justforfun

Fixing roof-texture asymmetries which were apparent in the images, and yet somehow I had missed! Am I working too much?

More row houses:

The central tile with most job has 220,000 sims, the adjacent ones range from 100,000 to 180,000. Usually the first no-job zots begin appearing when the cities approach 50,000 sims or so. Up to this point I had managed to overcome the stalls by increasing station capacity, easing congestion, or plopping the odd office or reward building, but there are now places where I wouldn't know what to do to further improve the situation. All my commercials and industrials are plopped and growified, at present the central tile has no less than 2 million available jobs. In other words, more than the population of the entire region, which is almost 1,500,000. I wonder whether the game expects any region this big to have highways and airports? Since mine is ante-bellum style, I have neither. Plenty of trains and buses though.

Ok, I assume there's no way to mod this. However, the cities where there is presently abandonment due to commute are all adjacent to the one where the jobs are. Even some residentials within the job city can't find jobs just a few hundred yards away, if not across the street! It seems to me the destination finder isn't working well even at short distance. Looks like it cannot handle the calculations once the city grows past a certain point?

So here we are, even after eliminating any and all congestion the new residentials I'm trying to develop can't find jobs. A much improved destination finder is what we badly need for large cities and interconnected regions. Achievable through some advanced modding? Unless or until we get there, my region is stuck, hence creating more residential models seems pointless.

Maybe those are the settings in the latest NAM, because I don't recall ever touching that property. Oh that explains it! What made me assume it was a capacity multiplier was the fact that the furthest square was set at 0.4, and the one next to the intersection to 0.2, which is puzzling if this is actually a congestion multiplier. I might have to reduce the values then, because despite setting the road capacity to 10,000 I still get mild congestion around several intersections. I'll have a go with yours. (btw, you do have good memory, Cori!) UPDATE: Nope, I just found out reducing the values doesn't reduce congestion, but setting them to 1.25, 1 and 1 does. I also had to increase road capacity to 15,000 to finally eliminate all red spots in the main tile. Despite this, there are still a couple of new residentials within the tile which can't find a job. Oh well.

Good point. The current values in my simulator are 1.25, 0.2 and 0.4. How confusing though, does it mean that the capacity of the intersection square is actually higher than 1, whereas it drops in the nearby squares? Is that because it takes into account the extra capacity of the intersecting road?

Usually yes. Every tile even has more than one university. Good idea, thank you. The no-job zots affect all wealth / education levels at the same time though. I'm now having a try by increasing road and railway capacity, to get rid of the few congested routes I have. Let's see if that makes a difference.

Just peeked, they actually don't at all. And yet the Demand Mod seems to be pushing development so hard that the limitations set by the Abandonment Mod are somehow overcome. In any case, even when the dilapidated buildings don't redevelop soon, they just sit there without ever coming to life. It's not that the destination finder finds any jobs for them in later runs. EDIT: A new question has popped up in my mind. When a city has still little development, any new residentials I add find a job very quickly, almost straight away. Does this mean that in such cases I am so lucky as to begin the simulation just at the time when the destination finder is running, or is there something else to it that I'm missing? It seems to me the more developed a city is, the slower the destination finder finds out there are new unemployed sims (even if they are located in the North-West corner, where they should be detected early!), and the less effective it is in providing them with a job, until it fails completely. However, the decreased speed and effectiveness isn't a simple function of population. I have smaller cities already stuck, and more populous ones that are still working. But all of them started out with very quick and 100% effective path finding, even the farthest from the jobs. In essence what I would like someone to explain to me is: what happens right after I growify my residentials? Why does the destination finder appear to activate immediately in young cities, rather than after a few months? Further: would it be theoretically possible to make the DF search for longer until it finds jobs? (from what I read, it would seem its workings are sadly hard-coded).

I just checked what's in my plugins folder, turns out that's the one I'm already using. Which is puzzling, because my buildings can decay and be replaced by unwanted new developments well before 180 years, sometimes in a matter of just a few months. I suspect the Demand Mod somehow nullifies the effects of this one.

Before I jump over there, let me report the results of my latest experiment. 1) Residentials plopped and growified in sim December, no-job zots showing up in February, residentials eventually abandoned in May. 2) Very same residentials re-plopped and growified in May, no-job zots showing up in July, residentials eventually abandoned in October. As you can see, in both trials the zots appeared two months after growification. Was that the moment when the destination finder kicked in? Between the two runs in February and July the interval would then be 5 months rather than 4. In any case, 3 months were then spent each time to decide no jobs are reachable. What I'm wondering is whether it might be a matter of synchronising plopping with the destination finder runs, but maybe I'm not understanding this right.

Extremely interesting, but then how did @CorinaMarie manage to have her sims travel vast distances over many tiles? The article says that Maxis apparently introduced a hidden x25 multiplier, so that 6 minutes effectively become 2.5 hours, did I get that right? But, but, what I am now mulling over is this: if the destination finder runs every 4 months, could that be the reason for the abandonment of some of the buildings I plop and growify? I mean, perhaps I just plop them at the wrong time? If so, can a mod be made to enable the destination finder to run on command?

Glad to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this problem. Please fellow mayors speak out so the modders will listen! The most absurd thing is that often my sims won't even find the available jobs in their own city! This happens after the population reaches 40-50,000 and is happening now in my central tile with 220,000 inhabitants. The tile in question has more jobs, museums, schools, parks and rewards than you can count. Surely there's something wrong in the way the game calculates commute?

@CorinaMarie OK, now I can't find the words to thank you enough. Of course you asked the crucial question. My goal is to build a functional city which still looks the way I want -hence 100% plopped and growified + the Demand Mod. I take inspiration from London, with most office jobs in the central tile, shopping high streets throughout, industrial zones scattered here and there, and medium-density row housing as the main residential type. As you can imagine I make large use of my own models, which I set to fairly realistic stats, with lower residents than Maxis standard. In this way I have so far managed to obtain a region which approximates the population density of a city like London and is overall functional. Why do I prefer a functional city over looks only? Because I like my region to be alive, to see the traffic moving on the main thoroughfares and pedestrians on the streets. If I could obtain this with eye-candies only, I would. Unfortunately, "artificial" traffic generators only spawn random cars that move aimlessly all over the place, without any realistic pattern. I suspect (not sure) setting occupancy to 1 sim per building wouldn't even solve the commute issue. I'm saying this because sometimes I plop a random house with just 4 or 5 sims and they still can't find a job. Now, say what you will about my playing style, and we know that the game wasn't originally intended to build European-style regions, the fact remains that a few thousand sims are unable to find 2 million available jobs in my region. This is absurd, someone please fix it!