Land value taking a nose dive

[Haljackey 17,268]

I've been playing this city since 2013. It's been a very prosperous city with a ton of land value. However starting it up recently and running the simulation, the land value just tanked and a lot of buildings are abandoning.

 

Loading the city:

 

And after a few years:

 

What could be causing this? I checked all my other city stats and all are fine. Taxes are low, fire/police coverage etc is good. No other weird problems. Could it perhaps be something I downloaded recently? I am not sure what it could be... the only thing I have that could affect it recently downloaded is @CorinaMarie's no kickout mod installed in my plugins last month.

However after uninstalling it. no change. The issue persists so that can be ruled out.

Just this one city seems to be affected. Other similar large, older cities seem fine.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Weird.   Be advised that some mods that change game mechanics can have lingering effects, such as   jobs_xx_uncapped.dat from the RCI Multipack.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

5 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Just this one city seems to be affected. Other similar large, older cities seem fine.

This also indicates it's not related to any recent mod specifically.

Here's my random guess: Did you perhaps change out any parks? Like bulldozing old ones and replopping new ones? During testing of my Parks Aura DataView, @Naomi57 discovered there can be residual park auras that don't always get canceled properly when bulldozing and replopping. And worse, if changing to a mod which uses the same IIDs for parks, but with altered values for either park effect and/or landmark effect the trouble can become exacerbated when bulldozing the old ones as that can add an increased negative effect hidden in the city data sub files.

While there's still no mod to see the Landmark Aura, there is my Cori's Parks Aura. You could check that in year 462 before un-pausing and then watching it as you run time. If that too starts showing nasty colors then it's a likely indication my guess has merit. (If it's a similar thing, but Landmark Aura related, then we've no way to peek at that.)

Ofc, this is just speculation and it might not reveal anything useful.

[Haljackey 17,268]

On 5/22/2021 at 10:23 PM, CorinaMarie said:

This also indicates it's not related to any recent mod specifically.

Here's my random guess: Did you perhaps change out any parks? Like bulldozing old ones and replopping new ones? During testing of my Parks Aura DataView, @Naomi57 discovered there can be residual park auras that don't always get canceled properly when bulldozing and replopping. And worse, if changing to a mod which uses the same IIDs for parks, but with altered values for either park effect and/or landmark effect the trouble can become exacerbated when bulldozing the old ones as that can add an increased negative effect hidden in the city data sub files.

While there's still no mod to see the Landmark Aura, there is my Cori's Parks Aura. You could check that in year 462 before un-pausing and then watching it as you run time. If that too starts showing nasty colors then it's a likely indication my guess has merit. (If it's a similar thing, but Landmark Aura related, then we've no way to peek at that.)

Ofc, this is just speculation and it might not reveal anything useful.

Yes I did remove/replace some parks recently. Scope of the work included the removal of the parks in the first image

Compared with this image

 

The garden in the lower right around the light rail was also mistakenly demolished and replaced: called 'FloraPack Test Lot - Seasonals'

 

-----

 

Using your data view, here is what it shows when loading the city

And after running the simulation for a bit, there is no change to this data view as land value drops

[Naomi57 2,985]

2 hours ago, Haljackey said:

Using your data view, here is what it shows when loading the city

I agree with @CorinaMarie's theory, and I've seen some weird Parks Aura results from demolishing and rebuilding certain parks/landmarks, but your Parks Aura is the most unnatural I've ever seen.  That even spread of a negative park aura suggests a modded park with a ginormous radius might be the culprit, or perhaps something else that's even weirder?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

I do remember that I have had the same circumstance many years ago, Dimly remember it happened after I installed a BAT named "?? Wall", then the land value was considerably reduced, many commercial and industrial buildings were abandoned, I can still recall that I have used that method which keep planting trees from God tools, then things were getting better for a while but couldn't resist for so long then changed back to this ginormous red within about 3 years, It's so weird as @Naomi57 said. I'm not sure if I could find out this BAT, I will try to search it later.

---- Update ----

My city has been developed for almost 400 years, no improvement even uninstalled that BAT.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

1 hour ago, Raymond7cn said:

BAT named "?? Wall"

Oh. Oh. Oh! This triggered a memory from some thread I read long ago.

Yes, iirc, there was some sort of seawall or embankment wall set which had a bunch of positive park aura for every single piece. I believe the gist of the thread was that later bulldozing all those pieces and the city tanked. Might even have been said bulldozing was done with the mod removed. (I don't recall that part.) It was long before my Parks Aura mod and at the time I don't believe I participated in the convo as it was beyond what I understood at the time.

If I were to speculate (and I will), perhaps the game only records up to 255 positive aura per piece and if the aura assigned to each piece is greater than that then when bulldozing I do know from testing it looks to the exemplar in plugins to decide how much to subtract so it prolly does deduct the whole amount which would then toss the cell(s) where it was located into a negative.

