Satisfying low wealth commercial demand

[Beo 0]

Hello, I am new to this forum, so I hope I post this in the right place.

 

I play vanilla simcity4 and have a city of 117000 sims and there is highest demand for low wealth commercial services. I want to satisfy it. Other commecrial demands are low. Checked the map for desirability, it is green everywhere. So I zoned a low density commercial zone. I excepted a low wealth commecrial boom. But the months passed and nothing happened. It takes many months to see commercial buildings in the new zone, and most of them aren't low wealth. I continued to zone, and now I control a city with a huge commercial district full of middle and high wealth commercial buildings, some of them abandoned, and almost no low wealth commercial buildings. What I am doing wrong, why I can't satisfy low wealth?

 

_{Note: Topic moved to appropriate forum.}

_-jmsepe

[Compdude787 916]

There seems to be almost unlimited demand for Low-wealth commercial services in this game. You will never fully satisfy demand, trust me.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Hm, depends. I found that many BATs have too low occupant settings. By 'too low' I mean too low compared to Maxis stuff, of course. Maxis has ridculously high occupant numbers, with a small 1x2 shoebox store employing as many as 30-75 people! Apparently many BAT artists were reluctant to set their BATs accordingly, so especially if you're using many BATs, you can easily find yourself faced with seemingly unlimited CS§ demand.

 

On the other hand, there are a few bigger CS§ / CS§§ BATs out there that can help satisfy demand.

 

The problem inherent to the game is that as long as there is demand for higher-wealth buildings and the desirability conditions of available commercial zones are good enough, the game will tend to build higher-wealth stuff. There's really not that much you can do, except perhaps for zoning low-density commercial in areas that are not very desirable

[Beo 0]

Thank you, I managed to solve it. I avoided watering the zone.

[Shark7 118]

If you are using custom BATs in game, then NIMBY lots are another option to lower the desirability of an area and attract lower wealth residential and commercial growth.

 

One thing I do is to pause the game occasionally and be sure to check 'Make Historic' on the lower wealth buildings, as this prevents them from growing into higher wealth buildings.

[madhatter106 3,912]

Hm, depends. I found that many BATs have too low occupant settings. By 'too low' I mean too low compared to Maxis stuff, of course. Maxis has ridculously high occupant numbers, with a small 1x2 shoebox store employing as many as 30-75 people! Apparently many BAT artists were reluctant to set their BATs accordingly, so especially if you're using many BATs, you can easily find yourself faced with seemingly unlimited CS§ demand.

 

I would say that I am guilty of this - I expect that a lot of my earlier stuff has really low occupancy, though I would say it's less a matter or reluctance to do so and more of a lesser understanding of how Maxis scaled their numbers.  I should go back and tweak the numbers, but it wouldn't be fun... 

[T Wrecks 10,210]

I'll have to take a look at my plugins folder. The thing is, being a total control freak, not a single file goes into my plugins folder before I have checked and, if necessary, tweaked it. So if your earlier BATs really did suffer from low occupant numbers, chances are I have tweaked versions flying around somewhere, which I could send you via PM.

 

@Beo: I wasn't sure if that worked for commercial as well. I knew it can be used to force industry to lower density and residential to low density and (mostly) low wealth. I should really play some SC4 again... Anyway, it's good to know that leaving out the water supply works for commercial as well, and even better to hear that you succeeded in overcoming this problem! Shark7's hint is also good. Since the game tends to replace buildings by "better" (i.e. bigger and/or wealthier) counterparts, making those that you want to keep historical is always a good idea.

[Turjan 1,048]

With low level stuff, firing up PIM-X and having it recompute the numbers takes very little time. But given madhatter's enormous productivity, any changes - and uploading them again - sound like lots of work.

[cogeo 960]

You can find some answers in some of my old posts and Unfortunately the imageshack site has changed its policies since then, The buildings look small but the arrangement is actually quite dense and the jobs per tile ratio compares to much taller buildings. You will be surprised to see how many CS$ jobs you can cram in how little space.. As for "realism"? Well, everyone knows that the SC4 building collection is poor, and BATters in general don't like making CS$ BATs (they mostly prefer CO$$ and CO$$$). Personally I would gladly make some, but I have lost my interest in SC4, changed the computer and haven't install SC4+tools (yet), Let's hope that some BATters make such BATs too. At least 4-5 are required, to get some variety. And of course their stats (particularly number of jobs, growth stage and building value) must be in line with the Maxis ones, and grow on lots of the same size.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Well, with SimGoober's RLS shops and NIMBY packs as well as madhatter's collecion of CS§ stuff, there's actually a good range of CS§ BATs by now - you just need to fix the numbers.

 

By the way, I have checked my files, and I have indeed modified many of the earlier low-wealth packs. The thing is, I have also translated the query UIs, so updating the files would require taking out the building exemplar from the tweaked files and replacing its counterpart in the original file using iLive's reader. It's not just a matter of using Windows Explorer to overwrite some files in a folder.

[Metalpuritan 160]

There are some decent C$ sponges out there, also keep in mind too that C$$ and C$$$ biuldings ALSO employ C$ just not as much as a dedicated C$ building does.  You could conceivably have a city with nothing but C$$$ and still have R$ working there.

 

This guy right here has a HUGE capacity for C$, be careful though, this lot or should say, these two lots create a massive amount of garbage, they could easily fill up 20+ tiles of landfill all on their own.

 

There are other great sponges too for C$, just go to the STEX here and in the search box type "mall" and there are 5 or so pages of mixed results but many of those results are decent C$ sponges.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I don't worry about this item.  I've had it happen once or twice by accident, and just glossed over it with a "Isn't that interesting". 

 

I lay down C low density lots quite a bit at the beginning of a new city, in fact they are the first things I zone because you need jobs for Sims.  And, sometimes I lay them down in big blocks. 

 

Mostly what I do with single occupancy C is lay them out in retail plazas in the middle of a big residential area.  These are sometimes referred to as strip malls, but if I do that, I generally put in a large anchor high-density 6 x 6 to get one of the big shopping centres.

[Metalpuritan 160]

In my rural areas I use 2X4 zones to bring out the flea markets.  I usually surround my State Fair reward with the, and then place a HUGE parking lot very close by and then surround the entire area with single grass tiles and lots of trees then zone for residential near by and then surround it all in farm land with a single or double tile width of trees between the farms to simulate hedgerows.  You can find this set-up quit frequently in my rural city tiles.