RCI... does it even work?

[medopu]

According to that guy the biggest he got was 15k, 5k commercial jobs, thats one high wealth office skyscraper. hardly anything compared to spamming offices like you claim or you can on CS, not sure why that shouldnt work or how that has anything to do with the fact that RCI in CS is much more basic and ignrable than it is in SC and you can spam high wealth offices all day long.

Sounds like he had a struggle too. had to make budget cuts and it would have worked better if he had industry. Mine worked much better without and was making 50k a week.

Jesus christ you don't read do you?
The bigger you get, the easier it gets. He demonstrated that it's just as possible to do it with much less population.

This is simply to show that you can ignore industry in simcity4, which is what I said in my first post. It has NOTHING to do with spam. It was just a comment I made, to show that RCI bar in SC4 might as well be only called just an "RC bar", depending on how someone decides to play the game. And that definitely makes Simcity 4 incredibly more basic than it should be.
There is no struggle like you say, at least not for me and for him and it doesn't require budget cuts at all.

You really need to pay attention to other posts and what we're actually debating. You're just jumping around subjects and mixing everything in. You keep repeating the word spam without admitting that the same thing is done with a slightly different procedure in simcity 4.

 

[OBXandos]

When someone discovered the teleportation of workers to their jobs about 2 weeks after the game launched I knew things would go downhill from there. It was later confirmed by a dev(on reddit I think) that workers teleporting was an intended design choice. Then we had the issues with hearse and garbage truck AI, the fact that only "clean" energy was viable at any stage of the game, the unrealistic amount of cims in buildings, and many more issues I haven't listed. At that point we at least had a couple of mods, like proper hardness and traffic++, to correct these issues. AD was released and broke most of the mods the players had created to to turn this city painter into a city simulator. Yes I am using that as a derogatory term.

If CO truly wanted a game that all players can enjoy then they have failed to deliver to the simulation fans. We have a wonderful city painting game with a very weak "simulation". With two paid DLCs already out the door I can't imagine they are going to "fix" their stated design goals just to appease the simulation fans. We are the minority.

Hopefully if they make a second game our concerns will be addressed but I for one will be quite wary when spending my money on it.

 

[medopu]

Ok, i promised a test for simcity 4, to see if we can have sustainable cities and regions ready to expand completely without industry.

Simcity5, this is not a test to see how easy it is to get to CO§§§ buildings, this is only a test, to see how it's possible to have a random region without any industry.

just to prove it, i've installed simcity 4 and played for a few hours, to come to a point when no industry in any further city is neccessary to provide jobs.
All my cities have 0 citizens employed in industry. No city has any special ordinances, i have no mods, and no taxes were altered.

1. city. Had to start with industry, but shortly block-by-block remove it, when it was possible to substitute their jobs with commercial buildings. As you can see by the graph, the CO§§ and CO§§§ are rising slow but steadily. If I kept just a tiny little spec of industry present, the growth would be much quicker obviously. But this was done just to show that industry isn't required at all necessarily.

Spoiler

Other auxilliary cities were built, to show it's possible to continue the whole region building cities this way.

Spoiler

Again, this has nothing to do with building normal cities in Simcity 4 with some industry jobs provided, this was just to show how easy it is to play in a way that avoids providing any industry jobs at all.
If I were to test how easy it is to spam CO§§§, playing style would have to change significantly. Don't mix these two types of examples when arguing against my position.

 

[Miwi]

Simcity 4's RCI wasn't complicated, but it was difficult. Thus the many, many threads on Simtropolis asking how to manage it, and mods that just removed it. Although we certainly don't want to oversimplify the game or made it shallow, we do want to keep in mind that a lot of players aren't looking for difficulty. I'm not one of them, you're not one of them... but they are out there in masses!

Today I had 3 people insist on Twitter that we remove the "limitation" on soil availability for landscaping.

/facepalm

I'm totally with you guys on this, as I think a lot of hardcore city builders are. Industry revamp would be awesome! So I'm totally pushing for what I can, but a good improvement/change/overhaul takes time, as we want to make sure it is done properly. So keep the ideas coming, it does get heard!

