No job zots

[andix 33]

Hi everyone,

 

after some time i started again playing sc4. In the new region i built a city (and still building it) with 408 000 residents. But now i get always 3 R$$ buildings abandoned and reocuppied. And when i let some R$ develop the same happens with this new buildings. 

The city has 208 000 R$, 140 000 R$$ and 60 000 R$$$. 220 000 Commercial jobs and 85 000 industrial jobs (I-HT bugfix installed). There is only one small purely industrial city in the neighbourhood with 50 000 additional  industrial jobs. So there is a high excess of jobs and the census repository vault says 160 000 vacant jobs in the city. No surprise there is a huge demand for all residential wealth-types and no demand for CO$$ and CO$$$ and some demand for I-HT.

Here is the city and the buildings at the left bank of the river marked which change their status from occupied to abandonend in monthly periods. I had the same problem with various R$$$ buildings all over the city, but when i increased the I-HT-jobs this problem was fixed. The R$$-problem still persists. But there should be no problem with R$$$ at all because before the increase of I-HT jobs there were already 120 000 vacant jobs.

 

I have latest NAM (no congestion problems) and a really dense network of all sorts of public transportation (subway, bus, GLR, monorail). For a real city it would be way too dense so i will and cannot build more, this would be absurd.

Any ideas what could be the reason?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You don't have enough Sims.  Try increasing the lower ranks.  The general rule is 2 Sims per job, and you are quite short.

 

By my calculations you need 610,000 Sims not including the demand from the external city.  Try adding some R$ lots to the external city, and beef up the others in the main city.  The ratio of R$$$ is around 15% which is correct.  Trust the Census Repository, it is usually right.

[andix 33]

Hi Nonny Moose,

 

yes, thats's the whole point. I have a lot more jobs than sims. There should never be "no job zots" because of the masses of jobs. I have a dense traffic system so all sims should reach the jobs in short commute times (and this is the case for nearly all residential buildings in the city with the exception of every new R$$ building i add). When i try to add for example a single R$$-building immediately comes the no job zot over this building. It gets abandoned but because of the high demand it gets reoccupied, then again abandoned and so on.

When the city had 380 000 residents i had the same problem with R$- buildings (not with R$$ and R$$$). So i stopped adding R$ although their proportion was 55% (not too much) and begun adding some R$$ and R$$$.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You really are out of balance.  The 2 Sims per job is one of the key ratios built into the game.  Maybe your problem is that you don't have enough lower ranks to fill the lower rank jobs in your C$$$ buildings.  Remember, there have to be enough R$ for those buildings to hire janitors, clerks, copy machine operators, mail boys, etc.  Generally speaking a CO$$$ building will have as many as three or four R$$$ jobs.  The rest will be R$$ and R$.

 

On any building, if you have the extra cheats dll loaded, you can see what the dispersion of jobs in a building is.  Activate the query operator (/) then hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and move the query operator over the building (don't click).  This is a debugging aid, but I have found it quite useful at times.

[Lennson 7]

You may want to check that your utility buildings (schools, hospitals, power plants, etc.) have the appropriate numbers of employees.

 

I've found that sometimes these buildings become unreachable to the routing even though they are next to a road. I've seen this happen the most when placed adjacent to avenues.

 

I don't know why but filling these jobs appears to takes priority and so residential buildings try to route them, fail and then abandon even when there are lots of other easily reachable jobs.

 

 

This may not be what's causing your problem but it is one way to have no job zots even with lots of easily reachable jobs.

[Andersen 7]

Just by looking at the photo, Nonny Moose is right. You don't have enough Sims to fulfill the job requirements for all your CO towers. I used to think that having all the no job zots meant that the game is broken, then after tons of trial and error they are a good indicator for an imbalanced job market. You can have too many Sims and to few jobs. Or you can also have to few Sims and too many of kinds of certain jobs. If you have a high demand for commercial service type jobs, it really helps to fulfill that demand as well. If can you design your city around a balanced workforce, you'll have a happy city.

[Mister Giggles 310]

It could be a lack of sims, though not for the reasons mentioned. Sims and their cars produce traffic noise.

 

Commercial offices and services have a variable amount of jobs available based on how many customers/traffic they're getting. If a huge commercial office has low customers, it is going to offer far fewer jobs than it should. Other factors such as air pollution also alter the number of real jobs the building is offering. Using the advanced query function of the SimCity 4 Extra Cheats Plugin.dll will tell you the true number of jobs the building offers for each residential wealth level.

 

Another possibility is that you actually don't have enough jobs. Check the demands category in the Census Repository. If your actual number of sims in a given wealth category exceeds the demands the city's jobs create, then you don't have enough jobs for everyone.

 

Yet another possibility is that the game is unable to figure out a way to route those residential buildings to enough jobs. The game does not - and cannot - figure out a job for each sim in every building. It does routing in chunks, and how big these chunks are depends on what already exists in the city. In short, if you don't have enough free jobs in a given building somewhere, then that residential building is out of luck regardless of how many actual free jobs exist.

 

The game also does not handle large outlying residential areas well (Explaining this in detail would take a while), which just adds to the above issues. Your best bet in this case is to just add a commercial sector right near the abandoning areas. This is a trick Nonny has mentioned a few times, as well.

 

It could also be a network issue. Add in subways if you haven't. Subways extend the range of the traffic simulator when it looks for jobs.

[andix 33]

Thanks for all the replies.

The Census Repository says that the city drives 280 000 R$$, so there are twice as many jobs in the city for R$$ as the actual number of R$$. The jobs are there.

I plopped an office tower near the three buildings and two of them are now "stable" with short commute times. But that's absurd, because the big CBD is so close to them that this should not be necessary. The residential areas in the right and upper corner of the city are far away from the CBD and there are no problems with too long commute times.