Syque

Thanks a lot for doing this. This information is very helpful, and hopefully it can be stickied eventuall when the info is more complete. I have a question you might be able to answer. Do all residential buildings of the same wealth/density combo have the same sized footprint AND supported population? If population is always the same but footprint size varies, that would mean the best way to optimize population is to destroy the largest footprint buildings of each class

It makes sense though: In real life home size is usually proportionate to the wealth of the people living in the area. I just think it's modeled a little too extremely here, and I feel like there should be more high wealth people per high wealth tower. After all, there are studio apartments in Manhattan that rent for $5k per month in certain neighborhoods. In addition to get more population, unfortunately you have to use curved roads sparingly. Curves will leave lots of gaps and spaces large buildings can't occupy, so to get the most people packed into your city you need a fairly strict grid system.

This sounds a lot like what's happened in my cities so far too. In the first one I focused on building up a high tech/electronics industry. The dirty IND buildings made way for medium/high tech companies pretty fast with a good education system. In the second city in a different region I instead did oil extraction and refining but had similar results. I zoned out my whole cities pretty quickly and had all 3 residential bars maxed out, commercial either empty or high wealth only and industry always topped out. I started having a good amount of big towers popping up, and when I checked them they were mostly high wealth residential, followed by high wealth/medium wealth commerical, and some medium wealth residential, and maybe one or two low wealth towers in the whole city. And while it looks cool and all, the highest population I've gotten so far was 75k, but it fell back down to 60k. Despite all this the wealth ratio is about 50% low, 30% medium, 20% high. When I checked out my neighbors in the region there was only one or two other cities that had any wealthy sims at all. And there's always way more jobs than there are sims to fill them in all 3 wealth categories. There will literally be tens of thousands of empty jobs in my city when I look at the regional jobs overview. And even though I have a good number of towers, there are still areas of my cities that are low or medium density even though the demand is through the roof and the RCI advisor is screaming at me to zone more residential. When I built parks, I only really built medium or high wealth parks, and I'm assuming you did the same thing. This is why we're getting high/med wealth towers but few low wealth towers: having value appropriate parks is important because sims only need happiness to expand. Land value only really affects who moves to the neighborhood regardless of density. So to get lots of happy low wealth sims without increasing land value, you need to put in low wealth parks. In conclusion I think part of the problem is that there is one variable that should be affecting land value/density that Maxis didn't model optimally: supply/demand. At least low wealth residential should be built densely even if there aren't a lot of parks around, because if there's thousands of jobs open for them in a city and demand through the roof for housing it doesn't make sense for them to be so picky about where they live.