Grrr..... NJ Zots

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Hello mayors!  I hate to have to ask about this as I have studied this for some time, but I will lay out what I know.  I understand that a 1:2 jobs to sims ratio is the general rule of thumb.   I also have been learning how education levels tie in to the equation (although I don't completely know how that all works).   I also understand how Residential wealth levels need to be balanced. 

However... I still seem to get clusters of these damned things in cities periodically.  Things will be running fine then all the sudden - BOOM!  NJZ explosion!   I'm really getting tired of fighting this and is really getting me to the point of extreme irritation....

Here's the stats to the city I'm currently having trouble with:

(Note those caps are probably goofy - I started the city before installing a cap-busting mod)

As you can see, there''s fairly saturated job market.  Education is at about 190 - a little lower oddly in the 11-30 range, but not drastically, perhaps 180.  Commute time is a little high 0.5, which is odd because of number of jobs, but whatever.

So there it is.. any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks for reading! 

[twalsh102 1,601]

Unfortunately, looking at a set of stats like this, give us little to no information about what might be going on!  Some of the following you may already know.

You could start by querying the buildings where the No Job zots are showing to determine the wealth levels of the Sims with no jobs.  Are the No Job zots showing up in one particular area of the city?  What does your RCI Demand graph look like?  I'm assuming there are other developed city tiles around this one.  The R census numbers will represent both those that work in this city and those that commute to other cities for work.  The job numbers represent both those jobs taken by this city's residents and those taken by commuters from other cities.  How saturated are your transportation networks?

A No Job zot can mean several things:  the most obvious being that no job exists at that Sims wealth level; the next most obvious being that jobs exist, but the Sim can't get to it in a reasonable commute time (maximum trip time is 2.5 hrs.); lastly, a job did exist but it went away.  For this last cause, if existing Industrial/Commercial buildings abandon for any reason, those jobs are removed from the market completely; if Industrial /Commercial desirability lowers for a particular building or area for any reason, occupancy for the building(s) involved will drop, leading to fewer jobs (in other words, people get fired).  A variation of this last cause is when the wealth level of a Sim increases, causing them to look for a new, higher-paying job (NO Sim is going to work beneath their wealth level!).

So, Desirability!  Assuming you have other factors such as Crime and Pollution (of all types) under control:
For CO, the two remaining desirability factors with the biggest impacts are Commercial NIMBY/YIMBY and Traffic volume (higher is better).
For CS, there are three:  Commercial NIMBY/YIMBY, Traffic volume (higher is better), and Proximity to R Sims of the same wealth level as the business.
For Industrial (other than agriculture), it basically comes down to trip times (lower is better) to either a Neighbor Connection, a Seaport, or an Airport.  For IHT, Residential NIMBY/YIMBY is a also a huge factor.

So, how's this for a conundrum:  traffic congestion obviously adds to commute times for R Sims or Freight Trip times for Industry. So the higher the congestion, the more likely a Sim is to bump up against that max 2.5 hr. commute time, or a Freight Trip to exceed 2.5 hrs. and fail.  However, if measures are taken to reduce congestion, you may also be reducing traffic volume past certain buildings, or through certain areas, which lowers CO/CS desirability, which may cause occupancy of buildings to lower, reducing the number of jobs available, causing Sims to get fired.

The Sims/Job ratio is really only useful in the context of a single, stand-alone city when looking at the data from RalphaelNinja's Census Repository.  If you are playing regionally, you really need to use the Census Repository from Ripplejet (https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1831),  as it not only gives you more information about your current city (including how many R Sims are commuting to adjacent cites, and how many C and I jobs are being taken by commuters from adjacent cities), it also gives you regional numbers, which can sometimes be useful in figuring out problems such as yours.

Education:  EQ maxes out at 200.   So you have a highly educated city.  EQ comes into play on a number of levels:

    Crime:  The higher the EQ level, the less likely crime is to occur, which means the overall crime level goes down, which means you can spend less money on police coverage.  The lower the crime level the higher the positive desirability effect for all developer types and wealth levels. The thinking here is that the more educated a Sim is, the more likely they are to have a well-paying job, which means the less likely they will have time to commit crimes, and the less likely they will need to commit crime to make a living.

    Wealth:  The higher the EQ, the higher the wealth level of a Sim.  This has a real-world analogy:  someone with a grade school education has a really limited range of job possibilities, almost all of which will be low paying; a high school diploma greatly expands the number of job possibilities, with higher income earning potential; you don't see many people with really high paying jobs, that don't have one or more university degrees. 

