Population over-exaggeration?

[jwsteele 77]

Hey all, I'd love your thoughts on this. This has been bugging me recently.

I live in San Francisco, which is the second densest city in America, behind New York City of course (largely due to the absurdity of Manhattan's density). So while I'm well aware that there are denser cities in the world, we are right up there for America.

I look at my place, and my friend's places (all of us live in the Northern/Northeast section of the city, which is the densest), and I know how many people live in our buildings. When I compare them to SimCity stats, it seems wildly overpopulated, sometimes by three or four times as many people as would be in the real life version.

This can also be verified by seeing people who have created insanely dense cities on a large city tile, often with 1,000,000+ inhabitants. Absolutely rad, but considering Manhattan is larger than a large city tile and has a similar population, and is more or less about as dense as a first-world city can get, it just seems unrealistic.

Case in point (and this is absolutely nothing against Don Miguel, who is one of my favorite BATers by a longshot, but this building is very similar to one a couple of my friends live in):

This is a townhouse. In a wealthy section of a city, this would be occupied by one family, maybe 2-4 individuals. If each floor was converted to a flat or apartment designed for single yuppies or low income families, like is often the case in San Francisco and New York City, you might have an apartment for each floor, with 3-4 people living there, so 9-12 residents, maybe 12-16 if you figure there is a basement unit. This file is 40. Like I said, not picking on him in the slightest, because I feel 95% (if not more) of residential files (both Maxis and custom) are similar, and I feel most BATers probably base population off the Maxis files to begin with. I just thought this would be an easier one to point out than a 20 story highrise.

Other case in point: Maxis mansions with like 12 people in them. OK, maybe in the 1850s when people had armies of servants, now it would likely be 2-4 people.

What do you all think? Are residential population stats, with both Maxis and user files, accurate? Or are they too high? Is there a "mod" that can downgrade the region to a more realistic population density?

[Wiecher 192]

These mods exist:

This one halves the population in residential buildings:

And this one reduces it by two thirds, but only for low-density:

I think they are both not compatible with downloaded residential buildings from the stex though, the description of the halving mod mentions that.

[Sandis_van_Great 346]

yeah lol i totally agree, even with traffic, alot of times youl see such a big traffic in a city, when in real life a city same size and same amount of people would have 5 times less traffic.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Think about it for a minute. If you were an R$$$ living in, say, a 5000ft.² mansion, how many people would live there if you were married and had two kids.

1. family is four.

2. cook one.

3. gardner/chauffer one.

4. housekeeper one.

5. maids, probably one per floor, so at least two.

All these are live-in. so that's 9, and I consider that to be a minimal staff.

If you did business from home, you might well have a live-in secretary and others helping you run the business, especially if your home was out of town.

[cogeo 960]

Well, if you are for realism, you can always develop your city in a different manner and control what buildings will develop by zoning medium- and, yes, some low-density zones too. Real cities aren't all-skyscrapper. You will need space for networks, civic buildings and parks too. And some space might be unusable (water or too slopped). And the simulator won't develop stage-8 buildings everywhere. Even for large cities. only up to 20% of the development can be stage-8, and another 29% stage-7 (the rest will be of lower growth-stages). And while the buildings may appear to house too many sims, but their lots are relatively large too, so this somehow balances the whole thing out. If you zone large areas of medium density lots, you will get rows of condos, looking quite dense, but not really housing big populations. Take a look in one of my cities:

Not a very big area (it's only a corner of the city), but there are quite a few medium-density buildings, and the population when the shot was taken was some 20,000 sims, and my main high-wealth area (which is even less dense) is not shown in the pic. If I devlop all the city tile this way I may get some 300,000 sims. It is quite dense in real-word terms (some 20,000 sims per square kilometer), but it looks dense as well.

And I wouldn't recommend installing those "halvers" (sorry guys), if you do so you should mod any custom you download in the same manner, so as to achieve a consistent behaviour.

[raja_indy14 8]

One of the annoying aspects of this is that you need to have unrealistically large areas of your city zoned for commercial or industrial. When I compare the zoning of a typical SimCity to real life examples the difference is incredibly stark. It may be the consequence of Maxis wanting to make cities more balanced between the three zone types, since in game terms players might become bored with creating the vast areas of residential neighbourhoods necessary to house the workers of dense commercial office space.

