Population of buildings in low rise and high rise buildings

[iDestroya 6]

I have a question about the population of buildings in skylines. I have been building a city with highrise ban as a universal city policy except in two small areas. I reached a population of over 60,000 with the low rise restriction. Out of curiousity, I lifted the high rise ban and ran it on fastest speed to see the changes. within a few minutes all my high density areas - commercial and residential - were covered in high rise buildings. but there was minimal change to population, and no real visible increase in traffic. Now why is that? It goes counter to common sense.

[Ltw 401]

This has mostly to do with the limitations of computers. In Cities Skylines the daily patterns of every citizen is simulated. Since these simulation take place for every single citizen (in for instance Simcity 4 that's not the case) there are certain limits involved. These limits were included in game code and are therefore not the actual limitation of your computer but of the game itself. Colossal Order did that in order to make the game stable for every computer. However, this also means that you would reach the limit quite easily if you would build highrises only (for population that is around 1.000.000 and for active agents that's around 65.000). In order to make sure that people are able to build large cities without reaching these limits early CO brought down the number of residents per building. This makes it easier to run but it makes the game less realistic as well. I would really like it if they are able to make the game less dependent on agent limits. However, by doing that there are also challenges to face such as limitations of computers and stability.

[Darf 1,439]

22 hours ago, Ltw said:

This has mostly to do with the limitations of computers. In Cities Skylines the daily patterns of every citizen is simulated. Since these simulation take place for every single citizen (in for instance Simcity 4 that's not the case) there are certain limits involved. These limits were included in game code and are therefore not the actual limitation of your computer but of the game itself. Colossal Order did that in order to make the game stable for every computer. However, this also means that you would reach the limit quite easily if you would build highrises only (for population that is around 1.000.000 and for active agents that's around 65.000). In order to make sure that people are able to build large cities without reaching these limits early CO brought down the number of residents per building. This makes it easier to run but it makes the game less realistic as well. I would really like it if they are able to make the game less dependent on agent limits. However, by doing that there are also challenges to face such as limitations of computers and stability.

This is not true - the base game just has a bad balance between high and low rise buildings. High rise buildings only have marginally more capacity. Besides that the only thing that that policy does is, is prevent lvl 5 high rises. Lvl 5 highrises don't have significantly more inhabitants than lvl 4 high rises so you don't see much change in population. For a good comparison download the realistic population mod that calculates inhibitants by buildingsize.

[Ltw 401]

21 hours ago, Darf said:

This is not true - the base game just has a bad balance between high and low rise buildings. High rise buildings only have marginally more capacity. Besides that the only thing that that policy does is, is prevent lvl 5 high rises. Lvl 5 highrises don't have significantly more inhabitants than lvl 4 high rises so you don't see much change in population. For a good comparison download the realistic population mod that calculates inhibitants by buildingsize.

I thought that the numbers of low rise (meaning zoned as low rise) and high rise were also close to each other. Checked it today and turned out I was mistaken about that. However, in general my reply still makes sine sense. CO has lowered the number of residents in order to make the simulation work properly (check this dev-diary from Paradox). With building-levels divided in 5 steps and a low number of residents in each building a logical outcome would be that the population-size doesn't increase that much. I checked the difference between a level 4 and level 5 building in my city and it was around 3 households (17 households for a level 4 building and 20 households for a level 5 building). This could vary per building but in general the number of residents is low. A building levels up if certain requirements are met. However, there are also factors that influence occupancy-rate. If a building levels up and from that moment the services and so forth isn't that good for a level 5 building it could happen that the occupancy-rate drops. This could mean that your building with a capacity of 20 households has an occupancy of 17 or 18 households. Which therefore could mean that your population-change is near to zero.

I noticed that CO is making use of the term household. In low residential housing this generally means that two persons are starting a family in a house located in a low rise residential zone. In high rise residential zones these households consist of young people (source here). However, I couldn't find a rule of thumb of how big these households are and therefore how many residents exactly are being housed in a building. It seems to be more residents in a high residential building but exactly how much more isn't that clear to me. I also don't know how this is approached in the game. For instance: If I look at a low rise residential building I could see 4 households in this house. This doesn't make any sense to me, it is not normal to have 4 families in the same house (especially when it's a family with 2 adults and 2 children). Therefore I was wondering whether this is a weird inconsistency in the simulation or if the term household is being used in the wrong way. However, it looked really weird to me.

FYI, I didn't know about the realistic population mod. Seems interesting! I have a lot of high rises so I don't know if it is wise to try it out but it might be nice to see what happens. What happens with the number of residents in low rise buildings with this mod?

[Darf 1,439]

It lowers the amount of households usually to one or two. Some really big buildings can have over 250 with RICO enabled. Highest growable I've come across has 100 orso.