Population thresholds counted only city-wide and not region-wide?

[dlo§rhuj]

There's something that has been bugging me for a long time.

For some reason, CAM seems to count the population threshold only by city and not by region. Even in a sprawling region, when I create a new city I start back with stage 1 buildings and have to work my way up. In the big cities, when I compare the bursts in city population with the stage thresholds (which are supposed to be region wide) they match up exactly with the city population rather than the region population.

I have no idea what is going wrong there. It was not like that in Rush Hour, if you started a new city in a big region you'd get highrises almost immediately. Not in CAM, though. Is there something wrong with my game, or is that a general problem?

[dlo§rhuj]

Starting a new city, it seems to work again, for that one city that is. Huh. (got a stage 9 with zero population, so that should be proof enough).

I deleted a city that consisted only of industrials... maybe that somehow messed up the simulation? I have no idea.

[matthew49]

Hello, I have been having a problem and after looking through all of the posts in this forum until this one, this one seems to be exactly what I am experiencing.

I have spent countless hours trying to figure this out. I probably have read through all the info on how growth stages work in the manual and in all the forum posts like 5 times each, literally. I am positive that I should be growing more in my residential areas.

My "main" city (the one I want to be my main city) has a population of 3000. I want to grow skyscrapers in this little city. Now I understand this means I would have to massively raise my regional population. Makes sense, since I would have to create suburbs around my main city. So After zoning medium density in my "main" city to no avail (except for one measly apartment), I decided to move out.

I created a suburb city and an industrial city, and spent a lot of time growing both of them. In my suburb city, I got to about 70,000. It was 90% suburbs and about 10% apartments, which I had little trouble getting there.

At this point I had a major industrial center, a regional pop. of about 70K, and a low-wealth residential demand of about 18,000, along with only being at perhaps 0 or 1 % of my cap in my little "main" city. According to the threshold chart my little "main" city, which is absolutely desirable in every way possible (its mostly middle class, with a bunch of mansions as well. It has every service it needs as well as more than enough water and power. And yes, it has parks.), should have basically turned into perhaps 50% apartments at this point at least, with some sky scrapers.

But no. When I entered my Main city again after all of this building up... nothing happened. Well... I guess something happened. The adjacent commercial section next to my little town all of a sudden grew a bunch of medium density high wealth offices. But that's it... the residential area didn't change one bit. Still one measly apartment (which I already had before gaining at least another 60K residents in my region), even though I have 18,000 people banging on the door of my region.

And if anyone is curious why I don't just create more suburbs in my "main" city, the answer is simple: I don't want to. I think the farms and the open space next to my city would look really nice, and besides, I have a huge suburb city a couple of tiles away anyway which already kept hitting its population cap.

I hope I have provided enough info and I apologize if this sounded more like a rant then a bug report, but I have been frustrated over this for many hours.

I also tried creating a new city, however this did not work for me as it did for the OP. And I am not willing to delete my industrial city just to play around with this bug.

I have CAM and NAM installed, as well as a few other minor mods. If nobody has a clue why this is happening to me I would be willing to explore the idea that there is some mod incompatibility, but I have a hunch that the problem may have to do with CAM itself since OP had the same problem as me.

The possibility also exists that despite all my research I am just missing some major fact about how this game works... after all although I have had the game for years I never played it as much as I am now and I am only just installing mods for the first time. If so, sorry for such a long post.

Thanks for reading.

[matthew49]

The "modify post" button is not working, so sorry for the double post but I had something to add:

I also forgot to mention, I have already fixed the double workforce bug. I am now playing my second region with CAM, which I started after fixing the double workforce bug, so I know this bug is not the issue. I know that the fix worked because I have some mod (forgot which one) that used to tell me the regional residential pop. was double what it really is, but now the number is correct. I actually abandoned my first region for the same reason that I am making this post. Originally I thought the double workforce bug was creating the problem, but even after playing though all my regions for 15 years after fixing the bug my "main" city didn't grow (I had the same layout in my old region as in this one). I decided to make this new region thinking that the bug was still affecting my old region. I guess since now I am finding out that the double workforce bug is unrelated, I never had to actually abandon the first city. It is all very frustrating.

[vortext]

Hi there matthew49 and welcome to sc4d!

Quite a wall of text, it must have been bugging you badly! 

First off all, as you found out by now growth stages do not work in the straightforward manner as the charts suggests. I wish I could tell you exactly how it does work then but alas, it's still somewhat of a mystery to me as well. However, from experience I can tell you new growth can and does skip stages but only with much larger populations. Case is point:



Yep, that's a stage 12 (iirc) skyscraper growing in the middle of suburbia (and almost causing a tragic hot air balloon incident  ).