For players not looking for difficulty there is an easy solution: Use the sandbox mode and you are done. Or call it construction mode, city painter, whatever... Nobody will complain.
As long as players are aware that they are in sandbox mode and they don't have to fear any bad consequences for their nice looking city, no problem.
But leading the players to believe with various indicators as e.g. the RCI display there is a relation between the actions of the player and supply/demand of different zones, where in reality it doesn't matter what they do in the game, how do you call such an approach of city "simulation" ? I feel "taken for a ride"....or fooled.
And btw, tax based on happiness of people is absolute nonsense, this has nothing to do with simplifying the game, only a confused financial approach that nobody can follow. Taxes are based on income and earnings (in case of industry/commercials), a real property tax and VAT. Why not simply setting a real property tax on the different zones ? And calculating an income tax for every employeed citizen, depending what kind of job he has ? Not a complicate calculation, only assuming the low-paid workers all get a low salary X, the high wage sectors get salary x*2, just a simple economic model. Same goes for earnings in industry etc. And to complete the tax model, let's set us a value-added tax (VAT) per inhabitant because every citizen uses our infrastructure.
This would make a lot more sense and you get a better feeling how a city generates income (or looses with e.g. high unemployment rate).

 

[DazKaz]

The word you are looking for is conned.

verb (used with object), conned, conning.
2. to swindle; trick:
That crook conned me out of all my savings.
3. to persuade by deception, cajolery, etc.

 

[punishEA]

Ok, i promised a test for simcity 4, to see if we can have sustainable cities and regions ready to expand completely without industry.

Simcity5, this is not a test to see how easy it is to get to CO§§§ buildings, this is only a test, to see how it's possible to have a random region without any industry.

just to prove it, i've installed simcity 4 and played for a few hours, to come to a point when no industry in any further city is neccessary to provide jobs.
All my cities have 0 citizens employed in industry. No city has any special ordinances, i have no mods, and no taxes were altered.

1. city. Had to start with industry, but shortly block-by-block remove it, when it was possible to substitute their jobs with commercial buildings. As you can see by the graph, the CO§§ and CO§§§ are rising slow but steadily. If I kept just a tiny little spec of industry present, the growth would be much quicker obviously. But this was done just to show that industry isn't required at all necessarily.

Spoiler

Other auxilliary cities were built, to show it's possible to continue the whole region building cities this way.

Spoiler

Again, this has nothing to do with building normal cities in Simcity 4 with some industry jobs provided, this was just to show how easy it is to play in a way that avoids providing any industry jobs at all.
If I were to test how easy it is to spam CO§§§, playing style would have to change significantly. Don't mix these two types of examples when arguing against my position.

Thanks for that, thats interesting.
But you had to start with industry and replaced it after ~50years, if i see that correctly? For me thats still more reasonable than having a city without any commercial from day one (but still illogical). And it doesnt make RCI matter less, it still separates between the wealth levels. You can not have a city full of only (!) high-level stuff like in skylines by simply leveling up your buildings, you still need to get the demand for high-wealth stuff first. And the demand was different high for the different wealth levels of your residents and everything else, in CS its all one. I hope i remember that correcly You have much more diversity in SC because of that.
And can´t we expect a little more than what we have in CS and SC, its so much time between those 2 games, where is the progress?

 

[medopu]

Thanks for that, thats interesting.
But you had to start with industry and replaced it after ~50years, if i see that correctly? For me thats still more reasonable than having a city without any commercial from day one (but still illogical). And it doesnt make RCI matter less, it still separates between the wealth levels. You can not have a city full of only (!) high-level stuff like in skylines by simply leveling up your buildings, you still need to get the demand for high-wealth stuff first. And the demand was different high for the different wealth levels of your residents and everything else, in CS its all one. I hope i remember that correcly You have much more diversity in SC because of that.
And can´t we expect a little more than what we have in CS and SC, its so much time between those 2 games, where is the progress?

1. I agree. CSL allowing you to not provide shops is perhaps even more ridiculous than SC4 allowing no industries after a few decades of in-game years.
I think that too few and especially too many industries and shops should have consequences. A player should get punished more than now, if he creates a lot of commercial zones or too few/none.

2. I think the main issue with our differences of opinion about SC4 vs CSL is how CSL deals with demand.
The funny thing with CSL is, that buildings look for the demand AFTER they level up, not BEFORE, like in SC4. And this is simple to prove. Start a new city, and don't plop down schools for education. Then start zoning offices or level up your industry as soon as you can. You will see that offices and leveled-up industry will be built but the demand will not be met (there are no educated workers) and the buildings will get abandoned and try to re-build, if the RCI meter allows them to.

The Cities skylines RCI demand system is very clunky, unintuitive and awkward compared to the elegance of SC4 and I wouldn't be so optimistic, to see that getting changed in a simple expansion pack. This would require a ground-up programming work. Perhaps in CS:L2 I hope
But devs, for gods-sake don't copy SC4 mechanics. Improve on them, SC4 got a lot of things massively wrong.

