High density commercial

[Xr3iracer 5]

Hello all,

I was wondering what other people think about the amount of workers high density commercial needs! I find once my cities move to high density the commercial takes lots of workers and creates unfilled jobs! I understand that buildings function with unfilled jobs!

So if you are building a tourism city and u have ur hotels near ur casinos I still need commercial in my residential zones to keep them happy! In turn I end up with buildings with no workers including my casinos!

How far will sims travel for commercial?! Do they use transport systems to reach it?! I currently mix my residential and commercial!

Sorry if this is a mish mash post but I could with some extra advice!

Thanks

[12thDoctor 14]

Yeah, there's quite a large jump between Medium density and High Density.... 

 

And I'm not sure how far they'll travel... (presumably as far as they need to?) but the closer they are to what they need the better because they will walk if it is nearby and creates less traffic to deal with. I usually do the same as you mentioned, and keep a bit of commercial interspersed with my residential. What I will usually do is dezone my commercial once they reach medium-density and that will prevent them from ever upgrading to high-density until you re-zone the building commercial. It's about the best way I've found for dealing with this. 

[Noobi-Wan 22]

It all comes down to balance. Although they look cool I don't think we were ever intended to have the massive commercial blocks that we had in SC4.

I usually try and stagger the size if the buildings to maintain the aesthetics without having to play whack a mole with the bulldozer as they go abandoned.

[Xr3iracer 5]

Thanks guys! I hadn't tried de zoning to keep them at medium density! I'm currently building a casino city so this might b handy as I can allow commercial near the casinos to become high density hotels!

I was finding if I didn't put commercial near residential they got cross and left!

[Eriseley 4]

One thing I've found building industrial cities is that your city can operate fine with plenty of unsatisfied shoppers so long as services are good. If you are looking at that statistic trying to have enough commercial to satisfy everybody, you don't end up with many leftover workers, but you can actually ignore it and pay more attention to "can't find shopping" messages, which itself is sometimes just location and not amount of commercial. As mentioned you can dezone to stay at medium density and a couple of these shops spread around your residential might serve better than one big building somewhere in the middle, even if they provide less shopping.
 

In any case, that all seems to work fine until regional play where your unsatisfied shoppers might flood out to someone else's city, annihilating highways unless you both have mass transit set up.

 

[Xr3iracer 5]

One thing I've found building industrial cities is that your city can operate fine with plenty of unsatisfied shoppers so long as services are good. If you are looking at that statistic trying to have enough commercial to satisfy everybody, you don't end up with many leftover workers, but you can actually ignore it and pay more attention to "can't find shopping" messages, which itself is sometimes just location and not amount of commercial. As mentioned you can dezone to stay at medium density and a couple of these shops spread around your residential might serve better than one big building somewhere in the middle, even if they provide less shopping.

In any case, that all seems to work fine until regional play where your unsatisfied shoppers might flood out to someone else's city, annihilating highways unless you both have mass transit set up.

Thank you!

I don't pay any attention to unsatisfied shoppers just "can't find shopping"

I think that whole menu is broken tho! I'm sure it's been discussed somewhere but I struggle to believe that in a city of 100k not even 20k are workers!!! There must b lots of oaps lol!

[perafilozof 143]

When trying to fix the problem of shoppers finding shops and shops getting shoppers it all about micromanaging the R and C mixing.

You will also face a problem where sometimes simply to many shoppers will head to the same shop that is actually farther away. And 50% of those shoppers are leaving the shop right next door asking for more shoppers. You can't really do much about that, that is the problem of the agents. But often those shops will bounce back the next day when those 50% shoppers find that it's closer than the one they went to yesterday.

 

You should also keep in mind that once you get to high density there is no where to go after that. So satisfying all the shoppers from a high density R isn't necessary, since you don't need full happiness because there is no next level.

 

That can however be a problem if you have another city nearby because those shoppers you didn't satisfy are sponed as commuter shoppers and they will go to that other city, regardless of the fact that the new city doesn't even have enough goods for it's own shoppers. It's kinda a first come first served thing. (you can pretty much take the I out of AI after that)