House/Factory abandoned again and agian

[jacobdang 0]

Seems that there is no obvious reason behind the abandonment. Simulation is quite unstable and fluctuate a lot. Can anyone suggest the reasons?

[reReticulated Spline 69]

Try the following to see what is the cause:

 

- Click on the house, what does it say is the reason for abandonment?

- Look at the bottom of your screen, are any icons red? There might be utility problems.

- Click on the green smiley at the bottom of the screen. Move your mouse over the wealth level of the abandoned houses, what are the sims complaining about?

- Click on the number of sims living in your city at the bottom of the screen. Go to the details tab. Check how many people are unemployed, then check how many unsatisfied shoppers there are.

 

Did you find the cause?

[jacobdang 0]

Try the following to see what is the cause:

 

- Click on the house, what does it say is the reason for abandonment?

- Look at the bottom of your screen, are any icons red? There might be utility problems.

- Click on the green smiley at the bottom of the screen. Move your mouse over the wealth level of the abandoned houses, what are the sims complaining about?

- Click on the number of sims living in your city at the bottom of the screen. Go to the details tab. Check how many people are unemployed, then check how many unsatisfied shoppers there are.

 

Did you find the cause?

 

Thanks for reply. That's very through and helpful.

 

After reloading the game things seem to become steady...

 

One cause could be when upgrading from low density to medium density, many houses are upgrading at the same time causing a lot of fluctuation in the population.

 

I check the info,  in the population panel they say no unemployment. However people are still complaining no jobs in happiness rating info, which is funny. And factories complain not enough worker.

[MayorQuimbie 13]

 

Try the following to see what is the cause:

 

- Click on the house, what does it say is the reason for abandonment?

- Look at the bottom of your screen, are any icons red? There might be utility problems.

- Click on the green smiley at the bottom of the screen. Move your mouse over the wealth level of the abandoned houses, what are the sims complaining about?

- Click on the number of sims living in your city at the bottom of the screen. Go to the details tab. Check how many people are unemployed, then check how many unsatisfied shoppers there are.

 

Did you find the cause?

 

Thanks for reply. That's very through and helpful.

 

After reloading the game things seem to become steady...

 

One cause could be when upgrading from low density to medium density, many houses are upgrading at the same time causing a lot of fluctuation in the population.

 

I check the info,  in the population panel they say no unemployment. However people are still complaining no jobs in happiness rating info, which is funny. And factories complain not enough worker.

 

When sims travel to work they will only travel so far, also remember $$ wealth sims need $$ wealth jobs and $$$ wealth sims need $$$ welath jobs.

 

Sit and watch the population overlay for a day, that may help you spot any problems....

 

 

I have a slightly different issue in one of my new cities, I have sims from other cities stealing all my local jobs ....

[Yaffle 29]

Sometimes the way the agent system works can lead to dead spots. I had a commercial building that kept going bust due to a lack of workers, despite there being unemployment. Watching the agents showed that they would fill the buildings either side of it, then either discover their job hunting "time" had expired and return home saying "got fired" or they would head to a different area of the city that was a bit closer however there were too many of them for the number of sinks there, they arrived, discovered the sinks filled, and then headed back to the other job sinks, but having insufficient time to get there.

 

I think this is one of the key weaknesses with the glassbox method - the lack of permanence makes things very odd indeed from a real world perspective. If each Sim "tagged" a sink as he/she left home they would know before setting off where their job for the day was, likewise run the reciprocal at the end of the day. Then you would not have the "travel most of the way there to discover the sink has been filled, so try another sink on the other side of the map, oh that's been filled now too" problem that causes this.

[12thDoctor 14]

I'm going to go out onto a limb here and guess that the cause here is that you have mass transit. In my experience, that has always been the biggest culprit in random and unexplained abandonment. I've added mass transit to an otherwise flawless working city (no abandonment issues) and within a game-day or two (with no other changes) suddenly start having buildings going abandoned with no workers or no jobs. Remove the mass transit, and everything goes back to normal. 

 

If each Sim "tagged" a sink as he/she left home they would know before setting off where their job for the day was, likewise run the reciprocal at the end of the day. Then you would not have the "travel most of the way there to discover the sink has been filled, so try another sink on the other side of the map, oh that's been filled now too" problem that causes this.

