RCI game DAT file differences between game versions?

[gviper 922]

I am wondering; has anyone ever noticed core RCI characteristic differences when building a city from scratch (primarily vanilla) across the difference formats (Original EA/MAXIS issue, Steam Deluxe Edition, Cosmi Software SC4 release)? I kid you not it feels like with the deluxe edition and perhaps Cosmi that the RCI meter functions differently. I noticed especially with the deluxe edition that I could build an entirely poor city and keep it going and growing, but as soon as I plopped and increased the education the demand for the poor nosedived and the demand for the middle wealth didn't rise either. it's as if it was forcing region play where one city is poor, one wealthy so on and so forth. but you can't have a city made up of all wealth levels?

[rsc204 21,867]

On 10/17/2021 at 6:51 PM, gviper said:

I kid you not it feels like with the deluxe edition and perhaps Cosmi that the RCI meter functions differently.

That might be how it feels, but the simple fact is that a fully patched copy of 1.640 or 1.641 version of SC4 Deluxe, regardless of how you got to that point, uses absolutely identical code. EA did not re-make anything for the digital re-releases, all the supposed 'updates' you might see on Steam, GoG or the like, are nothing to do with the game, they simply update how it interacts with their service. Likewise there are no changes in the base files, like the SimCity_#.dats and the like.

Therefore I would think that either you are remembering some difference from before the Rush Hour/Deluxe update (never played vanilla myself), or perhaps forgetting some mod you had installed that altered the behaviour of this feature?

On 10/17/2021 at 6:51 PM, gviper said:

I noticed especially with the deluxe edition that I could build an entirely poor city and keep it going and growing, but as soon as I plopped and increased the education the demand for the poor nosedived and the demand for the middle wealth didn't rise either.

When you have higher EQ sims, it will create demand for better workplaces that require more R$$ and R$$$ sims to work there. However, demand is more complex than a single factor, so if the R$$ demand didn't come, perhaps you need to fulfil demand for the CS/CO and I-M buildings that will fuel demand for them. That said, it doesn't seem like you want that demand?, the simple option would be to keep your sims dumb and not bother educating them.

Not that educating your sims prevents R$ from existing, even at the highest levels (the highest % of R$$/R$$$ sims), around 50% of your workforce will still come from R$. But until you start generating more than just a token R$$ and R$$$ population, this balance is much more heavily skewed towards R$. That's why making things better, triggers a lowering of R$ demand, because the simulator is preparing for a smaller percentage of your overall population to be R$. If most of your current sims are R$ at this point, then of course that is going to make this look more dramatic than if you already had a higher number of R$$/R$$$ to start with.

On 10/17/2021 at 6:51 PM, gviper said:

it's as if it was forcing region play where one city is poor, one wealthy so on and so forth. but you can't have a city made up of all wealth levels?

Region play is forced, but in a very specific way, in that at a certain point to keep the demand cycle going it will be necessary to expand beyond a single city. This is explained well in the following tutorial, which shows how to balance inter-regional demand and sustain positive growth.

Whilst you can have a city with mixed wealth inhabitants, one problem many users will have is that as their city becomes nicer, it becomes too nice for R$ to move in. Couple that with the R$$/R$$$ sims ability to replace lower wealth buildings and it's very easy to suddenly end up with not enough R$ sims, which can cause big problems. This is where working on a wider-region has benefits, because in a scenario like this, you could just have your R$ workers commute from a connected city to fulfil demand.

If you are familiar with the concepts of YIMBY and NIMBY (Yes/No In My Back Yard), you can use lots with such properties to control how nice areas of your city are. For example you can have a polluting I-D area, perhaps with your power plant, nearby a lot of R$ live because it's too polluted for R$$ and R$$$ to consider, it'll also have much lower land values, meaning new zoning there would remain affordable for R$ sims to keep moving in. Meanwhile another corner of the city might have a lot of R$$$ mansions, because the conditions are right for that. It's just more difficult to keep parts of a developed city "down", because a lot of the services you need for a very large population, themselves make the city a nicer place to be.

Yet it remains possible to retain poorer areas despite having good education, health and civic services, but often that requires a little help, for example by placing some NIMBY lots or doing something else to deliberately keep an area's desirability lower. Another strategy is simply to make a number of your very large R$ buildings 'historical', before the conditions for R$$ and R$$$ demand is met, so they aren't replaced. Likewise, use of the No KickOut Lower Wealth mod does a very similar thing, without all the effort of doing it manually. But by carefully checking the information in the data-views and taking things slowly, you should be able to retain control over how desirable given areas are to different wealth sims. If you can successfully keep on top of this, there is nothing to stop a completely mixed city from functioning with all zoning/wealthing types intermixed.

[gviper 922]

Thanks for the information and insight. It has been years since I developed a region and removed all my past work. I don't remember it being so difficult getting rolling, but, then again, maybe I forget that it was. I noticed particularly that my issues had a lot to do with a highly educated workforce and a disparately low-income population structure that I had created and locked in city-wide using the "make historical" tab. Now, I used that in the past to build-up commercial demand, to then "release" in my main city, but oddly enough it didn't work. So peeking around the mods I found a couple that have stabilized things and aided my goals. Pretty clear that original coding envisioned anything but stratified income levels in one city.