Commute Time Problems

[owen4757 2]

I have NAM but the commute times still suck! I had a mod that made people work at each others homes. This caused commercial and industrial to not grow, and cars to never be on the road. If there are any mod creators that could possibly make an "infinite commute mod" please do! It would be amazing!

[CorinaMarie 29,619]

38 minutes ago, owen4757 said:

If there are any mod creators that could possibly make an "infinite commute mod" please do! It would be amazing!

Since you have the NAM installed I presume you also installed the TSCT:

^ With the above settings it creates a NetworkAddonMod_Traffic_Plugin_Z_Ultra_Custom.dat file. If you've tweaked things differently then the file name will be similar, but not identical.

The question would be do your commute times suck because of congestion slowing things down? If so, you could crank up the capacities of the networks using this tool. However, if that's not the problem you could go rogue (against the NAM team's advice due to potential unbalancing of things) and double or triple the speeds at which each type of transportation travels on any of the various networks. As this is not sanctioned by the NAM team, it would have to be edited using Reader. The following properties are the ones that control the speeds:

And you can find what each particular one controls on the SC4Devotion's Wiki in the Traffic Simulator section.

[rsc204 21,815]

Simply trying to brute force your way around problems often only makes them worse.

Case in point, installing a mod that prevents sims from looking for jobs, by working from homes. This will dramatically change how the game works, failure to understand this will create an imbalance, because you must adjust your play style to match the mod.

For example, let's say the game ideally looks for a split between 70% commercial jobs and 30% industrial jobs. Approx 50% of your residents will work, so assuming a region population of 10,000 sims, 3,500 commercial and 1,500 industrial jobs need to exist for full employment. Note this is a very basic example, it's more complex in reality. So we add an industrial quadrupler mod into our game at this point. Now there would be 6,000 industrial jobs, but we'd need at least 4,500 more sims to accommodate this. Not having those could lead to a recession as buildings close due to a lack of sufficient workers, having a knock on effect further down the line.

Similarly, you change NAM capacity to Ultra, but you don't need it, now the traffic levels are much lower everywhere. Did you know this will reduce CS demand, because CS is reliant on high traffic volume for demand? Of course, if your roads/transport networks are all maxed out, it could help.

The point here though, mods aren't always a solution, understanding the game is key to success. SC4 is a reactive game, small subtle changes will always have an effect. Take it slowly, follow the RCI bars to see what demand you have. Check the graphs and data views to look for problems. Doing this will help you to understand which strategies work and helps to keep steady growth.

[CorinaMarie 29,619]

On 9/19/2018 at 7:07 PM, rsc204 said:

Similarly, you change NAM capacity to Ultra, but you don't need it, now the traffic levels are much lower everywhere. Did you know this will reduce CS demand, because CS is reliant on high traffic volume for demand?

This has been floating around in my mind for ages and I finally did some testing.

 

First off, here's the insane settings I'm using for this:

^ Notice specifically the Road at 24,000 capacity.

 

I've set up a test tile in which the only way for a bunch of Sims to get to work is via a road which passes a commercial property:

 

If I've done the math correctly, that shows 2.7% of capacity used and yet the customer count is high:

 

This would seem to indicate the customers are not a percentage of the network usage, but a hard coded (or tucked away elsewhere in the dat files) value.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

This would seem to indicate the customers are not a percentage of the network usage, but a hard coded (or tucked away elsewhere in the dat files) value.

The implications of this could be huge.  Something is fundamentally squirrelly with the traffic/commute times even with NAM. 

[CorinaMarie 29,619]

2 hours ago, RobertLM78 said:

Something is fundamentally squirrelly with the traffic/commute times even with NAM.

Now that is a horse of another color.

Maxis apparently never dreamed of what modders and especially NAMites would create for the game and so the commute time calcs are not able to adjust over the complete range that any given city tile throws at it. The numbers don't scale well from lazy rural tiles up to huge mega cities. By default NAM sets the scaling factor for the Commute Time Graph to 0.015 and that seems to be a decent compromise. Ofc for me, I'll then see something like a minute or less in my agrarian tiles so I often tweak the factor while I'm playing them.

What I've tested above is that the Customers/Traffic Noise Coefficient (property 0x0CAAAEB8) appears to simply be a factor applied to actual traffic count and when that answer gets into the upper range of a three digit number, one sees high customer counts without regard to the actual traffic capacity of the adjacent network(s). In my opinion, this simplifies things for city builders immensely. There's no need to adjust the network capacities to the size cities one builds to ensure good commercial growth. Now that choice of Low, Medium, High, and so on are all reserved for how much does one enjoy using the various offerings in NAM to alleviate traffic issues as well as for the visual aesthetics of the different networks.

Even with my crazy double ultra settings for the test, I can get high customer counts with a triflingly small percent of the network capacity. If my theory holds water, there has been some inadvertent misinformation being propagated over the years. (Similar to the mistaken belief that that the I-HT jobs fix patch had to be DatPacked when it turns out it does not.)