...or the New Rockford Mass Exodus. (TLDR at the bottom)
Interesting play session today. Decided to start a new game with a focus on heavy industry and slow, methodical expansion. I was off to a great start, had an excellent service network with well over adequate coverage of my city. Traffic was not an issue. I made dinner and mostly left it running at full speed to improve my bankroll - came back to about 6500 population with around 200k in the bank. Obviously this is excessive, but as I said I was playing slowly anyway and then let it run for a few years while I did other things.
Anyway, as I approached the 7,000 marker which unlocks all sorts of fun stuff, I noticed my ore district was more or less tapped out so I decided to switch over to generic industry -- I basically just erased the ore district entirely. All I can figure is I either hit that magic death wall where everyone in the city dies at the same time, or my removal of the ore specialization triggered some sort of cataclysmic death spiral.
Let it be noted that my excellent road network was not altered in any way, I didn't delete anything, I was still connected to the highway, etc, etc. ALL I did was erase the ore specialization network. Soon my entire industrial sector including the comparably huge pre-existing generic industry area I had before I ever built the ore district became a blur of "Not Enough Workers" icons. Soon everything became abandoned. This triggered my commercial areas to light up with "No Goods to Sell". There was absolutely no industrial demand. My population began to plummet. The coverage of residential zoning never changed -- there were still just as many residential buildings but they were emptying out. My residential demand shot up but nobody moved into the empty houses. I build more and more residential area which was promptly filled with new houses, yet the population continued it's meteoric descent.
I wiped out the entire industrial zone and re-filled a tiny tiny part of it -- two or three buildings built and maintained workers while the rest quickly abandoned and were bulldozed. Other than three buildings nothing ever grew back. Then all of a sudden I began to notice thousands of inexplicable "low land value" icons, even though there were wall to wall parks and tons of services. All the while the city emptied out.
Eventually my 6900 citizens dwindled to 1500, by swollen coffers became as barren as my once proud industrial sector, my city literally spontaneously imploded, and I hung my head in defeat and shut down for the night.
All I can figure is either...
Interesting play session today. Decided to start a new game with a focus on heavy industry and slow, methodical expansion. I was off to a great start, had an excellent service network with well over adequate coverage of my city. Traffic was not an issue. I made dinner and mostly left it running at full speed to improve my bankroll - came back to about 6500 population with around 200k in the bank. Obviously this is excessive, but as I said I was playing slowly anyway and then let it run for a few years while I did other things.
Anyway, as I approached the 7,000 marker which unlocks all sorts of fun stuff, I noticed my ore district was more or less tapped out so I decided to switch over to generic industry -- I basically just erased the ore district entirely. All I can figure is I either hit that magic death wall where everyone in the city dies at the same time, or my removal of the ore specialization triggered some sort of cataclysmic death spiral.
Let it be noted that my excellent road network was not altered in any way, I didn't delete anything, I was still connected to the highway, etc, etc. ALL I did was erase the ore specialization network. Soon my entire industrial sector including the comparably huge pre-existing generic industry area I had before I ever built the ore district became a blur of "Not Enough Workers" icons. Soon everything became abandoned. This triggered my commercial areas to light up with "No Goods to Sell". There was absolutely no industrial demand. My population began to plummet. The coverage of residential zoning never changed -- there were still just as many residential buildings but they were emptying out. My residential demand shot up but nobody moved into the empty houses. I build more and more residential area which was promptly filled with new houses, yet the population continued it's meteoric descent.
I wiped out the entire industrial zone and re-filled a tiny tiny part of it -- two or three buildings built and maintained workers while the rest quickly abandoned and were bulldozed. Other than three buildings nothing ever grew back. Then all of a sudden I began to notice thousands of inexplicable "low land value" icons, even though there were wall to wall parks and tons of services. All the while the city emptied out.
Eventually my 6900 citizens dwindled to 1500, by swollen coffers became as barren as my once proud industrial sector, my city literally spontaneously imploded, and I hung my head in defeat and shut down for the night.
All I can figure is either...
- I took too long in reaching 7000 population and unlocking high density residential before hitting the "death wall", and the 6900 people were two few to recover from it
- I went too far in improving land value and education before reaching 7000 and unlocking office zones, resulting in 6900 educated people with nowhere to work but heavy industry -- this explains the sudden emptying out of my generic industry but not the freak population decline
- Something, somehow depended on the continued functionality of my depleted ore zone, or it was bugged somehow, so when I erased the district to revert to generic industry it cause some massive chain reaction... I suspect it was coincidence and the cause was one of the above two scenarios, but it does seem uncanny that it all happened literally moments after I did this
