Toll

Resident buildings need to suck money out of the system via rent/mortgages..

Look the guy can't go and say, 'EA forced us to release this game before we were ready'. That is not how a games company keeps on the good side of the publishers they need (Thank God for Kickstarter..) EA had a release date, the game wasn't ready for that. Sure it was ready enough by a publishers standards and that is a very hard sell to a publisher to not release the game because it isn't ready. EA doesn't care that the AI pathing was so basic, they didn't care you can build 100% Residential cities, they cared that they could release it by their release date. That Is All. Unfortunately Game companies like Maxis can't bite the hand that feeds them, so they will not discuss things that EA has given a solid stance on. DRM/offline mode for instance. Deal with it. Please don't pin the blame on the company doing their best with the ENORMOUS pressure of a mega-publisher constantly pushing them. I'm sure the pathing was known, however they probably did not have the time to fix it to the way we would have liked from the start. Instead they had to focus on getting the game in a playable state by EA's release time. Don't say their testing was inadequate, you have no idea what they did, where they had to draw compromises, what took priority to make the release date. Add on top of that the Server issues upon release and they simply did not have time to patch in the necessary changes to game logic such as traffic. I'm sure they planned to just that ASAP after release, however the server issues delayed it. The fact they have a plan and testing it now to release soon, probably means they knew about it. Please, don't blame Maxis for something that was most likely caused by EA.

The game is a city simulator not a Sim's simulator. The way the game works is all about the buildings. Having to track the individuals going from a specific building to a specific workplace would cost a great deal in CPU power and would not add too much more to the game. The only reason why people care about it is because of the routing of agents, with tweaking that can be changed to reflect a more realistic approach. This game hasn't finished cooking, EA publishes were happy enough that the game was playable, I bet the game designers were trying to say, not yet, but publishers always win.

This game has a terrible fundamental, but seemingly easy fix. It is highlighted by 100% residential cities (with no other cities in the region). At the moment a residence will survive and expand without any source of income, or at the very least very little city wide income. 100% resident cities develop by using parks which does add a very small amount of cash via a couple of job slots. It currently stand this is enough to sustain and build up to high density. Obviously this is obsurd. The simple, yet far reaching fix to this is to require that residential buildings have to pay rent/mortgage per day/hour/whatever. Thus if the residential building does not receive enough cash from job buildings it decays. This would make 100% residential cities remain at very low density unless you had a supporting city nearby that had a high number of jobs to commute to and bring cash back. It would also strengthen the I-C-R cycle. Resident buildings require cash, generally by Industrial buildings who need to make cash to give to residential buildings from sales to Commercial buildings, who need to get cash by selling stuff to resident buildings. So a cycle goes. So industrail profit would be freights sales-resident payments-tax. This way, if your industry has no sales, it cant pay residents which forces population to move out of the city, commecial buildings would fail because there is no cash to buy stuff. The entire system would be so much more dynamic and interesting and inter-city relationships would have far more meaning as basically a way to move cash around and gradually build up and densify a region. Mining serves as a cash generator to kick start the region by injecting cash into the cycle, also to allow the simulation described above to function a little bit of cash is injected by each new building built. The cash removed from the system is via importing goods and also dumped into the Mayors city building account via Taxes and cash destruction by services/utilities. So in essence, Free Cash Flow should drive densification modulated by happniess. The happier your Sims the less cash required to increase density, converse being true too. (So you could have a very unhappy town, making A LOT of cash increasing density). Crime should also be a reflection on happiness, the less happy your citizens the more crime there is and vice versa. At the moment it seems happiness is the driver of densifcation with available cash having little to do with anything other then shopping. Please comment. Some of what I post above may actually be occuring however if it does, it needs serious tweaking as evident by 100% resident cities.

What is your traffic like? I'm pretty sure it is possible to have the following situation: Person from house looks to fill a job hole. Gets stuck in traffic. Hours pass by as they drive around the city looking for an empty job. Job time finishes and everyone goes home. That guy driving around all day swaps from looking to fill a job, to looking to go home. When they find a home it reports they didn't work and have no money. So whilst your population statistics say you have spare job slots, the in-game reality is a portion of your residents never find a job hole to fill in time before the job closes for the night. Same can apply with commercial shopping. Also possibly with freight.

What $ level are the shoppers trying to leave and what $ level is the majority of your residential buildings? Perhaps for some reason the Sims $ level changes after they shop, so they try to return home to $ dwelling when you only have $$ dwellings forcing them all to the leave the city and go 'home' to your neighbour city's houses? In the morning, do you get a big influx of people from outside your city?

Hello, Check your traffic. Specifically the trucks going from your Ore Mines to your Depot's and the trucks going from the Depot's to the Highway . The ones going to the Highway are the ones that sell the ore to the global market, if they get bogged down in traffic it can cause a delay in Global Market income. If you really need to, make a dirt road from your depot's to the entrace of the highway. Make sure this road does not form the shortest path for residents or other traffic, but IS the shortest path for your depot->Highway. This will pretty give your trucks high priority access to the highway and makes sure they don't get bogged down. The catch is though, it may cause large traffic issues at the entrace to the Highway/City depending on how your city roads are designed. However since you are just trying to get that ore sold then this may be not be relevent for you..