SquidInABox

Right after some experimentation with freight I have determined that Unfilled Freight Orders are just the excess demand for freight and has nothing to do with freight being shipped to power plants or anything I posted above. Freight gets shipped to the nearest source of demand. Creators of freight demand are commercial businesses, trade depots, and your services like Power Plants and Mines. Excess freight is shipped out of town if there is regional demand for it (I think, I've not been able to confirm yet as I'm focussing on single city play for now). If you have unfulfilled freight orders it means you have a high demand for industry and you should either zone more industry or improve the density of the existing factories (takes longer than R and C it seems). Most cities I've seen have a very large amount of commercial zoned which is why so many people have very high unfulfilled freight orders and very low demand for commercial. Factor in that alot of players don't realise that you need to exact very specific control over landvalue using parks to control how much of a wealth level you have and I can see where a lot of shopper demand is coming from. If you have a high demand for mid wealth shoppers it means you either have too many mid wealth shops or not enough mid-wealth homes. When it comes to the population number just ignore it. There is some fudge factor going on that means that at very low populations it is the sum of the workers and shoppers but at high populations it is grossly exaggerated. The only numbers you should look at are the values in the detail panel of the population graph. Some numbers: $ 4 Workers, 2 Shoppers, 2 Students $$ 2 Workers, 1 Shopper, 1 Student $$$ 2 Workers, 1 Shopper, 1 Student Students don't count towards population as far as I can tell. Each Density increase is a factor of ten. A mid-density low weath home houses 40 workers while a high density one houses 400. A Low Density Dirty Factory generates 90 Freight. It employs 38 Low Wealth workers (Production Line) and 2 Medium Wealth Workers (Managers). I don't have hard numbers on commercial yet as I was looking at Freight today. The Clean power plants do not generate any industrial demand while the dirty methods generate a few thousand (I believe 1000ish for coal and 4000ish for nuclear). A trade depot with freight storage generates Freight orders (demand) of about 800 per warehouse. Adding delivery trucks to it does not increase the speed at which the depot empties. The Port is a factor of ten higher. The depots and ports are great ways to generate Freight Orders without building commercial buildings. I noticed that adding a Clinic generates 24 Jobs. 12 Low Wealth, 8 Mid Wealth and 4 High Wealth. I am not yet sure if the standard of health care at the clinic suffers without the Doctors but I am assuming that it does.

It's very odd that they don't require freight to produce goods to sell so I'm putting that own as a bug for now. The Unfilled freight orders is another odd one and I find that most of my factories report "Freight Profits are huge!" while also saying "There is nowhere to ship our freight". On closer inspection all of the freight from factories was being delivered to my Mining facilities and power plants not to shops which I think was causing the problem. Freight got converted into money but it wasn't "Shipped" to a store. My rough ratio of commercial to residential is about 1:3 Comm:Res which pretty much ensures I have no unsold goods or unsatisfied shoppers. Once residential hits high density things start getting weird. High Density buildings may have something like 5000 residents but only 400 workers and 200 shoppers. The rest do nothing other than pay taxes and inflate your population. Hitting zero unemployment is quite easy as a result but demand is calculated oddly so you have factories sitting around without enough workers to run them. You need some commercial demand to keep industry happy. If industry isn't happy they will leave your city. However at the moment they will deliver their freight to power plants and mining facilities and make a profit anyway so it will probably work out fine if you have those. The way I think it was intended to work was that freight goes to shops or to trade depots (who then take it to shops or the region) you can build a trade depot between your industry and commercial districts so the delivery trucks from factories don't have to drive very far. Right now this doesn't seem to be working properly and delivery trucks are delivering to the mines and power plants nearby giving them high profits but thousands of unfilled orders (as goods never arrive in shops). I am going to experiment with putting my services on the other side of the city to my industry so freight trucks have to pass the commercial zone to get to them and see if that helps.

Schizoslayer here. I've sent you a friend request.

Fastest method I've used is to build a big Water pump over the polluted area and use Filtration pumps to clean it.

I think you may be on to something here. There is both Local Pollution and Regional Pollution. It makes sense that even with only one city in the region generating pollution it will be raising Regional Pollution levels which will manifest with blobs of air pollution being blown randomly onto your map.

