liquidjin

Looks like you are importing a lot of Plastic (> $100k spent in January). Your January Transactions go past the scroll bar so I can't tell to what extent. Do you need that much Plastic for every 3 shipments of Processors?

Nice work! This makes me think that the numbers are one of the few things that actually work correctly. I can vouch that the low commercial is true, but it is only a theoretical maximum. Not sure how to represent that. The chances of anyone having a city full of these buildings at their theoretical maximum are slim to none. You'd have to build one plot at a time (and only when in demand) and dezone areas when they were abandoned or destroyed.

I think there are a number of bugs at play here. If I lose my first game at Starcraft 2 tonight. I'll help you out with the experiment and post my numbers for a smaller city (as a control). Edit: I lost because of poor decision making skills. =( So here's what I found. Worker capacity in newly constructed commercial buildings fluxuates based on demand and I imagine the same is true for industrial and residential too. Freight demands do not change. Happiness or satisfied demands for power, water or workers do no seem to affect worker rates either. The number of $ workers in a small commercial building is always a factor of 2.5 of $$ workers. Always! (this also held true for my powerplants, so it might be true across the board). A small commercial building will employ 10 $ workers and 4 $$ workers by default. If you over make commercial (or you demolish a building and it constructs itself while not in demand) the building will employ less workers depending on how out of demand they are. I saw the following variations 8/3.2, 6/2.4, and 5/2). Furthermore, this only applies to buildings that start construction after demand has dipped. If you zone a bunch of commercial at the same time then any of the ones that are in construction before the demand drops will receive the full amount of workers. These tests were done using a new map, in a new region, with 7 small residences and 1-5 small commercial buildings. I added in a wind plant and a water tower eventually to test how that affected things.

The visuals are only a fraction of your true population. I wouldn't say that they were different behavior though. The numbers seem to match up for the most part (commuting numbers are broken though).

The whole system is broken right now, so honestly I would avoid using them and buses in general. Park and Rides are less effective than bus stops, because they cost more, take up building space, and can only hold 80 people (bus stops can hold 125 people for cheaper). Incoming commuters don't drive to Park and Rides and then get on public transportation. All buses come or no buses come. Buses turnaround when a stop has people waiting at it. They will also drop people off at stops within the town even though those people got on the bus to leave the town. There's no concept of parking in Sim City and very little traffic avoidance logic This game needs to be opened up to Modders immediately. I have grown increasingly bitter about its unfinished state. Server issues seem planned at this point. What kind of game journalists build a city and miss the ridiculous traffic and mass transit behaviors?

For the record, I don't consider this to be game breaking. On the contrary it is one of the things I enjoy about the agent based system. It works on a macro level, the mechanics are easy to understand, and it provides dynamic behavior and balance to the game.

I have a similar problem. I am able to get my citizens to commute but not enough of them. Out of curiosity, what's the number of open high wealth jobs in your industrial city? I have no $$$ in either city and I'm starting to think that is the problem. All of the open job listings probably require a bunch of high level management before the $$ and $ can be filled.

Remember it takes at least 3 types of sims to run a nuclear reactor and as your population increases so do the required number of workers. I'd need to know more about your town, but I believe that you may have too many Smithers ($$) and not enough Homers ($). Or you might want to check how many unfilled $$$ jobs you have.

It sounds like your industrial city needs more $ jobs than you can provide. You need to switch to a primarily service economy if you want to continue improving your citizens' wealth. There are three things that lead me to this conclusion: $$$ jobs rely on $$ jobs which rely on $ jobs. Homes act as a savings bank for money and happiness. Money leftover from shopping is stored in the home Money in the home is depleted by rent If the money increases to a certain value then you upgrade, if it is depleted then the residence downgrades. If the money is below a certain threshold before it's nighttime they try to go back to work Sims don't really care where they go to sleep at night - they go to the closest desirable residence they can find So let's take a typical scenario, assuming that your population breakdown of $/$$/$$$ is 60%/30%/10% respectively. Shift is over; everyone heads home. 90% of the time the new resident will eat into the savings of any $$$ home; 60% of the time the new resident will eat into the savings of any $$ homes. Less $ residents go to work the next day than the day before; they've got shopping to do (and their home values are increasing). You were barely hitting 50% of $ jobs at the start of this cycle, but now you're probably even lower. Places probably keep shutting and reconstructing themselves skewing the numbers but the fact is that your town is making so much money that the $$$ citizens are literally turning the $ ones into $$ faster than you can keep up with. You have a few things you can do: Start diversifying with more commercial - I believe these create offices that are more favorable to higher wealth populations Create a town of peons to commute in and prop up your elite Drive out the $$$ or $$ with higher taxes Dezone some of your industrial and take the unemployment hit You just replicated a first world problem in Sim City. Kind of cool, hunh?

