Sharp_Mayor

The only problem is that not even 10% of your citizens actually work, and sending 4000 to single block of four High tech industry is just begging to be gridlocked. Sure, you can space them out, and avoid a lot of that issue, but my city of 400k totally locked down during rush hour, and since freight feeds the Commercial needs, and commercial fills the shoppers needs, the goal is happy sims and a balanced city that won't burn up or shut down. And balancing the city is the bigger issue, because of the space limitations, if you made all of your workers just work industrial, water, garbage, and sewage would also need multiple locations, Besides, if the goal is making crazy money, build a couple of consumer electronics factories for the same workers you can have two of them and roll about 4-5 million per day. Hang on... who cares about freight? On the other hand, high density means that you need less space to generate jobs for your population, allowing you to build more residential areas and have a higher total population (and, presumably,make more money)

It just hit me... That was only one city.. Imagine how tossed you'd be if all four cities did the same thing? With the current path finding, I don't think there is a way to avoid eminent disaster, and since the games can't be saved, it's just a matter of time before even the perfect city is trashed by the random acts of glass box.

Yes, perablenta the numbers are wanky, but at least you can put the C and R in the same block, you can't do that with industry until you reach high tech, and who wants to re-design their entire city once that happens. Also, HD C still only uses about half of the workers that I uses. Most of my issues have come from the herding (pathfinding) coding in the game. I had built a solar farm, and everything was fine for over a year of game time.. then everyone decided to head there for work even though it only requires 300 workers, and then make a U-Turn completely busting my city. :-(

Seems like my entire population, well.. the 90% that don't do ANYTHING... All decided to go visit the solar farm, just to make a U-turn.. Had pretty much no major traffic issues, and now nothing can move in my city. I knew those 90% were in the game for a reason!!

Try shutting down your exports until your trade depots are full, and then start exporting again right after your trade report comes out. (After midnight) Also, you can open a recycling plant, and just extract Alloy, this will give you another nice bump.

This was my sandbox test city to have a balanced city once and for all. Sorry these are so big..

OK.. This is my very first post on ST forums, and I think this will help lots of people who suffer like I have with massive traffic issues. So, after building a city with 400K residents, and having the "No workers", "Can't ship freight", "Need More shoppers".. You know the deal.. I headed into the sandbox to tinker with a few ideas. What I have found are some very interesting points, which I am about to share, not all are related to traffic, but the combination of these tricks, will certainly help balance out your city, and the traffic will take care of itself. Let me start with the most glaring traffic issue. Commuters during rush hour. To fix the mad rush to the same area of your map, no matter what layout you are using, try this. Build your industry district as the road grid lays it out, this should give you enough room for one high density (which you will never have) Industrial building. Here's the key to this.. That block will produce the same amount of freight, be it low density ( 4 sites ), Medium density ( 2 sites ), or High density ( 1 site ). That is 360 freight per day. This trick should also help you balance out employment numbers. I'm going to use High tech for my example. One High density High tech Industry creates 360 freight, and needs 1040 workers. In a city that only 10% is work force, that's a crippling number. So, for the same production, stick with Mid or Low density. Medium Density needs 184 workers for two businesses, and low needs just 88 workers for four businesses. See how this can help get rid of that gridlock? Another tip.. Once you have the university, get rid of the intermediate schools, but keep the community college. Here's another tip about the university. When your city has 3300 students, demolish the dorms. The 1500 students in the dorms, just stop your city students from getting an education, besides, those dorms cost 1500 per hour. Reasonable if you are trying to upgrade the university, but they are otherwise useless, not to mention the space you can save by ripping them down. The Industrial info was part of another post, so I won't take credit for that, but these games are like dot-to-dots. But without the numbers. My city has 185k citizens, less than 100 combined unfilled jobs, very low crime, no abandoned buildings, and buildings don't burn down while fire trucks sit in traffic. No water, sewage, or trash issues either. Hope this post helps someone enjoy the game a little more. I know it worked for me.