Is my city bugged?

[fdjw88 39]

Right now my main city has three surrounding cities (each of them has 20K-30K pop), i play with tax code because i want all the skyscrapers in my 4th city. so for these three cities, i have made CO$$$ and CS$$$ tax rate at 20%. however, currently in my 4th city, the demand for office is negative (after i change the tax rate for CO$$$ and CS$$$ to only 1%)! how is this even possible, my other three cities has 0 CO$$$ jobs. do i need to scrap my 4th city and rebuild? 

[fdjw88 39]

NVM, i deleted my 4th city, and now the demand is back to normal, thx god i didn't build too much in my 4th city. 

[rsc204 21,815]

Well 120k population is probably not sufficient to get a city full of skyscrapers. CO$$$ and I-HT are the hardest type to make grow. Perhaps you are just rushing things a bit too much. Not to mention, playing with the taxes can have serious unintended consequences if you don't understand the fundamentals of the simulation.

My advice: Take things slowly, build a region and get everything working properly. Then naturally demand for C0$$$ will build up. If you avoid zoning high-density until you get to this point, then demand should be good enough to get a city full of skyscrapers.

[fdjw88 39]

9 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Well 120k population is probably not sufficient to get a city full of skyscrapers. CO$$$ and I-HT are the hardest type to make grow. Perhaps you are just rushing things a bit too much. Not to mention, playing with the taxes can have serious unintended consequences if you don't understand the fundamentals of the simulation.

My advice: Take things slowly, build a region and get everything working properly. Then naturally demand for C0$$$ will build up. If you avoid zoning high-density until you get to this point, then demand should be good enough to get a city full of skyscrapers.

so what would you recommend the population should be before the skyscrapers pop up?

[MissVanleider 1,850]

You probably need not only a reasonable population but also the correct wealth levels, it is difficult to raise demand in one particular tile for a certain type of growth until you have a critical mass within that tile. Normally 'specializing' tiles completely always fails in my experience. Messing with taxes usually maked things worse. My advice is develop your region beyond 4 cities, try not to play with taxes so much and aim for more rounded, generalist tiles until you really understand the simulation. Any office buildings you dont want in other tiles can be demolished / dezoned later, and you should eventually be able to grow a more specifically skyscraper driven city

[fdjw88 39]

1 hour ago, MissVanleider said:

You probably need not only a reasonable population but also the correct wealth levels, it is difficult to raise demand in one particular tile for a certain type of growth until you have a critical mass within that tile. Normally 'specializing' tiles completely always fails in my experience. Messing with taxes usually maked things worse. My advice is develop your region beyond 4 cities, try not to play with taxes so much and aim for more rounded, generalist tiles until you really understand the simulation. Any office buildings you dont want in other tiles can be demolished / dezoned later, and you should eventually be able to grow a more specifically skyscraper driven city

i learned all of these from youtube tutorials, and every single of them shows they can build skyscrapers from playing with the tax rates. i guess i will just keep what i'm doing until i have a much bigger population in my region. and then in my next region, i will just build my cities without doing anything with the tax code, and see how that works out for me.

[CorinaMarie 29,619]

15 hours ago, fdjw88 said:

NVM, i deleted my 4th city, and now the demand is back to normal, thx god i didn't build too much in my 4th city. 

I like this. It says to me that somewhere in your testing you intuitively came up with deleting the tile as a possible cure. And it worked. The why it worked part would be nice to know, but in the long run doesn't really matter. I suspect something in the region wide variables or such got crossed up and the deletion forced the program to reexamine and/or resample the data from the other 3 cities.

Here's my ideas on taxes. (And no, I don't understand the fundamentals of the underlying code.) My observations are empirical. I've played city tiles where I run at the fastest speed so the effects of my actions respond quicker. I enable the Gambling Ordinance to gain a positive cash flow. (Game tip: cannot be done before Feb 2 of the first year.) I plop a windmill, draw a street 2 squares long, zone a 4x4 farm and wait till it grows. I do not have any connections to other tiles. So, I keep zoning these little farms and extending the street until a new farm will not grow. At this point I play with the ag taxes and when lowering I know it will take 3 full game months to take effect. Lower ag to 1% and still no growth. This tells me the tax rate is not at all to blame for lack of growth. I put the rate back to normal. I zone a residential. If it's 1x1 it won't grow. 1x2 or 1x3 and it will. (Later in the game I can get 1x1 res to grow, but in the early low population the sims won't build there.

