Industrial Job Quirks

[sys12189 21]

First of all, I'm skeptical about this being an effect of mods (both the ones made by myself just for me, or something bigger like the I-HT fix), because this happened even before I actually got around to doing/downloading mods, although I can't rid the chance completely. Only the NAM was installed when I first found it, and as I grew industrial complexes the problem became much more noticeable until I decided to post.

If you don't like long text, skip the black ink... er... pixels of writing and just look at the pics and the bottom paragraph.

 

This was something that was observed a long time ago, but I found that some of my industrial buildings only had freight trucks going out of them. I thought that this was because of an overflow of jobs or something about traffic, except for the fact that I was following the 2:1 ratio and the Census Repository Facility showed I had 300K vacant jobs in my 3.5 mil region. Then I looked at the traffic and this is what I found: (perhaps because this side is close to my main city: pop count of 2.1 million)

 

AFAIK 4,543 jobs for Havoc Bioenactments or whatever it is, is about 90 times more than my modded capacity (47). I checked it up using the extended query, and it showed 53:301:44 (total 398), which I think is viable IF you count all the outbuilding lots between the motorway and the power line..... but still, 4543 is more than ten times even that. It's not always that building, but SOME building always has employment in the thousands range when it's clearly not supposed to.

 

On the other side of the Tech Center where there's no neighboring city, factories are swatting flies.

 

although I think it is related to the commute time issue a little, the real quirk isn't the swatting flies part, but the extremely dense workplace part. If sims really can't get to a specific spot to work, than jobs should not grow there (and I believe this is what actually happens.... maybe I'm wrong). The closer workplaces should hire only those 400-ish people, and the others should walk in the streets unemployed. Instead everyone hops on to Havoc Bioenactments thingy until it holds thousands.

About 2 blocks from the no commuting pic (you can even see one at the corner) there are subway lines with bus stops close by. Bus usage is like 50. They simply get off the subway and walk to their business.

 

After running a few game months, this difference becomes more and more evident. 9135 commuters close to the toll booth, 0 commuters at the other side.

 

In a nut shell, I'll abbreviate the problems to this. Is this supposed to happen?? (If not, is it something that I can smile over the irony, or some big bug that will later force me to reinstall something?)

  Edited September 5, 2015 by sys12189  

[Mister Giggles 310]

I like you. You have a tremendous curiosity about how this game works.

SimCity 4 is able to merge/unmerge industrial buildings for routing purposes as the game's engine deems appropriate. What you're seeing is not 4,543 sims working at Havoc Bioenactments, but 4,543 sims working at the entire industrial "complex". I only came to understand this phenomena within the last year, myself.

Jobs do not take into consideration whether or not they can be filled. As long as demand exists, the area is desirable, and other requirements met, buildings will grow like Mongol hordes out of an avalanche. It is entirely possible to fill your city with 10 million, mostly unfilled jobs.

What you're observing is normal behavior for the simulator.

You'll want to look at the "Drives" numbers in the Census Repository Facility for determining how much of what the city can sustain by the buildings existing within it. It's only important for residentials, as they'll start leaving the city to look for work, or abandoning, if their drives are exceeded.

There's a problem with the drives numbers, however, in your game: You changed the census numbers with your patch. The Census Repository Facility's calculations are written assuming vanilla census drive numbers, so you're going to get slightly off numbers for drives.

  Edited September 5, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[sys12189 21]

However, even if you say that the commuters are for the industrial 'zone', I'm still approximating about 500 jobs in that block, and the blocks close to the big city borders does have its share of commuters(usually 50~800 tho. 50 is very lacking for one block, 800 is just about full ) Does that mean that the other 4000 / 8500 people are supposed to be working somewhere else but became routed there instead of the other jobs in different places (ie. the second pic zone)?

PS: I usually look at the total drives and the vacant jobs only. I looked in the CRF file with ilives reader but I'm not such a tech gizmo that I could figure out where exactly it got its code from(if game_trend is from simcity dats I'm in a problem, if it's from region/city saves it's good to go), but AFAIK at least total jobs / vacant jobs / residential pop count is working properly, since these are getting added from the city file or whatever it is. I usually do my own wealth ratios. About 60-30-10 ~~ 50-40-10 region-wide seems to strike a balance(meaning I have some cities/sections like Beverly Hills and others like Harlem and get the ratio right  ), and I never had problems with no job zots.

I get some connection zots tho(usually when I re-urbanize/develop new squares)... funny thing is that good ol' Reed Place (~1800) had no problem getting all its jobs and after demolishing that the Cape cod houses(~50 pop total) says they have traffic problems. My region has the jobs. Sims just don't want to go to work, others that do all sign up for one crammy little building (or square). Great job making sense.

  Edited September 5, 2015 by sys12189  

[Mister Giggles 310]

That gigantic block of industrial buildings looks to contain many more jobs than just 500...

The Census Repository Facility has its census drives formulas contained in several exemplar files, such as instance 58276345. These formulas confuse me completely.

SimCity 4 has to split its CPU cycles between maintaining what already exists, and expanding the city. When many new buildings grow in a large city, the game may not actually get those buildings connected to the road system before they abandon. Yes, that seems to be an odd design decision. This is why Reed Place does dandy, and all your Cape Cod houses don't.

  Edited September 5, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[sys12189 21]

Only 398 jobs are allotted to that specific block(between highway and power pole), as checked by the extended query. Of course the large blocks by the edge will contain much more than 500, but I'm pretty sure anchor lots don't accept jobs from buildings across roads or power lines or even empty space; they are supposed to be separate. Usually a 'complete' block like the one on the right can have about a thousand. I modded the capacities respectively so that each growth stage has an appropriate amount of workers. 1 tile usually holds no more than 20~25 with the biggest & baddest I-HT buildings(Hsu Accelerators have 438. Spline Testing have 528, total). If I filled the place with Spline Testing, one block might get about 1500~2000, but that doesn't really happen.

[Mister Giggles 310]

I didn't notice the gap between the power poles before you mentioned it.

You have manually checked every lot in that block and verified the number of jobs they're offering?

What are the exact circumstances of that block's existence? Was it ever part of the industrial areas to the north, east, or south of it? If it was ever a part of another block of jobs, the simulator may not have had enough time to rejigger the routing to reflect the current circumstances.

What does the traffic query say for the surrounding industrial sections?

You altered capacities before these buildings existed, yes?

  Edited September 6, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[sys12189 21]

I altered capacities before this particular HT complex was formed, yes, but I had something like this with the vanilla game (actually with NAM only) installed as well. One I-D factory employed 8 thousand workers while the others: none...

Each time I come in a different block is getting the traffic. Sometimes none of them, but then the neighboring blocks get an increase (one block 8000 - others 300 => all are 500 or so) Also when these happen, the end blocks get some jobs too although it's only about 50 by the query...