At the time the regional population was close to a million and this city held close to 200k sims. So, in practical terms you'll need much larger cities and consequently a much larger region before you'll start to notice the cam effect, so to speak. Lets address regional demand next, starting with this:

I have a huge suburb city a couple of tiles away anyway

Emphasis is mine because that's rather silly. If you want your main city to thrive you really want to build demand in neighboring tiles and feed that into the main city. Moreover, you absolutely want to make transit connections so your sims can actually reach those jobs! This is SC4 101, really. Moreover demand in a particular city does not simply carry over to the region at large.

All census data is stored with each city's savegame file.
Now, while playing a city, inactive connected cities can satisfy this city's demand with their unused zone capacities,
but only to the tune of 10% of their existing populations and only if the demand cannot be satisfied in the city being played itself.

Again emphasis is mine. So, get those neighbor tiles connected and start developing them.

Also note the demand graph bars are mere indicators which provide a rough estimated rci demand for that particular city. The numbers assigned to the axis are near meaningless though and should not be taken as fact, let alone be used to make presumptions about regional demand. One could easily alter the numbers to make it seem as if demand ran into millions.

If you want to get a better grasp on population and demand read up on the demand simulator. In addition you might want to get Equinox' Expanded query mod and Tropod's grahp mod. The latter adds a new graph for the aforementioned regional extrapolation among others. The former adds cap status info to the queries. And of course the census repository is indispensable.

That said. Regional population and demand are puzzling for sure and I still can't quite wrap my head around the differences in reported capacity, workforce and population and how they related to each other over the region at large. In fact, I recently wrote a bit about discrepancies in reported region population count and am still awaiting an explanation (here, below the replies in midsection). 

So, while I can't provide a definite answer of any kind I hope this was somewhat useful nonetheless. 

[matthew49]

Thank you so much for your quick and detailed reply Vortex. However, I played around with it a bit more based off what you said and still didn't get the results I was expecting.

First off all, as you found out by now growth stages do not work in the straightforward manner as the charts suggests. I wish I could tell you exactly how it does work then but alas, it's still somewhat of a mystery to me as well. However, from experience I can tell you new growth can and does skip stages but only with much larger populations.
...

At the time the regional population was close to a million and this city held close to 200k sims. So, in practical terms you'll need much larger cities and consequently a much larger region before you'll start to notice the cam effect, so to speak.

While the idea of skipping stage, and developing CAM stages sounds nice, I am simply trying and failing to even get my low density housing to move up a single stage into small apartments. Correct me if I'm wrong but after having 100K residents this should not be a problem.

If you want your main city to thrive you really want to build demand in neighboring tiles and feed that into the main city. Moreover, you absolutely want to make transit connections so your sims can actually reach those jobs! This is SC4 101, really. Moreover demand in a particular city does not simply carry over to the region at large.

First of all, all of my cities are connected, even if they are not adjacent.

Secondly, I just experimented with the idea that the suburbs have to be adjacent. First I gave in and created a suburb section in my "main" city, then I create a giant suburb section and an industrial section in a neighboring city. The neighborhoods I created were crappy and poor, but they added another 30K residents all together. So now I am at 100K, with about 65K being a couple of tiles away and the other 30K being right here. And still... even after all of that only a single new apartment was grown in the part of my city which I am trying to grow. I will talk more about that in a bit.

Thirdly, I read through the link you provided and although the wording is confusing, I do not believe the quote you provided is relevant. Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but I do not beleive "satisfying demand" = "creating demand" in the adjacent city. I believe that is a separate calculation. One because it is only 10%, which is nothing (only 300 people in my main city before I created the suburb in it), and two because I think it is next paragraph that is really relevant here:

At the end of each month, demand not satisfied by building construction in the city being played is tossed to other cities in the Region.
When returning to another city in the region, in which such extrapolation has occurred, the presumed growth will sprout.

First of all, he didn't say anything about cities having to be adjacent, so I believe my 70K suburb a couple tiles away should count. Secondly, this is exactly the case. In my 70K suburb, I still had a ton of demand due to the industrial city next door (which, btw, is in between my 70K suburb and my "main" city, and is thus a source of jobs for both assuming the commute is not too long). And in my 70K suburb, there was no more space, all of the low and medium density zones I provided were filled up, and it seemed to be that there was still about 20K of demand (assuming the RCI graph is working correctly). Even if the RCI graph is wrong, there should have been demand since I had a ton of industrial jobs not taken in the adjacent city.

