No residential growth

[RippleJet]

One of the most important factors in order to get §§§ demand is education.

By increasing your population's EQ you start getting demand for I-HT and CO§§§.
Those are the prime motors for getting R§§§ demand growing.

Your average EQ needs to be a good deal above 150 for any substantial §§§ demand.
Check your EQ graph to see where you are at the moment.

Note also that you need to provide education to all age classes,
meaning elementary schools, highschools, colleges, libraries and museums.

[z]

My Sims are educated within an inch of their lives.  The education graph quickly rises and stays within the 198 to 199 range.  I get my five libraries and four museums, so I get the main library and major art museum.  Every residence is within the radius of an elementary and a high school (which are kept under capacity), and I install the university as soon as it's available.  Also, my Sims' life expectancy gets up to 95+, so this all seems to be working.  And as I mentioned before, demand for I-HT and CO$$$ is quite healthy.

BTW, the problem I described started only when I installed CAM; before then, I had a normal residential demand distribution in my cities.

[RippleJet]

Could you post a screenie of the Census Repository Facility's query?

[z]

Here's a city that's about a third built.  Most of the time I left the tax rates standard, and only recently did I drop the R$$$ rate to 3%.  Current R$$$ demand is about 9000.



Here's what happens when I drop the tax rate to 2%.  The demand rises to 10% after the mandatory three month waiting period, not the 12% I thought I had remembered.



Now if I raise the tax rate to 9%, where everything else except dirty industry is, demand plunges negative to the bottom of the graph as of the next month transition.  The CRF now looks like this:



One final point:  When I start a region, I typically create a bunch of cities that I start just long enough to give them names.  They have no residents or jobs.  So all of my active cities are surrounded by one or more of these cities, at least initially.  But even when a city is surrounded only by active cities, this problem still remains.

[xxdita]

You need more jobs. For the region as a whole, you have nearly 800,000 unemployed Sims. What Stages has Com & Ind reached now?

[RippleJet]

Here's a city that's about a third built.  Most of the time I left the tax rates standard, and only recently did I drop the R$$$ rate to 3%.  Current R$$$ demand is about 9000.

The demand graph in the game is logarithmic, so you cannot read the exact demand from them.
The only values that are correctly shown in the graph are the minimum (-6000), 0 and maximum (+24000).

What in the logarthmic graph appears to be +9,000 is in fact only +1,343
When you lowered the tax the demand went up to +2,375
When you increased the tax, the demand went down to -5,236

All these demands can be read from the Census Repository Facility's query.

Almost 10% of the city's population is R§§§, and that's quite normal in a city with good coverage of education.

[z]

xxdita:  I see the numbers you're looking at, but I don't think they're correct, and I don't think I have 800,000 unemployed Sims.  The CRF says I have a total workforce of 6.5 million, yet my regional population (both as shown in the regional view and as the sum of the cities' population) is 5.3 million.  As not all of these are in the workforce, the CRF's number seems vastly overstated.  (Perhaps this is related to the problem.)  Furthermore, in most of my cities, the total jobs exceed the population, with the exception of one city, which has a large number of commuters into downtown, where the jobs vastly exceed the population.  R and C have reached stage 15, and I has reached stage 10.  Here are my cities, arranged according to position; the overall numbers look pretty good to me.  But remember, this is running R$$$ at a 2% tax rate.   (The city is Chicago, for those who are familiar with it.)  All numbers are in thousands.

Logan Square                              Lincoln Park
R:  368                                       R: 1547
C:  121                                       C:  442
I:    77                                        I:  176

                        Near West Side                         Downtown
                        R:  917                                    R:   656
                        C:  631                                    C: 1379
                        I:   658                                    I:   117

                                                 Near South Side
                                                 R: 1803
                                                 C:  862
                                                 I:   877

These numbers look good to me, and furthermore, the cities look very healthy.  No dilapidation, almost never any abandonment, and almost never any briefcase zots.  Most of the maps develop very quickly, except occasionally for some far corners, which do develop over time.  Mayor ratings range from the high 80's to over 100.  And all of this is true even if I grow a city with R$$$ at the default tax rate of 9%, which results in no R$$$ population.

