Not enough clients for goods

[Lord KhaZimir]

. For those who think it's just about managing traffic, think again.

Traffic is an easy answer to all problems. After all, it's true, if trucks don't reach the commercial/industrial/cargo zones then goods aren't delivered and the entire system collapses. Traffic has a big impact IRL too. I could dismiss this cause only after having carefully studied how my city traffic worked (and it worked well i think as i've only one highway exit and no real roundabout). But the senior retirement problem could rampage an industrial zone in a few weeks ! Fluctuations of the workforce strike the specialized industry first and triggers a chain reaction. More imports -> more traffic from outside -> traffic bottlenecks -> more noise pollution throughout the city -> less workers reach their jobs ect... Not to mention what i call Maxis-like "Alien abduction disaster" : Am i the only one to suffer mysterious losses of population ? I see 112 birth, 68 deaths, high residential demand, low unemployment and still i there is -468 pop per week in a 28000hab city (sometimes i loose 5000hab before stabilization with unemployment rising )... Where are they gone ? No, i didn't paint large areas of green zones at the same moment, No, i don't have more deaths than births, No, my traffic isn't clogged... And why should i absolutely paint new zones to get them back ?

 

[ReginaRC]

Oh yeah, there are a lot of fun aspects to managing Skylines and it was that realization that made me quit obsessing over the demand meter. LOL However, I've also found managing traffic to be one of the most important aspects of this game.

I'm not sure what you mean by commercial offices because the buildings that grow in my commercial zoning aren't offices. For the commercial sector, it can be a pain in the rear when you want to zone an area of light commercial but your Cims have become educated because the early light commercial wants uneducated Cims so it can take a little while for those jobs to start filling. Once they do, though, the buildings will level up fairly quickly to Level 2. Level 3, however, is a bit trickier. Of course sometimes I have to remind myself exactly what one of the mods I use does because it affects how commercial and industrial level up and in some cases makes it easier, in others makes it harder. That particular mod allows industry to evolve based on the education level of the workers who start there and having a cargo depot nearby, which is all industrial should need anyway.

I had a horrible lack of employees yesterday when I started playing, about 17% of my citizens were seniors. One of the things I had thought I did was enable a high-rise ban in the Old Town District but still had high rises. As it turned out I apparently forgot to enable that ban and when I did that took care of my lack of employees. Once they rebuilt things were turning back around and before long I ended up with a huge pool of people to put to work. I finally got that solved by adding a bunch of offices to the Sterling District and getting them all leveled up so now unemployment levels are great. However, it also had the unintended consequence of giving my city way too much school capacity since I had to place more services in the Sterling District to get everything leveled up all the way. Now I'm getting a horribly highly educated workforce. I checked a few buildings and about half the employees had maxxed education levels. I think I'll turn the University off for a while. If I keep elementary and high school occupancy below what's needed the university is a nice thing to have fairly early on, but otherwise not so much.

One of my next missions is to build a new area of farm land. The original is kind of crammed into a smallish space and I want to be able to spread them out a little more and use some of the farm park-type things to create a buffer zone between the actual industry buildings and the "work camps" I'll be building. This is one of those times I long for things like the Mega Lots that were made for SC4. It should be a fun transition as I"m going to try to get a bunch of uneducated workforce into those farms and at the same time get the current farm workers into jobs they're qualified for.

Oh, I also am really wishing we had rail to underground in this game. I'm crossing my fingers this will be something included with the tunnels DLC.

 

[ReginaRC]

Traffic is an easy answer to all problems. After all, it's true, if trucks don't reach the commercial/industrial/cargo zones then goods aren't delivered and the entire system collapses. Traffic has a big impact IRL too. I could dismiss this cause only after having carefully studied how my city traffic worked (and it worked well i think as i've only one highway exit and no real roundabout). But the senior retirement problem could rampage an industrial zone in a few weeks ! Fluctuations of the workforce strike the specialized industry first and triggers a chain reaction. More imports -> more traffic from outside -> traffic bottlenecks -> more noise pollution throughout the city -> less workers reach their jobs ect... Not to mention what i call Maxis-like "Alien abduction disaster" : Am i the only one to suffer mysterious losses of population ? I see 112 birth, 68 deaths, high residential demand, low unemployment and still i there is -468 pop per week in a 28000hab city (sometimes i loose 5000hab before stabilization with unemployment rising )... Where are they gone ? No, i didn't paint large areas of green zones at the same moment, No, i don't have more deaths than births, No, my traffic isn't clogged... And why should i absolutely paint new zones to get them back ?

Goodness, I sure hope it's okay if I double post because I don't want to go back and try to edit this into my other one.

