Population Count Way Off

[TXIce 0]

I can't figure out what I'm missing here and I'm wondering if this is maybe why I'm having such a tremendously difficult time trying to keep my residents happy in this particular city.  The basic problem is that I'm having a huge rash of residents closing down due to 'no money'.  The vast majority of the residential zones are bright red with unhappiness and I'm having to bulldoze double digits worth of buildings every single day (in-game day that is) because they keep abandoning the buildings.  Now I'm checking everything I can think of; I have what should be a pretty good balance of RCI, I've got good coverage of utilities, etc, ample busses with short wait times and little to no traffic problems to name some basics.

 

Then something hit me that doesn't seem quite right and I'm wondering if this might just mean my city is borked for some reason.  All of my buildings are medium density or lower and are all low income at this point.  I went through and counted all my residential buildings and I came up with a total of 150 medium density buildings and 20 low density buildings.  Given that a low density residential is supposed to house 4 workers and 2 shoppers, with the medium density housing 10 times that (40 workers and 20 shoppers); I come up with a grand total population of 9120 residents in my city (which matches the worker/shopper counts in the population panel).  Yet I just noticed something (not sure why it took me so long for this to click), but the total city population number shown in the panel reads 53,296...more than 5 times what it would seem it should be reading.

 

Am I just missing something here or is this definately not right??

[Cob92 360]

The population is fudged. 

[TXIce 0]

You think that might be why I'm having so much trouble with this 'no money' thing?  The game thinking I've got roughly 40,000+ more workers than what I'm trying to supply jobs for?  Not real sure what to do about it aside from bulldoze everything and see if the counter resets back to zero or something.

[DVDGuy 16]

I think the game uses the number of active agents (workers, students, shoppers ...) and derives the population figure from that. This link has the formula and graphs:

 

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/109072/what-is-the-formula-for-converting-population-to-residential-agents-workers-sh

 

I'd look into your road structure, and perhaps try zoning more industrial, even if the unemployment rating indicates zero unemployment. For the road problem, if sims go out looking for work at the closest industrial zone, and it's filled, they move on to the next and so on - but if this takes too long, and doesn't leave enough time for sims to go to work, then go to the shops ... then they won't be happy.

 

Also what's your tax rate? That could also lead to "no money" problems, I think.

[TXIce 0]

This is getting more complicated than I wanted it to be, heh.  When the first responder said the population was fudged, I thought he meant it like "yeah, that's messed up".  After looking at that link I understand what was meant now.  I had done some testing on a sandbox city where I was checking the various residential densities and what not and the population matched my initial thinking (4W/2S per low density $, 40W/20S per medium density $, etc).  I guess I just hadn't done it on a scale big enough to cross over the point where the numbers begin to "fudge".  Further testing in that sandbox, though, and I see where it starts to differ.  Anywho...thanks for pointing that out.

 

As for trying to zone more industrial, I did that and it didn't seem to work (or perhaps I didn't give it enough time to work).  All that ended up happening was I ended up with a bunch of extra industrial buildings that were closed because they didn't have enough workers.  I even let a couple of the medium density industrial I initially had upgrade to high density so I had an large excess of available jobs.

 

I checked on the transportation/road layout too and I'm not seeing where that may be a problem.  Traffic is pretty light even during the "rush hours".  I never notice that I get any major bottlenecks or anything like that.  But I guess a picture is worth a thousand words.  I had just gotten done bulldozing all the residential in an act of desparation so that's why the housing is a little sparse at the moment, but if nothing else you can see the road layout.  The four major "blocks" near the bottom left are the main concentration of the residential and commercial.

 

I can try to lower the tax rate.  I did bump that up from the default 9% initially, but I set it to what I understood to be an "acceptable" level for the low wealth residential at 12%.  I know that rate wouldn't necessarily increase their happiness, but I understood it shouldn't decrease it either.

[commanderkai 38]

Four way intersections are a big no-no in this game, because the traffic AI is hilariously incompetent. Limit yourself to three-way intersections, and avoid having streetlights automatically appearing (some, like avenue-avenue intersections always develop them) at intersections. Basically do not connect a high density street to an avenue. It will cause traffic nightmares.

[Stuart98 98]

As far as I know, the fudged population numbers are nothing but a display lie used to entice you for some achievements. Disabling them fixes nothing in a city, just gives you the true number of agents in the city.

[perafilozof 143]

Here is a link to actual numbers of agents for RCI:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiK1gO7pmnQEdEVkck9adUNTU2hoclJoSEpTY21sdEE#gid=2

 

And as you can see when you hit high density one C high density $ required 600 workers and gives 355 goods. This means that you need 3 x high density R which give 400 workers each to fill the jobs of $ for 2 x high density C $ and you will have 100 goods left over while you will still need additional 100$$ workers and 10$ workers.

 

It's simply pour balancing. My best guess is that someone had made good balance and did good math but then someone else came along the had to cut those numbers down for the game to have less agents and run better on more PC-s but instead of creating new math they just cut the numbers down resulting in system failure. 

[TXIce 0]

Four way intersections are a big no-no in this game, because the traffic AI is hilariously incompetent. Limit yourself to three-way intersections, and avoid having streetlights automatically appearing (some, like avenue-avenue intersections always develop them) at intersections. Basically do not connect a high density street to an avenue. It will cause traffic nightmares.

 

Right, I'm aware of this concept and I avoid them as much as possible.  There are only 2 four way intersections in my main grid area and they are both where the medium avenues cross each other in the center and right of the center.  Everything else is a "T" intersection with no traffic lights on the avenue.  Traffic is not an issue in the city (yet anyways).

[TXIce 0]

Here is a link to actual numbers of agents for RCI:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiK1gO7pmnQEdEVkck9adUNTU2hoclJoSEpTY21sdEE#gid=2

 

And as you can see when you hit high density one C high density $ required 600 workers and gives 355 goods. This means that you need 3 x high density R which give 400 workers each to fill the jobs of $ for 2 x high density C $ and you will have 100 goods left over while you will still need additional 100$$ workers and 10$ workers.

 

It's simply pour balancing. My best guess is that someone had made good balance and did good math but then someone else came along the had to cut those numbers down for the game to have less agents and run better on more PC-s but instead of creating new math they just cut the numbers down resulting in system failure. 

 

Thanks for the link to that spreadsheet.  I had actually started something similar where I was plopping the various buildings in a sandbox and recording the number of jobs and trying to record the number of worker/shopper agents in the various zones (though I could never get a low density $$$ commercial to spawn for some reason, heh).  But this is alot more in depth than I would have gone.  Thanks.