How does the game upgrade existing buildings?

[dlo§rhuj]

One occurence in my city caused me to wonder about the game's inner workings. I was building up a city and had two nice CO§§ buildings, one with 8,000 jobs and one with 6,000 jobs. As the city grew, I hoped that they would upgrade to give me more jobs which I sorely needed at that point. Well, they did upgrade, but not in the way I expected at all.

The two CO§§ buildings each turned into a CS§§§ building with 1,000 jobs each - that is, I lost 12,000 jobs! I would have almost lost 20,000 sims to this if I hadn't acted quick and plopped a few high-capacity commercial buildings to relieve the job demand. This made me wonder how the game can consider losing 12,000 jobs an "upgrade" and simply build over the buildings like that.

I know that people consider the upgrading of buildings a given, but now, I am just thinking about how it works. I thought that buildings could only upgrade to higher-capacity buildings (or buildings with a similar capacity, but higher wealth), but it seems that I was wrong. I didn't even know the game could "upgrade" from CO to CS - I'd consider that more a downgrade if anything since CO has much more beneficial effects.

Has anyone else ever looked into this or have there been others who had to deal with "strange" upgrades?

[ACEfanatic02]

I've actually been looking into the same system lately, as I think it's the source of a number of irritating bugs in SC4.  (The following is all based on observation -- I make no guarantees that I'm right.)

The game appears to decide what upgrades to make based on a few factors: demand, desirability, wealth, and growth stage.

If there is demand for that zone type, and the area has the appropriate desirability, the game will upgrade.  However, buildings only grow to higher wealth levels, and to equal or greater growth stages.

This has a few problems:
- Doesn't take into account demand for the *current* wealth level.  (This is part of why CS$ and CS$$ have effectively infinite demand in developed regions.)
- The game often overcompensates for the higher wealth's demand, causing abandonment and dilapidation issues.
- As you noted, job capacity between wealth levels is significantly different.  Commercial is even worse, as CO and CS bring in even *more* difference -- 2k+ office towers can technically be overridden by CS$$$ boutiques with less than 1k jobs.

A similar, equally annoying example shows up with residential zones, where an entire R$$ block will upgrade to R$$$, be unable to find jobs, and then dilapidate back to R$$.  Leaving you will essentially the same setup, just uglier.

For all the complaints that SC4's pathfinding gets, I really think this development system is *far* more broken.  However, it's also not in the realm of things that can be fixed via modding.  (Rebalancing stages (CAM) *helps*, but it would take far more invasive changes to actually fix the problem.)

[dlo§rhuj]

Well I guess the CO/CS problem could be fixed by realigning the growth stages so they're more comparable. As in (this is just guessed without looking at any actual data) CS growth stages should only go up to 10 so the CS stages have roughly the same jobs/tile value as their CO counterparts. That way there wouldn't be such huge drops when a CO is replaced by a CS, and in total, once large buildings appear these replacements would stop entirely.

The other problems are of course not as easy to fix. I'm very familiar with the residential problem; especially in regions where desirability is high, the game often decides to go for R§§ and R§§§ only, without actually looking if there are any jobs for them. The effect is that they move in and dilapidate soon later (or mass migrate to neighbor cities, creating traffic problems beyond anyone's imagination; once I've had over 200,000 people use a train station to get out of the city!). It's so bad I actually have to force the game to build R§ by setting the taxes for the other two to 20%, this way they will stop building but existing ones will not leave either (as long as desirability is high enough which it should). If the game worked properly such ugly workarounds wouldn't be needed, but as it is, there's no way around them.

[whatevermind]

... buildings only grow to higher wealth levels, and to equal or greater growth stages.

This has a few problems:
- Doesn't take into account demand for the *current* wealth level.  (This is part of why CS$ and CS$$ have effectively infinite demand in developed regions.)
- The game often overcompensates for the higher wealth's demand, causing abandonment and dilapidation issues.

...

A similar, equally annoying example shows up with residential zones, where an entire R$$ block will upgrade to R$$$, be unable to find jobs, and then dilapidate back to R$$.  Leaving you will essentially the same setup, just uglier.

This indeed would be quite the fix if anyone knows how to do it.

I've sometimes used making buildings historical to keep them from upgrading, which isn't really practical in widespread application, but can at least preserve a handful of key buildings

[APSMS]

I've noticed this on a few occasions, but my cities are strangely developed. A few thoughts, however...

I read somewhere on this site that it's important to understand that the building query only lists possible jobs out of the maximum, unlike housing which displays actual residents. Since customers aren't simulated (The residential "Traffic Noise" query is the same exemplar that determines business traffic) the only people that visit a given COM/IND building are the workers, so the only real indicator of how many thousand people were working at a particular building is to use the Route Query Tool and see the numbers that show up there, as that is the actual workers at that site (I struggle with brevity, so hang on here).

Aside from this, only a fraction of total employees are at the given wealth level of a COM/IND building, which is why in a city w/only CO$$$, CS$$$, and I-HT, you will still only have about 10-20% of the population be High Wealth, and the bulk R$$ middle class. The I-HT bug is fixed by a download found somewhere on the STEX which has greatly solved my R$$$ abandonment issues, but otherwise I would suppose that using the "Make Historical" option is your best bet to maintain buildings you like around. Some NIMBY stuff in the area might also be enough to discourage $$$ but not be enough to drown out $$ demand

[dlo§rhuj]

I-HT bug? Care to elaborate?

Yes, the exact values of what ratio of Sims a given workplace employs are given in the CAM manual. The problem, however, lies somewhere differently - after a while, you will have near unsatisfiable demand for R§§§ (and most other things too - except for CS§§§ and CO§§§, the bars seem to never go down at all!), no matter how many buildings you build. And for some reason, commute seems to fail for R§§§ more often than for other Sims (I wonder why?) so you'll see those buildings dilapidating more often.