greenOak

Thanks, there was an older version still kicking around in my plugins folder. Got it working now.

Having trouble with the buildings showing up as brown boxes. The installation page says the .model has been moved into "BSC MEGA Props MISC Vol03.dat". I installed the linked dependencies but the closest version of that file I have is "\Plugins\BSC\BSCProps\BSC MEGA Props MISC Vol03 v3.dat". I've tried renaming the file (removing the v3) but I still get brown boxes. Any help would be appreciated.

The appearance of a no road zot over a newly constructed growable residential building is well known. Sometimes it is not a problem as the zot disappears before any adverse effects can occur. However, often in large cities the building becomes abandoned before the zot goes away. The issue is mentioned in this 10-year old thread. No Road Connection in all residential buildings - SimCity 4 General Discussion - Simtropolis Some said that this doesn't happen and that OP and others must be misunderstanding what is going on. I am open to alternative explanations, but you can see the issue in the link below: SC4 No-road zot bug The only solution I have found to this problem is saving and exiting to the region when the no-road zot appears and then loading back into the city. When I do this the no-road zot always disappears very quickly. However, having to constantly enter and exit from region view quickly becomes frustrating. It takes me just as long to finish the last 20% of a tile as the first 80% because of this bug. I have tried running the game at the slowest simulation speed to no avail. As for mods, I'm using NAM, Cori's No Kickout (issue still exists without this mod), and the rest are custom buildings. Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this bug?

Not sure if this applies to you, but buildings along avenues near connections can lead to long commute/no job zots due to cars being unable to reach commercial/industrial lots or cars leaving from residential lots being forced to exit the tile. If that avenue connects the way your roads do (can't tell since its blocked by the commute time graph) I could see that being the root of the problem.

Thanks, this clears some stuff up, but I still don't really know the answer to the hypothetical I posed in the OP. What exactly do "will be happy with" and "most" mean? Will they outright refuse to work jobs outside their desired employment, or do they just prefer to work there but will work elsewhere if the jobs are available? Does the chart imply that no more than 37% of highly educated R$$$ sims are willing to work I-HT or CS$$$?

I have a question about the "Workforce Drives (Demand of Occupation)" table linked below: Workforce and Occupation Demands (Drives) (sc4devotion.com) Do the percentages represent hard caps on the number of sims that will work certain jobs, or do the merely represent the amount of CI demand that each sim generates? For example, the table lists 150-200 EQ R$$$ as 75% CO$$$, 37% CS$$$, and 37% IHT. Suppose I had 10000 highly educated (150-200EQ) R$$$ sims in a city - would this mean that only 7500 could work CO$$$ jobs, or could all 10000 work CO$$$ jobs if I had enough job slots (ie more than 10000/0.15 = 66667 CO$$$).

So maps are slightly larger than 3x3 large SC4 tiles. Disappointing that in the 20 years since SC4 we haven't got anything close to the scale of SC4 regions.