3. I think that a solution for buildings too quickly achieving max level in CSL is possible.

Simply lessen the effect of services and parks on building level-up as well as making these services more expensive to operate.
That way, the gameplay to achieve the max-leveling remains the same, but the result might change drastically since players would not always be able to afford leveling up the wealth of every office and residential home.

 

[Builder1337]

Hey @Azurespecter, would you say that making the RCI more diversified would be good for the game? As of now, you have the standard Residential, Industrial, Commercial and Offices with sub-sections. How about adding more sub-sections? Add logistics under industry, different types of offices and so forth. That way you'll make it more interesting to experiment with what type of demand there is. With that you could expand the RCI bars in-game where you have more colors for all the different types of RCI-demand. At one point people will want a restaurant in your town, and not just another food store or drug store 2.0

 

[medopu]

I'd also like to see more building levels for special industries such as logging, tourism, leisure and so on. At the moment there's only one level and it looks unnatural that low-density zoning for tourism can produce skyscraper hotels because they're level 1 specialized commercial building.

@Builder1337 the reason why we don't have 100 different categories of zones is that it becomes cumbersome to zone so many different colors. We already have 6. I think a more elegant solution would be to have your idea, but have your proposals part of district specialization, than a seperate individual zone.

Pair your suggestion with people demanding medium density zoning, and we're soon reaching 20 different zoning varieties and that's cumbersome.

 

[DazKaz]

I also think there is enough variety in the zoning but the specialization needs to be able to level up.

If you zone a tourist specialization on the fringes of your city, the motel buildings there would be a lot different to the Ritz hotels in the centre of your down town city area.
Farming zones would level up better if they are given room to expand and buy up more area for fields out on the perimeter of your city, than freeholdings in the confines of more built up areas. Same with logging companies.
Leisure would also thrive better if it was positioned near to high population areas, but far enough away not to cause complaints due to noise if well serviced by public transport, than those in less accessible areas.

All the tools are already in the game to make it great, there just needs to be some interaction between them than makes logical sense.
I would love to see some high level farms, with big multi coloured fields out on the fringes, producing 3X the amount of the tiny level 1 farms we have in the game at the moment.
Preferably with fields that fill the gaps between irregular shaped tracks and roads.

 

[Alex24]

I want to summarize what in my opinion should be done to achieve a more realistic and more fun RCI System:

Demand
Currently it doesn't matter wether you build low-rise or high-rise. For most of the cities in real life this is just not the case. Regulations and less profitability is making highrise rare. Especially if you look at the scale of Cities in this game (ranging between 25k to 250k) and compare that to cities in real life with similar population, you will see that the high amount you COULD build is just weird.

- Introduce demand for zone branches​

Residential
I think that low-rise and high-rise is not enough seperation. Thus mid-rise would be an option. I know that you can use the "ban high-rise" policy, but this isn't really the best solution for that. IRL most cities have large areas of mid-rise buildings. Reference pic 1 It's not really making it more complicated, it's making it easier to control the growth and together with realistic demand it is making it more realistic.

- Introduce mid-rise residential
​

Commerce
Now it's getting a bit more difficult in dividing things, since commerce is part of the tertiary sector. It's essentially a service company which provides the goods to our residentials and optains goods from the primary and secondery sector. In real life we got commerce either mixed with res and offices in city centers or in the outskirts as shopping centers or shopping parks. So is there any high-rise commerce? I would say no, mid-rise is more common. (There are some commerce buildings currently in low-rise that totally don't belong there)

- change high-rise commerce to midrise​

Industry
This is where I see changes most urgently. Basic economics seperates industry into:

• primary sector: produce/gain raw material
• secondery sector: process raw materials into goods
• tertiary sector: service and supply

check for comments in reply please include "potato" in the first line, so I can see that you read the whole text and not just commented based on some keywoards.

Currently for the primary sector we got agriculture, forests, minerals and oil. Basically all we need. But the representation it is ... crap. Farms are way too small, so are forests. (Yeah, the devs already commented on that before release. But still, if we want to improve the game, this needs to be overhauled). What does this mean for zoning? There should be a primary industry zone, which would be very different from the default ones. Similar to those of Cities XL, in which you can create a polygon where the farm is built. Applying this for forests wouldn't be that difficult, since a forest is a big area with trees and a forest company with a mill. A farm isn't really different from that. Also oil fields could use that system, because the drlling rigs and pumps are spread over the area (even without being connected to a road). A mining area probably got one big access to the mine and several other buildings near it in the zone. This system would require a lot of work, so I can't imagine this dream to be made true.

