Stage Limits Not Matching Prima Guide

[chickapachimecho 3]

I am playing SimCity 4 and have reached a poor residential population of over 2000, so at least 27% of the building should be stage 4 and 7% stage 5 according to Prima. I put down a 1x3 medium density residential zone over an existing low density residential zone with a low density poor residential building. No stage 4 or 5 building is replacing it. I tried to bulldoze it, and another poor low density residential building popped up. Why? The zone has water, power, and road access, there is demand for residential, and the area is desirable (it is green).

[Propfam 2,286]

It is that way. Assuming you're playing vanilla, the way the percentage works is in that case, there's 27% chance of new and redevelopment being of stage 4 type. It doesn't mean that 27% of all buildings will be automatically stage 4. You still need to expand the zoning and grow your population first to the point where it's a piece of cake to build stage 4 buildings. I play with CAM installed and it's way harder to grow a medium-density building in that amount of population. I need at least around 50k in a freshly-located medium tile to have stage 4 and up buildings. You may only need 10k. Note that the chance really depends on the ratio of zoned area compared to the tile size and as many people repeat, your region size. If you have a fresh region, expect everything to be much harder. Otherwise, if you let's say have 1 mil+ population, it would be pretty easy to grow such building. Another way is to increase the chance is to reduce your taxation to something like 5% (or even 0% if you're brave enough) and try to put god-mode trees in your tile. To access the god mode in an established city, hold Ctrl+Shift+Alt and click on the god mode icon.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,044]

6 hours ago, chickapachimecho said:

I am playing SimCity 4 and have reached a poor residential population of over 2000, so at least 27% of the building should be stage 4 and 7% stage 5 according to Prima. I put down a 1x3 medium density residential zone over an existing low density residential zone with a low density poor residential building. No stage 4 or 5 building is replacing it. I tried to bulldoze it, and another poor low density residential building popped up. Why? The zone has water, power, and road access, there is demand for residential, and the area is desirable (it is green).

Hi and welcome to Simtropolis.

Please remember that the "X% should be stage X" is not a direct prescription. These values simply describe a ratio that would be in place should ideal conditions exist in your cities. Conditions in which there are virtually no limits for anything to grow. In such situation, the game will keep the percentage shares for all stages that are described in Prima.

Water and power alone is unfortunately too little to guarantee bigger buildings in your town. While desirability indicates good conditions for developer type to move in. Not the growth stages.

You also need parks and public transportation to encourage your Sims to upgrade their dwellings. In case of commercial establishments, you also need high traffic on nearby roads to see the businesses develop. Don't be too preoccupied with the Prima chart - you have to do your part too!

[chickapachimecho 3]

I have been doing a lot of testing, and the guide seems to be completely off. Filling lots with trees is usually enough to get higher stage buildings to appear. Over 80% of the low wealth sims live in stage 4+ buildings. There are under 1600 low wealth sims and about 1400 of them live in stage 4+ buildings. Almost 1/3 of all residential lots are stage 4+. The prima guide says less than 10% of low wealth sims should be in stage 4+ buildings. I only have the NAM and parks aura mods installed.

The total population is about 3000. About 400 high wealth and 1500 medium wealth (some of who are in stage 4+ buildings).

[TheMurderousCricket 5,044]

Frankly, why does it bother you that much? As I said before, the game will never represent the manual one-for-one. Discrepancies are bound to occur. You know that saying? "In nature, averages never happen".

It sounds to me that you could give a try to CAM, one of the pillars of which is an overhaul of growth stages. However, CAM leans towards dynamic development and heavy urbanization so it depends what you are most happy with.