Zones ratio

[SsStranger1]

What should the commercial:industrial:residential ratio be? i always did 2 houses per 1 indu and commerical in simcity

[grapplehoeker]

Firstly, forget everything you learned in Simcity. It does not apply to Cities:Skylines.

Secondly, you have to remember is that you are the city builder and ultimately you decide what you should build. This means you should only treat the RCI demand meter for what it is... an indicator of demand. This means you should treat it as a means to tell you what is possible to build, not what must be built. This is where many new players fail by allowing the RCI to dictate to them what they build, and end up in a mess, chasing their tail.

Thirdly, commercial is the keystone for everything else.
Commercial requires consumers and consumer goods. It will import consumer goods which creates delivery traffic from the outside.
To help prevent import costs and limit the traffic to and from the outside, you can zone generic industry to supply your own commerial. Generic requires processed goods. It will import these which creates delivery traffic from the outside.
To help prevent import costs and limit the traffic to and from the outside, you can zone specialised industry to supply your own generic. Specialised industry requires raw materials and processed materials, which it will import from the outside if the natural resource is not present.
To help prevent that, you may use the Infinite Oil and Ore Redux mod.
You may use the Outside connection (Trade) overlay to monitor the import and exports. Using that information you can balance the different amounts of zoning required so that ideally you can reach a balanced state of zero imports and zero exports and yet all businesses' needs are met.
Think therefore, commercial>generic industry>specialised industry.
Commercial should be a lot smaller than you would expect. by limiting it, you not only limit the industry but also the amount of delivery traffic on your roads. This helps to keep traffic manageable!

As for Residential, ideally you need both low density and high density in sufficient quantity to fill every job vacancy with educated workers. Why educated? Because a well educated population brings many benefits and helps level up all of your buidings. Ideally you should strive for around 10% unemployment, which will ensure that your educated Cims will work anywhere, including vacancies that only require uneducated.
Something you should also bear in mind is that residential is your bread and butter. It is the prime source of revenue and anything else is secondary. So you should have a lot of residential and you should level it up to maximise your rent from it. I say rent because that's what the tax is... rent.

As for ratios, if you follow the above you may find that you will have something like at least 4 times as much residential as everything else combined. But don't think in terms of ratio. Build what you want and remember to build what you need.
I hope that helps ;)

[SsStranger1]

Thanks, getting 10k per week now. Doin good.

[Mister Dawg]

I realizing this is an old thread, my apologies. I found it very useful.

Hello Grap long time :). Very good info above.

I'm going to start a new city over the holiday. I want to maximize population - see if I can't do better than my old 600k city. I've learned a lot and it seems the new Industries expansion has resolved the Not Enough Raw Materials issue I used to run into and couldn't work around.

Anyway. Good points above on building what you want. So what I want is sustainable 600k+. Going to be flat and square. I see you suggest maybe residential is 4*(industrial+commercial).

Does this still seem about right, given this is an old thread?

Is there a ROM target ratio for commercial to industrial? I'm thinking that should be more predictable.

I will have all the new Industries - just part of the plan even though they aren't required for population. How do they factor in?

Any other thoughts for a large population? Not looking for mods... I'm going vanilla + TM/PE and a pedestrian overpass. Traffic management is key as you pointed out above.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Mister Dawg:

I see you suggest maybe residential is 4*(industrial+commercial).

Does this still seem about right, given this is an old thread?

Is there a ROM target ratio for commercial to industrial? I'm thinking that should be more predictable.

I will have all the new Industries - just part of the plan even though they aren't required for population. How do they factor in?

Hi.
Yup it's still applicable, even more so in fact if you're using the Industries DLC, since 5 star Industries do employ a lot of people.
The only thing, as far as Industries DLC is concerned, is that it's almost a seperate mini game in itself and not all of the regular Skylines rules apply in the same way. By that I mean for example, you don't have to hook up any means of public transport for Cims to get to your Industrial parks since they will just draw from the available work pool.
So, for ratios, as a rule of thumb for the basegame, I would still say RCI = 4:2:1
But, now with Industries DLC, I'd go further
residential 4-5
commercial 2
industry 1
specialised industry 0.5 (optional)
Industries DLC 1.5

As for vanilla + TMPE, if it works,fine, if not then prepare to ditch TMPE ;)
For 600k, your main concern will be watching for reaching the game limits, so if there's any mod you will have to use I'd suggest this one,
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=531738447
I wish you success!

One last thing that just occurred to me... keep in mind the amount of space you'll need to accommodate all of the Industries plus associated logistics for freight, storage and so on. It will need a lot! For example this 60k vanilla city... as you can see the area for the Industries above the main city is almost half the size of the rest of the city ;)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1564651679

[HardonCollider]

Be sure to raise taxes to milk your citizen's money for nefarious purpose.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by HardonCollider:

Be sure to raise taxes to milk your citizen's money for nefarious purpose.

Nonsense! I never raise anything above the default 9% and I don't fiddle with the budgets either.
As you can see, money just rolls in!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1564164483

[Mister Dawg]

Alright. That's different than 4X everything else combined lol. I was drawing that out and that was a lot of residential!

I'll shoot for 5:2.5:1.5, with mostly Industries DLC - to just pick some numbers.

Nice city layout there - very logical and well organized.

I don't tinker with the taxes or budgets either. No need to. However if I'm solely interested in building and managing infrastructure and population I'll turn money off all together. :D Still looking for that optimal layout that's the fun part for me.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Mister Dawg:

Nice city layout there - very logical and well organized.

Thanks, this was a concept I was experimenting with for Parklife and it just happened to work for Industries too. If you look carefully, you'll notice that the city is divided in two with those 3 Park areas in between the top and bottom halves... NO road access between top and bottom.
ALL of my residential is below and all of the commercial/industry is above. That means in order for Cims to travel to work, shop or play, they must travel via the Parks. This effectively makes the Parks a sort of tollbooth for Cims... and a very profitable one too lol.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1588046871
;)

[Mister Dawg]

Very clever!