Help with what's next

[scape 5]

so i build a few cities.

i have all the proper mods to 'fix' the game.

i have loads of downloaded growable lots, skyscrapers ofcourse

but i had maybe 1 or 2 of those ever grow, and they werent even the nicest ones.

my cities are stuck at 350k, and they dont seem to grow bigger.

how do i get them to grow bigger from here, and how do i get the skyscrapers to grow?

 

or what am i doing wrong or what am i missing?

[matias93 7,535]

Hi and welcome!

I guess the first thing to say is that 350k sims on a medium tile is a very high number, particularly on rugged terrain on which you cannot build the 100% of the surface, so I guess you may be hitting some theoretical limit.

Nevertheless, the absence of skyscrapers or big buildings can be caused by several motives, which, in order of complexity, are:

• Inadequate Zoning: most skyscrapers on the original game grow on 4x2, 4x3 or 4x4 lots (or their rotated equivalents, 2x4 and 3x4), so if your more density-prone lots are smaller than that, you won't find the biggest buildings there, unless the game decides to fuse together adjacent zones of the same type and density. Custom lots are more diverse in that sense, but the skyscrapers tend to be on even bigger lots, up from 6x6.
• Lack of Incentives: the game looks for traffic to see where a commercial building would be more 'desired', so the commercial zones that face busy (and sometimes, somewhat polluted) roads and avenues are the most prone to grow big. But the areas should also be desirable by other metrics: the game expect commercial areas to be close to squares and plazas. This recently developed tool could be of use to see if you are providing your commercial zoning with enough desirability.
• Insufficient Demand: I heavily doubt this would be the case on a full city, but if most of your resident sims are too poor, they won't demand high wealth services, nor commercial offices at all. Get sure to make at least some of your residential neighbourhoods middle or high class to help the more sophisticated commercial buildings to emerge.
• Hitting Demand caps: The game uses 'demand caps' to avoid small cities to develop huge buildings by accident (something that SimCity 3000 was too prone to do), and includes methods to overcome those caps in a controlled manner: you can plop 'reward' type buildings to alleviate some kinds of caps, and to build transportation connections to other cities on your region to help with this. This is one of the most common causes of stalled growth, as most users tend to forget the reward buildings, or actively avoid them because their style doesn't match the kind of city they are building. Some content creators, noticing this, have released custom reward buildings with the same effects but different appeareances; you can find some of them on the STEX looking for 'rewards'.
• Low Growth Stage: this also is a somewhat infrequent motive, unless you have blocked some Maxis lots from growing. All lots in the game have a growth stage, going from 1 to 8 in the original game, but increased with the CAM mod. To grow higher stage buildings (where all the skyscrapers are), you need to have lower stage buildings on your city. If you have blocked (or bulldozed systematically) the buildings of a given stage, this could be restricting the higher stage lots to appear.

If nothing on this list resolves this issue, or if your problem is that you aren't seeing specific buildings grow, it may be that the skyscrapers you are expecting to grow simply aren't growable at all. Many custom-made buildings have been released only as 'landmarks' and do not grow, but can only be plopped by the user from the landmark menu.

Try with this tips and then tell us how it's going. Good luck!

[scape 5]

thanks for the detailed help matias93.

kudos!

 

i will test your tips and see if i can get those skyscrapers that look so pretty

[scape 5]

ok im still baffled.

i added some screenshots to show what i have done.

the skyscraperes i added in my plugin folder are growable (i checked, because i think its coolest). but most of those are stage 8.

what am i missing to make those skyscrapers pop up everywhere?

 

[matias93 7,535]

Well, you certainly have a lot of stage 8 residential buildings there, so you effectively capped the residential growth, there is nothing else to do there.

Commercial skyscrapers are always harder to get, and I guess we'll need to see your demand and traffic charts and maps to pinpoint what could be happening. My impression is that you managed to distribute your commercial areas across most of the built surface, helping your sims to commute to work in short routes. This is generally good, particularly in real life, but in the game it means that you probably don't have any particularly busy intersection or transit hub that would attract the right amount of traffic as to justify some stage 8 commercial tower.

