Basic simulation still unsatisfying?

[MarkJohnson]

It's been awhile since I played, but as I said, the effect I didn't like was the way that the simulation works as you get close to and reach the caps. In particular it seemed that there was much less traffic, and there seemed to be odd artifacts in the patterns of growth, resource use, and consumption of services like death, garbage, and education.

Can you post a shared copy of your city? It will be easier to see your city in action than just randomly guessing your issues.

* Critical units blocked from spawning by 64k unit limit (no hearse for you!)

Yes, this happens a lot. You'll need to rebalance your city to despawn all of the traffic so it can spawn more agents.

* Chunky grouping of which agents are simulated each tick. If I remember correctly, it picks a fixed number to simulate each tick, and they seemed to always be from the same area, so depending on how long it takes to get to all of them, and patterns in the game, certain areas seemed to behave differently than others.

Agents are spawned based on the demand for that particular zoning type. The demand bars are your guide for that. And don't over zone. That is the number traffic issue. It's not the road, but the buildings creating large chunks of traffic as once, plus the buildings level up creating even more demand for cims to move in. It will get chaotic real fast building this way.

* Imbalances between parts of the simulation created as different entities are trimmed and limited by the caps. For example, what happens to traffic and economy simulation when someone who should be going to work and shopping etc can't leave the house because you are at traveling agent cap? Then this times 1000...

There are two agent limits in this game. Vehicles with 16k limit and Citizens with 64k limit.

If you hit the vehicle limit, then vehicles won't spawn until to free some up. Otherwise you start having lack of raw materials, causing lack of good being produced for generic industry and commerce not getting enough goods to shoppers. Also, services will get shortages of vehicles and you have various problems, like death waves.

* Very different traffic dynamics in new areas as you get to the limits where far fewer agents end up traveling.

You will get different dynamics when you surpass the 9-tile limit. It is a whole new ball game and balancing zones become even more critical.

But, this is an agent based simulator and agents need to get from point A to point B in a TIMELY manner or bad things happen. So, if you are having this dynamic imbalance on 9-tiles or less, then your city is extremely out of balance. This will can each district that has too many workers travel across the map to an area with too many jobs not filled and timing out. All you need to do is provide more jobs in the area with excessive workers and provide more workers to areas with too many jobs. i.e. build more C and I for more jobs, and build more residential for more workers.

I wasn't building ginormous 1M pop cities when I hit these things, and they spoiled the game for me.

No, but you were likely building ginormous tracts of industry, both generic and specialized creating huge imports/export and too far away from commerce for them to make deliveries on time. At least that is the most common mistake in this game.

Agents don't like traveling very far in this game. I'm guessing 1km or less. Then they will import what they ned and export what it can't deliver.

Also, if agents get delayed to their destination, they will spawn. Also, if they cannot make their destination when calculating the route, they won't even bother spawning. And if the can make their destination very quickly, they can often spawn once, then stay at their destination seeming the whole time they are alive. The game seems to only spawn things that are out of balance.

Maybe try looking at my layout and try your own 1-tile city with low traffic. It will help you tremendously to move forward in this game.

Also, if you want, you post a shared save of your city and we can look at it and offer some advice.