How do I slow down growth?

[Propfam 2,286]

Hello,

I have a region with around 1 million people, which I'd submit to that hottest challenge. But I have a huge problem. You see large enough cities will stagnate really quickly. Coming out of it is pretty hard, except if you develop other regions to the next stage. And there are only so much freely available city tiles out there. On the other hand, if you start another city, there's a chance that you'll have very high demand. This isn't sustainable thanks to needing more money than it has (I'm using hard mode. So $100k) and most importantly, lack of education and health development. How do I reliably slow the development? Thanks.

[superhighway_410 90]

For new cities, In my experience, It's all down to self-control and looking beyond just the demand charts. Even if you have plenty of demand in a new city, you don't necessarily need to capitalize on it immediately. In fact, trying to fill an entire city tile to fulfill demand is one of the ways to bankrupt yourself quick. Instead, build in gradual steps - build a small neighbourhood, some shops and a farm or industrial area, let it build out and check how you're budget is looking. The incremental method is also good in preventing your cities from stagnating because you avoid over-developing.

As for the lack of health & education, you don't need to provide those things immediately, no matter how many complaints you'll get from your health advisor. Just let your city grow naturally until you can afford to put those kinds of facilities in. In fact, it may be a good idea to have cities in your region that lack education because some jobs require poorly educated workers. In reality, the only services you should have immediately are power and fire coverage (and police if you have the more riots mod).

[rsc204 21,806]

I can only echo the comments above, slow and steady wins the race. Rushing to build creates many problems if you aren’t in full control. By the time you start seeing problems, often it is really hard to rebalance things. Whereas if you spend this extra time building things properly to begin with, everything is just easier.

This is a common problem because a lot people are impatient to get cities full of skyscrapers and the game just isn’t intended to work this way.