Stagnant Demand

[MutantPlatypus]

So I have this city (I'll call it J-Town) I've been playing for a while, and I can't get it to grow any more.  I'm under the demand cap, civics are well funded, civic coverage is good, no eternal commuters (I think), nearby parks/plazas, about 1.2k plopped commercial RCI (Peg's Mall Canals).  Neighboring cities have working demand, though.  Except for about 100 kilosims in two unconnected cities, all my region's residents are in this city.

Does this mean I need to build up neighboring cities some more?  That doesn't seem to help.

Here's a shot of my census:



UPDATE:  I'm not using ploppables without their demand being there.  Note that this is a demand issue.  Buildings will grow if I bulldoze the old ones, and I have appropriate zone sizes for the larger buildings.

[SC4BOY]

The game is designed to require regional connections to develop to it's fullest. You comment on your having "unconnected" cities and I note that you have zero commuters in your report. Build regional connections and continue your regional buildup and I expect you will find your problems just go away..

[MutantPlatypus]

I have lots of regional connections.  They're just between this city with residences and about 8 other cities with only industry.  There's lots of connections.  I thought all the connections did was relieve caps.  Do they boost demand, too?  Do I need residences in neighboring cities?

[Indisguise]

Well you might wanna also load up some screen shots of the city or region, sort of working blind here.Also you using any other mods  (using the  NAM ? setting if used ?  you using the CAM ?) Demand charts are helpful, but they only tell part of the story. Yes building up the surrounding cities would most likely help. Regions run like a car engine, better to have all cylinders pumping.

- Check your zoning, later in a cities development to get the larger higher capasity buildings you need to start zoning deeper, mainly 4x4 for most of the games  high capasity RES and COM buildings could go 5x5 or 6x6 but that would depend on your  custom content you have in your game. Add parks in the areas to raise land value to stimulate the higher stage building to start growing.


-Lower you tax rates, as the city population goes up the sims almost demand you lower the tax rate. your at 400K and still at 9% almost across the board except for MANF and Dirty IND.


- check you city for a well placed intergrated MT service, try and make them work together , bus stops, rail mono-rail etc, specially for city to city travel

- play the surrounding cities even for a small while to update the sims comutes.

- double check garbage and make sure your city is dealing with it. People forget about it a lot of times, and any sort of build up it in the city beyond it's ability to deal with it will kill growth reguardless of demand. this is also true for air and water polution levels.

-when you start getting into the higher population cities seems to stagnate or it's grow seems to slow to a crawl for periods of time , they sort of become lumbering dinosaurs. Mainly this has to do with new sims moving in and lowering you over all cities EQ. These sims will want lower class jobs CS and dirty or manf IND for a time, but with proper schooling and time the EQ will rise growth will continue. Sometimes this growth comes in short spurts and isn't visually apparent as most building ussually aren't 100 full to capasity and the sims shuffle through out the city changing buildings for various reasons. Like upgrading wealth class, getting older, moving closer to their jobs etc etc

[SC4BOY]

I just also noted that you are WAY overdriven with CO jobs... are you using plops?

[MutantPlatypus]

Thanks for all your help, guys!  Eventually I'll get this dinosaur lumbering again.


I'm using the NAM on high and the CAM without any modified census drives or pedestrian speed (encourage nothing).  No other demand or traffic mods.  I'm also using the BSC Functional Seaports and AC Functional Airports.  If it would help, I can send you a copy of the region and you can dink around with it.  I can't figure out how to attach files.  Do I need to be a moderator to do that?

I just also noted that you are WAY overdriven with CO jobs... are you using plops?

I noticed that, too, and assumed citizens of SimNation were coming in.  I have no idea why its so overdriven.  I have the convention center and an AC Major Regional Airport, maybe that's why?  I'm not using RCI ploppables (except for a few UT Mall Canals by Pegasus, about 1.2 k jobs).  Oh and the Modular Amusement Park is probably doing about 50 jobs.  I just now started organizing some of my downtown areas (hotel/casino blocks, office blocks, etc.) with LotPlopped buildings.  Here's the kicker, though:  I make sure I have the demand before I plop.  When I bulldoze buildings, demand for the type bulldozed comes back up again.  If they were imaginary workers, would that happen?  For example, I will bulldoze CS$$ until demand comes up before I plop a CS$$.  If the demand is less than -6000, its really not by much.  I don't have to do much 'dozing to get the demand back in the positive.

As you can see, the EQ of my city is 198.  I haven't had any dumb noobs move in recently.  However, in case they do, this city is connected to cities that are all IR, ID, and IM.  Strangely, those cities total about 200k in industrial jobs, but the census says I only have 20k of workers commuting out of the city.  Even if I had new guys move in, I assume demand for CS$ would have gone up, right?  Another weird thing: Demand for IHT jobs are through the roof in neighboring cities, but I can barely keep demand up in this city.

The city has very well integrated mass transit.  Road top sub/bus stations abound, and if I had to guess, nearly 80% of my sims take mass transit.

There is no garbage buildup.

[MutantPlatypus]

Well, due to a little bug (here) that effectively doubles your count of residents, I officially throw away the previous demand values.  It also explains why my commercial demand seemed so overdriven.  I'll have to apply the fix and massage the region back into a normal state, as I really don't want to give up the maps.  i spent a lot of time on the canals, parks, ploppable water, and other things that can't be exported easily.

[SC4BOY]

Yea that bug is a real "killer".. they've been promising an update for over a year.. I guess there must be a lot of problems with it.. You'll also, unfortunately, find the "massage"-ing to be really annoying.. good luck with it.

[Indisguise]

Learned a few tricks to counter the CAM 1.0 workforce bug. Basicly you have to trick the game, by creating cities with lots of job types you don't want in your main or showcase cities.


When I first build a new city I make it a specilized city with no RES, soaking up all the demand for IND and/or CS. By doing this you can bankroll a large amount of money and set up roadways and transit system etc etc before adding RES.  When you want to convert the city to hold RES dezone the city and move this type of specilized city  farther out to outliying cites, as long as the city is connected to the other cities in the region you can build these types of cities by sheer demand as long as there are no RES in the city itself and without sims actually comuting to the city in question from established cities.

Another trick could be to add these types of specilized cities to the edges of the map. This does require a bit more work as  you need to  make up a new config for the region and expanding it, and importing cities to the region, but it does work.

[MutantPlatypus]

Neat, thanks for the tips!  It seems I actually do have to build neighboring cities no matter what.  You just can't max out a single large tile by itself (even just building ID, IA, and IM cities next to it isn't enough, you have to at least have residence or commerce cities, too)

[SC4BOY]

I've never had any problem developing the cities/region.. the issue addressed was when you've played "CAM 1" for some time and have a relatively developed city, it's quite the pain to then try to correct the res/jobs ratio after you "switch" to some variant of "CAM 2".. or for that matter if you try to "un-CAM" it..

[MutantPlatypus]

Hah, well, my "massaging" consisted of bulldozing jobs until demand balanced out again.  It wasn't that difficult 

But I'm still having a stagnation issue that only seems to be solved when I develop commercial and residential zones in connected cities.