Gentrification / Mansion popup / R$$$ unemployment has been one of the most talked about topics in the SC4 community. As far as I know, the main ways of dealing with this are: 1. Blanket neighborhoods in pollution 2. Zone (light density) no more than two tiles deep 3. Mark R$/R$$ buildings as historical 4. Use the no kickout lower wealth mod (the one by Cori) 5. Use the less abandonment mod (by bones1) Unfortunately, none of these are that appealing to me. The less abandonment mod is the most appealing but in my experience doesn't help very much in practice. The no kickout mod eliminates any type of gentrification which I think is an interesting mechanic. Marking buildings as historical also shuts off all gentrification and can be very tedious. Zoning no more than two tiles deep only works for low density zones. Using pollution just seems mean and for the most part only works for preserving R$ buildings. A couple years ago, this thread by Psiman caught my eye - Modding / Recalibrating Land Value. In theory, this would be exactly what I'd want, but unfortunately progress on that seems to have stalled. The last couple of days I've been messing around with other exemplar properties using Reader, and have gotten some promising results. Lets first examine what exactly the problem is. Consider the city below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QB60_Tv1TDCRYxidMBpVOFTDOCjr7CPO/view?usp=sharing This city has about 6000 people, and has just been hooked up to a region with large demand for R$, R$$, and R$$$. I have also just put in a school with a basketball court and a small playground. Note there is a dirty industry area that can't be seen in the picture that most sims are currently working at and the pollution is spreading into the top-left part of the neighborhood. Using default maxis settings, I get this after a couple years of simulation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sxvje13yMTF038yyOolT_uaTtU7FOBai/view?usp=sharing A single elementary school, basketball court, and small playground is enough to drive desirability high enough that the neighborhood becomes flooded with R$$$ mansions. There is also already dilapidation. Using the no abandonment mod, the situation looks a lot better: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uaqvmMcMQrVHDEvRtUMlKov2Dz-Ko7ah/view?usp=sharing We have increased desirability to the point where R$$ moves in, but not enough to the point where R$$$ moves in. However, you don't need to add much more to get mansions to pop up. The mayors house and a house worship is more than enough. Note that the overlay is from a mod that shows park aura (Cori's Parks Aura) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KxJHw_nDBE_ZmmaFusGnZQP_okLtuHOk/view?usp=sharing Additionally one can simply add a bunch of trees or bus-stops which give a transient aura effect large enough to get over the desirability threshold. The main problems I see are that: 1. In general it's too easy to raise desirability to the point where R$$ or R$$$ sims move in (governed by exemplar 0x87cd6355 - Desirability Threshold Growth) 2. Transient aura effects make it too easy to temporarily push desirability over the above threshold (governed by exemplar 0x87cd6397 - Transient Aura Effect) Other exemplars I looked at were: 0x87cd6348 - School Effect 0x87cd6348 - Hospital Effect 0x87cd6341 - Park Effect (on desirability) 0x87cd6354 - Desirability Threshold Decline 0x27812850 - Park Effect (magnitude + radius for specific lots) My goals were basically two-fold: 1. Make it possible to provide education and healthcare to a R$ neighborhood without increasing desirability to the point where R$$ sims move in. 2. Make it difficult to raise desirability to the point where R$$$ sims move in so that R$$$ will grow in very select areas. Basically, this would allow R$$ areas to naturally exist. I made a few changes. First, I greatly reduced the magnitude of the park effect for all parks (and rewards once I get around to it), as well the radius (but not as much as the magnitude). This was coupled by increasing the maximum desirability increase park effect could have (R$: 10 -> 20, R$$: 24 -> 36, R$$$: 30 -> 60). Thus, it is more difficult to get maximum park aura, but the reward for doing so is greater. I increased the range of the hospital effect for R$$ (-10 to 10 instead of -8 to 8), and R$$$ (-20 to 20 instead of -10 to 10). In my experience, both hospital and school effect tend to be binary, and thus contribute to desirability by either giving the minimum value (subtracts from desirability) or maximum value (adds to desirability). I reduced all transient aura effects by a factor of 4. By default they can range anywhere from -100 to 100, now they range from -25 to 25. I increased the desirability threshold growth for R$$ to 100 (default value is 50), and the desirability threshold growth for R$$$ to 160 (default value is 50, it is 120 with the no abandonment mod). Desirability threshold decline for R$$$ was raised from 50 to 100. Now let's take a look at the results: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zZ-Iu_0eUCvSkG2m0Qxw3tZm3dGGgeSP/view?usp=sharing Even with the school and a hospital, there is only a limited amount of R$$ sims moving in. In fact, once the transient aura has decayed, the area is no longer desirable enough for R$$ to move in. Now I fill in the middle block with 3 large green parks, 1 medium green park, and a few small green parks and open grass areas. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hmHGnnmln2v8ZzRQim5UR2Og7GzSXsEn/view?usp=sharing The neighborhood is mostly R$$, aside from the right-most houses which aren't covered by the school, and the houses to the upper-left which are affected by pollution from an unseen industrial era. R$$$ houses have developed but only in the areas closest to the central parks. These seem like big improvements to me. After I'm done fiddling with the park effect of rewards, I'm going to try playing a region from scratch using these settings. I'll report any interesting findings here. I'm also going to mess around with the desirability thresholds for commercial buildings as blocks of CS$$$ buildings next to slums is another thing that's always annoyed me.

