darkscaryforest

Thanks for further clarification. Mayor rating, land value, desirability, lack of traffic, education level, healthcare level. But, the more I research...the more I realize these might not be that relevant to what we are discussing. I've been reading your thread. Most notably the pinned response from Naomi57. It made me look at wealth levels, something I ignored. I had a split of 10k R$, 85k R$$, 20 R$$$. I read about how every building employs every wealth level. And indeed, many many of my places were only halfway staffed, presumably lacking R$ but having no R$$$ slots. So the fix: I remember what you said about spending a large amount of demand in a small area. I raised taxes on R$$ and R$$$ to isolate demand on R$. I repeatedly bulldozed just 1 jobless R$$$ building at a time and waited for them to rebuild. Lo and behold giant R$ high rises formed in those small spaces housing thousands. And the jobs are there for them. I also learned to use the historical button to lock these down so they don't get developed away. I noticed to get these giant builds I had to have the zoned building a certain size, like a 2-by-3. Unfortunately, again, this had another unintended side effect. My demographics completely flipped! Suddenly I had 90k R$ and about 10 R$$. It was the higher taxes that did it. A blunt instrument for change indeed. I reverted that and it flipped back to normal plus some higher R$ portion. As a side note, wanted to include that I deleted all that hi tech in the neighboring region and indeed all the abandoned hi tech in my main city lit up again. So now I understand why there were no jobs and how to fix it for the most part. However, in terms of continuing to develop the region to greater density and have hopes to acquire skyscrapers and such, I discovered a much larger problem. I read from the thread about the importance of traffic near commercial zones. I noticed in many of the tutorials and in Naomi57's Jamaica Bay the tendency to avoid grids. There is usually some deliberate separation of residential and industrial in such a way to bottleneck traffic through commercial in the middle. I...uh...didn't do that. I have a big fat grid where all roads lead to all other roads. Traffic is actually pretty low almost everywhere! Which apparently I now see is not necessarily a good thing. In the few areas that do have traffic, commercial is indeed larger. However, most other places have low traffic, low customers. I don't really have a good plan for how to condense it further in this grid. I think it might be a good idea to start over in a neighboring region with that in mind. I now have a population of about 140k that will let me have a high growth stage starting point.

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.

Thank you for taking the time to go through my babbling and quote/answer so many questions. You've already helped me quite a lot with the responses. I promise to go through this in detail. I really must split my SimCity time into playing and reading to learn more. This thread will be a good source. If you have any time to expand further on what you've said...as it has dezoned some of my previous thinking, I'm very appreciative. Maybe the BEST thing I could ask you is...the city I described. No land. Lots of people without jobs. Low demand, but everything else looking green. What would you have done to fix it and why? For some reason I was assuming it was the opposite but this excellent to know. I appreciate it, but no mods needed for me. I want to learn and adapt to how to play it and now I understand that commercial has a bigger role than I thought it did. This high density response right here...kind of blowing my mind in my understanding of the game. OK so I thought to create demand I must get more sims to move in with well upkept residential zones, but they need jobs to stick around so I indeed am quick to build commercial and industry to keep trudging forward on this zoning treadmill. Yet you stated that you can in fact pool demand and spend it when applicable! How can you create more demand (specifically commercial and industry), banking an excess without engaging in this zone building loop? I always thought if I were to build more of one zone it'll need more of the other to actually develop...but here I am without more land now. What is the way forward? Is there a way I may measure the demand I have pooled? I suppose that's just the RCI graph but I was hoping for numbers like you stated. Another thought: I thought medium and high density zones will rebuild themselves to taller and taller buildings over time anyways. In fact, that's what I expected to happen when I have so many sims that need jobs. But it seems need for jobs, is not the same as demand. For example, those 3000 soaring resident buildings I spoke of used to be tiny apartments. I thought they just suddenly sprouted up into these towering buildings one day. Maybe commercial and industry zones don't do that? Or maybe they do, if there is an excess of demand like you mention? EDIT Reading through that thread..I have a sinking feeling that the problem is wealth demographics which I haven't been paying attention to. IIRC 80% of my sims are $$.