    The combination of Wealth level and EQ affects demand for jobs.  For example:  X # of R$$$ Sims with a medium-high EQ creates demand for Y # of jobs (remember that 2:1 ratio) of different types in the following ratios:  5% CS$$, 20% CS$$$, 20% CO$$, 40% CO$$$, 15% IHT.  The same number of R$$$ Sims with a high EQ would create demand for jobs in the following ratios:  25% CS$$$, 50% CO$$$, 25% IHT.  So just a changing EQ level can change demand, which can cause an over-abundance or under-supply of jobs at different wealth levels (i.e. lower or higher demand), which can cause a higher or lower demand for R Sims of various wealth levels.  In the above scenario, if those R$$ Sims can't find jobs elsewhere (causing the No Job zot), this can cause R$$ demand to go negative.  If demand stays negative, the simulation takes over to restore equilibrium by causing these Sims without jobs to leave town (abandoning their homes), until demand returns to 0.

So, the bottom line is that whenever No Job zots appear, there is usually no one thing that one can point to and say "AHA, there's the cause!"  You need to take a time out and assess all the possible factors that might be in play.

Wow, now there's a wall of text for you.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Do you have the high-tech fix? Is it installed right (packed)?

[APSMS 1,892]

Excellent post, Tim, except for this:

6 hours ago, twalsh102 said:

So, how's this for a conundrum:  traffic congestion obviously adds to commute times for R Sims or Freight Trip times for Industry. So the higher the congestion, the more likely a Sim is to bump up against that max 2.5 hr. commute time, or a Freight Trip to exceed 2.5 hrs. and fail.

Max trip commute time if you aren't using the NAM is 6 minutes. The graph is a lie; apparently 6 minutes seemed pretty short to Maxis devs too, so when they made the commute time graph they multiplied the output by 25; 25x6=150, hence the 2.5 hour figure.

The issue is that, of course, in an unmodded game 6 minutes is a mind-bogglingly short amount of time to make a work commute, and with large populations congestion (and CPU time to find appropriate routes within that limit) can slow things down to a crawl, causing the no-job zots to appear rather frequently, and in waves as the simulator runs through different cycles.

An uptick is that w/o NAM subway can reach any tile in a large city under the time limit. A side effect is that this appears to be hardcoded in the destination (job) finder, so excessively dense cities may not function properly without a subway network to trick the game into understanding where the appropriate jobs are, even if the transportation network is otherwise fluid.

You probably already knew this; it's mostly rehashed for visibility. The NAM, of course, sets max commute time to 600 minutes (10 hrs), which is actually enough to walk the entire tile if you so desired, but has the side effect of making the pathfinder's job easier because the requirements of a successful route are much less stringent, so the game will tend to run faster as a result, because the first successful route found by the pathfinder is likely to fit the 10 hour limit, and it can move on to the next path.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

On 2/22/2017 at 10:39 AM, twalsh102 said:

...

... Are the No Job zots showing up in one particular area of the city?  What does your RCI Demand graph look like?  I'm assuming there are other developed city tiles around this one.  The R census numbers will represent both those that work in this city and those that commute to other cities for work.  The job numbers represent both those jobs taken by this city's residents and those taken by commuters from other cities.  How saturated are your transportation networks?

...

Wow, now there's a wall of text for you.

Hahaha - quite a helpful entry - thanks!  As to your questions: 

Yes, the zots are showing up in just one section - along the eastern edge of the map and also happen to be the newest neighbourhoods, mostly (just a couple exceptions, but they were still adjacent to the new neighbourhoods)

Demand fluctuates mostly positive, the only things in the negative are R$$$, ID, and IHT - and that's because of tax rates - personally I think the game builds too much IHT so I try to keep a nice mix of ID, IM, and IHT.

There are other cities in the region, but after nearly finishing an 8x8 large tile region a few months ago and then discovering the eternal commuter bug, and realizing that I had in some places basically invited them to come, I started a new region and am planning on waiting to make [minimal] connections to cities after I have each one working well on its own.   A radical approach, but so far it seems to be working well, even in spite of this issue.  I probably would have just kept plugging at it without having asked for help, but this particular city had cycled through every wealth level with the NJZs (same part of the map of course) over a 15-20 year period.  That's when I realized I might just want to ask about this ;D

22 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

Do you have the high-tech fix? Is it installed right (packed)?

I do!  But in rather an unorthodox way - I didn't use the tutorial, but had found a mod that does that for you.  

In fact I should mention that I have NAM as well as the RCImulti MODpack installed (among other mods, but these are probably the most relevant).  Sorry about that! 

So to expand on my answer @twalsh102 I've been leaving in the CS$$ and CO$$ demand mods in there (so those are always in demand).    I also have the jobs_standard_uncapped.dat file in there, which does fix the IHT bug.