The reason I-M demand is strongly negative is probably due to your sims being more educated. As a rule of thumb, poorly educates sims increase demand mostly for I-D, moderately educated sims mostly for I-M, while highly educated sims mostly for I-HT. It is likely sims who were once driving demand for I-M are now driving demand for I-HT. You can search “workforce occupation drives” for a more detailed breakdown. I-D demand is strongly negative because of the 12% tax rate. If you still have I-D buildings left in the city, the aforementioned effect could be causing negative demand at all. Negative I-D and I-M demand isn’t actually a problem unless you want to have I-D and I-M in your city. It’s normal for an I-HT dominant city to have negative I-D and I-M demand. It is very common for a city to: 1. Start with only I-R and I-D demand due to a poorly educated workforce. 2. Once sims become more educated (city wide EQ ~50), I-D demand starts tanking, while I-M demand starts rapidly increasing. To balance this demand, one can demolish I-D buildings which will get replaced by I-M buildings. 3. Once sims become highly educated (city wide EQ ~150+), I-M demand starts to tank, while I-HT demand rapidly increases. Again, to balance this demand, one can demolish I-M buildings and have I-HT buildings grow in its place. The only caveat being that I-HT won't develop in even moderately polluted areas.

I'm curious if anyone has any tips for having high R$$ desirability in an area high while keeping R$$$ desirability low. For example, if I want R$ neighbourhoods, I can use pollution, deny services, or NIMBY buildings to suppress R$$ and R$$$ desirability. However, I have a much harder time trying to create R$$ neighbourhoods. It seems as soon as I try to make an area nice R$$ and R$$$ desirability jump to max. Basically in my experience R$$ desirability = R$$$ desirability for 99% of my city. I'm well aware of the trick of zoning no more than two tiles deep, but this only works in low density areas. I know I could also just do stuff like jack R$$$ tax rates, along with the "make historical" button or no kickout mod, but I'd like to be able to create medium/high density R$$ areas in a more organic way.

Yeah I think I figured it out. My avenues were making weird connections and weren't being used. After I re-built the avenues these issues went away.

The issue is general but is definitely worst for R$$$. FWIW R$$ buildings seem to do better than R$ buildings. The IHT R$$$ fix is installed. The problem definitely seems to be with the industrial zones which often show buildings with no workers at them. A few of the commercial blocks appear like this as well. Having said that I'm not really sure why this is the case - there is mass transit to the area, and the people who are working in these remote zones don't seem to be upset about commute times.

I have uploaded some screen shots. A few notes: The sudden spike in commute time I believe corresponds to when I started working on another tile and started having commuters between tiles. The effected areas are not really visible currently since I've already played whack-a-mole to the point of not getting these abandoned buildings. I'll try to upload a video of what I'm describing later.

I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this. SC4 runs slower for large cities (which should be expected), but I have a hunch it ends up causing unemployment due to the simulator not being able to find jobs for sims quickly enough. I make this claim for the following reasons: 1. It seems that without fail, my cities start off with little to no unemployment problems until I fill up about a quarter of a large map. At this point, a number of the newly built buildings (regardless of wealth) will initially get the no job zot, and then it quickly goes away. Once I get to around 75% of a large map, almost all the new buildings (again regardless of wealth) get the no job zot, and more often than not go abandoned. 2. In these large cities there are job vacancies (as per the census repository facility). 3. Occasionally these newly built buildings will find jobs and the commute time almost always displays "Short". 4. These buildings jump from showing no commuters to all of them (usually around half the building capacity) instantaneously. Earlier in the game if I have unemployment problems I'll usually see something like 20 commuters in a 200 capacity building. 5. These problems appear to be tied to the number of buildings on the map rather than population or job totals. (ie. I don't these problems in a dense 100k city, but will get them in a low density 100k city). It may be the case that I'm consistently doing something wrong in sprawled out cities but it doesn't seem like the case for me. It's pretty annoying because everytime I fill up a large map, in the end I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole with new buildings, destroying them if they go abandoned, and waiting for the seemingly random time they don't. I've considered moving to medium size cities but I've always felt cramped in with such cities. Just for the record, these are the gameplay altering mods I'm using: NAM 36 I-HT R$$$ Fix Industry Doubler Less Abandonment Mod (Bones1) I do however have a ton (likely 500-1000) custom buildings which probably slow the game down to at least some degree.