The secondery sector in CSL is mostly generic industry which pollutes. But there are a lot of companies in that sector which do so. A seperation could be done with a policy or a specialization. Thus we could build this industry next to residential areas, which is quite common.

The tertiary sector in this game are the offices (and commerce). Theoretically it also includes the services we offer our residentials, such as healthcare and education. IRL most offices are mid-rise or high-rise. Once again, introduce mid-rise. But not all services are provided in offices, for example logistics. But I wouldn't mind not having them, it would probably be too much.

Probably one more crucial factor is the demand again. Assuming our cities are built in developed countries they would still start with a focus on the primary sector when it's still a village. As wealth and population grows, the demand for goods produced from domestic production rises. The producing industry and the population needs services from offices, thus demand for that increases. Is sold at commerce.

- new zoning for primary sector
- specialization for non-heavy industry (manufactuary)
- mid-rise for offices
- demand
​

In the end it's a decision whether you want to improve depth or not. With a good tutorial you should quickly understand the principle. Personally I would really want to see something similar to that.

​

 

[grizzycz]

I don't think we can expect any big change in RCI for current CSL. Maybe for CSL2. What I would like to see, and what I think might be reasonable in terms of time/resources, is to have detailed RCI. E.g. to see low/high demand, to see which type industry or commercial zones are needed and to have office demand in separate column or as a specialization of detailed industry bar.

 

[JimmiG]

Simply lessen the effect of services and parks on building level-up as well as making these services more expensive to operate.
That way, the gameplay to achieve the max-leveling remains the same, but the result might change drastically since players would not always be able to afford leveling up the wealth of every office and residential home.

There are a couple of problems with that approach.
-It doesn't make the game "harder", just more grindy. It simply means running the game at the highest speed for longer before you've accumulated the money for your next expansion. You're really just changing the pace of the game, not the difficulty.

-You're already placing an unrealistic amount of fire stations, police stations, schools, crematoriums etc. as it is. If anything, the effectiveness should be *increased*. No real world city has a high school for every block, 2 big police stations within 500 meters of each other etc.

It's pretty difficult to make a city builder truly challenging. Many view SC4 with rose tinted glasses, but it was also pretty easy once you got a city going. Even the incredibly punishing game Banished gets easy once you figure out the basic game mechanics so your towns don't starve, die out of old age or run out of tools.

 

[medopu]

There are a couple of problems with that approach.
-It doesn't make the game "harder", just more grindy. It simply means running the game at the highest speed for longer before you've accumulated the money for your next expansion. You're really just changing the pace of the game, not the difficulty.

-You're already placing an unrealistic amount of fire stations, police stations, schools, crematoriums etc. as it is. If anything, the effectiveness should be *increased*. No real world city has a high school for every block, 2 big police stations within 500 meters of each other etc..

I totally agree with everything you've said. I specifically wrote this with (like you said) people in mind who have rose tinted glasses for SC4.

- Yes, I agree i should've used a different word It doesn't make the game harder, but the effect would be, that a player would no longer be able to afford service/park spam in order to max-out every inch of zoned building to the highest wealth category. Just like in Simcity 4. You would still have an easy game (just like simcity 4), but at least you wouldn't be able to level up every building, only the amount that your budget allows you to.
Your plopping would be more constrained by your budget.

- Again, I agree. The cities in games require already too many instances of services. By "lessening of the effect" I probably had something else in mind than what you understood. With "effect" i meant the "effect on buildings leveling up", not the "service general effect".

In fact, i'd be all for the increase in coverage area of the specific service buildings, but I would decrease their impact on nearby buildings leveling up.

It's pretty difficult to make a city builder truly challenging. Many view SC4 with rose tinted glasses, but it was also pretty easy once you got a city going. Even the incredibly punishing game Banished gets easy once you figure out the basic game mechanics so your towns don't starve, die out of old age or run out of tools.

Exactly. The main problem I have with people accusing this game of being a "city painter" is just how unable they are, to provide valuable suggestions for a way in which an expansion pack could "remedy" their complaints. There are just a few of them, that bother specifying what would be necessary to resolve that issue, but none of them provide any real solutions, that could be realistically fulfilled in an expansion pack. The problem is, that in order to completely revamp the simulation, you would practically need to remake a whole new game, and that would take YEARS, if it could even be possible.

