errantry

Two possibilities: 1) You don't have the right jobs. Your sims may live next to an open job, but unless it's the right type, they won't take it. Depending on the EQ and class composition of your population, you need to have different jobs available. Route query the various houses to see where the occupants are going and also make sure that the number of commuters leaving is ~ half the population of the house. 2) Sims are leaving the map. If the edge of your map is closer than the nearest jobs they are willing to take, they will leave the map if you have a city bordering on that edge. Can't really do anything about it. Yeah, it sucks.

If you have the space, don't give water for your industries. Water is not required, except if you want it to be high density zones.

There is a good number of IHT packs in STEX. Search under high tech or IHT. I have also seen a lot of nice looking houses. You can go with entire packs like PEG's various styles. I think you can even block out certain Maxis buildings from occurring, but I never tried that mod.

Interesting. Query the routes for a couple of different residential areas. See what routes they are taking to work and if it correlates to the actual commute time.

Sims will take illogical paths. Particularly if they are close to the edge of the map. Then, they will commute to neighboring regions for jobs even if commute time is longer. Query your roads connecting different regions. I bet there are a lot of sims leaving your tile. You can deal with this by minimizing the number of ways to go to different tiles.

Social services are not vital early on, and shouldn't be built unless you can afford it. Beyond water and electricity, build only what you can afford. For early cities with mostly R$ population, hospitals, schools, etc simply aren't required. Make a profit first, and then build them. Also keep in mind that it's not possible to simply build IHT/CO straight on in your first city (without cheating anyway). You need to build ID/CS early on to keep everyone employed and generate revenue to build up education, etc required for IHT/CO. Take things slow, build some dirty industries. Then, build some education buildings which increases people's education so high tier industries are in demand. Which will give more money so you can build more services, and so forth. Also, zone in small chunks and decrease capacity of schools, hospitals, etc like the above poster suggested. Don't mess with the global budget though. I don't find it necessary to make profits from transportation.

The only solution I know is the Crime Simulator Mod, which reduces all crime levels, but really helps a lot with large lots. It should be on STEX

On top of what the other posters said, what are your commute times/traffic like? Specifically, is there any bottle necks (too much traffic, no direct roads) in your transportation systems that prevent people from getting to your jobs? Are there too many people leaving your region because your residential areas are too close to the edge?

See Jasoncw's response. He got most things covered. Minor comment on traffic. I'm not sure what high or low customers actually accomplishes. Commercial buildings with low customers functions perfectly fine for me. For residential, you can also query the house, and they will give you info on hospital coverage, etc.

The detailed RCI tells what you need to provide the zone with. For instance, ID zones pop up anywhere with electricity, but IHT zones require electricity, water, and high desirability. So if you have high IHT demand, you need to zone accordingly, or the zone will remain empty. Density is a marginally related concept. It deals with do you want your people to live in house, small apartments, or skyscrappers. It doesn't change the wealth of the inhabitants that live in them. High density building do require more services and desirability, but is not related to types of businesses in anyway.

Let the no job things run for longer, and once the building becomes abandoned, it will tell you if it's long commute time or low desirability. I don't know the size of your city, but getting jobs from other tiles have always been flaky for me. My sims generally can't travel more than 1 large tile in distance for jobs.

I think airport lowers the Commercial Cap of a city, but nothing else. That benefit would not transfer into a neighboring city.

I'm trying a new style of play, where I have connecting cities, one specializing in IHT and one specializing in CO. Both cities are fairly large (100K each), so I need to move about 50k people between the regions (I know this isn't very realistic). How can I do this efficiently? I try connecting them with one highway, but the on/off ramps become horribly jammed. I try using the simulator Z park and ride mod, and make the sims take subway to the train, which goes across the region, then have them get on the subway again to their location. This doesn't seem to be able to move very deep into large regions, where my city edges gets abandoned to commute (which doesn't occur with highways before). Is any way to do this better, any mods or anything?

It's the census mod by ralphninja/ripplejet. It's great to get detail info on your city.

I have been able to build 200K cities with near full environment bar. It's doable, though not necessary (or that useful). - For air pollution, raise taxes on ID and IMT to 20% to push them out of the city. Have a good mass transit system. Enact clean air act and automobile emission act. Build powerplants in corners and box them with trees (or build/download a cleaner powerplant from STEX. FYI, the Maxis solarplant is stupid. No way you can gather that much energy in that small area.). - For water pollution, connect your pipe system with the water purification plant. Also, water purification plant seems to have a radius limitation, so build them to cover all areas. - Have proper garbage disposal. Have a recycling plant to cut down on amount of garbage zone needed, or build incinerators and box them with trees. - Put trees in all empty places. Less important, but helpful.