Did some experimentation with Tourists in a single city region today and these are my conclusions: Tourists prefer to use Mass Transit over any other kind of transport. Even High Wealth tourists are adverse to driving places while on holiday. To get tourists to visit you need to make your city attractive to them. Plop a casino and you will start to get a few low/mid wealth tourists driving to your city. The same happens if you plop a landmark. Tourists buy souvenirs. This can cause some tourists to go home before they ever reach your Casino if they have to pass through your commercial sector to get to it. Tourists will do whatever touristy thing they come across first and if they spend all of their money on postcards and straw donkeys they will go home. Tourists will do one thing in a day. This might be taking pictures of a landmark, gamble or shop. Once they have done this thing they will look for a hotel. If there are no hotels to stay at they'll go home. Low and medium Wealth tourists prefer trains. If your casino city is just starting out make sure to link up your railroad and that the station is close to the Casino. Failing that make sure your buses have a low wait time and there are bus stops. Tourists will walk if it is quicker than waiting for a bus or streetcar. Medium and High Wealth sims will arrive on cruise ships if you have a Ferry and the appropriate upgrade on it. I never saw more than about 1000 sims arrive this way so one Ferry will suffice for a very long time. If High wealth sims have nothing to do in your city they will just turn around and get back on the boat. Airports allow Medium Wealth Tourists to arrive. I never saw this get very high only peaking about 600 a day despite there being more capacity available. With passenger upgrades high wealth sims will use the airport. I noticed an odd thing where High Wealth sims would arrive in my city, find nothing to do and so search for a hotel (of which there was one luxury hotel) stay a night then drive to the airport to go home the next day despite never doing anything than sleep. Sometimes it's good to build casinos with just the Comedy clubs/lounges to attract more sims to the region and others to specialise as hotels and others for gambling. Some make lose a little money but it will be offset by the others. Bigger casinos attract more sims but often not enough to make themselves profitable for a few years. They will make the smaller casinos much more profitable though and when you build an even bigger fancier Casino the previous Casinos tend to become profitable again from the overflow. Tourists in my city tended to get stuck in Streetcar stops. I think this is a bug and I had to turn off my entire streetcar system to free them up. I sometimes lost about 50% of my tourists to them just crowding streetcar stops but never going anywhere. An unrelated thing I noticed while doing this: Industry will sell it's freight to a nuclear power plant if you have one. My factories never sold any freight to shops because the cities power plan was so much closer.

Traffic is a big contributor to air pollution both from your own roads and the Highway. The only solution to pollution from traffic is to have less traffic problems. If you have a huge traffic jam on the highway for 12 hours of each day those cars are generating lots of pollution which is getting blown into your city. Just converting traffic into buses won't solve everything if those buses are also getting stuck in jams all day. Streetcars, ferries and trains will generate less pollution while also helping get the traffic moving. EDIT: Ideally if you can design your city so that all the low/mid wealth sims walk everywhere and only the high wealth sims are driving around pollution from traffic should be at a minimum. Good luck with this task though

One other thing I noticed during this town was that Sims will work at wherever is closest and is hiring the appropriate education/wealth level. I saw alot of sims just walking across the street to work at the gas station or factory across the street rather than driving. In my town I had a single long avenue with residential on the right and jobs/services on the left (as you faced into the town from the highway). At the furthest end of the avenue was factories, in the middle was commerce and by the highway there were services. Most of the people living near the highway were working in factories at the other end of town and driving a long way because the commercial jobs were being filled by people living across the street from the shops but the factories had so many jobs the people living across the street couldn't fill all of them. All of this information can be gleaned from watching the Population map for a couple of days in game time. It's a lot harder in a big existing city though because once a city breaks down traffic wise it's very difficult to fix. I once had a city where workers were sat in a traffic jam for 3 days and there was no morning commute because none of the workers had gotten home yet.

I've not looked into this yet but it is on my list. I do know that tourists do show up if you are the only city in a region but I don't know how it's calculated and what affects it. I've had a few multiplayer games where I was making huge amounts of money from Casinos and tourists which dried up the moment the other cities in my region had enough of their own shops to satisfy their populations and soon my own sims started migrating to their superior shopping districts and my Casinos started losing money at a fantastic rate. I think things like landmarks which increase your cities attractiveness to tourists basically encourage the shoppers in other cities to shop in your city instead effectively sucking the shoppers out of the other players cities. The one thing I know for sure is that I've seen a correlation between the number of shoppers leaving one city and the number of tourists arriving in another.