What I propose is FAAR from ideal, but at least my suggestions could be fulfilled by even a basic modder. What most complainers crying for more simulation demand out of an expansion pack is pretty unrealistic, if not downright magic.

I KNOW people will hate me for saying this, but being a realist, I just wish to warn a few guys on this forum, that yes, their complaints are completely valid, but there's simply not an easy way to resolve these complaints. I don't want them to wait for years for an expansion pack, that would never have a chance to see the light of day.

If the developers don't have balls to say to these simulation enthusiasts, that most of what they want is impossible in cities skylines 1, then I will do their job. I don't want people to waste their time like that.

 

[velarios90]

C'mon don;t look for excuses for developers. It's completely their fault that they "teleport" workers to factories or offices and create commercial area unnecessary and troublesome.
Simply, to have your city working perfectly you just need residential areas and office areas. Citizens don't have urge to go to shopping.
TBH only major traffic creators and recipients are factories and commerce, which are redundant to get your city growing.

Traffic spam that industrial areas create is unbelievable and unrealistic. Instead of worrying about residential-workplace commute I have to constantly struggle with endless sausagevan or tractor streams.

To transform this game from "city-painter" to "city-simulator", they should introduce missing links between key areas of this game like workers commute, give more feedback about RCI, and introduce demand-availability-necessity parameters, now there is no demand for anything in the city except city services, economical aspect of the game is nonexistent. And fix the industrial areas.

 

[DazKaz]

For a short easy fix, commerce needs to be properly integrated in relation to the residential zoning.

If there is a need to zone commerce in order for your population to grow, that in turn will need imported or home grown goods.
This starts to raise the traffic to a level where it matters, then you need to consider public transport to get the cars off the roads in order to make room for the vans and lorries.

If the number of cargo train terminals and cargo ports was also integrated into the imports cap i.e the more of them you have the more imports you are allowed before the cap (I don't think it is at the moment?) this would also improve game play and allow people to have less industry if they don't want it, but the trade off would be higher rail and port costs.

If you play the game as is, but following the demand graph once the population tops 150K the games not that bad.
Goods start to run out in the commercial zones, you need more of them, so traffic grows.
Room starts to become a problem so you find yourself having to come up with solutions to improve traffic flow which often involves moving entire industrial zones.
New road layouts are needed and I ended up putting cargo terminals in the center of my commercial zones to inject goods right into the middle.

Its this ridiculous concept that a city doesn't need shops (commerce) to survive where the whole thing breaks down.

Out of interest how many of you guys have grown a city to 250-300k population on the original 9 tiles using no mods or terrain leveling and keeping commerce at the level as indicated by the demand bars?

 

[Alex24]

-You're already placing an unrealistic amount of fire stations, police stations, schools, crematoriums etc. as it is. If anything, the effectiveness should be *increased*. No real world city has a high school for every block, 2 big police stations within 500 meters of each other etc.

True that. I did some research:

Linz (Austria) got 200.000 inhabitants and an area of 96 km^2 (not even close to a world city, but a very representable city)
2 professional fire stations with 9 smaller substations, 4 volounteer fire stations (large companys got their own fire stations)
total amount of 54 vehicles (not inlcuding 9 boats), 21,5 mill € expenses, 293 Fire-fighters;

96 km^2 is covered by 15 stations = 6,4 km^2 for each one. 2,52 km * 2,52 km
200.000 inhabitants / 15 stations = 13,334 inhabitants per station

Now we still have to consider that the time is different in CSL. While the amount of fires might be realistic, the time it takes the fire trucks to get there isn't.

I agree that the effect near city-services should be nerfed. IRL places are not really worth more if they are next to a service point (excluding healthcare maybe), aslong they are in an acceptable distance.

distribution of stations (pic)
source

 

[punishEA]

medopu asked, so just some ideas to improve the game, to make it harder and more real, like a simulation.
A simple DLC will not be enough to do most of the changes, but you can pick some of them and make some small improvements. Unfortuanetly this game cannot be patched or modded in a way in which an expansion pack or DLC could remedy all or many complaints, the changes needed go way too deep if you ask me. But i am happy if someone proves i am wrong

-Make commercial zones matter!
Make them essentially needed, based on some ratio
Introduce a system in which low-level cims need low-level shops and high-level cims need high-level shops, also connected to industry/goods demand in the same way

- Make it harder to level up all your city:
Increase the area of effect for service buildings massively, dont need to change the power of effect, only scale it with the bigger area, aswell as increase their maintenance-costs by a massive amount to stop spamming service buildings - watch your budget! This also removes the 100police station, 100hospital, 100 whatever - unreal citys.
Decrease the power of effect for parks and buildings like that, aswell as increase the maintenance-costs to stop spamming them - watch your budget! The same can be said about the subway/public transport, its super-cheap ingame and the effect is overpowered.

