Commercial Happiness & Happy Town Achievement

[NADster]

Trying to get the achievement "Have more than 95% happiness for 5 years" I have a problem with commercial happiness.

The other three are all 97-100%, but commercial is stuck at about 79%. I can lower their taxes to 1 resulting in 86% happiness, but that's it!

In the wiki I read:

Commercial happiness can be the most challenging to increase and many have reported issues getting it above 85%, even with 1% taxes and tax reduction policies. Part of the reason might be in the game's leisure mechanics. To your citizen and tourists, shopping at a store is a form of leisure (not marked on the leisure map) much like visiting a park or plaza. If a city is flooded with parks, citizens might be getting their leisure fulfilled there before visiting the commercial district. However, if this is the case, it is usually not extreme enough to warrant a lack of customers warning.

So... I destroyed all my free parks, gardens, plazas in the whole city with zero impact. I currently only own the monuments and their prerequisites. Do I have to destroy them too?

What about the small/big business enthusiast? I switched these on/off with zero impact on happiness even after six months.

My city has more than enough polices, fire stations, busses/metros, healthcare, ... tourist harbour & rail, international airport, space elevator. And of course enough worker (edu and non-edu).

What else can I do to raise my commercial happiness from 86 to 95+ percent?

 

[kebzero]

I had the same problem wrt. Commercial happiness, it would not rise above 79-80% without flooring taxes - with the same result as you, stuck at 85-86%.

That said, keep in mind the achievement tracks the average happiness, so it isn't necessary to push Commercial up if you can placate the other three. The four components aren't equal either, they're divided based on how much zoning you've given each type. Running with a lower ratio of commercial to residential/industrial/offices might have a higher impact than shutting down parks. A smaller city with the bare minimum of commercial might also work.

I got the achievement while I was still building up cash reserves to survive a long-term tax cut - the city statistics said global happiness was 94% consistently, so I'm not entirely sure what happened, might be a rounding error. Sounds like you're in the borderlands too - you might get the achievement just by being patient - which you'll have to be if you want to prep for the tax cut method anyway.

 

[FXben]

A tip that I got from a youtube video was to up budget rates above 100% for services and that helped to get that last level jump also. Maybe try that?

I know it doesn't sound quite right, or it's not exactly intuitive to do that but I saw the evidence so...give it ago n see

 

[NADster]

Thank you for the answers. I'll try all of them ...

 

[NADster]

okay...

set all services to 150% funding => no change
destroyed all special buildings except the monuments => no change

let the game run almost handsoff for 5 years at 100, 99, 97, 86 happiness => achievement.

 

[Kagemusha]

Parks raise the land value ... I would suspect that therefore the destruction of all parks may rather be contraproductive for your commercial happiness.

Aside from this I guess that a steady supply of goods for sale makes your commercial zones happy

 

[draqsko]

okay...

set all services to 150% funding => no change
destroyed all special buildings except the monuments => no change

let the game run almost handsoff for 5 years at 100, 99, 97, 86 happiness => achievement.

How was your education levels before and after the hands-off run? Commerce really depends on education so maybe letting it run like you did finally pushed your citizens' education level high enough to make your commercial zones happy.

 

[NADster]

With the eden project all land value was deepest green, destroying the parks didn't change anything.
Education was maxed out also with the Hadron Collider.

 

[draqsko]

With the eden project all land value was deepest green, destroying the parks didn't change anything.
Education was maxed out also with the Hadron Collider.

The reason I ask is because 5 years is enough game time to turn over your population, in which case your cims would get fully educated whereas a shorter period of time could still see a significant level of your population being lower educated simply because they missed the opportunity when they were younger. HC doesn't affect your education level of Adults or Seniors, only Children, Teens, and Young Adults can attend schooling at all. Once enough of the older people died and were replaced by their children, then the effects of the HC come into play but that only happens after you turn over your population AFTER building the HC.

 

[NADster]

I built the HC a while before I tried to max out the happiness, so the effects were active from the beginning. I started with 86% commercial happiness and finished it 5 years later with 86%.
In my industry and both commercial types where were a lot of overeducated workers, before and after the five years.

I highly doubt that education is the reason for not getting above 86%, but as I wrote, I got the achievement with this number ...

 

[draqsko]

I built the HC a while before I tried to max out the happiness, so the effects were active from the beginning. I started with 86% commercial happiness and finished it 5 years later with 86%.
In my industry and both commercial types where were a lot of overeducated workers, before and after the five years.

I highly doubt that education is the reason for not getting above 86%, but as I wrote, I got the achievement with this number ...

So then the reason you got the achievement is not because of commercial happiness, but in spite of it. Sure it needs to be close for the averages to work out, but you just proved that it was from something else that pushed the average happiness over the boundary.

Something just occurred to me looking at some saves I have. One of the requirements for upgrading commercial zones is the wealth of the customers. Could it possibly be that you had residential zones get upgraded in that time (which also correlates to getting wealthier in game, higher level buildings are considered wealthier, as well as having more people), or you drew in more wealthy tourists? You might have been fractions of a point away, which wouldn't show on the UI since the change would be miniscule, however with a having to reach a hard number that little bit can be a big difference. I mean you could have had 85.5% happiness when you started, then it slowly crept up to actually being 86%, while your average was only 0.1% happiness away from the achievement.