In my experience, before actively trying to not have skyscrapers on my cities (I'm simulating a South American city, we have at most two or three of those on the entire metro area), the few times I managed to grow a stage 8 commercial, it was on a ridiculously busy intersection, built over a highway pass and a railway-to-subway hub. And it was only one building (this KPMG tower on the middle of the image):

[scape 5]

how can i tell i have stage 8 skyscrapers?

and i downloaded a lot of cool skyscrapers, but they dont appear.

i think my transport works well enough at this point. 

 

basically i want those skyscrapers i downloaded to grow, and not those semi boring oringal ones..

[scape 5]

i have a standard maxis skyscraper, who is now occupied by RS$$

is this a stage 8 building? how can i tell?

 

and i dont want this one, i want a cool one i downloaded  

[CorinaMarie 29,902]

You can try the Block ALL Maxis Buildings by DuskTrooper mod so only the custom content you have can grow.

[matias93 7,535]

As a rule of thumb, anything from the NDEX team is stage 7 or 8, and almost anything of such a size as well.

Seeing an example from your list on the Reader:

On your last image, there are several stage 8 residentials, the most characteristic of them this 4x4 huge towers right on the bottom of the image, just over the 'Safety' meter.

[scape 5]

as you can see i have quite a few buildings downloaded. they are growable. 

how come they dont grow? or very very rarely?

basically i want to improve my region to such a way, that my downtown is only the biggest of the biggest

[matias93 7,535]

Though there have been some experiences on probing the density limits of the game (the infamous Magnasanti project for SimCity 3000), the game wasn't designed to showcase a huge number of buildings of the highest stages growing side-to-side, but rather as emergent landmarks.

This has not stopped the players from wanting to increase the density of their cities, and that's one of the reasons why the Colossus Addon Mod (CAM) was created. Tarkus did a great work explaining shortly what (not) to expect from the CAM on his blog, and as he says,

Quote

There’s a popular notion out there that the CAM is basically a mod to get more skyscrapers and a larger population.  While you will see more sustained growth with the CAM at the top end of the scale, making the process of getting those skyscrapers that much more satisfying [...] has some other nice effects on the overall balance of the game, even when you’re not trying to build your own Hong Kong.

 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 2/28/2020 at 9:47 AM, scape said:

i want to improve my region to such a way, that my downtown is only the biggest

1) Develop the suburbs and exurbs needed to support that. Manhattan does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, even on Manhattan, the sky-scraper areas are quite limited. You must build up huge demand in sectors that can't satisfy it themselves (because they're stuck in lower stages). That's when you go to your CBD to let a super-scraper grow.

2) Tell us what you have modded. Do you have CAM? If so, which version?

3) Choke the zoning. Huge skyscrapers have huge demand-satisfied. You won't see such chosen by the developers if you zone "huge tracts of land". Instead, you must cultivate huge demand spread across many sectors that can't grow what's wanted, and then you go to the CBD where the stages and caps have been blown and the super-scraper can pop up.

If you don't cultivate while constricting, you won't go vertical. Instead, you'll probably have mid-level pin-cushion like you showed us.

Keep working at it (and consider using CAM).

[xxdita 1,097]

Shameless plug. Go Turbo. 

[infamousjbe 593]

On 2/28/2020 at 9:47 AM, scape said:

as you can see i have quite a few buildings downloaded. they are growable. 

how come they dont grow? or very very rarely?

basically i want to improve my region to such a way, that my downtown is only the biggest of the biggest

Could depend on which building style those custom lots are assigned to and which building style you have selected. You might want to make sure your game is set to "build all styles" at the same time. That way the game will pull from all the content available.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

3 hours ago, infamousjbe said:

make sure your game is set to "build all styles"

As of last report (this year), the "build all styles" feature is still broken (and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead).

[CorinaMarie 29,902]

Just now, jeffryfisher said:

As of last report (this year), the "build all styles" feature is still broken

It's only broken inasmuch as they do not build all at once, but they do build in sequence with a minimum of one year between styles.

[Naomi57 2,985]

In terms of my own play style, you already have heaps of skyscrapers, but if you want more of them, or bigger ones, some of these tips might help you.  

On 01/03/2020 at 11:28 AM, jeffryfisher said:

3) Choke the zoning. Huge skyscrapers have huge demand-satisfied. You won't see such chosen by the developers if you zone "huge tracts of land". Instead, you must cultivate huge demand spread across many sectors that can't grow what's wanted, and then you go to the CBD where the stages and caps have been blown and the super-scraper can pop up.