RippleJet: I didn't know that the demand graph was logarithmic.  Is it possible to fix the scale numbers?

Yes, I now have a healthy R$$$ population, but that's with the tax rate at 3%.  The city is 84 years old, and I ran it for the first 50 years with R$$$ set to the standard 9% rate.  The Jobs and Pop graph confirms that during this time, the R$$$ population was zero.  When I dropped the tax rate, the R$$$ population quickly climbed.  Only at this time did I get offered the Country Club, which requires 2000 R$$$; usually, I get that offered much earlier in the game.

[RippleJet]

As not all of these are in the workforce, the CRF's number seems vastly overstated.  (Perhaps this is related to the problem.)

This is indeed the very problem.

It's been known for quite a while now that changing certain RCI exemplars makes the game double those numbers.
As if the game machine loads the exemplars twice, and adds them to each other.

That's not how external dat files normally are read,
where an external plugin would supersede the exemplars residing within SimCity_1.dat.

Both the regional residential capacity and the regional workforce becomes doubled the way your city sees them.
In other words, the development simulator thinks there are 100% more residents in your region, than there really is.

This all leads to a larger need for jobs, than you would expect otherwise.

We have been fighting with this for quite a while, with the hopes of releasing CAM 1.1 with a solution.
So far, the only solution seems to be a direct patching of the RCI files into SimCity_1.dat.

And our tests have also shown that the demand will plunge if upgrading CAM 1.0 to CAM 1.1.

In addition to that, the ToolMan looking into making the patching an automated process, is rather busy with another unreleased Tool

RippleJet: I didn't know that the demand graph was logarithmic.  Is it possible to fix the scale numbers?

Unfortunately, no. At least I haven't found any properties controlling that.
Only the minimum and maximum values can be set by properties in certain exemplars.

[z]

This is beginning to make a lot of sense.  It also explains why, on average, my cities need more jobs than residents to run smoothly; they didn't used to before installing CAM.

Since I know nothing of the internals of CAM, I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but anyway...
If you know which RCI exemplars are causing the numbers to be doubled, can't you just change your numbers to correct for the doubling?  And if the doubling only happens in certain circumstances, can't you check the numbers that you're getting against the game's numbers for consistency, since the regional population displayed in the region view is always correct?  My apologies if these are nonsensical questions.

Also, I hope you're going to fix the problem about demand plunging if upgrading from CAM 1.0 to 1.1 before release.  I assume so, but it wasn't quite clear from your message.

Finally, although it's clear now why I need so many more jobs than I would expect, I still don't see why R$$$ is now tied to a lower tax rate.  This happens with a population as low as a few hundred.  And yet R$ and R$$ work as before.  Although in an old region that I converted to CAM, I had the exact same problems with both R$$ and R$$$.
Other than that, the conversion worked perfectly.  Very strange.

Anyway, CAM is fantastic, and I wouldn't be playing SC4 at this point without it.  Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far, and good luck getting everything resolved and moving forward.

[xxdita]

Unfortunately, having any numbers in the exemplar properties in question only adds to what's already in the game files. So the only way to fix it the patch RippleJet mentioned. Sometimes the best way to adjust for this is to create throwaway cities, full of Commercial & Industrial jobs, and no residents (a small tile here and there throughout the region usually). This should give the balance needed. Another solution would be to plop high capacity Ind & Com buildings in major cities.

[z]

If the numbers from the different exemplars are being added together, wouldn't zeroing out the appropriate numbers in the RCI exemplars in SimCity_1.dat fix the problem, at least on an ad hoc basis?  Has anyone tried this?

[wouanagaine]

Yes, but then you should backup your original simcity_1.dat
So to make a short reply, do it at your own risk

I'm testing CAM 1.1 with a modified simcity_1.dat ( in the way Tage wrote ), and so far it is ok.