I believe I already have the extended query mod, but I have not tried the graph mod you provided, I will try that soon.

Now just to touch on the experimenting I talked about before, here is what happened in more detail: First I created a big suburb section in my main city, which originally refused to grow at all. However it was on the other side of a river from the rest of my city, with no connections, so I believe this was only for that reason. Next I went to a new adjacent city, and created an even bigger suburb section with an industrial section that were connected. They both grew, no problem at all, until they were at maybe 30k population. Next I went back to my main city, and immediately the second I got back my suburb section I built there grew and filled up. But still, nothing happened to the part of my city that I wanted to grow.

Next I tried an experiment: I created a medium density section right in the middle of the disgusting, poor, crowded, uneducated, and unhealthy suburb which I just grew in my main city. And right away, two apartments grew. After all the work I had to do just to get three apartments in my beautiful and perfect main residential center, two popped up here with no work at all.

Although frustrating, I believe this is bringing me closer to figuring out exactly what is going on here. I used the route query tool to see where my sims are working in each of my residential centers in my main city and my adjacent suburb, and noticed some strange occurrences.. Lets just call them ""Main" Poor Town", "Adjacent Poor Town" and "Rich Town". In Main Poor Town, every single one of my residents was commuting to the adjacent city. After all, they had no choice but to do that. However in Adjacent Poor Town, all of the residents there were commuting into my main city. This makes no sense at all. Firstly because there is an industrial center right in that city in which nobody is working at, and secondly because there are no jobs on that side of the river in my main city. So some sort of weird eternal commuter bug or something is already happening there... but it gets weirder. In the Rich Town, I found that almost every single one of my residents were working in the town itself, in the civil buildings: the schools, hospitals, etc, or in the adjacent commercial center. Not a single one was working in the nearby industrial center (in the same city only about 30 tiles away). However that industrial center was thriving... with 0 workers. With the route query tool all I found was freight leaving all of those big factories... but all of them had no workers from this or any other region.

The way I see it is this: 1) Factories run on ghosts, not actual workers. 2) Having workers commute to adjacent regions basically breaks the game. 3) For some strange reason that I still can't understand, Sims hate to live in nice neighborhoods that have tons of jobs available (assuming the ghost factory workers aren't actually keeping the jobs from the real people.).

Sorry if my post progressively became a rant again. You should probably win an award if you actually read through all of that.

[Simcoug]

It may be easier to get to the heart of the problem if you could post some pictures.   

[HappyDays]

SimCity 4 is a funny little game...

As long as demand exists and other conditions are met (Stage, zoning, desirability, power/water/part/fire requirements), industrial and commercial buildings will grow and add tax revenue regardless of the number of people actually working them. Commercials are negatively affected by the lack of traffic, however, and high wealth offices or services will be much harder to grow without enough traffic near their zones.

While I agree with Simcoug that pictures are needed for an accurate diagnosis, I am almost tempted to say you simply haven't grown up enough to see higher stage high wealth residents. You got some growing amongst the wretchedly poor when you zoned for it, so perhaps you merely need to pump the numbers up some more.

The game doesn't entirely transfer over the current stage cap numbers when you begin a new city, just a percentage. What percentage I don't know, but I have found I've been unable to get stage 15 buildings to grow on a tiny island city when the whole region has 20 million sims/jobs.

[matthew49]

SimCity 4 is a funny little game...

As long as demand exists and other conditions are met (Stage, zoning, desirability, power/water/part/fire requirements), industrial and commercial buildings will grow and add tax revenue regardless of the number of people actually working them. Commercials are negatively affected by the lack of traffic, however, and high wealth offices or services will be much harder to grow without enough traffic near their zones.

While I agree with Simcoug that pictures are needed for an accurate diagnosis, I am almost tempted to say you simply haven't grown up enough to see higher stage high wealth residents. You got some growing amongst the wretchedly poor when you zoned for it, so perhaps you merely need to pump the numbers up some more.

The game doesn't entirely transfer over the current stage cap numbers when you begin a new city, just a percentage. What percentage I don't know, but I have found I've been unable to get stage 15 buildings to grow on a tiny island city when the whole region has 20 million sims/jobs.

I appreciate the reply however I do not believe you read my post closely enough to understand what I am asking (my post is long, I understand.) I am not looking for more higher stage high wealth residents. I simply want apartments... poor tenement apartments. And even these I am having a ton of trouble with. I would be happy with any sign of upward growth. Unfortunately, getting even a single tenement is literally 100 times harder for me than getting 100 Victorian Mansions. Also you said something about "stage cap numbers" and starting anew city, but honestly I am not sure what your even talking about (please be more specific).