Yeah, the HS has a pretty steep worker requirement, 460 workers in total, which given your population would be a good third of your entire workforce. Also, educational buildings are lower on the priority list for jobs, which means it would be filled only after all your service buildings. There's definitely a sweet spot for each educational building, depending on your population size. Sorry, I don't follow. None of my government buildings come close to having 100 workers let alone 460. Edit: Hmm after trying to grab screenshots for this I think i honed in on the problem. High School requires a minimum of 50 workers in my scenario (I had 48 or under in previous times). Something I couldn't achieve while people were actively commuting back and forth from jobs. Looks like you have to reboot your city every now and then to get things working properly. The game definitely has trouble keeping track of commuters properly.

Yes, I had a bunch of them littered around. They did nothing but increase happiness and cost me money. This is not always true. I've been building true suburbs in my region as connected cities to a main capital and it can't handle anything above a grade school. The problem that I feel like I'm getting time and time again is that there are population constraints on what you can and can't do. It's either that or a consequence of going almost exclusively residential in a city. My city in question has approx. 9k (70/30 split of $ and $$ residents). I can run an almost maxed grade school with 791 potential students no problem. However, when I replaced the grade school with a high school and gymnasium - the game told me the school was closed because it couldn't get enough workers. I have lots of potential $ and $$ employees in my suburb because they all commute to the capital. P.S. another example is my library. It's completely useless (12 books a day). In my capital, my library was cleaning up. Sims who can't afford to commute back to the capital for shopping just get another job or go back to an empty residence.

How do you get students to commute? I have a city with a grade school, high-school, and a University. However, I couldn't get any kids from my suburbs to take the bus to them.

In my experience I find that population determines how many workers each public building will hold, and if it has the minimum to function. Once they are plopped they will generate workers of different wealths (e.g. my city hall workers do quite well for themselves - go figure).

It doesn't look like you can simply replace a grade school with a high school. Population is definitely a factor. I have an educated low to mid wealth small town that can't get teachers for the high school even though there are at least 40 $$ people being considered unemployed. The town has ~9k residents (fake number) and 715 students. I replaced my almost fully upgraded grade school with a high school and gymnasium. But the high school won't open because it claims there aren't enough workers. It tells me to zone more residential. I shouldn't have to zone more anything. My town needs more jobs, not workers (they are all being forced to commute on purpose). (Purple are all of the students in my town; green buildings are educated residences; the other education building is a library) I also noticed that my grade school teachers were working 24/7. I tried to make the switch at a time that wouldn't affect them but it was impossible. The kids always left when they were supposed to, but the teachers probably got deleted when I removed the building.

Has anyone tried these experiments on a region basis instead of as a single-city? I'm actually impressed that the game responds in this manner, it's very true to the real world. People accept horrible conditions when they don't know any better or lack the opportunities to go somewhere else. They also are very susceptible to bait-and-switch tactics. The sim fails for me if it can't correct itself when the sims have choices (i.e. does he just get X number of new sims daily because that's what the region would always get? Or does every city benefit from new sims?) I would love to see the following experiment determine how imbalanced or balanced taxes actually are. City #1 - strictly Industrial / shopping center city (might need Bus Terminal) City #2 - Low tax city with basics (electric, water, 5% tax) City #3 - Medium tax city with health services (electric, water, sewage, clinic 9%) City #4 - High tax city with health, safety, and education services (electric, water, sewage, clinic, police, fire, schools)