 

Mass transit is the real flaw here, and from what I've experienced, it isn't even necessary. I've had cities 300k-600k population with no mass transit and no issues. But the problem stems from how worker agents get jobs and how mass transit works. There was a dev blog explaining how worker sims.. erm... work, awhile back. Finding a job for a sim is different than finding a home, where sims take the first home that has an open spot. Basically, workplaces send out a "ping" that looks for available workers. When it finds some, the workers take that "job" and it does actually hold that position for that sim. The worker then leaves to go to that job. If they don't arrive before the cut-off time, they get "fired" and head back home for the rest of the day and that job opening remains unfilled for the rest of that shift. (So sims actually won't ever drive to a job only to discover it's been filled.) 

 

If there is mass transit near, they'll get on the mass transit. But mass transit essentially works a bit randomly... as far as I can tell, it doesn't take sims where they want to go, per se. So they'll ride around somewhat randomly and hopefully the bus takes them close to where they need to go and they get off. More likely, though, is that they won't get to a stop they wanted to get to quickly enough and a good number of sims will end up fired each day. Those jobs won't get filled and you'll end up with sims out of work (while there remains unfilled jobs) and you'll have buildings without workers (despite being excess jobs). The other problem that I've seen happening is that sims will take mass transit to get to work---even if the job is within normal walk-to-work distance---if the mass transit is closer than job. I've seen this happen, first hand, and I was baffled. I suddenly had single HD commercial buildings surrounded by HD residential going abandoned from lack of workers and residential directly adjacent to HD commercial buildings unable to find work when there was a plethora of open jobs within walking distance. I removed the mass transit and it suddenly stopped happening. 

 

Street cars seem to be more effective, simply because you have much more limited routes and it increases the likelihood of the streetcar stopping at a stop they want to get to sooner, but the problem essentially remains. With either street cars or buses, the fewer the stops is more often than not better... but that just may be fewer problems arising from fewer sims using the mass transit.  

 

With a good traffic/road layout and well placed R/C/I layouts, you can get huge populations without any need for mass transit. 

 

If you aren't using mass transit, though... I'm not sure. 

[Yaffle 29]

Thanks

 

That makes a lot of sense. I always use mass transit (well, streetcars as buses just seem to cause worse traffic than not having them) because it "feels" like the thing to do and lots of sims use it. I couldn't see what was actually happening with it though, so this is helpful.

I often follow the streetcars around the city as a sort of random walk guided tour, and often I see that I have many streetcars going one stop (which could be one block) then switching sides and coming back one stop and repeating. Each time 200 Sims get on and off - could they really have wanted to catch a streetcar to go less than a block? If a Sim jumped on such a streetcar that then (s)he would never get to work. I have RCR in a block with a stop outside the C, and as you say most Sims get on the mass transit to go, well I don't know where.

I am not convinced about all of this, as I cannot seem to trace Sims through mass transit. By that I mean if John Doe gets on a tram and I follow the tram I cannot find John Doe ever getting off. It's as if that Sim is destroyed and recorded as a number on the tram and then a new SIm is spawned at the stop.

[12thDoctor 14]

I am not convinced about all of this, as I cannot seem to trace Sims through mass transit. By that I mean if John Doe gets on a tram and I follow the tram I cannot find John Doe ever getting off. It's as if that Sim is destroyed and recorded as a number on the tram and then a new SIm is spawned at the stop.

 

Yeah... that's exactly what happens. I recall seeing this discussed a few times before but my memory of exact details about what is happening and why it happens is a bit vague. I don't expect it will be ever "fixed" or changed, mainly due to technical restraints or complications, from my understanding. I think a large part of it had to with the memory and system resources. But the Sims in SC2013 are persistent... until they get on mass transit. I guess a certain amount of the sims' data isn't stored when sims get on mass transit and the stuff like their name and where they came from is lost... but I don't know if all of it is lost or if just some of it is. 

 

The part I am unsure about is if worker sim boards a mass transit vehicle with a specific destination/job/position in mind--the way that dev blog explained--then once they exit the mass transit, will there be a worker sim which still has the same job destination (but just a different name)?  (Now, I'm assuming that it remembers how many of the sims on board are workers/shoppers/tourists and then when it drops them off, recreates the same number of workers/shoppers/tourists, but I'm not even entirely sure about that either.) But say three workers get on a bus, Sim A going to Job 1, Sim B going to Job 2, Sim C going to Job 3.... when the bus drops them off, does it drop off three sims with the same destinations? One for Job 1, one for Job 2, one for Job 3? It's hard to know whether this part is still persistent because sims don't say "Going to work at so-and-so-specific-building-name," so you can't really be entirely sure. 

 

Maybe Guillaume or someone else from Maxis can chime in, here, and let us know how that works.