confuse people into thinking that this discussion is anything more than just a quick experiment I'm working on.

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose

I have tried the isolated zoning thing in the past, but you have to realize that zoning has nothing to do with wealth levels. 

quote>

I should have mentioned that I also am taxing out the wealth levels I don't want.  I'm actually not just isolating the zone types, but also the wealth type.  I have only R$ in one tile, R$$ in another, CO$$$ in another, etc. for all the zones and wealth types except for agricultural.

Thanks for the info on the commuter loop.  I've always set my neighbor connections to the middle of the tiles, and whatever method I use to connect them  runs right through the middle of the tile, so if it is a tile with jobs the transit type goes right through it.  Hopefully I'm safe with this method.  I haven't seen very high congestion anywhere.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

well, good luck with that.  The program doesn't like it, so you have been warned if your damands go all screwy.

You can't see a loop on the congestion display.  Use the alternate on that panel, the traffic volume display.  If you get any yellow or red paths, the chances are you have a loop somewhere unless you deliberately created a congested area.

[gtribe 0]

Originally posted by: A Nonny Moose

well, good luck with that.  The program doesn't like it, so you have been warned if your damands go all screwy.

You can't see a loop on the congestion display.  Use the alternate on that panel, the traffic volume display.  If you get any yellow or red paths, the chances are you have a loop somewhere unless you deliberately created a congested area.

quote>

I had a previous region that worked taxing out all wealth types but 2 (i.e. R$$$ and CO$$$ in the same tile) and I was able to get over 5 million sims, but unfortunately it looked strange from the region view.  This is the first that I seperated all of them and I'm at 500k only using low density, but again, it looks strange from region view.

Thanks for the tip on the volume display.  I thought volume and congestion was the same, just that traffic volume showed a specific transportation type.  Now I see that the colors are different.  Still no yellow or red that I have seen so far, so I hope I'm ok.

I just realized that with NAM ultra settings a road has 12000 capacity, I wonder if that is why I don't have any yellows or reds in my traffic volume display.  I'm not sure if the values in that data screen scale with nam or not, but 100% is labeled as 6000 on there.

[gtribe 0]

I was able to get progress up and running again by converting some of my low density to medium and high.  Now it's growing pretty quickly, which is nice because I'm at the point where I can just keep bulldozing and regrowing to get the buildings I want, so there isn't too much repetitiveness.

Here is where it stands now, it's not pretty, but I'm just trying to test some game mechanics so I'm not really worried about the looks.

Since I'm not having any more issues with this method of region growth, I'm changing the title of the thread to better suit the goal of my region.