Much like my fix for a baked in Phantom Slider problem, I would personally try modding a 1 x 1 park (open grass would be fine) to have +255 positive park aura and plop a dozen or so, run time, save, then quit. Now edit the very same park in Reader and set the park aura to 1. Go back in the game and bulldoze only those plopped that were set to 255. Run time and see if there is any improvement in that area. Save, quit, re-mod them back to 255, go plop, save, quit, re-mod to 1, go bulldozing, saving, etc. Try this sequence a few times and see if it can counter the baked in bad aura.

Obviously, keep a saved backup copy of the city at year 462 before attempting this.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

2 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

which had a bunch of positive park aura for every single piece.

Yes Cori! I'm not pretty about this wall, But I just scaned my Plugins, It's probably this one, There are also part2 and part3, I opened it with Reader, whereas every parameters seemed ok there, so I presume that ( it's just as you said ) I probably triggered some limitation by using this BAT, but this BAT itself unlikely has problem.

Just a bit curious, when I was playing with simcity_1.dat, I have seen some Exemplars of developer (?), they seems has land value parameters within, Is it possible to improve this by modifying these? @CorinaMarie

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

2 minutes ago, Raymond7cn said:

Just a bit curious, when I was playing with simcity_1.dat, I have seen some Exemplars of developer (?), they seems has land value parameters within, Is it possible to improve this by modifying these?

Yes indeed. The land value parameters can be modded. There's a nice in depth thread here on ST somewhere in which the OP did some impressive testing. Let's beep @Cyclone Boom since he's our expert for ferreting out long buried threads.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Thank you in advance @Cyclone Boom, This is too complicated than i thought before.

[Cyclone Boom 16,852]

12 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

There's a nice in depth thread here on ST somewhere in which the OP did some impressive testing.

Here is the one...
 

Last active quite a while ago, but there's plenty of of detailed info and illustrative pics inside. Maybe this can be helpful to explain about the modding side too, as there's a few details about it. For the land value property, it says there are 36 Rep values to that, and it might be they're in 18 pairs.

[Haljackey 17,268]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I would personally try modding a 1 x 1 park (open grass would be fine) to have +255 positive park aura and plop a dozen or so, run time, save, then quit. Now edit the very same park in Reader and set the park aura to 1. Go back in the game and bulldoze only those plopped that were set to 255. Run time and see if there is any improvement in that area. Save, quit, re-mod them back to 255, go plop, save, quit, re-mod to 1, go bulldozing, saving, etc. Try this sequence a few times and see if it can counter the baked in bad aura.

I am having some difficulty following all the suggestions here. and can confirm that I do not have the wall mod @Raymond7cn mentioned.

...Do you happen to know if a mod/download exists that has +255 park aura? I can maybe try that instead?

Also just a note that I reloaded the city, demolished 'FloraPack Test Lot - Seasonals'. Saved. Reloaded. And land value still tanked. I am not really sure where I downloaded this park from... but after a search didn't find any leads on Simtrop or SC4D.

The next possible attempt I am thinking of is to demolish everything I built recently, save, then reload. Maybe that's enough to change something perhaps? I'll for sure keep a backup of my current city before attempting. May be able to give it a try tomorrow perhaps, along with these other suggestions.

This is the same city that also had another crazy issue in the past. Not sure if related however?

As always, thanks for your help everyone!

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

2 hours ago, Haljackey said:

...Do you happen to know if a mod/download exists that has +255 park aura? I can maybe try that instead?

I don't offhand (and it could be none have that much). For the test, it'd be trivial to create a pair of mods to override the Maxis Open Grass Area park with the corresponding park effect numbers. I could prolly make those sometime tomorrow if no one else steps up.

 

2 hours ago, Haljackey said:

The next possible attempt I am thinking of is to demolish everything I built recently, save, then reload. Maybe that's enough to change something perhaps?

I like this as a test. Maybe even selectively bulldoze a quarter of the city at at time and especially check the park aura while running time with everything bulldozed (not obliterate city as that resets the sub files). If there is still that nasty red aura with everything bulldozed we'll know there are nasty things hiding under the hood.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hiya @Haljackey, @CorinaMarie

This is my city which I played for 400 years, I couldn't solve it even by demolishing everything at then,  But I do hope you could resolve it by this.

@CorinaMarie, Inspired by CB's valuable sharing, I tweaked "baseline desirability" of all developer's Exemplars to '500',  Then I could see the whole city's land value became to green. However I have no idea if it will be helpful in this case.

Improve Land Value.dat

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

Edit: Maybe a stupid question,  I wonder if we could get some clues from Query.txt or Cori's Report.