Hi all!
A question on general gameplay. I have added more than a little content from the LEX to enhance my regions cities and am running into a glitch of sorts.
Though I have quite a diverse set of lots installed, my zones are producing multiple iterations of the same lots over and over. (one industrial zone grew 15 Blackies Ice lots upon zoning)
I'd prefer to let the cities grow organically, rather than plopping. Is there something I'm missing that gets the diverse set of lots installed to grow?
Be careful that you don't mix CAM with non-CAM lots (and vice versa).
There are a number of factors that can determine whether a particular lot grows a lot, a little or hardly at all. The basic problem is, whilst the base content was all modded to a standard, so it would play nice together, for a long time most modders just came up with their own systems, but there wasn't a lot of consistency. Should a particular lot match other lots in other ways, but whlst providing more jobs/capacity, the simulator may well be favouring it over others that would otherwise potentially appear. If you download PIM-X (http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2260), you can use it to automatically re-calculate the stats for a given Lot/Building. Essentially running downloads through this tool will ensure consistent stats for your entire content suite. Of course many modders use this excellent tool for creating, so you may not have to do everything. But for example if you notice a particular building/lot not working great, you could run them through the process and hopefully correct them.
Not forgetting other factors, consider how the game decides what to grow and when. This involves a lot of factors such as the available zone size, demand, growth stage you can support. Essentially once the game decides what it wants to grow, it pools a list of all the items that match those requirements and chooses one of them. So when a building/lot appears a lot, one simple solution is to ensure you've more than one option that fits the same circumstances. Generally speaking, the more choice you have (mods), the less likely that you will get repeated buildings.