Help! Lots of residential demand but no development

[TheChameleon84 0]

I have filled my city with residential and commercial and an adjoining city with industrial zones. I have good amenities, good public transportation and good connectivity. Desirability all over the city is pretty good. At the moment I have high demand for residential so I started rezoning some mid and high density residential. However, I see no development in these zones. The houses remain the same low-density. I did get some mid-density housing early on but growth has completely stopped. I don't know what do now. Demand in the other industrial city is exactly the same as this one. Any suggestions on how to stimulate growth?

[twalsh102 1,601]

Something is definitely out of kilter here.  So I have a couple of questions and some observations.

What is your total population at this point?

Your graph shows essentially no jobs available, while still showing demand for low and mid-wealth Sims.  I see quite a few high-rise buildings.  Were these plopped or did they grow?  What is the occupancy of all these buildings?  If they were plopped, are they LM w/jobs?

 Your major problem at the moment isn't why mid- and high-density residential isn't growing, it's why almost all of your commercial and industrial demand is in negative territory.  The bottom line is that if there are no jobs to be had, no Sims will want to move into the city, and there will be no residential growth, regardless of what the demand chart says.

The fact that there is that much residential demand when there are no jobs available definitely points to something be "broken"/seriously out off whack!

High-wealth residential desirability view doesn't tell us anything because right now you have negative demand for high-wealth residents.

There are so many moving parts to the game.  Demand caps could be in play; Stage limits could be in play; you may have over-developed one or more developer types, which often leads to negative demand, which often leads to wildly-swinging demand fluctuations.

What are your advisors recommending?  any warnings?

 

[TheChameleon84 0]

 

2 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

Something is definitely out of kilter here.  So I have a couple of questions and some observations.

What is your total population at this point?

Your graph shows essentially no jobs available, while still showing demand for low and mid-wealth Sims.  I see quite a few high-rise buildings.  Were these plopped or did they grow?  What is the occupancy of all these buildings?  If they were plopped, are they LM w/jobs?

 Your major problem at the moment isn't why mid- and high-density residential isn't growing, it's why almost all of your commercial and industrial demand is in negative territory.  The bottom line is that if there are no jobs to be had, no Sims will want to move into the city, and there will be no residential growth, regardless of what the demand chart says.

The fact that there is that much residential demand when there are no jobs available definitely points to something be "broken"/seriously out off whack!

High-wealth residential desirability view doesn't tell us anything because right now you have negative demand for high-wealth residents.

There are so many moving parts to the game.  Demand caps could be in play; Stage limits could be in play; you may have over-developed one or more developer types, which often leads to negative demand, which often leads to wildly-swinging demand fluctuations.

What are your advisors recommending?  any warnings?

 

Ok so I'll answer your questions one by one.

My total population at this point is 27,552. If it helps I'm attaching a chart of my population and job growth over time.

I'm not sure what you mean by plopped or LM? Up until quite recently I had a lot of commercial and industrial demand. That's when these high-rise buildings popped up. At the moment they are almost full. Each has an occupancy upwards of 220 with a max of 241. 

This gave me an idea. I had recently added some low-density commercial zones within my residential zones. I just removed them and commercial demand immediately spiked. RCI graph is attached. Same problem though. There is no development at all.

Can I check whether a demand cap is preventing growth? I tried placing some parks and other recreational buildings to see if that would stimulate growth but no go. What are stage limits?

My advisors are just being a bunch of sycophants right now. They're not mentioning any problems. In fact they're quite happy.

 

Thank you for your help!

[cogeo 960]

Isn't this SC4? Ask a mod to move the thread under an appropriate forum.
 

As for your question, this demand isn't really that high. It can easily be consumed ("satisfied") if you get one R$ and one R$$ hirise to grow. Local R desirability can do the trick.

I'm going to release my "Growth Catalyst" lots soon - they are modded as parks, to make use of the so called "transient aura effect" (a sharp increase in R & C desirability, as soon as you plop a park or plaza, which declines a couple of months later - causes instant growth). You plop them, get the desired development and then bulldoze them.

You can achieve a similar effect by planting trees ON the lot (yes! ) you wish grow or upgrade. Don't save you city unless you get the desired development (instead exit to region w/o saving and try again until you get the building you want).

[TheChameleon84 0]

@cogeo,

 

Yes this is SC4. How do I ask a mod to do that then?

About desirability, the problem is it is already pretty much at the max for R$ and R$$. There's still no development. I don't know what more to do. I already tried placing parks and stuff there but no good.

