I disagree, I just hit 75k in my city and I have almost zero offices and the bare necessity of retail. It has been that way since the beginning of my game. One of the keys I have found to building an industrial city is that you need to keep your unemployment between 6% and 12% to ensure that cims will take jobs that they are over-educated for. When my unemployment hits 12% I zone more industry, when it hits 6% I stop. Only when my growth has come to a complete standstill do I zone commercial. I have had nice steady growth with this method.
You know, right now I'm disagreeing with what I said too. When I posted last night I hadn't played in about a week and I forgot just how much industry I have in my little bitty city of right now just around 25,000 Cim-citizens.
First of all, I hope you can forgive my ramblings. It's late and I'm tired, but trust me when I say if you can read through it you should start to understand. My industry so far just flat-out works. It also rarely ever has trouble with employees but I'm sure one of the reasons for that is because I use a slower aging mod so I can hang on to my workers a little longer than the default settings but I think (despite the fact they don't have to have access by road to labor to pull from the pool) keeping easy access to labor sure seems to help. The farther away a work place is or the harder it is to get to is going to result in not enough workers and buildings going abandoned. You have buildings start going abandoned and you could end up in a death spiral. In my city whenever the seniors retire someone takes over those jobs easily enough without resorting to having super high unemployment rates. Shoot, half the time I don't have any unemployment and still keep things humming along.
Oh, I also don't give a lot of attention to the demand graph but instead pay attention mostly to my unemployment rate. If I have workers I make jobs. If I have jobs I move in people, it doesn't matter what education level they are. Right now I have a horribly high amount of over-qualified Cims working in just about every job possible.
I originally had one area of generic industrial, another area for timber and a third for farms. The spot the generic was in wasn't a good place for it and I wanted to build houses where timber had been so ultimately I moved them way off yonder in a corner of my map about two tiles away from where I started my city, and put a chunk of ground into oil production. I don't have access to a harbor so everything has to go either by truck or rail. When I moved that big bunch of industry out I left the cargo depot there because it's handy for deliveries to some of the commercial section and was easier for my farms to get to than some other routes out. That mess is kind of spread out with smallish specialized sections and a fairly large generic industry group. I put the generic industry closest to the depot so it could level up all the way. I also added a small area of generic industry a way off from that so it was up to Level 2.
I also forgot I had added a third depot closer to the farm ground that also handles a small amount of generic industry and newly acquired ore resources. So yeah, that added up to three cargo depots for a city of roughly 21,000 Cims.
By the time I quit tonight I had added a fourth mainly because I ended up with a huge surplus in the labor pool so I wanted that section of generic industry to level up and to build some more. I also had to fix up the road to lead into the dense commercial section because all my delivery vans were clogging up the main thoroughfare so I put an avenue leading into the large dense commercial then connected a couple of rather unattractive off-ramps from the main road to that. It ain't pretty but it sure worked a treat.
So a person might wonder, "Why in the heck would you have FOUR cargo depots in such a small city? Isn't that a waste of money?" Well, here's the thing about money in this game. The more you invest into your city the more you're going to get back. It really is as simple as that. If you put in a cargo depot which allows an industrial area not just to grow but totally thrive your profit will increase several-fold over what that depot costs. If you spend money on transit infrastructure it will come back to you multi-fold from what you've put out. I had put in bus routes last time I played and today the first thing I did was turn on the policy for free mass transit. At the time it was costing me roughly 700 a week, easily affordable at this point. Later I decided to experiment a little with the metro system. I don't have a lot of stops, just a few in fairly strategic places: two in the midst of the densely zoned area of apartments and office buildings, another near the university, and one each in the two main industrial areas. It set me back about 2,500 a week to put them in. The first thing I knew I was adding to the industrial area because the workers could get there much more easily and profit-wise I was right back up to where I was before I put in the metro.
I was wondering about this dynamic too. I have a population of around 18,000 and my industrial zones have complainers and some abandonment. I want to find out how exactly industry and commercial play together. I don't expect goods to be delivered to offices so I try to spread more low density commercial around the city and I just started building a high density commercial zone. The high density commercial is complaining about lack of customers and also have some abandonment. I'm thinking of getting more traffic/customers into the commercial zones by placing bus stops, parks and tourist traps so they can demand more product from industry. Think that will work? I'm thinking there's a domino effect from the customer level like in RL. Testing it now.
Yes, bus stops and parks are great for commercial areas but also don't forget the all-important commodity: enough people to shop there in the first place and of course easy access for delivery vans. I had a struggling commercial area, not horribly off, but not doing nearly as well as it could, either. I put it in its own district and turned on the perk for light commercial then went off about some other business. Just across the highway from it (and I know I posted about this somewhere within the last couple of days, just can't remember where) and started in building on an intentionally wealthy section of the city. This part of town has offices around the outside then a ring of apartments inside of that. By the time I got to the commercial development the land had valued up so nicely (wonderful things, those policies can be) that the people from those apartments had made their way across the highway and done so much shopping in that other commercial area it had fully leveled up. I was a little concerned their own commercial area might not fair as well but by the time I added it there were enough Cims to support both sectors. It was this second (the ritzy one) commercial district where I had to fix the road today to keep the delivery vans from backing traffic up halfway across the map.
Oh, Commercial definitely loves bus stops and they're one of the things you can do to increase property value.
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