Commuters without a neighbor connection

[yigit007 2]

I have two cities connected to each other; one of them is farm driven, while the other is mixed residential, industrial and commercial. The problem is, Census Repository tells me that I have 30k commuters living in one of the cities (which only has 20k population) and working in the neighborhood, but this number does not change even when I remove the connection between two cities. This connection never had more than 1k commuters btw. Related to this, Census Repository reports 27k vacant jobs and a great residential demand, but I don't see any of these vacancies. I'm guessing this might be a bug and I wonder if this can be fixed without destroying&rebuilding one of the cities.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Just delete the census repository. You can look at your ratios in other graphs, or at the region level at the stats on the open city dialogue box. If one source is incredible, look at others.

[yigit007 2]

You might be right, but I believe what census repository shows is might be correct, since I can't satisfy my demand for any RCI category. Right now, I have more jobs than combined workforce of my two cities and still R demand is through the roof. I checked my plugins to see if I had installed a demand enhancing plugin, that's not the issue either.

[z1 566]

Have you been running both cities frequently? If not, things can get out of balance after a while.

Also, I have also known the Census Repository to be correct, so I would be very hesitant to dismiss its data.

[wardlitell 8]

You should take a look here, in particular the dialog between Ripplejet and Cogeo in the third page.

http://sc4devotion.c...hp?topic=6095.0

This value is some kind of historical extrpolated demand for your whole region. I use the census repository in every city i play, but i never really undestood the interest of this particular value for the player.

Unfortunately, Ripplejet dosen't seem to be active anymore, so i don't think it would be usefull for you to ask him directly in this topic.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Z is right; it would be unwise to dismiss the information the CRF offers. Let's go through this, see if we can't find an explanation for what you're seeing...

First: Are you using CAM?

I have two cities connected to each other; one of them is farm driven, while the other is mixed residential, industrial and commercial. The problem is, Census Repository tells me that I have 30k commuters living in one of the cities (which only has 20k population) and working in the neighborhood, but this number does not change even when I remove the connection between two cities. This connection never had more than 1k commuters btw.

If you're referring to "Commuters from SimNation", the number you're seeing is both accurate (Kinda, sorta...) and meaningless. This number is the POTENTIAL commuters into your city, it can expand wildly for no apparent reason, and does bubkus to your city (Good or ill). I'm not sure how it's calculated, although someone familiar with the programming of the CRF would be able to say for certain. Anyway, this number generally only trends upwards and doesn't go away, even when neighbor connections are destroyed.

A strange number, indeed.

Querying the neighbor connections, as you have done, will give the real number of people coming and going from your city.

This connection never had more than 1k commuters btw. Related to this, Census Repository reports 27k vacant jobs and a great residential demand, but I don't see any of these vacancies. I'm guessing this might be a bug and I wonder if this can be fixed without destroying&rebuilding one of the cities.

You won't see any of the vacancies directly unless buildings are abandoned (100% vacancy). However, you can query some buildings and discover that while they may, for example, offer 3,500 jobs, only 1,000 sims are working there. That 2,500 is added to the vacancies number.

If you have more questions/seek elaboration, it would be good of you to post a screenshot of your CRF so I can intemperate the data better.

Edit: Snipped out a piece of information that, frankly, I'm not sure about.

  Edited August 9, 2012 by Mister Giggles  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Let me be perfectly clear. I suggested deleting the CRF because the user plainly did not understand what it was telling him. Too much information can be pernicious.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Could be, but if the information being provided is not perfectly clear/ill-explained (Such as it seems in this case), one cannot be faulted for requesting elaboration. Besides, think of it this way: One cannot become wise without first being educated. Some people are better at educating themselves via reading, others by asking, yet still others by experimenting, screwing up, and figuring out what they did wrong.

[yigit007 2]

Well, first of all, I'm posting from a mobile device so I'm limited in terms of posting a screenshot. I do use CAM, but I datpack-patched simcity1.dat, thus workforce is not counted twice.

I do understand what CRF says, I'm just showing you a discrepancy that is against game mechanics (at least, as far as I know them). Even when I check several buildings with both query and route query tool, the jobs appear to be almost fully utilized. Further, bulldozing some of the commercial buildings won't change vacant job count (this should have decreased it). That, and having an always positive and very high R demand show that something's not right.

[wardlitell 8]

Referring to the ripplejet words in the link i suggested to you, datas you're reffering to are not the current number of commuters from your city and its vacant jobs, but ( i quote him):

the total of all extrapolated growth that has occurred during the lifetime of your region.

Note that unless this extrapolation is allowed to be fulfilled elsewhere in the region, that extrapolated growth has actually been lost

So, i don't think there is any bug involved. In my opinion, those values are only usefull when you try to utilize the unused demand of a city you previously played to develop the one you're currently playing. As i generally don't play several cities at the same time, i just don't care about it.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I do use the CRF, but I also use other graphs and displays. The whole business has to be integrated by the player to get the desired result. I only use the repository in very large cities as I can usually manage the smaller ones without that level of data. I tend to play an entire region all at once, despite the time to switch tiles.

[cogeo 960]

The numbers shown in the "Commuters" entries are historical cumulative (sum) data. You can clearly see this in the LUA script that calculates them. So one might conclude that this is a number that can only increase, however it seems that the game keeps only the data of the last 60 or so months, ie what you see in the figures is the total number of commuters (or demand extrapolated?) in the last 5 years. I had proposed fixing this, eg display only the data of the last month, but the problem is that the data are not reliable at all. Most of the monthly data are zero, with only one sample in 3, 4, 5 or even more (eg 12 or more) being nonzero; sometimes a sample may be broken into two, if you run the city for 10 gamedays or so So the best that could be done is take the data of the last 12 or 24 months and normalize them to monthly levels. Still, this is not accurate and many tests would be required to make calculations that are even fairly close to the actual ones. I would wish to make this correction (along with some few additinal fixes and optimizations), however this thingy isn't mine and therefore I couldn't relase it. RippleJet is not active in the forums either. I may do it for personal use, and maybe send the update to certain players per mail.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Eh? Just ask permission to make a public release, you'll probably get it. I seriously doubt RippleJet will object to someone updating the CRF in his stead, especially if that person is you.