Why has my beautiful city gone into decline?

[Bahger]

I am so baffled, and, having formed a great affection for this game, almost discouraged. Can anyone help, please? Here are the symptoms:

- Very healthy economy, well-balanced zoning, successful farm and forestry industries as well as generic industry, efficient roads and services (police, fire, garbage, schools), 300,000 in the bank with income at about 8,000 per week and expenses less than half of that, I thought I was in great shape, expanding my city and solving problems until:

- At just over 7,000, the population began to decline, inexorably, by an average of 50 people per week. I did everything I could to reverse this trend, especially as I had a lot of money and my economy remained strong. I built schools and worked on beautifying the city, made sure there was good hospital, fire, police and other service coverage. Sims were tweeting that my city was "paradise". However, as the population slide continued, other things began to go wrong:

- I was having to demolish more and more abandoned buildings in my previously thriving forestry zone. Businesses were reporting "not enough goods to sell". As time went on, with me still checking everything was in the green and the roads were working efficiently and all outside connections were solid, I began to see lots of deaths being reported (even though healthcare was good and roads not blocked and there was no pollution) and no matter what I bought for the city that produced lots of smileys, the decline continued. Eventually construction ground to a halt on my industrial zones even though there were jobs available and the population to fill them.

I must be missing something very fundamental here, even though my city got off to such a good start. I am not sure I want to start over without being any the wiser about what might have suddenly ruined my progress; can anyone help me out? Many thanks.

 

[Arandur87]

Well, CIMS will die after roughly 6 years of ingame time, no matter how good your healthcare is.

So basically your population can decrease, if your growth isn't continious. Did you build a bunch of residential zones in a short period of time? Or did you evenly spread some zones over time? That's one of the things, you should do, to maintain a steady growth in population.

With decreasing pop you will most likely loose workforce, therefore produce less goods which leads to abandonded industry and commercial areas.

Ensure a steady growth and you will be fine

 

[barrygreybeard]

I too have seen this happen, it seems to go in cycles, just keep developing your city , it will bounce back. You have to remember that populations change, people get older and become seniors and drop out of the workforce, education changes citizens priorities of where they want to work. If your timber industries have a lot of over educated workers and your commercial and office zones level up to provide more places for higher educated citizens they will take those jobs. There are a few discussions here about how to deal with unemployment for example and how the best ways to fill these jobs would be. Just hang on in there and your city will pick up again with a little TLC.

 

[Turjan]

The simulation tends to produce regular population swings of about 3,000 to 10,000 inhabitants up and down. Unfortunately, the amplitude of this curve doesn't change much with base population numbers. It's even more erratic with smaller populations. While a swing of 6,000 people is hardly noticeable in a 250k inhabitant city, it's obviously quite dangerous if you only have 7,000 inhabitants to begin with.

You probably have to be very careful with producing a smooth development curve in a fledgling city. This means no zoning of lots of residential areas and then working for years on your industrial area or your favorite dam project only. It may well be that these swings roughly correspond to the size of residential areas you tend to zone at once. I haven't correlated this properly though.

 

[Bahger]

Thanks, guys. Amazingly, I went back to an earlier save and fixed it. I needed more generic industry because my businesses were not getting supplied. I had to slow down, stop over-managing. You can get out of synch if you want to do everything so rapidly that you do not leave enough time to heed the effects of decisions that play out on a delay. So now I am at 11,000 and everything is in the green, solid income, expenses under control and population numbers on a solid uptick. The "death wave" issue is interesting. It is disconcerting to see those skull and crossbones crop up in batches when there appears to be no apparent cause, same goes for waves of building abandonments and garbage pileups. As I said, I think I have to be patient and assess the eeffectsof my actions as they manifest themselves over time rather than get too far ahead of myself. Thanks again.

 

[barrygreybeard]

Glad to hear it's picked up! But that's only until next time

 

[novapaddy]

Your problem is absolutely familiar to me too. BUT I found the solution.

The last thing I would do is start bulldozing lots of stuff, as I think it can really mess up your game. I did that, messed it up and had to go back to an earlier save and take a totally different track.

So anyway THE SOLUTION: There is a mod, it is a 6 x 1 park, tiny little mod, tiny little park WITH HUGE EFFECT. It makes your citizens very happy, almost immediately. Because it is so small, you can place it in all those tiny plots that are too small for anything else. Watch those red colours change to that bright blue, happy colour.

Last night using this mod, I turned my game around again, was losing citizens, lost 5,000 over an hour or so, remembered the little park, and was soon back up in numbers, gaining 400-500 every turn...,