[xxdita]

Actually, that was tested, at least somewhat. Modifying the simcity_x.dats with Reader can really screw them up, preventing the game from starting. So the alternative is to create a patch to change the particular properties of the exemplars in question.
Patching it to remove the properties altogether would make a mess of things, should CAM not be installed. So it's better to just patch the CAM exemplars into the simcity_1.dat, to prevent any issues. If a user feels it necessary to uninstall for any reason, it's as simple as replacing the backed up simcity_1.dat, which is also available on disc 2 of the game.

[c0rnh0li0]

I'm about to blow up a region I worked on for 10 months. I designed the configuration before I knew how the CAM worked. So I had the eternal workforce problem. But I redid my transportation so that I didn't have any commuters going from A to B to C to A. Yet, residential demand still plummeted. As a last resort, I demolished all city connections in hopes the game would recalculate how many are acutally in the region (little over 200,000). But it still says 315,000+ (according to the CRF).

Any suggestions?

[RippleJet]

I'm about to blow up a region I worked on for 10 months. I designed the configuration before I knew how the CAM worked. So I had the eternal workforce problem. But I redid my transportation so that I didn't have any commuters going from A to B to C to A. Yet, residential demand still plummeted. As a last resort, I demolished all city connections in hopes the game would recalculate how many are acutally in the region (little over 200,000). But it still says 315,000+ (according to the CRF).

The eternal commuters are unfortunately permanently saved in the saved game files.
Thus, even if you bulldoze all border connections, they would still be there.

They don't even have to be seen as people actually commuting over the border.
The Simulator only sees them as residential capacity available elsewhere (not specifically where) in the region.

Due to this there is also very little chance of recovering a region that has built up a huge amount of eternal commuters.
Even without the CAM you would at some point have experienced the same sooner or later (later than with the CAM in play though).

The only chance of getting some sort of recovery is to substantially increase the number of industrial and commercial jobs in your region.

[c0rnh0li0]

The eternal commuters are unfortunately permanently saved in the saved game files.
Thus, even if you bulldoze all border connections, they would still be there.

They don't even have to be seen as people actually commuting over the border.
The Simulator only sees them as residential capacity available elsewhere (not specifically where) in the region.

Due to this there is also very little chance of recovering a region that has built up a huge amount of eternal commuters.
Even without the CAM you would at some point have experienced the same sooner or later (later than with the CAM in play though).

The only chance of getting some sort of recovery is to substantially increase the number of industrial and commercial jobs in your region.

That won't work. I'm irritated as it is w/20 floor commercial bldgs w/no workers. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

[fantnet]

I am running to the same issue with one of my suburbs but it happens with others. The growth slows even though I placed a number of parks and schools etc. but all residental growth stop even though I have enough demand. Can anyone help me  please

[RippleJet]

Your Census Report looks very healthy, so there sholdn't be anything restricting R§ and R§§ from growing.

With a regional residential capacity of 14,000 you should be getting a lot of stage 4 buildings, but also some stage 5.
Can you just make sure you haven't zoned only low density residential zones?

Another possible cause would be that you already have a lot of stage 2-5 houses,
and the simulator is trying to grow some more stage 1 houses.
In that case you'd need more undeveloped residential zones.

[c0rnh0li0]

Here's a question: What if I took the CAM out of the plugins, then reinstall it?

[fantnet]

Your Census Report looks very healthy, so there sholdn't be anything restricting R§ and R§§ from growing.

With a regional residential capacity of 14,000 you should be getting a lot of stage 4 buildings, but also some stage 5.
Can you just make sure you haven't zoned only low density residential zones?

Another possible cause would be that you already have a lot of stage 2-5 houses,
and the simulator is trying to grow some more stage 1 houses.
In that case you'd need more undeveloped residential zones.

so far I have develop a lot of low density zones. but mostly between stage 1 -3 and some four. So I shoud go to medium density?