Unemployment Test

[SirTokalot 0]

I set up a city on a medium map with a mix of RCI on each 6x6 block like this...



Everything was running perfectly. Then I saved and exited the game. I opened it back up and there it was like a plague. No Job Zots randomly all over my neighborhoods.

Here is a shot of my commute graph...



As you can see, it went up some. Not much but it did increase. I do have a few of the homemade mods installed, but this is clearly a bug. I''d like for someone else to try this same experiment and let me know what happens. My test city has No neighbor connections, but it is connected to sim nation from the west and the south. With a mixture of industry and commercial on each residential block, there should be 0 unemployment. Everything is a nice well balanced assortment of $, $$, and $$$, so I cannot see what the problem is.

[SirTokalot 0]

I went back to try another test that someone in live chat mentioned.(sorry I forget who mentioned it) The test was to relay the roads to see if that helps with commute times. I relayed every road in the city and instead of making commute times better, it made them worse. It went from 12 minutes straight up to 16 minutes. I also noticed that while the buildings were being abandoned and unemployment grew the population kept increasing until it hit a little over 19k. My well balanced city of $, $$, and $$$ was quickly becoming mostly $. The population was bouncing between 15-19k too. every couple of sim months it would fluctuate 4-5k sims.

On top of commute times increasing after my first game save I also noticed the crime increased and the education decreased. Probably due to the mass abandonment and all the new $ sims that flocked in.

To summarize, the city was beautiful and growing strong until I saved my game. After returning to the game it was all but destroyed. Does anyone else think it could be something in the game save that does it? Please reply if you have any comments on this.

[Gr Moff Matt 0]

Does the fact that you have spread out your industrial zones make pollution more bearable?

Anyway i had a similar problem:

I had a brilliant city, 75k population, 3 landmarks, loads of decent rewards and well educated and high health system.

Then i decided to try a city on my own without the patch (i knew i'd fail anyway ), so i uninstalled everything but the commute patches, the others i kept as i needed the school and clinic patch. Anyway, i went back into the game and decided to see what my 75k city would be like, i forgot that i uninstalled the traffic patch, and i watched my city collapse! Even though i installed the traffic patch again, my city still wouldn't recover.

[SirTokalot 0]

Actually spreading the industry out like that made pollution even worse until I activated my clean air ordinance that kills the pollution.

[Dr_ExK 0]

hi sirtokalot,

 

I guess I'm more interested in this prob than anyone else, and thank you so much for trying out a mixed city

 

Many mayors look at the query box and quick to conclude that a no-job zot is due to long commute as soon as they see a 'long'. However, I've long suspected that no job is caused by the interplay of path finding bug and another bug.

 

By assuming that it's primarily caused by long commute, we risk jumping into a wrong conclusion.

 

I suggest that everyone comes back to the drawing board and focus on one simple city (like the one by sirtokalot or myself, in which jobs are so commonplace that commute time can't possibly be a problem.)

 

I've also tried to 'relay' roads according to Tropod's suggestion - and it didn't work for my city.

 

I hope this thread will attract some interest. As the direction some experiments are headed might be a dead end if the participants are oblivious to this issue.

 

Of course, that's just my opinion

 

[Dr_ExK 0]

oh yeah, just wanna say that I've exactly the same problem .

[Abby Normal 0]

What size map was this done on? I'd be inclined to think that the commute time shouldn't be involved since at 16 minutes it would definitely not cause any no-job zots, unless possibly a small percentage of the population couldn't get to work and most of them had a commute time under 16 (so it would average out). It probably has something to do with the way it recalculates everything from a save game, I would suspect the reason is for regional play. Although in doing this it does seem to wreak havoc with a city the first year or two after you load a saved city.

 

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by relaying roads, can you describe that?

[Dr_ExK 0]

hi abby,

 

I've high respect for your work, and 7trumpet's (among other new participants whose names I've recklessly forgotten for the time being)

 

'relaying road' is just one trick suggested by Tropod. Where no job zots show up, Tropod suggested that we re-lay (as in, lay again) the roads in front of the them. The trick didn't work for me.

 

This no job zots problem seems to be the most severe when you reload a city that was fine when you saved it.

[the7trumpets 10]

Thanks for the compliment

 

I'll throw my 2 cents in on my observations of "no-job" and "no-car" zots:

 

No-car zots:

 

They seem to appear when there is no road transportation tile (highway, road, or street) adjacent to any part of the lot.  Contrary to common belief, it does not matter which way the arrow is facing, that is purely for the graphical representation.  The pathfinding engine can hop on to any highway, road, or street that is adjacent to any part of the lot.  The only other instance that they appear is when the nearest job is more than two hours commute time away from the residential zone in the same city.  I have not yet determined what the "limit" for inter-city commuting is, if there is one.  It's still a little up in the air how it calculates commute time for travel between multiple regions.

 

No-Job zots:

 

They appear when one of two things happen.  First, if there are simply not enough jobs for the "working" age citizens (some unknown age range, probably about 20 to 60).  In this case, no job zots appear at the "furthest" (by birds flight) residential plots from the available jobs.  This is difficult to see if you have jobs zoned in more than one area, but very easy to see if you have no jobs in that city, and all sims commute to a neighbor.  Secondly, if there are enough jobs, but because of some combination of traffic causing slow down on the roads, and high population centers near the jobs taking up all the available jobs in that area, a no-job zot may appear on the residential plot.