20 hours ago, APSMS said:

Excellent post, Tim, except for this:

Max trip commute time if you aren't using the NAM is 6 minutes. The graph is a lie; apparently 6 minutes seemed pretty short to Maxis devs too, so when they made the commute time graph they multiplied the output by 25; 25x6=150, hence the 2.5 hour figure.

..

So the graph, which in this case is reading about 0.5 is a half hour?   That seems reasonable, even for RL.  By the way, I do have some subway lines in the city, complimenting the tram network - though I'm not sure that would make a difference since I have NAM installed.

Whew.... I hope I've covered everything.  Thank you all for your help. 

[rsc204 21,810]

2 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

I also have the jobs_standard_uncapped.dat file in there, which does fix the IHT bug.

Nope, sorry to tell you, it doesn't. It's been known for a while what the cause of the problem is. But for reasons not totally understood, the game simply ignores this modified exemplar if it's loaded after the original file. Most mods work fine this way, you just give the modified exemplar the same ID and load it after the original. So far as we know, there is something in the .exe that prevents this with the particular exemplar that alters the requisite property. In short, the only way the I-HT fix will work is if it's DATPacked into the original SimCity_1.dat file (so it replaces the original exemplar with a modified one). See here:

I'd imagine that's potentially your problem here. Check out all your I-HT development. Can you trace any of the workers there back to R$$$ houses? If not, this should be priority #1.

2 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

In fact I should mention that I have NAM as well as the RCImulti MODpack installed (among other mods, but these are probably the most relevant).  Sorry about that! 

Demand mods are really just a big cheat that makes a huge number of changes to the underlying simulation. Unless the modder who created it fully understood the relation between all the altered effects on the simulation, problems can stem from using such things. I'm not saying that is an issue here, but it throws a gigantic spanner into the works and makes it harder for the rest of us to diagnose problems. Using cheats is fine, I don't care either way. The point here is that the simulator is like a delicate ecosystem, change one thing, others things react to the change. If the harmony of the whole becomes distorted, you can end up with big problems. So when I read comments like "I got 150,000 sims in 30m using this mod", my first thoughts are, "hmmm, but at what cost?".

[RobertLM78 1,597]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Nope, sorry to tell you, it doesn't. It's been known for a while what the cause of the problem is. But for reasons not totally understood, the game simply ignores this modified exemplar if it's loaded after the original file. Most mods work fine this way, you just give the modified exemplar the same ID and load it after the original. So far as we know, there is something in the .exe that prevents this with the particular exemplar that alters the requisite property. In short, the only way the I-HT fix will work is if it's DATPacked into the original SimCity_1.dat file (so it replaces the original exemplar with a modified one). See here:

I'd imagine that's potentially your problem here. Check out all your I-HT development. Can you trace any of the workers there back to R$$$ houses? If not, this should be priority #1.

Demand mods are really just a big cheat that makes a huge number of changes to the underlying simulation. Unless the modder who created it fully understood the relation between all the altered effects on the simulation, problems can stem from using such things. I'm not saying that is an issue here, but it throws a gigantic spanner into the works and makes it harder for the rest of us to diagnose problems. Using cheats is fine, I don't care either way. The point here is that the simulator is like a delicate ecosystem, change one thing, others things react to the change. If the harmony of the whole becomes distorted, you can end up with big problems. So when I read comments like "I got 150,000 sims in 30m using this mod", my first thoughts are, "hmmm, but at what cost?".

For sure there's always a cost - and I didn't use that particular mod without a lot of consideration beforehand.  ;D

Anyhow - I just had to double check... and yes, I do see R$$$ sims going to IHT jobs, using the path query tool.  So, that does seem to be okay.  I based my 'goals' for percentages of residential wealth levels based on an averages of how many jobs are possible in each classification - so I arrived at 9% R$$$ +/- 4 or 5% is my own 'cap' for a city.   That said, there should be more than enough in the commercial districts for the current percent of about 13% R$$$.

Here's what RippleJets census is saying - though I have worked on the city since posting RaphaelNinja's version and things have settled down through some simulator renewal, with about 20,000 less R$$$:

[fredinno 54]

add Monorail through your jobs and Residential districts. Often, the workers can't get to the jobs if your city is large.

Also, check if there are any glitch (modded) buildings- namely, if there are buildings with a 0/0 capacity, or empty lots from removed buildings or badly made buildings.

Those usually create fake demand/supply, and should be modified or removed.

[APSMS 1,892]

8 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

So the graph, which in this case is reading about 0.5 is a half hour?   That seems reasonable, even for RL.

I wish the commute time graph correlated to something. There was inherent wonkiness in the Maxis Traffic Simulator (MTS), but for the most part it was accurate (divide by 25). With the changes made by the NAM, the graph no longer appears to any concrete value; at best it can be an arbitrary goal for your city to maintain a specific commute time as indicated by the graph, but it shouldn't really be taken to mean anything with NAM changes.