-Rework the budget-system to prevent getting all and everything maxed out without spending a single thought about money (there is already a MOD in the basegame to do that!!):
See above. Stuff must be expensive.
Per-building budget. You must have control.
Make income only based on taxes by wealth/level of building and remove happiness as a factor so its easyer to understand what happens.
Remove day-night slider, a budget should be per day/week/month, but not per 12h - so its easyer to understand what happens.
More detailed budget so you know what does what.

-Rework the (time)scale of the game to give it a realistic feeling (many mods exist about these things):
Make day and night longer, so effects of day and night have more time to show.
Make cims age slower and die more random to prevent death-waves.
Rework population of buildings, highrise-office buildings must employ hundereds of cims, not only 20; reduce cims in residential buildings, raise them in big industrial ones, ect., make it to a realistic state.
Reduce the amount of goods needed and goods produced (specialised industry traffic is nuts), aswell as reduce the amount of trash produced (its so incredible high, you need like 100 incinerators) - traffic will be less, but see next point
Make cims reach their workplace (at least offices) and not teleport, so (office) districts with their new hunderets of employes will finally have some traffic in them, traffic rises again.

The actual speed the game is runnig is fine i think.

-Rework specialised zones:
Introduce at least 3-level buildings to make it possible to upgrade them to higher education needs, this also can prevent stuff like having highrise-hotels if you dont want them and you have more control.
Remove them from the districts and give them their own colours so we can put forest industry next to farming next to generic industry without creating 3 different districts, same goes for commercial so we can put shops next to our hotels next to bars

-Rework industry
Interconnect the different types of industry with goods-cycles
Adjust the demand for different level of industry by the demand and provision (education, lvl of cims, numbers of commercial zones) of the city
Introduce clean high-tech industry with own colour or separate specialised district

-Rework RCI, make it BIG!
Consider education in the demand, aswell as the lvls of your city-buildings
Introduce the special-district policies as zones, and represent every zone in the RCI, so you know exactly what is demanded and what not.
Separate the offices from industry because of the very different requirements and effects of these two.
Make office demand based not on how many jobs you need, but on how big your city is, and how much industry and commercials are in the need for office service; the bigger your city the more attractive for big banks and insurances and stuff like that.
Separate the different levels of buildings in the RCI and give them different demand and requirements, so you still need low level stuff in your city and can not max everything out - similar to the anno series! <-- this!

-Introduce air pollution
Do it! its not that difficult.

The most important thing is the RCI overhaul, as well as the first 3 points.

Many more things can be done. But i bet we will not see any big changes at all, so no need to write more things down. And dont forget i am just a gamer, no game designer - but my gaming history would have lead to different design-choices.

My hope is that in Cites:Skylines2 (or Cities:Bigger Skylines) things will be better, with depth and real skyscrapers and huge farms and zonable parks and all the other stuff

 

[DazKaz]

I have found out something interesting.
After the revelation that it was possible to grow a city with just office and residential zoned I decided to test it out for myself.

I dezoned all the commercial and industrial and rezoned them all as office instead.
After a short period of complete chaos things adjusted to the new setup. Luckily I had a huge city purse saved up to take up the slack of this adjustment period that cost the city about 8 million bucks.

What I have discovered after a very short period of growth is a downward trend of the population and no way that I can discover to get it moving again.
I have tried adjusting the taxes, and policies, but nothing seems to be working.

There is plenty of unused low and high density residential zoned areas, as well as unused office.
Its just that no one is interested in moving into them. There is no demand for residential or for offices (industry) so these zones just won't grow any more.

So I have come to the conclusion, that if I am going to obtain my original goal of a population of over 300K, I am going to have to reload my save of the balanced city I had before I converted it to offices.
This means I don't feel so conned now, and owe the Dev's an apology, but RCI clearly needs some work still, especially early game.

 

[nikgame]

I am a big fan of this game but am only a newbie and I really want this game to be the perfect one. I have OCD when it comes to game mechanics and all.
I came across these mods which claims to simulate things in a more realistic manner(both are by same author).. I have not used it though :

1) Realistic Population and Consumption mod
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=426163185

2) Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=654707599

Can the more experienced people try these and give some feedback?