Neighbor Cities provide infinite jobs

[Vivec 0]

I started to notice this issue when playing with CAM 2.1.0. I noticed that my main residential city (90k residents, 10k Commercial jobs) had over 15 times the residents than the only neighbor industrial city jobs. Residents would commute in numbers way more higher than the available jobs. The whole region has around 6 times residents than jobs capacity.

Is this normal gameplay behavior? Or is my game just broken. I always thought that Sims would get no jobs icons if there are no more "free" jobs in neighbor cities.

For the interested, I tested this problem. I removed all plugins and made a new region. I made 2 cities, 1 all residents (plus services) and 1 in the neighbor tile, all industrial-commercial. I installed the Census Repository Facility to help me with the testing. Here's an example of what would happen after various testings: I noticed that if my jobs city had more than 1 job, residents from my R city would still commute in the thousands, even when regional view showed like 20 jobs. The Census repository showed the same 20 regional jobs when I was in the jobs city. When moving in the residential city, the Census repository would still report these 20 regional jobs, nearly all houses would get "no jobs" icon, R demand drop, and the Route Query would report 20 commuters, so the game would actually notice that my neighbor city had only few jobs, but after 2-3 months all "no jobs" icons would disappear, and the residents start commuting in the thousands, demand raise again, and the Repository Facility report thousands of fake regional jobs. One time, when in the jobs city, the Census repository would still report 1k+ of regional jobs, despite having deleted all jobs buildings. Removing the road connection would then show accurate 0 jobs capacity, restoring the road again thousands!

The good thing is that demand would balance that, and I would get massive negative R demand in the jobs city, despite my R city growing thanks to all those invisible jobs, creating more demand. The problem is when playing with NAM + CAM. Commuting becomes way more viable, and with the CAM increased demand makes having jobs a very minor and exploitable issue.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

Sims commute speculatively -- allowing you to fire up the neighbor and either build more jobs or make a further connection to yet another sector. Imagine how sticky things would be if they didn't.

NB: If you run commuters in a triangle (or larger closed loop), then you can create the "infinite commuter" problem where they go round and round, being counted multiple times. This is generally bad, but you can collect loads of tolls!

  Edited December 20, 2018 by jeffryfisher  
Infinite commuters

[HayleyRenaNemeth 465]

2 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

Sims commute speculatively -- allowing you to fire up the neighbor and either build more jobs or make a further connection to yet another sector. Imagine how sticky things would be if they didn't.

NB: If you run commuters in a triangle (or larger closed loop), then you can create the "infinite commuter" problem where they go round and round, being counted multiple times. This is generally bad, but you can collect loads of tolls!

haha imagine sims being so stupid that they drive in circles for hours. 

[Vivec 0]

I'm well aware of the infinite commuters loop, I tried to recreate the loop in my test region in a triangle, over 3k commuters become around half in the second city (~ 50 jobs) and then in the third they become exactly as the number of jobs available (still around 50). No commuter goes back to my residential city (where I added some Industrial jobs). This game is so weird!

The thing that surprise me is that the game at first acknowledges the lack of jobs every time I go back to my main city, giving me massive unemployment, but then "resolves" the problem by creating as much as needed jobs in neighbor tiles. Since those made up jobs create demand I can grow my R city as much as I want while having like 40 regional jobs. To me this sounds like a bug, but what I can say!

I will have to play around this in some way, give up on specialized cities, and try to artificially keep the regional jobs as around half the residential population if I want some semblance of realism and balance. Like making mass transit not too effective to generate road traffic to keep commercial customers high was not ridiculous enough!

This explains the problem in my old region, where demand would wildly fluctuate when moving between cities, since all those fake jobs created demand only on the starting tile of the new commuters.

[Prophet42 1,503]

The simulation actually assumes a certain amount of growth in the neighbor city.  So initially, your residential city may notice the lack of jobs from your job city, but after a couple of sim months it starts to assume your job city is growing thus providing "future growth" jobs.  Now if you open up your job city but do not let it catch up to the number of jobs your residential city assumed, then the simulation will correct itself and provide the actual number of available jobs in your job city.  The vice versa is also true, as you play your job city, it will assume a certain amount of residential growth in your residential city until you open up the residential city and the simulation corrects to the actual number of residents.

[Adamskisc4 20]

On 22/12/2018 at 2:34 AM, Prophet42 said:

The simulation actually assumes a certain amount of growth in the neighbor city.  So initially, your residential city may notice the lack of jobs from your job city, but after a couple of sim months it starts to assume your job city is growing thus providing "future growth" jobs.  Now if you open up your job city but do not let it catch up to the number of jobs your residential city assumed, then the simulation will correct itself and provide the actual number of available jobs in your job city.  The vice versa is also true, as you play your job city, it will assume a certain amount of residential growth in your residential city until you open up the residential city and the simulation corrects to the actual number of residents.

The census repository says you should play a city for a while to allow it to grow after entering otherwise the extrapolated growth from the region will be lost. Between brackets it says 10%, but does that mean population growth of 10%? Jobs? Jobs in specific sectors? Cities have different profiles ....