Zero demand for business

[steelgrey 0]

I built a city on a small sized tile, and it was very successful to start with and I had a lot of high wealth residents and businesses. I had started out with dirty industry and wanted to make my city cleaner so I gradually got rid of them in favor of high tech. Anyway my funds starting taking a nosedive and I realized it was mostly to do with traffic levels and the fact I hadn't planned a mass transit system from the start. The way the city was set up it was going to be very difficult to fit bus stops in, so I decided to start afresh and do it right. So I bulldozed the whole lot and set up my dream city. I set taxes to keep dirty industry away and set all other levels of tax to 0% in the hope of attracting residents and businesses in straight away. Well once I started the clock I noticed the RCI levels of commercial and industrial were at rock bottom, and residential very high. I decided to run it for a while and see what happened. In short the levels bottomed out and stayed there. I had placed parks everywhere and had all types of schools, large police and fire and a hospital, yet could not attract any businesses, not even low wealth. There is no crime, the air pollution is very light in only one corner of the city, water pollution is zero. 

So my question is, is the RCI bugged in any way, as I had a similar problem in another city I created, in the end deleting it.

I have read guides, hints and tips and so on and nothing helps me. No matter what I do, no matter how nice and clean I make the city and all the civics I have placed, the city is a failure.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Welcome to Simtropolis.

 

If you set all your tax levels to zero, how do you expect to get any income?  Your city will go broke and you will be promoted out of the game.

 

The RCI graphs only report the demand for the conditions in the game.  They are not broken.

 

To get ourselves onto a level playing field, your game should be at least at build level 638, preferably 640 or 641.  To find this out use windows explorer to find the file SimCity 4.exe then hover your mouse over it.  Report this please, and describe your machine.  If we don't know what we are talking about, it make is hard to help.

 

Looking forward to your next post.

[steelgrey 0]

Thanks for your reply. I set the levels to zero because I wanted the city to populate quickly. I actually had almost 6 million in cash as earnings from the city I bulldozed to build the new one. I did this because the original city had some serious design flaws with roads and transport, and I was tired of looking at it anyway as it was not that pretty. So I thought starting from scratch again, but taking a massive hit financially, might work if I could attract as many residents and businesses as possible. I was prepared to lose most of my money in the hope it might pay off. Then I was hit with the RCI levels bottoming out and staying there. Even residents were not interested. The city had every amenity and hundreds of parks, it was clean, had mass transit and carefully laid out roads, with no possibility of any dirty industry moving in, it had zero tax rates, yet nobody was interested.

Anyway I decided to scrap the whole lot and play a different region instead, and the RCI is behaving itself it seems.

Sad thing is now I don't think I can play it anymore as it crashes far too often for my liking and has already cost me quite a few hours in lost time. A patient and methodical laying out of a new city, running it for a while and adjusting and zoning to build it up and then suddenly I'm back on the desktop 

 

Edit- I have checked and it seems I am on version 1.1.641.0 I am using some building plugins for growable buildings, the NAM mod and RCI query mod tool.

Computer is an i950, 6gb RAM and a 7970, 64bit Win 7 Premium

  Edited January 23, 2014 by steelgrey  

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Well, if you invoke the single core option you will be much better off with respect to desktop crashes.  Win 7 runs the game well, and if you take regular internal saves (CTRL+s) you will avoid many of the crashes that seem to be caused by excessive program garbage not being collected.  Here is the full text of the article on command line (target) options.  You may have to register to read this at SC4Devotion.  Registration is free and it is a safe site.  The option you need is -CPUCount:1

 

I do a save every time I've done something I don't want to do over, or about every 10 minutes or so.

 

If you leave the game running on its own it won't crash very often.  It is the loose nut holding on the keyboard that seems to cause most crashes, so saves are kind of necessary when you are building. 

 

As a matter of interest, I left the game running in my sandbox earlier today (actually overnight) in a background desk top because I forgot about it.  It was still running this morning so that means it chuckled away to itself all night.  Because it was a sandbox test, I had used the moolah command to set the treasury to a very high number, and this had almost run out when I switched to it this morning.  One of the advantages of the Unity Desktop in Ubuntu is that you can have as many desktops as you like.  I have four.  Currently, only this one is active, but sometimes when I am running my system monitor I have had as many as three open at a time.

 

The current wine decor I am running is Windows 7 on this account.  In my alter ego account the wine decor is XP.  It doesn't seem to make much difference.

[Prophet42 1,503]

For your original issue, have you played any other city tiles in your region?  If you had any connections to neighbors, that helps demand by 'tying' it with the region demand.  If you did not restore your neighbor connections in the redesigned city then you will have reduced the commercial demand for that tile.  If you restore any neighbor connections, the commercial demand should bounce back.  To spur growth try planting trees in the undeveloped zones or put in some mass transit stops.

[infamousjbe 593]

 

 

Well, if you invoke the single core option you will be much better off with respect to desktop crashes.  Win 7 runs the game well, and if you take regular internal saves (CTRL+s) you will avoid many of the crashes that seem to be caused by excessive program garbage not being collected.  Here is the full text of the article on command line (target) options.  You may have to register to read this at SC4Devotion.  Registration is free and it is a safe site.  The option you need is -CPUCount:1

^this, or you can just use the SC4 launcher () to take care of the command line prompts and auto saves in intervals that you set. Much easier for non tech individuals like myself. 

 

Been using the launcher since returning to SC4 last year and have had no issue with it so far. Writing the command line prompts are finicky if you don't set it up exactly right. 

 

(OffTopic: I've noticed most advise using the command line prompt instead of the launchers. Is there a particular reason for not suggesting the launcher in cases like these?? Not that it's highly important, but more for self understanding.)

 

On top of that, did you actually just delete everything in the original city and start over, or did you actually start from a fresh (never used) region/city tile?   I wouldn't suggest starting over on a city tile you've already spent time on then drastically alter the taxes (shouldn't adjust more than 0.3% at a time) after deleting the city (actual city, not city tile on the region) itself.  The simulation has already progressed in demands and stages, you wouldn't actually be starting from scratch just by deleting a city and starting over. You've most likely threw the simulation into a tizzy if you used that method of starting over.

 

Another note about your original post. You mentioned you replaced a significant amount of I-D to I-HT, correct?  Be aware that I-HT has a bug that doesn't properly employ R$$$ sims, only increases the demand for R$$$. To remedy this situation, you'll want to apply the I-HT Bug Fix mod so you're I-HT will indeed employ your R$$$

 

I-HT bug fix:   Make sure to stick to the instruction to the tee in order to get the fix to work properly. This will entail using the Dat Packer program apply the fix.

Dat Packer: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=26

[steelgrey 0]

Hi guys and thanks for all your replies I appreciate them all. Anyway I got quite fed up after the crash I mentioned and didn't play the game after that. Instead I bought the 2013 version and have been playing on that instead. Once again thank you.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Come back in a couple of months when you get bored.