In the previous games there was an assumption made that areas of high traffic would be desirable to commerce due to passing trade. This was something of a botch because they couldn't simulate every individual and were using a statistical simulation. In this game they use an individual simulation where every sim gets simulated. This lets them split sims into people who go to work and people who go shopping. This is much closer to what happens in real life (albeit very simplified) and puts traffic as a symptom of commerce not a cause. Shops tend to be in areas of high traffic because of all the shoppers and because keeping shoppers in the same area is convenient for trade making traffic a result of commercial zones not a cause of them. Previous games essentially had it backwards. It's important to note that in this game there is no such thing as "Desirability" anymore. Just land value and happiness. The game no longer calculates where is "Desirable" for certain kinds of building it just compares the landvalue against how happy it is. If a commercial building is making a lot of money it gets happier. It's both simpler and deeper than before.

My first suburb. 95% Low Density Mid Wealth residential plus education. All utilities and services provided by other cities in the region.

I was tired of traffic problems and wondering why my commercial businesses were always complaining about not enough shoppers so decided to do some experiments to figure out the simulation going on. This was what I determined in a small town with just one (long) road with residential zoned on one side and businesses on the other. Residential Buildings contain 3 kinds of Sim... Workers, Shoppers, Students How they change into each other I don't know but that's not that important right now. Students will go to school if they can or failing that they will go to nearby parks. If there is nothing for students to do they will stay at home and do nothing. Workers go to work, work and then come home. For Industrial Jobs there seem to be two shifts, 6am-6pm and 6pm-6am. Commercial jobs seem to depends on the type of store but most of the low wealth stores are open 24 hours with the same shift schedule as factories. Shoppers require money. This means somebody in their home needs to be working. If a Shopper has money then they will try and spend it in shops until they run out of money or run out of shops. Shoppers ONLY buy Goods, they will never buy Souvenirs those are only bought by tourists (who never buy Goods). Tourists ONLY come from the Region. Some are global and can be generated from things like cruise ships and airports but also any shoppers that are visiting your town from another town become tourists. Factories take Workers, Power and Water and generate Freight. Freight is sold to Shops in exchange for Money. Money is then delivered to factories which generates happiness. Happy Factories get bigger. Shops generate Goods and Souvenirs at every shift change. They DO NOT require Freight from Factories to have Goods to sell. Goods are sold to Shoppers generating money making the shops and shoppers happier. Happy shops become bigger shops. Bigger shops have alot more goods to sell. When a shop has no more goods to sell then Sims will not enter it - they will walk right by it until they find a shop that does have Goods to sell. If a shop has nothing to sell (not even souvenirs) they will close for the rest of the day until the next shift change. The important things to take away from this is that Workers and Shoppers are not interchangeable. A Worker will not become a Shopper during a 24 hour period. EDIT: They might due to the way shifts work BUT if they do change they wait until they get home to do it. I knocked this together to show the different kinds of traffic that moves between each kind of zone. Orange represents the highway and all of your region connected mass transit as those are the points Tourists enter your city. Notes: Commercial buildings no longer like high amounts of traffic. Zoning commerce on heavily travelled routes is a terrible idea. Factory workers go directly between home and work - they never stop to shop on the way. There should be no commercial between the factories and the residential. Factory freight generates very little traffic and it is trickled throughout the day. There is no rush hour for freight. Shoppers and commercial zone workers will take the same routes as each other. So long as you keep the route to your commercial separate from the route to Industrial rush hour traffic jams are minimized. School buses can affect the morning commute but not the evening one (schools kick out at 3pm). Students will walk from quite a long way to get to bus stop so you may not need as many as you thought. Tourists don't give a fig about your residential or industrial zones. Make sure they can get to your commercial zones on a different route to the people who live in the city. Crime tends to target commercial zones and each robbery reduces the amount of money a store makes (as well as killing their workers causing them to close). Focus crime prevention on commercial areas. Shops complain about not having enough shoppers if they have Goods lying around not being sold. If you are seeing this complaint just after shift change that's normal as they just restocked. Check around 5pm to see if there are unsold goods.