 

This is difficult to explain, so I'll try to illustrate, but as we all know, abby is much better at this than I

 

 

In this example, there are some instances when it seems that R2 takes the jobs at I 1, leaving I 2 too far away from R1 for R1 to take the jobs at I 2.  This means that even though you have enough jobs for the city, and all of them are within reachable distance of residential zones (R1 could work at I 1 and R2 at I 2), some of the I plots may never develop (I 2), or may go abandoned becaues the sims that 'could' commute there (R2) are instead working at closer jobs to thier house (I 1), causing no job zots for the sims (R 1) who can only work at those jobs (I 1) close the R2 houses.

 

 

I hope all of that makes sense, and this has not been difinitively proven, it's just what I've obseved in uncontrolled situations.

[Dr_ExK 0]

hi 7trumpet,

as I've not experimented with region play, the validity of my comment is only valid for a standalone, mixed city:

(i) car zots:

I've never had a problem with this bug. They appear all the time, but after the zones have been developed, they disappeared. The car zots bug is almost insignificant compared to the jobless zots.

(ii) jobless zots:

Your insights are all very valid, but definitely don't explain the situations of our cities. Our cities have very very low traffic volume. My city had an average commute time of 35 (sirtokalot's is 12+), and the traffic overlay was completely green. I also had some undeveloped zones very close to the jobless zots. But they simply wouldn't develop.

Also, the problem seems to strike suddenly and instantly just after a city is reloaded, as you can observed on sirtokalot's city.

of course we've taken care of other stuff, like power, water, schools, parks, hospitals, police, etc etc (they are almost a yawn to mention now ....)

[RalphaelNinja 244]

Dr_Exk,

I've started another post related to this
https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=33756

Ralphael

[Sharr 6]

I'd say that you are seeing more pollution overall because your traffic is not focused. I would bet that if you built a grid of transportation islands and filled them with trees that the pollution would decrease significantly. But that's a great commute time. Even at a huuuuge 16 minutes.

[Dr_ExK 0]

hi sharr,

 

what is 'a grid of transportation islands' ???

 

 

 

[Sharr 6]

The transportation island is a concept developed by MayorHomer a couple of months back. It is a 1-tile wide strip used to put buses and subways on it. You have one every block or couple of blocks. The remaining space on the strip should be filled with trees or grass with trees to reduce pollution. I've seen great success at reducing traffic pollution by using those.

[SirTokalot 0]

Sorry I haven't followed up on this, but I restored my .dat file after some modifications and then remodded some stuff and now my game setup is completely different. I have noticed something in one of my newer cities though. After applying toroca's industry mod (the one that triples jobs) I have noticed a lot less no job zots. Infact, I have a city of almost 400,000 sims on a medium map and there is like 2 maybe 3 zots in the whole city. I have 2 neighboring cities. 1 is almost self sufficient with about 200,000 sims and the other one is mainly Industry and Commercial with about 70,000 low and medium Residential. Like I said though, my game is custom modded and that could be the main reason for the success with little or no no job zots.

[Dr_ExK 0]

is the use of mod able to shed a light on the cause of the bug?

[Tim 0]

Hey I read most of all of this post I have the same problem my commute is medium the zots apeear losty on my $$ i put jobs right next to them with decent demand and they still go abandon within a fwew minutes. The $ will take over, but I saw somethin that interested me on this post you all metioned a commute, and road patch where can i get that? Is it by maxes or some 1 else?

[Sharr 6]

Tim,

It's one of the various mods available in the mods section. To be honest, it may be easier to just get Larsz's SCEdit and tweak the transportation speeds since there were complaints about the initial modpack.

[Tim 0]

ok thx is this cheating? I dont want to cheat if it is lol

[Sharr 6]

only if this is a competition.

[Tim 0]

[Tim 0]

Ok i got the program and installed it i run it which has a black screen I push Open .dat then i pushed Open Locale.  Some data came up with no numbers filled in, i know no numbers not suppose to be filled in. I go to transportation like you said, and I see Speed, walk, car, buss etc going vertically, and sreet, road, highway etc going horizontal.  All I wanted to no is how do I no the correct numbers im suppose to put in them? is it ok to give me your numbers you put in them or it depends on your city?  I need some help tweaking the transportation.  This program doesnt come with a readme or anything how to use.  Anything that will help me I greatly  appreciate it.

[Sharr 6]

I suggest doubling the walking speed and upping the car speed slightly. About 30 to 50% more on car speed is my modest suggestion, so that you don't kill your commercial areas.

[Bakuku 0]

yeap, same problem here!
I have this city with a population of a 130 thousand (my pride and joy), everything was perfect until i saved the game . Next day when i started it again...there it was, almost the whole city was unemployed!
There's definately a bug somewhere of even a virus, who knows.
Hope someone out there can provide us a patch to fix the problem, otherwise, what's the point to keep on playing it right?
regards

[louisville327 0]

Wow, a full year and a half!

[skallben 21]

at least he searched the forums

[Yajimari21 0]

wow... this was long dead...

[Dolfan348488 0]

Woohoo...well cant complain....at least he didnt make a new thread

[Superchan 23]

i think some people don't use the search becuase when they do they post on an old topic and get yelled at.

[ForcedRegistration 0]

Hello anyone/everyone,

What is the status of the "unemployment bug" which occurred and caused rampant neighborhoods of unemployment whenever a save game was loaded? Entire blocks would go vacant, and the system would never reach the equilibrium that existed previously.

I had asked this question in the chat, and the persons there had no idea about what I was talking. So it's apparently fixed. Was this in an official patch by the company or one by a group that was working on the problem unofficially (called the "ModdSquad")?

I know this sounds like an outlandish question, but I haven't played SimCity4 since Summer2004, when I got so frustrated with aforementioned bug that I started playing SimCity3 instead.