Same Buildings Over and Over

[ThunderVamp9 2]

I don't know if this has been asked before, or if this is the coorect forum for this.

I've added some mod to my SC4, and everything seems to be going great but I did notice one thing that bothers me quite a bit. I seem to get a LOT of copies of certain buildings in my city. And I mean a lot. And it's not as though they are spread out, either. They can very often be right next to each other (I had a whole section of commercial that was all Dave and Buster's. Blocks and blocks of them.).

Is there anything that can be done to prevent the game from doing this?

 

Thanks in advance.

[rsc204 21,808]

There are a couple factors that cause this repetition. All lots have a property called growth stage, this is closely linked with the number of jobs or sims of a given building. At any given point the likelihood of a particular growth stage being chosen is connected with the desirability in a given area. Other factors include the size of the zone, because that will limit the possible options.

The game does randomly select what building to place, but only after all the other conditions are met. This randomisation is based on the in-game time, which isn't truly random in the typical sense. It therefore becomes quite possible due to a combination of these factors, that when the simulator is looking at possible buildings to grow in a given spot, few options would exit to choose from.

If we take an old favourite, Wren Insurance from the vanilla game, it appears with annoying frequency because there are few other lots with the same footprint and growth stage. I.e. there are no competing lots to choose amongst in many typical situations. The easiest way to improve the problem is to make sure competing lots, not just the same size, but with similar stats exist in your plugins folder. Bear in mind though, if you have two buildings, but one has significantly more jobs / sims than the other, again the simulator may prefer one over the other, based on current demands. So for example, knowing you have an issue with Dave and Busters, I would try to ensure I had a couple more similarly sized buildings on the same lot size, with the same stats existed in my plugins folder. This can require a lot of work searching the exchanges, but is much easier if you are able to make a few custom lots using the tools provided with the game.