Industrial Zoning within a designated Industry Area

[Captain Australia]

This strikes me as a bit weird, if I've misunderstood maybe you could educate me ?

I see a massive stretch of fertile land, so with the new Industries DLC I designate that as a "farming area", and call it ... let's say "Sunny Acres".

Within that Industry Area, I can plop down all of these production specific buildings, they'll make me revenue, require transport/export/whatnot .. I get all that. (I like that the farmland can actually be set up to look like proper farm areas, as the farm industry zones pre-Industries DLC were pretty bad IMO).

What I find weird is ... if I zone industrial within the designated farming area, it seems to default to "generic industrial" .. like .. polluting factories making widgets ... instead of farming-specific industrial (farmer's markets and other such).

I've realised I can designate DISTRICTS within the farming industry AREA, and that industry zoning within a DISTRICT that I allocate to farming (all within the overall farming area) will have the farm theme.

It just seems strange & roundabout, I don't understand why all the industrial zoning within an industry area wouldn't default to the corresponding industry ....

Setting up districts within the industrial area allows me to work around it, but it's a bit tricky, and can result in overlapping district/area names, weird hard to differentiate.

Am I missing something ?

[Zourin]

Industrial Zoning is a different layer than District Zoning, and the two can overlap. It sounds like you didn't create a generic district in pre-DLC fashion using the basic district tool, then toggling for basic agricultural/farming specialization. Non-Industries gameplay hasn't changed.

Something to note is that Pre-DLC 'specialized' yellow-zoned industry buildings do not provide resources for the DLC Factories. Those farms don't generate or process the "crop" resource, they produce consumer goods for commercial zones/export and are taxed based on their level. The DLC is more like 'state sponsored' factories, since their profits go straight into the city budget. If you build NO farms, but build an animal pen, the factory will seek to import 'Crop' resources from off grid (better still, a warehouse that's stockpiling imports from off-grid). That's how oil/ore industries can sustain production long after the area has run dry.

That said, you probably want some generic and specialized industry just to meet commercial demand, because DLC factories take a long time to ramp up and don't even begin to serve consumer demand until you can construct final-tier goods like Furniture. Without them, commercial districts will have to import goods via a billion hotdog vans coming through your interstate exchanges and railroad depots.