The most obvious examples are the low-density housing, where a single family home might house more than 10 people. In a typical North American suburb it would be out of the ordinary for more than 4-5 people to occupy such a house, and on average likely no more than 2.5.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Think about it for a minute. If you were an R$$$ living in, say, a 5000ft.² mansion, how many people would live there if you were married and had two kids.

1. family is four.

2. cook one.

3. gardner/chauffer one.

4. housekeeper one.

5. maids, probably one per floor, so at least two.

All these are live-in. so that's 9, and I consider that to be a minimal staff.

If you did business from home, you might well have a live-in secretary and others helping you run the business, especially if your home was out of town.

Understandable, but the numbers still seem exaggerated to me. Mansions in-game can hold up to 40 people, and middle class, two story houses hold 12. I'd say the residential capacities of most of the buildings are doubled from what they would be in RL.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

The Sims are obviously a fecund bunch of people.

[jwsteele 77]

Think about it for a minute. If you were an R$$$ living in, say, a 5000ft.² mansion, how many people would live there if you were married and had two kids.

1. family is four.

2. cook one.

3. gardner/chauffer one.

4. housekeeper one.

5. maids, probably one per floor, so at least two.

All these are live-in. so that's 9, and I consider that to be a minimal staff.

If you did business from home, you might well have a live-in secretary and others helping you run the business, especially if your home was out of town.

Maybe in the Edwardian era, but certainly not today. Today's wealthy may have a live-in nanny if their kids are little, but the rest of the servants you mentioned do not exist in the live-in capacity. Not to mention that 5,000 square feet is space for a 5 bed (or 4 bed house with an office), kitchen, dining, family, living room. Large, but not big enough for all those family members. The country estates that could hold such a staff were 12,000 square feet at minimum, and usually considerably larger. Considering that most of us are designing cities that are contemporary, such stats make no sense. (I work in residential real estate in Silicon Valley).

So can you edit the custom buildings (not Maxis) you download to have less occupancy? Is this easy, or advanced?

  Edited September 14, 2012 by jwsteele  

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Depends on what you've got. If you have all the BAT components (.sc4model, .sc4desc, .sc4lot) you can use the Plug-in Manager to edit or create a new .sc4desc file and update the .sc4lot file. Otherwise you are stuck with the ilive reader which is not simple.

[SimCoug 5,977]

My simple solution is to not pay attention to the population numbers - I just cut the number in half in my head and to get a rough estimate of what the actual population is. Maxis chose the numbers to fit the simulation, so when you start tinkering with all the occupancy numbers for realism's sake, you may end up with more problems than what you started with. But if you wish to go that route, you can adjust any BAT's .SC4desc file with to your hearts content - the learning curve is a little steep, but there are plenty of tutorials out there to learn on.

[Tarkus 6,934]

I concur with SimCoug. I've always considered the inflated population to be effectively "ambient" population, designed to silently simulate things not expressly present in the game engine, like running errands, etc. The extra population helps slant things like demand and traffic patterns toward a more realistic direction.

-Tarkus

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I've always believed the number of Sims is about double the number of jobs. Momma doesn't work, and there is a fuzz of kids who don't work either. The whole thing fits nicely into fuzzy logic, and I am pretty sure this is what was intended. If you have 5,000 jobs (total) you need at least 10,000 Sims. This rule of thumb works for me, and I use it all the time.

Remember, all these tools that dump out masses of statistics tend to be in the "too much information" category and need to be taken with a grain of salt. Looking for exact formulae in this program is like trying to measure the dark energy in the universe.

[jwsteele 77]

Alright, I will (begrudgingly) just half the population in my head. I think the person who said it was to balance out the three zones, and not make cities entirely residential, was probably right. Still lame. I will be using the industry quadrupler, however.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I will be using the industry quadrupler, however.

In the end, I think you will regret this. However, every man to his taste.

[jwsteele 77]

I will be using the industry quadrupler, however.

In the end, I think you will regret this. However, every man to his taste.

Why

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I will be using the industry quadrupler, however.

In the end, I think you will regret this. However, every man to his taste.

Why

Every time I've used one of these demand twisters, something else goes wrong. This program is what we call 'organic' in the programming game. If you take that big brass bolt out of the navel, the rear end falls off.