I find climbing from 200k and up real difficult...

[the--dud]

I've found that somewhere around 200-250k population it becomes really slow and difficult to grow. All your citizens are educated so traditional industry becomes a struggle. Traffic can easily become gridlocked. Commercial areas struggle to get goods. Unemployment can grow quite high even if you fill your C and I demands.

For long periods my population might stagnate or even lose 100-300 per tick. Then I'll build a new large commercial area and population starts rising again, but then my commercial starts lacking goods... Then I take some time to sort that but then there's a new traffic issue or something else.

After 200k it just seems to be constant issues with either traffic, commercial goods, unemployment or a number of other issues that cause your population to stagnate or drop...

Perhaps I need to restart and be even more careful about not only my highway network but goods and people transport networks... Oh well, time for a new city I think! My current city seems to stagnate at about 290-295k and whatever I do I can't take it much further...

Sorry for the incoherent nature of this post but it's hard to put in word what exactly happens. There just seems to be some diffuse changes to the games which makes growth stagnate.

 

[BlackViper.com]

I have noticed that the "RCI" demand is generalized. This means all three can be completely flat, you build industry, not enough workers, then residential goes up and after building housing, commercial goes up.
What I am saying is build "something" to knock the equilibrium and things will get rolling again.

 

[the--dud]

I have noticed that the "RCI" demand is generalized. This means all three can be completely flat, you build industry, not enough workers, then residential goes up and after building housing, commercial goes up.
What I am saying is build "something" to knock the equilibrium and things will get rolling again.

Yeah that works for a little bit but shortly after you end up in the same stagnation again I've found?

I think part of the issue is that you can have really high unemployment with no RCI demand. I don't think the RCI demand properly handles late-game 100% educated populace... Something weird happens with employment, industry and offices when you have 100% education but I can't quite put my finger on it. I just know something strange is happening!

 

[Z0NE]

I find that the best solution when you reach this point is to keep zoning offices. This will push the unemployment down and eventually demand for other zones will creep back up.

 

[Kryo777]

I fight unemployment by turning the Hadron Collider off. It usually just takes two or three weeks for the unemployment rate to drop from 30% to 10% or even less. Then I just turn the HC on again. Rinse and repeat.

I'm currently at around 280.000 +/- 20.000 population and I can't keep going because the game doesn't allow me to place more buildings. I don't know if it's a cap or a bug. :/ I just don't get it. I play for a few hours - everything is great - I save the game, go to bed, the next day I can't place any more buildings. #frustrated