Anyhow, it'd take me a couple pages to really get to the point I was going to make and that is: once you have a decent sized city with all types of zones, you can learn from making small adjustments. Ideally you want a city where the population is not fluctuating. Like less that 5 peeps difference from year to year to year. Now, pick one of the taxes and adjust it by 0.1% and watch your city and demand graph for 6 months or more. Stay with one zone's tax rate until you get the demand to be no more than 2000 above or below zero. Then do the same for all the others. For my tests I want Dirty Industry to be below zero and the others to be above. By finding how much the low class sims will pay, I can keep them from getting way too enthusiastic with the types of residences they build in my new zones.

The whole point being once the demands are basically level, you can then watch those demands fluctuate by how you zone and build your city.  By using trial and error methods you can learn the effects of taxation without bothering with the buried techy details. (Ofc, the techy stuff is lots of fun too if you want to learn.) Anyhow, build demand for the $$$ by creating enough surrounding middle and low class stuff. Let the demand for your skyscrapers build slowly till it's 4000 or more. Now when you zone for them in a highly desirable location they will sprout right up provided the other factors for them are met. The part I don't know for skyscrapers is what the overall region and city tile population and number of connections and such need to be. I prolly read about it in the Prima guide, but I don't remember the specifics.

Or, if you have mods installed, they may have info about that.

Good luck.

 

[fdjw88 39]

16 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I like this. It says to me that somewhere in your testing you intuitively came up with deleting the tile as a possible cure. And it worked. The why it worked part would be nice to know, but in the long run doesn't really matter. I suspect something in the region wide variables or such got crossed up and the deletion forced the program to reexamine and/or resample the data from the other 3 cities.

Here's my ideas on taxes. (And no, I don't understand the fundamentals of the underlying code.) My observations are empirical. I've played city tiles where I run at the fastest speed so the effects of my actions respond quicker. I enable the Gambling Ordinance to gain a positive cash flow. (Game tip: cannot be done before Feb 2 of the first year.) I plop a windmill, draw a street 2 squares long, zone a 4x4 farm and wait till it grows. I do not have any connections to other tiles. So, I keep zoning these little farms and extending the street until a new farm will not grow. At this point I play with the ag taxes and when lowering I know it will take 3 full game months to take effect. Lower ag to 1% and still no growth. This tells me the tax rate is not at all to blame for lack of growth. I put the rate back to normal. I zone a residential. If it's 1x1 it won't grow. 1x2 or 1x3 and it will. (Later in the game I can get 1x1 res to grow, but in the early low population the sims won't build there.

Anyhow, it'd take me a couple pages to really get to the point I was going to make and that is: once you have a decent sized city with all types of zones, you can learn from making small adjustments. Ideally you want a city where the population is not fluctuating. Like less that 5 peeps difference from year to year to year. Now, pick one of the taxes and adjust it by 0.1% and watch your city and demand graph for 6 months or more. Stay with one zone's tax rate until you get the demand to be no more than 2000 above or below zero. Then do the same for all the others. For my tests I want Dirty Industry to be below zero and the others to be above. By finding how much the low class sims will pay, I can keep them from getting way too enthusiastic with the types of residences they build in my new zones.

The whole point being once the demands are basically level, you can then watch those demands fluctuate by how you zone and build your city.  By using trial and error methods you can learn the effects of taxation without bothering with the buried techy details. (Ofc, the techy stuff is lots of fun too if you want to learn.) Anyhow, build demand for the $$$ by creating enough surrounding middle and low class stuff. Let the demand for your skyscrapers build slowly till it's 4000 or more. Now when you zone for them in a highly desirable location they will sprout right up provided the other factors for them are met. The part I don't know for skyscrapers is what the overall region and city tile population and number of connections and such need to be. I prolly read about it in the Prima guide, but I don't remember the specifics.

Or, if you have mods installed, they may have info about that.

Good luck.

 

thanks a lot for the feedback. i think you point actually goes back to building up the cities slowly but surely. i believe the main reason for having a large populaton in the surrouding ctiy before building downtown (a city with lots of skyscrapers) is to actually break the prop cap for skyscrpaers. now the math is, you need 43560 commercial jobs at min in your entire region to make skyscraper grow, and this number includes C$ C$$ AND C$$$. however, without a large pop, a region can't really have that many Commercial jobs. so i will keep playing with the tax code in this exercise, and then in my next region, i will leave the tax code be, and see what my region will become. the other reason why i want to play with the tax code, is because i don't want dirty or manufaturing industry to grow in my 4th city, because i want to air quality to be super clean, so more R$$$, high tech and C$$$ will come.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Fooling with the taxes is a mug’s game.  See my reply in your other thread.