[TheChameleon84 0]

Ok so I did a bit more digging and I noticed something odd. Here is my industrial city.The residential/commercial city is on the left and you can see a high-speed rail connection going there. I had saturated my industrial demand but still had some commercial left so I built a bridge to the right side of the map for commercial development. Now here's the odd bit. As you can see commercial development has occurred, but the weird bit is that my HSR station on that side is unused! The query tool tells me that all the roads on that side are empty! There is nobody travelling there so I don't know how the SIMs are getting there. I have double-checked and the line is ok. Nothing seems to be broken. The corresponding RCI graph is also attached. I think this might be what's causing the problem. Is this a bug? 

[twalsh102 1,601]

Chameleon, to answer the last question you had for me:

Growth stages are determined by population thresholds.  There are eight stages for commercial and residential, and three for industrial (in the vanilla game).  There are usually more than one population threshold per growth stage.  Each building in SC4 is assigned a certain growth stage at which it will begin to grow.  Stages somewhat equate to zone density and building size.  But it's a little more complicated.  Each pop threshold has a different ratio of which stage buildings will be built.  These are your stage limits.  You just hit stage 7 population wise.  But until you hit the next threshold, more than 50% of the buildings the game will build are stage 4 or below.  The game strictly maintains these ratios, and there is no way around them (other than plopping Landmarks with jobs).  Please note that this is still just a short summary extracted from the below mentioned reference work..

I have a big recommendation for you if you think playing this game is going to turn into a long-term hobby for you.  You can learn this game (somewhat) by just playing the game, learning from your mistakes, and asking lots of questions on these forums.  But you're going to get a lot of disjointed information about the inner workings of the game thrown at you, and you're probably often going to get frustrated.   IMHO, to have a really satisfying experience with this game, you need to have a good base of knowledge of the game's inner workings.  One good way to do this is to acquire one of the Prima Official Strategy Guides for SimCity 4.  There is one for the original SC$ and one for SC4 Rush Hour.  Unfortunately, both are out of print (go figure for a 13-yr old game).  The last I looked, you could still find the original one on Amazon.  But the Rush Hour version can be a little hard to find.  Both will give be able to give you a good idea of how the game works, and why it does things the way it does.  Don't expect any magic bullets, or a step-by-step guide on how to get to a Million Sims in your city.  It does give you a good foundation  and gives a lot of hints on how to avoid some of the common mistakes.  It also gives the most common stats for almost every building included with SC4.  And lots of charts (including the 2-page one for stage limits).

Basically, the more you know about the mechanics of the game, the better prepared you are to anticipate speed bumps, and possibly avoid them (which of course leads to a much more satisfying experience).

I hope I'm not scaring you off.  But to build the truly large, long-lasting, and continuously developing cities you see people display here, it takes quite a bit of work, not only just playing the game, but lots of research in these forums (and those on other sites), and other reference works (such as the book(s) mentioned above), and asking lots of questions.  Welcome to the forum!

[TheChameleon84 0]

@twalsh102 great reply! Thanks a lot for the info. It sounds really interesting. I will try to get my hands on the guide. 

 

Do do you have anything more for me on my current problem? What do the make of the unused station? And more importantly, how do you recommend I proceed further? 

[Terring 6,473]

The topic has been moved under an appropriate forum. Much better, right?

Moderator Terring

[cogeo 960]

About the R-not-growing problem, take a look at this thread. Also here. You need that local surge of desirability to trigger growth (again that "transient aura effect").

Something strange I have noticed with your cities is that demand for R is NOT equal. It should be, cause your cities are connected. Did you tweak taxes? I can think of no other reason. Or maybe have you hit R caps, but this would have caused a big drop in demand.

As for the station not being used, there may be a variety of reasons:
- Your sims don't need to cross the river and get to the commercial area, as they can find jobs at the industrial area. Btw this layout is quite unusual, most players would have instead zone commercial between the R and I, ie sims would have to get through the C area to get to I (C benefits from the high traffic). As you obviously have more jobs than people (that's why you have so high R demand) it's also the case that your sims have choices; they choose the I jobs because the trip is shorter.
- Your sims can't use the HSR because they can't reach the HSR station in the R city. Do you have some feeder mechanism there? Eg some parking next to it (heavy rail stations typically do have built-in parking functionality, the others typically don't), or a connecting bus network?
- Your sims can't use the HSR because they can't reach the jobs at the commercial end - they can only work at buildings within walking distance from the station. Stations don't provide taxi, shuttle or car rental services!  You can partially overcome this by providing a dispatcher mechanism there: a local bus network, connecting the station with the rest of the C area. You can use RTMT to build bus stops on top of roads and streets, without having to bulldoze any of the existing development.
- The station you placed at the I area is badly modded and won't allow through HSR traffic (don't actually know, just a case).
- Some players claim that if an area is not connected by some "road" network (street, road, avenue, highway) it's not considered "connected" at all, so your sims won't be working there. Try putting a road bridge too (even if your sims will finally prefer the HSR).