Further to @jeffryfisher's advice, vertical density growth depends strongly upon economic conditions.  A diverse economy across RCI is best for maximum growth, though some of that diversity can be in neighbouring city tiles.  In terms of choking the zoning for commercial, you want to focus your high density commercial zoning only on those areas that deliver maximum commercial benefit.

There's a couple screenshots below that show what I mean.  This is not one of my skyscraper cities, rather it's just a tourist island and bedroom community, but given the restricted real-estate available, I've been exquisitely careful to zone commercial in all the highest opportunity areas.

High Traffic = High Customers
High Customers = High Commercial Growth

There's four ways of increasing road traffic that come immediately to mind for me.  Looking at your screenshots, these might be useful to your situation:

1. More highways.  Highways have three times the speed limit of avenues, meaning that sims will commute further to work.  More sims on greater lengths of road means more customers!  
2. Utilise your neighbour connections.  Whether ploppable car ferry or highway neighbour connection, these are often ideal spots for commercial zoning, because neighbour connections are very attractive destinations for sim commuters.
3. Use highways to funnel maximum number of commuters into using just a few routes.  These few routes then become ideal locations for highly profitable commercial towers.
4. Ensure maximum employment, checking using the Traffic Query tool.  Unemployed sims don't pay taxes, and they don't contribute to road traffic (customer) levels, either!  Low wealth R$ sims can be super useful that way, because you can pack large numbers of them into high-rise tenements quite easily ... as long as they have suitable jobs!  Large R$ populations are often handy contributors for increasing road traffic.

On the subject of neighbour connections, Maxis Highway (MHW) neighbour connections are extremely good tools for increasing commercial caps.  Airports are important for increasing commercial demand caps, too.

Here's Traffic Volume view, and then the same screenshot in Air Pollution view.  Air Pollution (where it's caused by road traffic) provides an alternative view on identifying the best commercial opportunities.

You can actually zone right next to highways, you just need to face your zoning away from the highway, like this:

Notice the orange lines in that screenshot shows the shopfronts facing the street.  They are facing away from the two-lane highway (single-tile highway RHW-2), but still collecting the traffic-based benefits of the adjacent highway in terms of increased customers.  That's one big reason why the lots are so very healthy ... 59 workers in a low density two-tile commercial lot on a little island city is very, very healthy.

For further info on checking for and encouraging maximum employment, this other post of mine might be helpful.

https://community.simtropolis.com/journals/entry/29025-thoughtful-reflections-on-oompa-loompas-aka-where-are-all-the-workers/

PS.  If you have NAM installed, I recently discovered that Tram-on-Street and Tram-in-Road (GLR) are exceedingly useful for boosting both residential and commercial growth, but it's quite a difficult feature to use.  They are good that way because they increase Traffic Noise / Customer levels, without needing to worry at all about the street capacity.  Whereas subway is a difficult balancing act, because they take commuters off the road, trams are like the best of both worlds.  The tram commuters are counted as subway/el-rail in terms of traffic volume, but they count as customers in-terms of commercial growth.  Disclaimer:  I've only built three tram suburbs so far, having only discovered this technique recently, but I know some tips and tricks on the subject if you want to try them out.

[xxdita 1,097]

It really isn't that complicated. 

A stage 8 has to have 1.5x the capacity of the stage 7 it is to replace, but at the same time, that can't be more than +6000 capacity. So a stage 8 with 18,000 capacity can only grow where a stage 7 with 12,000 capacity is already in place. A stage 8 with 20,000 capacity just can't grow. (Granted, this is per tract rather than lot)

My Turbo mod increases the amount of possible growth each month, to allow for larger capacity buildings to grow, as well as allowing more of them to grow at once, provided the real demand for such growth is in place. 

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 3/10/2020 at 6:11 PM, CorinaMarie said:

It's only broken inasmuch as they do not build all at once, but they do build in sequence with a minimum of one year between styles.

Yes, you can achieve rotation by setting the interval to 1 or 0, but the important safety tip for newer players is that if you select "Build All Styles", you won't change anything. You'll end up with whatever rotation interval is set, and if you thought "Build All Styles" would work as advertised, then your interval might still be the default (which is not 1 year).

Takeaway lesson: Set your desired rotation interval and ignore "Build All Styles" completely.