Commercial death wave

[Camlon]

I have heard a lot of you talk about people death waves, but I haven't experienced much of that.

But I am experiencing something completly different, which is a commercial death wave, which can be seen in the chart below. Once I reached the peak, I had about 30K in population and nearly everyone was working in commercial.

Then I started to get the message, that many businesses are unable to get goods, commercial demand went to zero, and I had to remove a lot of commercial areas. Now that I have 100K population, I still have less commercial than when I had 30K population.

This also happened with my wife city, but it happened at 60K population. The difference between our cities is that she plays on normal, while I play on hard +40% maintenance.

I think it might be a side effect of the popbalance mod, but I'm not sure. Anyone else experience something similar?

But I really don't mind it, it makes the game more fun.

 

[Bavarian Steve]

You need to do one of two things. Increase the Industrial output of all specialized industries. Make districts that specialize in oil, ore, forestry, AND farming. OR, make lots of out of town connections so that you can import industrial products to support your commercial demand. These would include connecting to the highway that leads out of your town many times over, adding the cargo trains, and adding the industrial ferry. The more out of town industrial connections you have, the more you can import to support your commercial demand.

 

[Camlon]

You need to do one of two things. Increase the Industrial output of all specialized industries. Make districts that specialize in oil, ore, forestry, AND farming. OR, make lots of out of town connections so that you can import industrial products to support your commercial demand. These would include connecting to the highway that leads out of your town many times over, adding the cargo trains, and adding the industrial ferry. The more out of town industrial connections you have, the more you can import to support your commercial demand.

Actually, increasing the output of specialized industries won't help much, because they export to generic industry. None of my generic industry is complaining about not enough goods to sell.

In the beginning I just ignored the problem, and kept reducing commercial. But eventually I got commerce complaining about not enough services. To solve the problem of not enough goods to sell and not enough services, you will need to increase the amount of generic industry.

The problem is that workers prefer to work in commercial or offices, which makes it difficult to expand the industry. To fix that, you will need to limit the amount of jobs so that they have to take industry jobs. Having a lot of connections is great, but I don't think that is what limits commercial. The roads are not congested, I have several connections to the highway, the train doesn't come often enough, and the boat doesn't come at all.

But I wasn't really after solutions, I am just interested if other people have experienced the same.

 

[IVIaarten]

I don't think that workers prefer to work on commercial. They do like jobs that are close, and jobs that match their education level.

Try leveling up your generic industries to lvl 3, they need highly educated workers then (bonus is they pollute less). Also make sure it's easy for your cims to get to the industrial sector (public transport).

 

[Kharisian]

Camlon, as to people who are experiencing the same, I'm having it myself.

Sure, I'm in the midst of my first actual commercial boom (took until I hit 200k, which is a bit ridiculous) and I'm starting to see warning signs of an inevitable collapse. Most of the commercial in older areas of my cities is fine, but when I build new complexes it seems the entire city comes out to see them. Most of the cars I've been checking have been driving halfway across the city to the new areas. I fixed the traffic problems, but I fear the damage has still been done. A lot of stores continue to have problems, and I'm betting it's because the goods are taking too long to arrive and are continually heading to stores which are doomed to die from a lack of goods already.

It's not a massive problem yet. Maybe one or two stores go under a week. But with commercial demand still at crazy highs I'm expecting eventually it will all crumple and I'll have another 100k in population before commercial demand rises from the ashes again. It feels to me like two problems that current exist in Cities Skylines; one, a problem that exists for a time tends to perpetuate a cascade of other problems until abandonment or similar issues works itself out (in my case, eventually goods will head to stores that need it), and secondly, and two, the demand bar reading what people want, but perhaps not what the city can properly handle. The latter encourages players (and I believe myself included) to build in a direction that might actually lead to problems, like a commercial collapse you have had and which I bet I am on the precipice of.

 

[Bavarian Steve]

Hmmm Camlon, when I had this problem, that fixed it. I have received those messages but I was expecting it. Why? Because I had no industrial services in my city. In my previous post I also meant to include the refining of the specialized industries to make the resources into sellable items, but got lazy and assumed you would understand that which you do. Commerce is connected industry in this game. If you are either not importing enough goods to sell or manufacturing enough goods to sell, then commerce suffers and you get those two messages. The production goes Raw Producers (Industry specialized AND Built on top of said resources)--->Processors (Industry specialized, but NOT built on top of resources)----->Generic Industry (Industry NOT specialized)----->Commercial sale.
Here is a graphical link describing it in better detail: http://i.imgur.com/F0CQHxY.png