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A few strange issues

Started by memph, July 06, 2009, 06:12:39 PM

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memph

I'll start with the worst one.

So I was building my region's main city and just passed the 1.4mil mark when I look back at the city's population to see how it was going and noticed it was then at 1.163mil. I was really confused because my population rarely dropped by more than a few thousand, so I checked my buildings. All the R$$ and R$$ were either abandoned or at 1/5-1/2 of normal capacity. I mean literally all of them. Before long I found out that my residents seem to hate my teachers because when I queried my buildings, all of them had low education levels. They were previously high across the city. After this happened, the education graph still showed high education levels and the data view showed all the residences in bright green except for a few new ones in orange/brown. The R$$ and R$$$ buildings then started filling up with R$ sims by the hundreds of thousands despite a demand of only about 6000 while R$$ and R$$$ demand were maxed out (I think that's 24000?). Jobs for R$ sims shouldn't have increased either. It was mainly CO$$$ that increased, CO$$ increased a little and commercial services and industry did not (no industry in that city).

Here's my city. This is my first Sim City community, so I'm not sure how to upload and post screenshots properly, but I can take snapshots and give out more info on my city.
edit: because the image wouldn't fit in the page, I gave a link to the image on photobucket.

threestooges

First of all, welcome to SC4D.

I would wait for a second opinion before relying on this, but I believe the problem might be in the number of available C$$-$$$ and IHT jobs available as well as the living conditions for the R$$$ buildings. If the R$$$ building does not have plenty of parks, water, power, services, and all those other things that the high wealth sims want, they will leave. This does not cause a building to abandon, but merely switch to a lower wealth level and increase the resident quantity. If it keeps going, you'll end up with the R$ that you seem to have. This downgrading has nothing to do with the number of jobs available, but it will impact that aspect too once it has downgraded.

The pic you showed looks very crowded. I would suggest building some parks, making sure there is little traffic, and generally making sure everything flows smoothly.

This change from R$$$ to R$ will also impact your education levels. The R$, to my understanding, are new sims and they start with a lower average intelligence than the ones who have lived there and benefitted from the education system. They are then averaged in to the city's EQ. This may just be a symptom of the R$$$ and the R$$ buildings downgrading.

Hope that helps.

memph

#2
I think it might be a bug, it really doesn't make much sense. Nonetheless, thanks for the welcome and the reply.

As for jobs available, I have about 50,000 CS$$ and close to 1.5mil CO jobs. There aren't any HT jobs but since there are more commercial jobs than residents, do you really think it's an issue?

As for power/water/garbage, I have no garbage in my city. About 2000 tons are exported and the rest is taken care of by 5 waste to energy plants in the corner of the city (so their pollution reach the city itself). Water and power: I only use about 60-80% of what I produce.

Parks: Every city block has a strip of parks/plazas in the middle. I think that should be enough. I have the CAM addon and avenues only, so road traffic isn't too bad. Especially since a very large majority walk and those that don't take the bus (causing most stops to be overcrowded).

Health/Education: The entire area is covered by high schools, elementary schools and hospitals with a good number of libraries and museums. They're well funded and while education levels have dropped a little with the R$ sims, they're still very high. And shouldn't the wealthier sims be unaffected by that anyways? In any case, the drop in wealthier sims came before the increase of R$ sims, so I don't think that would be the reason.

I'm also working on building a cross shaped strip of parks/gifts/public buildings across the whole city about 8-15 squares wide.

The reason this is so strange is that the change was so sudden. In a second I lost about 70k (out of 130k) of my $$$ sims and more than 150k $$ sims. Everything was fine for 100+ years but suddenly without doing anything all those sims abandoned me. The R$ sims came in more gradually, over a few years (and are still coming).

Edit: general layout of city block-

So that layout with alternating commercial and residential blocks. Thanks to the workplaces being available within a block, the high CO density and more jobs than residents, commute is usually short, at worst medium.

Edit2: actual picture to show what a typical neighbourhood looks like. The parks/plaza strips can be a little hard to see but they're there. And while almost all of the blocks alternate checkerboard style between commercial and residential, there are a few exceptions like near the highway in this pic.

This picture shows you the commute to the WillsTrans Corp Tower, with the Velascoma Associates next to it. It certainly is there and can be queried, but it's invisible... Their lots are both 3x4. I have both office towers elsewhere in my city (with Velascoma on the same bloc, its the black on in the top right), but for those, the WillsTrans needed a 5x5 lot and the Velascoma a 4x5 lot. The visible WillsTrans also had about half as many jobs when maxed out. This on another bloc in my city too, with 2 Velascomas and 1 WillsTrans. So that's a second problem.

memph

The problem with R$$ and R$$$ moving out was sort of resolved now, after playing my city again. They started moving back in, although gradually. The education levels still show up as low in the buildings though.

memph

At least I thought so. I gained back the R$$ resident I lost and eventually got quite a bit more too. Not the R$$$ residents though, only a very small portion of them came back despite adding about a million lower wealth residents and enough jobs. For some reason, even though taxes are lower in the big city, CO and R demand are considerably lower than in the neighbouring cities where the R$$$ demand for example was enough to add 100,000 R$$$ without even putting a dent in the demand. While CO and R demand in the neighbouring cities are always through the roof, in the big city, R$$, R$$$ and CO$$ are usually negative and while there is CO$$$ and R$ demand, it's still lower than in the neighbouring cities. A few weeks ago, I decided to deal with the high industrial and commercial service demand by expanding my suburbs and probably added 1-2million jobs... When I went back to my big city I was hoping to have sky high residential demand only to find it was even lower than before and hundreds of thousands of R$$ sims were leaving and being replaced by R$ sims.  ???

Education levels are still low when I querry the buildings, even though the EQ is around 175 and the city polls and data views indicate a perfect education system.  ???