And a final (albeit a little irrelevant) suggestion, your networks look horrid (esp that HSR descend to the bridge). Learn how to level terrain (using plopped street tiles, not the ingame leveling tool) and use some Slope Mod (I would also suggest further custom-modding it) to lay beautiful and less steep networks.

Hope this helps

  Edited September 7, 2016 by cogeo  
Updated links to other posts

[twalsh102 1,601]

I'm not sure I have any specific recommendations.  It's kind of hard to troubleshoot a specific problem such as this without being able to sit down in front of it and just start digging around. 

A couple more questions and maybe some clarification of what I'm seeing.

So, just to verify:  the area on the right side of the river is only commercial?  The HSR connection is the only one crossing the river?  If it is all commercial, and the HSR connection is the only way across the river, where would the cars come from?

Where are your other HSR stations?  I think I see one other HSR station on this tile, toward the lower left corner.  One thing to consider, Sims always travel towards the jobs, or towards home at the end of the day.  Even if a quicker method of travel is available two tiles away, Sims will not backtrack to access it.  They will only use public transportation if it is on-the-way to the job.  So if that is the only other HSR in this city tile, only Sims living down in the lower left hand corner of the tile will try to use HSR to get to any jobs on the other side of the river.  How about on the other city tile?  If I'm not mistaken, HSR functions the same as Subway in that it will only accept transfers from walking Sims, i.e. a Sim traveling by car cannot transfer to HSR or Subway.

Haven't a clue as to why the query is showing the station is unused.  Possibly the situation is time dependent.  Maybe it sees lots of use first thing in the morning when Sims are going to work, and lots of use at the end of the day, and in between nobody is moving back and forth.

If this tile in the same region as the previous tile you displayed?  If so, another concept you need to get familiar with is that of regional play.  One of the above mentioned guides will do a much better job of explaining it in detail than I can.  But here is a synopsis:

1.  Once you create neighbor connections between two or more developing city tiles, you are playing regionally.

2.  As such all demand is shared (and satisfied) across the region among connected cities.  Thus, you will see the exact same demand graph in every city.  Anything that you do to affect demand in one city, affects demand for all connected cities.

3.  This provides the benefit of being able to create specialized cities.  This has several benefits, chief among them - pollution control.  You can have one city that is nothing but industry and power plants and landfills.  Since pollution does not cross city tile boundaries, the next city tile over can be residential and hi-tech industry  with no worries about pollution.  You can create another "city" that will become your skyscraper business district, and maybe another one that is nothing but farms and another that is primarily focused on seaports and warehouses and trucking firms, etc.

4.  By doing this, instead of thinking about each tile being a city unto itself and needing all the requisite components for growth, think New York City, with all its separate bedroom communities and suburbs and business districts and industrial areas and...   all interconnected and feeding off of each other across an entire region.

5.  If you think about how any large city is put together, it's kind of hard to try and fit all that in a single city tile, even a large one.  But if you have the entire region to turn into your megacity, you are limited only by your imagination, and the size of the region you are playing (and if you download some of the regions available on this site, there are some truly monstrous regions).

6.  Having said all this, this is likely the cause of your demand being all out of whack to begin with.  If you were reacting to the demand graph in each city as if it only related to that city, when in effect it related to the entire region, then you most certainly over developed in a big way.  Unfortunately, there is no easy way to correct this.  You might try just letting the game run a while without any other changes to see if the game eventually auto-corrects the situation. 

A correction to my earlier post about the guides:  they provide all the relevant stats for all the in-game buildings available from the menu.  As far as I know, there is no comprehensive guide available about all the growable buildings in the game.

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

1 hour ago, twalsh102 said:

Even if a quicker method of travel is available two tiles away, Sims will not backtrack to access it.

Even tho I wrote this for someone when we were talking about freight trucks, my Freight Path Mini Tutorial illustrates the aforementioned principle.

 

[rsc204 21,804]

2 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

If I'm not mistaken, HSR functions the same as Subway in that it will only accept transfers from walking Sims, i.e. a Sim traveling by car cannot transfer to HSR or Subway.