I think some better explaining would be easier than a picture and sufficient.

                ABCD
                     E


Those are currently my 5 cities and how they are aligned.

The only geographical thing to note is a river which divides D in half. The north side and south side are disconnected, and only the north side connects to C while only the south side connects E.

Here are the cities in the order that they were originally created:

D= the "main" city which I am trying unsuccessfully to grow. D is geographically separated north and south by a river, and everything I initially built was on the north side. The north side of D is where I want my city to grow. It contains a mix of everything: residential (a VERY nice neighborhood), commercial (very successful), agricultural, and industrial. The south side is where I eventually created suburbs. They are not connected at all, and I am not sure how much this matters.
C= almost nothing, just a long avenue with some stores.
B= a giant dirty industry city with a ton of coal power plants and landfills to top it off, however with one nice little High tech part towards the west.
A= Giant suburban center, with 70K people in houses and apartments.
E= my recent experimenting. includes suburbs and industry, and is only connected to the south end of D. Has about 30K people, but with maybe 5 or 10K technically belonging to City D.

ABCD are basically just connected with one very long avenue, which has very little traffic lights in order to minimize commute time.

The idea originally was simple: B would be the main work center, where people would commute from A and D in order to work there. I would only zone high density in D in order to force my population density there, and then grow a commercial city in C based off of the traffic between B and D. However, while A and B are successful, D only will grow 3000 residents on its north side (the only side connected to C), and therefore C is crippled as well.

Clearly a lot of things about the game are confusing me (ghost factory workers, commuters that commute to nothing, etc.) however I think the one big practical question I have is why is my North side of D not growing. The first idea was that the suburbs in A were too distant, however I believe through experimenting with E I have proved otherwise since that didn't fix the problem.

Should I try connected the north side of D with the south side? I wasn't sure if it would even be worth it since nowhere have I found anything stating that the residential areas actually need to be connected with one another in order for them to help eachother grow. However unless you guys are seeing another problem here, I am not sure what else to try (even though in terms of gamer mechanics I see no reason why that should change anything).

[vortext]

Clearly a lot of things about the game are confusing me (ghost factory workers, commuters that commute to nothing, etc.) however I think the one big practical question I have is why is my North side of D not growing.

Okay, I think the issue here is the north side of D simply does not have access to enough jobs to get any growth going. Sure, you have residential demand in large supply, however, in order to satisfy that (i.e. get actual growth) certain conditions have to be right. Arguably the most important of which is that those potential new sims must have access to jobs, somewhere. So, this leaves you with a few options to try out.

First it is possible to get them commuting from D to B but you'll need faster transport (highway, train) and make sure there's no exit anywhere in C. You'll probably also need to go through D -> C -> B and back again a few times to get the commute going.

Second, provide more jobs in C and switch back-and-forth between C & D a few time to get that commute going.

Last and most simple option would be to connect the north and south side of D, either by bridge or tunnel.

Balancing RCI types over different city tiles is doable and actually my preferred method of growing but it requires some transit planning beforehand and can be challenging from time to time, all of which makes it all the more fun! 

[HappyDays]

Matthew: I'm sorry for misunderstanding. Assuming you have the jobs available somewhere in the region and there are roadways out of town, 70k is enough to get apartments - many of them. If they aren't growing, something is missing. We're going to need to go deeper. Install this:

http://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1831

Census Repository Facility. It'll tell you how many of each occupancy group exists in your city (High wealth residents, low wealth commercial services, etc) along with a lot of other information. Primarily, you'll want to look at the "drives" number, which reveals how many of a given occupancy type your city/region can support. If you look at your industry city and see the drives it generates for low wealth residents, you'll be able to compare to your cities and see if, in fact, the jobs exists for more low wealth residents.

If the jobs exist, then your cities aren't connect to them. Consider making another industrial area beneath A (Direct access to jobs), or get the traffic going out of A to E (The game doesn't care where jobs are once residents leave their originating tile).

Stage limits for CAM explained (I used the wrong word!): http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3578.0

[matthew49]

Guys, I tried playing around more and zoned some more medium density in city D in a slightly different place and all of sudden a million apartments starting popping up everywhere. I don't know what I was doing wrong before but I feel like it might have been something stupid like not being close enough to a park or not being patient and waiting long enough, or that I didn't place some sort of demand cap building like a courthouse (which I just placed). Thanks for all the help everyone (I really appreciate helpful communities like this), I'll post here again if I have any more problems with this fun but complicated and confusing game...

[HappyDays]

On a related note, the Census Repository Facility also tells you what your current demand caps are.

It is a highly useful tool.