Is it possible to grow "too fast"?

[TimW]

I am at a point in my city where I have more cash than I know what to do with it (~$8M). I am used to the slow-growth model of the simulator. For those who have been tracking, I have a nice peripheral highway system that is half-finished. If I filled all of that in in one shot (say about 2 sq km at a time) along with the requisite services, would that be considered growing "too fast"? At what point would growth be considered too fast in the simulator?

 

[metacritical]

if you did what you propose two things would happen. initially you would get a lot of extra traffic, likely causing serious traffic issues for a good few game years; though this depends on the efficiency of your existing network: to clarify, you would still get a lot of extra traffic but it may not last as long as a few game years. secondly, and much later on to the point you may not link the two things together, you would get a serious death wave where everyone who moved in at the same time dies at the same time, leading to a pretty much precipitous decline in your population, again leading to traffic issues and/or abandoned buildings due to the accumulation of corpses and the scarcity of hearses to remove them all.

if you are happy with these consequences then zone as much as you like. if not, then it is always best to spread your expansion apart and never zone a lot of residential all at once.

 

[Promethian]

The death wave is the worst of it and even if you are very careful you will eventually start getting death waves because of the senior mechanics (seniors live very long and don't have children so you end up with large numbers of them). There is a lifecycle mod that I highly recommend which effectively kills death waves by randomizing immigrant ages and increasing the age range at which a pop can die. Just search the workshop for the word lifecycle.

 

[heliostellar]

You can avoid the death wave with the Randomize Age mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=571655171