I think this depends more on how a given HSR station is modded. If you are using the NAM stations for HSR, you can trust that they work correctly. But if you are using custom stations, try replacing them with NAM ones and see if anything changes here.

 

[TheChameleon84 0]

@cogeo

4 hours ago, cogeo said:

 

About the R-not-growing problem, take a look at this thread. Also here. You need that local surge of desirability to trigger growth (again that "transient aura effect").

 

What thread?

5 hours ago, cogeo said:

Something strange I have noticed with your cities is that demand for R is NOT equal. It should be, cause your cities are connected. Did you tweak taxes?

It's because of taxes. They are set differently for both cities.

5 hours ago, cogeo said:

And a final (albeit a little irrelevant) suggestion, your networks look horrid (esp that HSR descend to the bridge). Learn how to level terrain (using plopped street tiles, not the ingame leveling tool) and use some Slope Mod (I would also suggest further custom-modding it) to lay beautiful and less steep networks.

Thanks for the tip. I've installed the NHP slope mod. Let's see how it works.

[TheChameleon84 0]

@twalsh102

Ok I think some things got lost in translation here. As I mentioned in the original post I have developed the two cities in tandem. One is my R and C city and the other is primarily I. I only started developing C in the other city once demand for I dried up there. So to answer your question, you can see my other HSR station in the first screenshot I posted, in the top right corner.The track branching upwards is the one leading into the second city (the orientations of the screenshots are different, which is why it might be confusing).

5 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

So, just to verify:  the area on the right side of the river is only commercial?  The HSR connection is the only one crossing the river?  If it is all commercial, and the HSR connection is the only way across the river, where would the cars come from?

That is correct. However, as I understood it, this was a bug in SimCity that NAM is supposed to fix. Is that not correct? To clarify, my sims are travelling from one city to the next fine. They just don't travel onwards from I to the C district. I don't expect there to be any cars in the C district. However, I do expect for sims to take the HSR station and then walk from there to their offices. They are not doing that.

I am familiar with the concept of regional play and I've been developing the two cities as one large city. There are no I zones in my first city and no R zones in the second. 

Lastly, thank you for all your help. I much appreciate it.

[Jasoncw 11,839]

I think twalsh102 is spot on (except don't buy the Prima guide because a fair bit of the information in it is incorrect).

When you start out, the game has all of your buildings at the lowest Growth Stage (each lot in the game has a Growth Stage number which roughly corresponds to jobs/residents per tile), and as your population increases the game allows your cities to have an increasing proportion of higher stages (that is, bigger more urban buildings). This is done so that if someone's small farming town happens to have a spike in demand it doesn't accidentally grow a skyscraper. It forces players to build horizontally before building up.

To solve your problem, fill in the rest of your empty space with residential zones. The zones will develop with more small buildings, but your total population will increase, and as a result the percentage of buildings in your city that can be higher stages will increase, which will cause existing buildings in your city to be replaced by bigger buildings. Once those buildings are replaced the population will rise again, thus allowing an even greater percentage of your city's buildings to be a higher stage, resulting in a positive feedback loop. 

And then once the rest of the city has developed more you can dezone the areas that you want to be empty.

 

Also if you're having budget problems, demolish your high schools. If you have complete elementary school and library coverage of all residential zones you will get a very high education after a few generations of sims. iirc it's even possible to get a super high education with only libraries if you're willing to wait a long time.

Once you learn how the game works you become a god who can manipulate your cities at will. I can start a new city, take out a bunch of loans to build stuff, and have a high populations and millions of simoleons in a short amount of time, and you will be able to too.  

[CorinaMarie 29,556]

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

Also if you're having budget problems, demolish your high schools. If you have complete elementary school and library coverage of all residential zones you will get a very high education after a few generations of sims. iirc it's even possible to get a super high education with only libraries if you're willing to wait a long time.

Add a museum and then, yes, you can get to about 120 for overall EQ. The key part tho is you need a stable population. Ideally no fluctuation, but if it's 10 peeps one way or the other month in and month out and hovering around that midpoint from year to year, then it'll still do fine. You do have to let the city run for a long time and it's best not to be zoning new stuff while they educate themselves.

[Jasoncw 11,839]

That reminds me of a good point that new players (and most players in general?) wouldn't know, which is that demolishing residential buildings "kills" the sims, so they won't pass on their education (someone correct me if I'm wrong), lowering education overall.

So if you don't like a section of your city and you want to demolish it, demolishing it all at once can have unexpected consequences. 

