Demand messed up

[MintberryCrunch 83]

Can anyone tell me what's gone wrong with my RCI demand?

 

For some reason, all my cities in one region have the same demand, that looks like this:

 

 

I have no demand mods; I did recently install the new NAM, if that has anything to do with it. I noticed it happening not long after I installed it.

 

So all my offices are dilapidating and mansions are popping up everywhere. What could be causing it?

[crishy 57]

Did you recently plop buildings with lots of commercial jobs? Or created or zoned a lot of commercial? Maybe you created too many commercial jobs and hence demand dropped accordingly.

 

I seriously doubt NAM has anything to do with that. The Radical Ordinance's Crime Does Not Pay sometimes results in sunk residential demand, but never seen it affect commercial.

[Prophet42 1,500]

Demand is region wide for any cities connected together.  Just looking at the demand graph it looks like you over-zoned commercial.  You need to zone more industrial and residential.  You could also try converting some of the commercial into either residential or industrial.  Also, bulldoze and abandoned commercial buildings to see if you can get more CS$$ to grow.  However you will have to mark them historical to prevent them from re-developing into C$$$ and then becoming abandoned again.  The simulator seems to favor higher wealth buildings.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

I guess I'm just confused because, if I overzoned commercial, how come Cs$$ demand is so high? I just tested it in one of the cities; I put a big square of high-density commercial zones, and within no time at all, the whole block started growing medium-wealth commercial services. 

[crishy 57]

Well that is the beauty of random growable buildings.

 

What is the population of the region? Lower population regions tend to be more affected by wilder fluctuations in the RCI.

 

Also I avoid decreasing taxes to stimulate specific sectors from coming, my experience is that it messes up demand really bad afterwards.

[Lennson 7]

There is a possibility that NAM caused the demand change.

 

Changing the traffic model changes the amount of traffic noise, which is used calculate the customers desirability value for commercial.

 

This is mentioned in the Traffic/Customers section of, http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Understanding_the_Traffic_Simulator#Customers.2FTraffic_Noise_Coefficient.

Note: Commercial offices were found to be most affected.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

The population of the region is 1,041,000 or so.

 

And thanks, I have some things to look into; I had a different traffic simulator before I installed the new NAM, so I'll see if that has anything to do with it. 

[MintberryCrunch 83]

Okay, so it looks like the problem is due to traffic. Look at the congestion on this town I started recently that only has a population of 15,000:

 

 

It was never like that before! It was almost all green except for a few roads by the border on the right (which is a much bigger city).

[crishy 57]

Commercials love traffic though, never had any commercials leaving because of high traffic unless I had a ton of pollution from that traffic.

 

Changes in traffic simulation may affect desirability but not RCI at least not from what I have experimented with.

 

What is the amount of commercial jobs region wide? You can use the Census Repository to get a very quick detailed breakdown of these jobs by sector.

 

In any case zoning residentials seems to be the best response to that RCI swing. High pollution from traffic may be countered with transit stops.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

How is your balance of Sims to Jobs?  Remember is should be 2:1.

 

The heavy congestion on some of the neighbour connections could indicate a deadly commuter loop.  Put some toll gates on them.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Is the tile you showed us an image of connected at the corner to two other towns? And are they connected to each other as well, or a fourth city?

If so, consider blowing up connections. You may have generated eternal commuters, a phenomena where commuters continuously and forever travel in a circle around these three/four towns and wreck their economies.

 

This explains the matter visually: https://simtarkus.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/cam-1-0-manual.pdf

 

Search for "Eternal commuters".

[MintberryCrunch 83]

^Yeah, I know there are some issues with eternal commuters and that's something I'd like to fix.

 

Either way, I fixed the traffic issue; it seems to have been because I hadn't properly configured the NAM traffic simulator; after setting it, the excessive red and orange all over every city has gone down. 

 

But I still haven't been able to do anything about the demand. Every time I open a city, mansions and high-wealth apartments appear everywhere, office demand is still at rock bottom and medium-wealth commercial services show up everywhere. 

[crishy 57]

Traffic has nothing to do with the global RCI demand - I do have both eternal commuters in a number of cities and high traffic in specific places and they only affect demand for zones in that location.

 

If your new R$$$ (or any other residential) are able to get jobs then I suspect your problem is simply too many commercials. The solution is to keep zoning residentials.

 

The only problems are:

 

1) Zoning too far from the job locations (that may occur when you fully segregate commerials and residentials into different neighborhoods) in which case you might have to mix zones a little bit.

2) Making sure you have a good balance of different residential wealths. You can make medium and high density residentials R$ and R$$ historical to prevent them from being replaced by R$$$ later. Excess R$$$ can be demolished and hopefully replaced by poorer residents.

 

The Census Repository again can be used to see how many residents of each wealth category you have in both any specific city and region wide.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The answer to high-wealth mansions at the beginning of a game is to disallow them by zoning.  Don't use the default click/hold zoning for low density as this allows the game to consolidate lots into 3 x 3 and 4 x 4 lots to grow mansions.  Zone manually instead using the control key to lay down blocks of 2 x 1 instead of 1 x 2 R.  This means that there are streets only two grid squares apart, but so what?  Once you have a few 2 x 1 low density R lots built, you can freely zone 1 x 1 R which doesn't grow below level 3.

 

By today's standards the default lot sizes in this game are enormous, and apply only to affluent areas.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

^Thanks, yeah, one of the cities in question has huge blocks filled with low-density residential and they were all turning into mansions and limiting the population in the area. 

 

Also, I will try and get the Census Repository installed and see what it says.

 

I'm just curious about when the scales tipped; unfortunately since I can't remember, it's hard to say what ultimately caused the "flip". A recent city I started that now has a population of 95,000 is loaded with commercial offices; so not that long ago office demand was high region-wide, then something happened, and now it's as low as it can be. It's that "something happened" that I'm curious about. Because it happened rather abruptly.