I'm a new player. This game just feels like a black box to me most of the time. When I have a problem or am successful at something, I only have concepts of the what or the how instead of solid knowledge of what is happening. I appreciate anyone who can help me understand more about the game with my current problems.
I have NAM installed as well as various fixes (including hi-tech fix, opera house fix). No CAM mod installed. I've started my first region. I built a city in one of the small squares. I completely covered it with a mix of residential, commercial, and industrial zones. It looks fairly successful at first glance since I have 120k sims, a large surplus of money, high education/healthcare/desirability, and traffic is under control by having bus stops and a subway along with the roads.
The problem is I have massive swathes of high-wealth, high density residential areas without jobs. Interspersed in these areas were buildings abandoned "due to commute time", but I suspect what that really means is "abandoned due to infinite commute time" aka no jobs. (Can anyone confirm if that's a real thing?)
I wanted to say the issue was that I have high density residential stuff and low density industrial/commercial? I honestly don't know. What I mean is I mouse over a resident building and see spots for an insane 3000 people, where as I mouse over the biggest high-tech building I can find and it has like 100 jobs. Is it the case that way more of your land will be commercial and industry? I was kind of hoping I'd get very large workplaces too. I don't see how else I could raise the pop further otherwise.
Since I was out of land to build more stuff...I knew one way to fix this was to go to a neighboring region and build commercial/industry there. So I did...and it sort of worked? Maybe? I could build a few sections of hi-tech and commercial before the demand zeroed out next door. Then I would reload the main city, quit, then reload the neighbor and low and behold a little more would magically build. I repeated this like 30 times and now 1/3 of the neighbor city is filled with hi-tech/high wealth commercial with 0 residents. I can't tell if I just exploiting a bug here on accident or if you're supposed to reload repeatedly like this.
In main city, there are still a few places with no jobs, but I wanted to say that it worked and they are commuting. However, then I noticed a NEW problem. Now, almost all of my existing hi-tech and commercial in the first city are abandoned due to low demand. These places were fine before. I'm assuming this is because of the neighboring region. I don't understand..I thought I was just filling in the jobs that were missing? Yet somehow I have supplanted jobs in the first city...
Was I wrong in thinking that I was filling in the missing jobs by building in a neighboring region? Maybe jobs are like pollution...trapped in the same city square
Maybe my issue is about this magical, nebulous growth stage I've heard about? Like if I go off and make 3 other 100k cities, and then reload my first one sky scrapers could pop up and solve these density problems?
I feel I don't have great control over this stuff. I just kind of float on vibes.
Thanks for any help. Like I've said I've watched tutorials but it really feels like there's a lot of black magic here.