[TheChameleon84 0]

@CorinaMarie @Jasoncw thanks for the advice guys. I'll take it into account. The problem at the moment is that I am out of space in my R and C city. To zone more R I'll need to dezome some C. You think that would be ok?

[Jasoncw 11,839]

You might have built more since the last time we saw but in your pictures there's tons of space around. I see the center areas of each residential section are for civic buildings and that there are buffers between the commercial districts but you could fill those with residential and it would add in a lot of space. Right now you're at a weird stagnate point and you just need to keep on zoning until you get over the hump. 

You can also just start another city tile. The stage growth stuff is region-wide. 

[APSMS 1,892]

There is another point that no one mentioned, and that is that your C buildings don't actually need workers, which is why you can have that area developed and still have no commuters.

Demand for Workplaces (C & I) needs to be high enough for them to grow and stay occupied, but keep in mind that the building occupancy listed in the query is not actual workers, but only the maximum number of workers that can currently work in the building with the current demand (the larger number is how many people will work there if demand is perfect 100%).

The only way to know how many people work in a building is to use the route query tool, and add up all the various travel types. If you don't have any commuters, you don't have any workers. It's that simple. Chances are, for your second city's COM area, it's too far away from the workers, who are all working in the IND, and therefore not traveling onwards to the COM areas for work. There's no recreational shopping in SC4, so no work means no business.

Ironically enough, I don't think that I've ever noticed demand equally distributed across the entire region. Not sure why that is (though it's worth noting my regions aren't well-developed), but I've never seen it explicitly. I'll have to double check this the next time I get in the game.

[TheChameleon84 0]

Thanks a lot guys. I think that answers many of my questions. I'll now experiment with s few things before reporting back. 

[markussaage 762]

And like in real life you'll need more poor R$-Sims than R$$-Sims or rich R$$$-Sims to make your cities work. And you'll need to keep the poor R$ residentials areas by making the buidings "Historic", so they won't upgrade. That is an essential step, but a little annoying, because you'll have to query every building and set the marker. Once the game has the "Mix" between all three residential groups, everything will grow. And what I've figured over my years playing is, that there are certain points in this game, when nothing goes. What I mean is, you get the feeling, the game is stuck in not getting any further with develop overall. I might be wrong and this is a personal feeling, but to me it first starts around 10,000 residents, then 30,000 again and around 50,000 again. So but this is the part, when the stages in the game kick in. In a game like this with so many mods available it is hard to say what the effects are, because it depends on, what you are using. So every player has it's own, unique setup and it is hard to compare to others. What works for me might not work for you. Experimenting is the right way to go, and this place here is the right place to ask. But overall, have fun! It's not a game, it's a hobby!

Kind regards!

[TheChameleon84 0]

So an update. I now have a population of 55k and still a bit of room left in my city to zone R. I still don't have any new high-rise buildings, but at least development isn't stunted.  If I run out of space before high rises start to appear, I'll start another small city with just R. Btw, any idea how much population I have to hit before the high rises start appearing?

[Jasoncw 11,839]

http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Stage_Limits_and_Threshholds

The rowhouses are usually stage 4, apartment buildings are like 5-6, and the tall buildings are 7 and 8.

 

It's also worth mentioning that there's a limit (a "cap") to how much of any type you can have, and that limit is raised by parks, rewards, and some other buildings. So if you never build any parks your growth will mysteriously stall once you reach the cap. For most people during normal gameplay this isn't a problem because building parks is fun, but you don't have very many parks so building some might help. And statistically a reasonably placed park will pay for itself through the development and higher tax income it causes, so you don't have to worry much about the finances of it.

[twalsh102 1,601]

Right now (at 55K) you are right in the middle of the first two population thresholds under Stage 8.  The stage limit chart shows that only 13% of your buildings can be Stage 7 or 8 buildings (only 2% Stage 8).  I don't know about the stats on the available Maxis buildings, but vast majority of the custom content skyscrapers (non-CAM) I've come across seem to be set at Stage 8.  Of course if you are using CAM, the stage limit info I've given so far is useless.  You would be further down the chart (between Stage 6 & 7).

You can find the Stage limit  chart for CAM 1.0 here (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3578.msg109154#msg109154).  I don't think Invisichem has updated these charts for CAM 2.1, or if there any changes that would necessitate this.

  Edited September 9, 2016 by twalsh102  

[TheChameleon84 0]

@twalsh102 thanks. I haven't installed CAM. I'm only using NAM.