Worth noting that although a city tile is ~2.4 miles on a side, the game lets subways run at 150kph (MTS) or 110kph (NAM). Either way this is far faster than subways typically operate (150kph=~94mph). Sims similarly walk at 15kph (NAM), mostly because Sims don't wait at stations and otherwise the simulator would always default to car transit, making the default situation more of a necessity for successful public transit rather than an aesthetic convenience. Trips can take 3.2 minutes to travel from one corner of the map to the opposite corner when moving at 150kph (theoretically the longest route possible in a city tile, since diagonals are a convenient lie in SC4).

Aside from the ridiculousness of a 90mph subway train (or even 70mph), commutes outside the city are always labeled long. Medium tiles are only 1.2 miles a side, which takes the average car about 2 minutes on side streets to traverse, but in game it's possible with the MTS to get NJZs due to overly long commutes. This happens even more frequently with large tiles in the MTS even though again it would only take a car ~10 minutes to go the longest possible distance, 8km or ~5 miles. Such a commute in a car in the MTS would be deemed too long, and the Sim would have to find a different job or go hungry, despite the RL situation of people sometimes commuting over 2 hours every day to get to work (the fire crew near my house has some people that live 10 hours away, but they only make the journey twice a week, once to get to the station and the other to go home).

.5 is probably referring to minutes, as the graph sees it. I think the NAM removed the scaling factor, but I can't be sure (I remember reading something about it specifically somewhere). Either way, don't trust the commute time graph. Unfortunately, knowing the commute times of the Sims is a meticulous process that will essentially involve finding every single tile along the path and calculating the time to cross it, which is horribly tedious if you have a decent sized city. The graph is basically meaningless in this case.

[rsc204 21,810]

Assuming the figures are correct, you have a total workforce of 3.9mil, with a total number of jobs at 4.6mil in the region. So you need more residential, mostly R$$ based on the "drives". Of course these figures fluctuate and change, but you've 700,000 jobs open with no employees, not insignificant.

Now let's say you have a factory that needs a handful of R$ sims for menial jobs, mostly R$$ sims to do the work and some R$$$ to run the business. What happens if the capacity of the potential jobs for that factory isn't being met? Even if that's only by one of the three wealth groups and not entirely. The business fails, because it can't operate properly. At this point those sims who were working there become unemployed and must look for other work. If this starts happening on a semi-large scale, soon enough you'll be seeing lots of NJZs, indicative of a recession in game.

Balancing demands, wealth and EQ levels is a complex beast sometimes. Because if the right sims can't get to the right jobs, you create a domino effect. As sims loose their jobs, it starts to affect demand, then this can cause changes that continue to make the problem worse. Once you give the economy what it needs, the effect will level off and you can begin to grow again.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

6 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Assuming the figures are correct, you have a total workforce of 3.9mil, with a total number of jobs at 4.6mil in the region. So you need more residential, mostly R$$ based on the "drives". Of course these figures fluctuate and change, but you've 700,000 jobs open with no employees, not insignificant.

Now let's say you have a factory that needs a handful of R$ sims for menial jobs, mostly R$$ sims to do the work and some R$$$ to run the business. What happens if the capacity of the potential jobs for that factory isn't being met? Even if that's only by one of the three wealth groups and not entirely. The business fails, because it can't operate properly. At this point those sims who were working there become unemployed and must look for other work. If this starts happening on a semi-large scale, soon enough you'll be seeing lots of NJZs, indicative of a recession in game.

Balancing demands, wealth and EQ levels is a complex beast sometimes. Because if the right sims can't get to the right jobs, you create a domino effect. As sims loose their jobs, it starts to affect demand, then this can cause changes that continue to make the problem worse. Once you give the economy what it needs, the effect will level off and you can begin to grow again.

Interesting points - thanks!    I am beginning to wonder about the EQ variable: I had always figured the higher the better, but should it not get too high?  

As I've got all cities isolated at this time, I will need to go through city by city to see where more R$$ is needed.   I imagine those 138k jobs in this city will be best filled by R$$.

 

16 hours ago, fredinno said:

add Monorail through your jobs and Residential districts. Often, the workers can't get to the jobs if your city is large.

Also, check if there are any glitch (modded) buildings- namely, if there are buildings with a 0/0 capacity, or empty lots from removed buildings or badly made buildings.

Those usually create fake demand/supply, and should be modified or removed.

I might check out the monorail option.  As I've been having an issue with the patch that fixes night-lighting I haven't really jumped into modded buildings.  Basically the only custom buildings I have installed are civic and transportation (the exception being Simgoober's industrial packs and a few of his stand-alone factories - and those seem to be functioning just fine -  at least so far).