CAM 1.0 and farms stage 1 not growing

[FrankU]

A weird thing happened these days.

I have CAM 1.0 installed.
I always thought it worked correctly, but suddenly I find something weird.

I have been working on a set of new farming lots. I make these with Pim-X, so the properties should be correct in relation to CAM.
When I started testing these farms I found that only the highest stage I had installed grew.

What did I do?

I have made farms stages 1, 2 and 3 up to now.
I started a completely fresh new region. A new empty city.
In this city I zoned for a large agricultural area wit space for many farms. About 50. I also zoned some low density housing. I plopped 1 power plant. That's all.
I saved this city.

In my my documents/SC4/plugins folder I have:
- a_cam
- BSC Prevent-IR-lot
- Dutch farm lots (i made myself) including all dependencies.
- some usual stuff
- Z_cam

In my C:maxis/sc4/plugins I have some standard plugins that I always use, like:
- some usual mods, like slope mod, opera slider, private school slider, data view mods, etc: nothing that should interfere with CAM or farm growth as far as I know.
- NAM,
- buildings as props 1 and 2,
- maxis landmarks
- extra cheats.dll

Then I did some experiments.

1. With the above setup:
When I hit "run": my own farms, but only stage 3 start to grow. No stage 1 or 2.

2. With Prevent-IR-lots off, so that also Maxis lots may grow:
only stage 3 grow: my lots plus Pedriana.

3. When I take a_cam and z_cam out:
Farms stage 1 grow. Maxis and my own.

4. When I take a_cam, z_cam out and Prevent-IR-lots in:
My farms stage 1 grow.

5. When I put A_cam and z_cam back, take my lots out, and leave Prevent-IR-lot in:
Only Maxis Pedriana grows.

6. When I take the first setup, but remove my stage 3 farms:
Only my stage 2 farms grow.

How can this be? Did I screw up my CAM installation? I don't know.
Does it have to do with the fact that I have moved some standard plugins and dependencies into my C:Maxis/sc4/plugins directory?
Are there plugins that appear to screw up CAM, although you might think at first sight they have no influence?

[jmyers2043]

Hey FrankU   

I started a completely fresh new region. A new empty city.
In this city I zoned for a large agricultural area with space for many farms. About 50. I also zoned some low density housing. I plopped 1 power plant. That's all.
I saved this city.

You should have the same percent chance to grow stages 1 through 3 in the test city you describe. . .   

The CAM has the Maxis farm lots included unless you've modded the CAM on your computer. I had relotted all my Maxis farm lots before the CAM. Then found the original Maxis ones growing after installing the CAM. So I put the CAM in \Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4\Plugins. This means that the CAM loads first and my farms which are in MyDocs load last. I'm not sure why you have A_CAM and Z_CAM. Seems redundant.

I test farms a lot. My test region/city is a completely empty plugins (maxis vanilla). I have Grandpa Al's farm blocker. Like you, I zoned the city with some RCI plus farm zones. I ran the city for about a year then saved the game. So there it is. All I have to do is to put in my new farms in the plugins (I can add the CAM now if I wished). See what happens. Exit without saving so my 'test' city is ready for the next round of farm lots. The only thing I care about is to see the new farm lots grow. I don't care about pretty stuff like NAM ... Landmarks ... etc.

I do mess things up occasionally. Such as I'll set the max slope to 20 and the min slope is 5 ... but I'm testing on a completely flat city. I can't think of anything else other than having the stage growth set improperly.

Are the Sims who have moved into your city in fact, R$ Sims? How about roads? Can the Sims arrive at the farm to work in the fields. I'm making wild guesses as it's hard sometimes to imagine what may have gone wrong in the Netherlands   

I'm traveling this weekend and will not be at my gaming computer. I'm offering to help and can look to see how your farms grow in my test city but that will have to wait until Tuesday of next week. I'm certain you'll have it solved by then but the offer is there.


- Jim

[Lowkee33]

3. When I take a_cam and z_cam out:
Farms stage 1 grow. Maxis and my own.

6. When I take the first setup, but remove my stage 3 farms:
Only my stage 2 farms grow.

Only thing I can think is that your stage 1 farms are in the same folder as the stage 3 farms that you removed.  The other test would be to take out the stage 2 farms and see if is indeed the case where nothing can grow.

Think I am going to lean with JMyers though, sounds like one little thing is off in a mass of modding. 

[FrankU]

Hi Jim and Carl,

Thanks for your reactions.

I am not sure if I understand what you mean by CAM has the Maxis farms included. I guess you mean: The CAM has edited the Maxis farms so that they fit in with CAM properties and behavior.
In that case I can tell you that what happened to my farms also happened to the Maxis farms when I removed the blocker. So both my farms and the Maxis farms are affected.
And the point is that only the stage 3 farms grew when I had all stages 1, 2 and 3 installed. So only my stage 3 and the Maxis stage 3.
Ah, but what happens when I remove my stage 3 and leave the blocker out? Will only stage 3 Maxis grow? I have to test that!

I have a A_CAM folder and a Z_CAM folder, because the installer installed it that way. In no way I edited the CAM. The only thing I did was adding a IHT fix file into the Z_CAM folder (I forgot the name and can't look it up now, because my game computer is 40 km away). But it was a file that was authorized by the CAM people. Otherwise the CAM installation was completely fresh.
This IHT fix couldn't be the cause of this behavior? Now couldn't it?

My test city is in a region that I have never played before. I only zoned LowRes, a bit of LowCom and Farming. No neighbor connections. And of course the sims can drive from home to farm! I might be making some sort of stupid mistake, but not that obvious!

And I checked the growth stage. In PIM-X I find the farms in the list where I expect them: the farms that I wanted to be stage 3 were indeed in the list when I clicked on "Lots Stage 3 IR" Also in Reader the Growth stage is set to 3. The same for stage 1 and 2.