Alien abductions--gotta love it! When the numbers are going down most likely you have enough of an unemployment rate the Cims are getting out of Dodge. I kept seeing where I'd lose ten or twenty in a week and look the number of deaths and it just didn't jive. Then one time when I had the game paused I started clicking on the cars on the highways and started seeing my Cims driving out of town. Once they got across the border my population showed another loss. After discovering this I've been a lot keener on trying to keep unemployment down.

 

[Lord KhaZimir]

My people leave even when unemployment is low (-2%) and positive birthrate (more births than deaths), especially when residential demand is high. Maybe they can't afford the rent anymore ? I'd like to have more feedback because i already know that firemen are cool when they save kitties in the trees but that's all you get from chirpy.

 

[Chyll]

I am going to toss in that I saw something similar to what the OP described in a city over the weekend - booming commercial districts and industrial sections I had not touched in ages just started idling due to lack of demand for their goods. No serious traffic snarls around the factories.

I noted that this was only happening in a those area where I had turned on the city planning option for boosting industrial production. The one area I had not modified was not showing this behavior.

Turning off the city planning option almost immediately corrected the issue. I investigated no further as I had a traffic problem that was vexing me and returned to it. Forgot all about it until I saw the discussion here, and just thought I would share the observation.

 

[Lord KhaZimir]

I am going to toss in that I saw something similar to what the OP described in a city over the weekend - booming commercial districts and industrial sections I had not touched in ages just started idling due to lack of demand for their goods. No serious traffic snarls around the factories.

I noted that this was only happening in a those area where I had turned on the city planning option for boosting industrial production. The one area I had not modified was not showing this behavior.

Turning off the city planning option almost immediately corrected the issue. I investigated no further as I had a traffic problem that was vexing me and returned to it. Forgot all about it until I saw the discussion here, and just thought I would share the observation.

This confirms that the amount of goods produced in my city is too important to be exported by "only" two cargo stations. I have no city planning option in my industrial district however. I bet if i enact the same ordinance, all my industrial zone become crazy and has to be entirely bulldozed soon after

I think cargo stations are underpowered. No city of 30000hab in the world needs more than one cargo station, that would make much more than 30 stations for a million !

One can say that i'm complaining because the game doesn't react like i would like it but i think there is some tweak necessary here

I suggest Train stations/airports/harbours upgrades instead of losing precious land by redundance....

 

[ReginaRC]

This confirms that the amount of goods produced in my city is too important to be exported by "only" two cargo stations. I have no city planning option in my industrial district however. I bet if i enact the same ordinance, all my industrial zone become crazy and has to be entirely bulldozed soon after

I think cargo stations are underpowered. No city of 30000hab in the world needs more than one cargo station, that would make much more than 30 stations for a million !

One can say that i'm complaining because the game doesn't react like i would like it but i think there is some tweak necessary here

I suggest Train stations/airports/harbours upgrades instead of losing precious land by redundance....

I agree, it would seem that many shouldn't be necessary but I've found they are because otherwise there are so many trucks and vans trying to get in and out of those places that traffic just becomes a snarled mess. It doesn't bother me, though, because I learned a long time ago not to expect complete realism in city builders. My favorite thing, after all, in SimCity 2000 was the arcologies, especially the ones that launched into space.

 

[Turjan]

I think cargo stations are underpowered. No city of 30000hab in the world needs more than one cargo station, that would make much more than 30 stations for a million !

I have 14 stations for 240k people, so I think you can safely double that number you mentioned.
Of course, these are also used for intra-city freight traffic.

I suggest Train stations/airports/harbours upgrades instead of losing precious land by redundance....

As many of the aspects of this game, it's not as simple as that. You have a vastly sped up general time frame colliding with a real-time traffic simulation. The number of stations is, therefore, dictated by how many vehicles the station itself and the traffic network around it can process, and this is severely limited because of that real-time traffic simulation.

 

[golden.radish]

I built a city that had a connection <-> connection train line between two land-squares, and a single cargo train station feeding my commercial district and had the problem of not enough goods to sell. The cargo train station simply couldn't keep up.

So I scratched that and built a new city with a cargo train station and cargo harbour PER commercial district. Now I have the problem of not enough clients for goods.

I use subway segregation to keep my road traffic to a minimum, and have over 4700 citizens using the subway, but it's apparently not enough. I've tried increasing the number of subway stations in the commercial areas, but it seems to be limited by a hard-coded fall-off distance from the residential areas, regardless of the means of getting there.

The problem then is... the layout and growth of the city becomes limited to keeping res areas close enough to "goods-fed" commercial areas, which... isn't easy if you have to rely on harbors and trains, both, to keep them adequately supplied.