And Carl,

No, sorry to say, but the farms are all in a separate subfolder. For finding and testing versatility. This is my directory setup:

FrankU Dutch Farm Fields
- Growable Farms
- - Building exemplars    
- - - Stage 0      Contains the building exemplars of stage "0" farms.
                                      You know: the farm fields, in fact stage 1.
- - - Stage 1      Contains the building exemplars of stage 1 farms
- - - Stage 2      etc...
- - - Stage 3
- - Growable Lots
- - - Stage 0      Contains the lot files of the stage "0" farms.
- - - Stage 1      etc...   
- - - Stage 2
- - - Stage 3
- Plopable farms
Etc...

When I remove stage 3 only 2 grows. When I take out 2 only 1 grows. When I take out 1 only ")"grows, which are in fact also stage 1, but somehow they don't grow together. Which makes it even more mysterious. Only thing is: I had the stage 0 with only 2 jobs. My stage 1 range from 2 to 10 jobs.

Could it be that the higher stages block the lower in some way? Maybe I rename the subfolders so that Stage 0 is loaded last. And then test again? Some weird kind of overwriting?

I have to do some testing again. Another new fresh region? I don't know. Downloading CAM anew? Or taking all files out of the C:\program files/maxis/sc4/plugins folder? Maybe that does something? I'll see if I can find something. And otherwise I will be lotting on stages 4 and 5.

Thanks,
FrankU

[jmyers2043]

let me see if I understand correctly. The farms do grow ... but only the highest stage.   How many jobs do your tpyical stage 1,2, or 3 farms have?

[RippleJet]

The only thing I did was adding a IHT fix file into the Z_CAM folder (I forgot the name and can't look it up now, because my game computer is 40 km away). But it was a file that was authorized by the CAM people. Otherwise the CAM installation was completely fresh.
This IHT fix couldn't be the cause of this behavior? Now couldn't it?

No, it couldn't.
The "IHT Fix" (as documented by HeinBloed4711, and by niloluiz before him) is attached to this post.

[FrankU]

@ Jim,

Indeed, when I have installed CAM only the highest stage available grows. And there is no difference between the Maxis farms and my own. So it can't be something I did wrong with my farms, I guess.
The numbers of jobs:
Stage "0": 2 jobs
Stage  1 : 2-10 jobs
Stage  2 : 16-20 jobs
Stage  3 : 50-60 jobs
Stage  4 : 100-120 jobs

My city has about 120 farm areas zoned. When I start the game indeed only the highest stage available grows. When farms of all stages are available and about 80 farms of stage 3 have grown I see that also some stage 2 and stage 1 farms appear. My population is then about 2500 sims.

In the meantime I have made some stage 4 farms. They do not grow, not even after I have laid down water and put down a fire station. So at the moment my guess is that these will appear when appropriate conforming tot he CAM read me.

Somewhere I read something about building value (or something) that had an influence on what farms grow often and which do not. Is that tro\ue and what could I achieve with this property?

@ Tage,

Indeed, that is the file. I always thought it was a fix that was part of the CAM. Is that correct? It couldn't be the cause of my troubles, now could it?

[Lowkee33]

I'm pretty sure Building Value is a property that relates to how often a building will grow.  Buildings that grow like weeds are often too high compared to the others.  I think that tax revue is also effected by this, so probably best not to make it too high.

Demand also plays a factor.  In my game I have a CS$1 with 8 jobs and another with 16.  They both rest on 1x1 lots.  However, if demand reaches 8 (actually about 6) the smaller CS will grow.  Demand never reaches 16, and that lot never grows.  If I wait until demand is more than 16, then chances are that the large CS will grow.  Don't know if that is always the case though.

You will need a 500 capacity of other types of industry for the stage 4 farms to grow.

Still not sure about your stage 1 vs 3 issue...   

[FrankU]

So if I edit the Buildig Value (in Reader, I guess?), the higher valued buildings will grow more often than the lower valued buildings? So I I want to have my simple fields grow moreoften, than their value should be higher than the larger lots that should grow less often?
I'll try that.

Edit:
Somewhere I just read that zoning itself has an influence on desirability. Could it be that the large area I have zoned in my initial test city already gives such large desirability that stage 3 farms are growing? This could explain the fact that after many stage 3 farms have grown also some stage 2 and 1 appear.
I usually live in the naive assumption that the stage caps are population numbers, but I know that it is not true. I am a bit lazy in that respect and tend to forget what I read about desirability, population, stage caps and the like. But the stage growth is pushed by desirability, isn't it?

[jmyers2043]

But the stage growth is pushed by desirability, isn't it?

Well, one needs I-AG desirability for any farm to grow. A lot of road traffic, heavy air pollution, or high land value around and about reduces farm desirability. Those factors will hinder farm growth in general but do not have anything to do with specific farm stages.

Stage growth is a function of regional industrial capacity. Let's say for argument sake that my industrial capacity = 500. That means that the total factories that have grown in my region can employ 500 Sims. It's not a job count. I may have 350 Sims working in the industrial trades but the capacity is still 500.

Scenario: I have the CAM and I have a region with no factories. I'll have a 50% chance a stage 1 farm will grow, a 30% chance a stage 2 farm will grow, and a 20% a stage 3 farm will grow. 

What if I have enough factories in my region to employ 500+ Sims? I'll have a 45% chance that a stage 1 farm will grow, a 28% chance for stage 2, 20% chance for stage 3, and only 7% chance for stage 4. By the way, since I have the CAM I'll also need water for a stage 4 farm to grow.


Hope this makes sense.

- Jim

[FrankU]

Thanks Jim,

This makes sense indeed. It just does not explain why I see only stage 3 growing. I have to experiment further.