Not Enough Customers...but this time it's different

[CaddyShack]

So in my neverending pursuit of fixing all the issues with my expansive city, I'm now tackling one minor issue that's only recently come up in my city; not enough customers in commercial.

But there's a difference this time, and specifically only my commercial tourism has had calls needing more customers, and it's only started happening recently and in small groups of tourism commercial scattered across my whole city.

So perhaps I'm wondering...what changed? What went wrong? Did some algorithms change? Has the influx in new DLC like Parklife, Industries, and Campus affected them in some way, since I've only started adding Park Areas, Industry Zones, and Campuses only recently.

Historically, my city used to have the largest tourist booms, but years ago something changed when I changed my city up and the tourists dropped radically. This was perhaps all the way back to maybe even before Mass Transit, and my city had changed again to accommodate Green Cities, which caused my city different problems with trying to make money.

Could any of these previous factors be finally biting me back after so long? Perhaps I should work to remove some of the tourist commercial since it seems my city is no longer as focused towards tourism as it once was?

[CaddyShack]

Anyone have any theories to help me out?

[Aeidotronics]

I don't have any ideas for you, but I'm having the same thing.
I wiped a major tourism destrict to move and rebuild it.
The original large district was always full and fine but the newer smaller one doesn't get enough customers with only a few buildings.
Cims don't seem to use the nearby passenger harbor these days, either.
I think the new airport stole them all.

[~\\Savarast//~]

I find that when I'm at higher populations the game is -extremely- sensitive to swings in the RCI. Two ways I help mitigate this is by 1) expanding in slow and meticulous fashion instead of building large "fixes" to the balance and 2) let the city age and balance out naturally. Otherwise its a constant swing between "not enough customers", "not enough goods" and "not enough buyers"

Oh, and if this is your first foray back into Cities:Skyline since Sunset Harbor, there seems to be a much higher need for residential in general which is connected to the Eldercare and Childcare in someway it seems.

[CaddyShack]

Originally posted by Aeidotronics:

I don't have any ideas for you, but I'm having the same thing.
I wiped a major tourism destrict to move and rebuild it.
The original large district was always full and fine but the newer smaller one doesn't get enough customers with only a few buildings.
Cims don't seem to use the nearby passenger harbor these days, either.
I think the new airport stole them all.

Interesting you mentioned that the harbor doesn't get as much use as it used too, bc my passenger harbors stopped getting used as much as well. I have 2 of them and they raked in lots of tourists before, and it's connected to my tourist harbor area but I also have other minor tourist areas within my downtown and near my international airport where I also keep the space elevator.

Something turned tho and I did notice a decline in passenger harbor capacity, as well as my smaller airport not raking as many tourists as well and even the space elevator has brought 25% less tourists then it did too. This has lead to alerts on some of my tourist shops at the harbor, small airport area, and downtown as well as another area in the western side of my city not getting enough customers. The district where my international airport is hasn't had much problems raking in tourists.

[CaddyShack]

Originally posted by ~\\Savarast//~:

I find that when I'm at higher populations the game is -extremely- sensitive to swings in the RCI. Two ways I help mitigate this is by 1) expanding in slow and meticulous fashion instead of building large "fixes" to the balance and 2) let the city age and balance out naturally. Otherwise its a constant swing between "not enough customers", "not enough goods" and "not enough buyers"

Oh, and if this is your first foray back into Cities:Skyline since Sunset Harbor, there seems to be a much higher need for residential in general which is connected to the Eldercare and Childcare in someway it seems.

I haven't played since after I got Industries so I'd expect some changes to algorithms might've changed since then. I am currently tho working on adding more of those care buildings and I've gotten a good range of them around my city (well except eldercare which are huge buildings). The only other city issues that are more major are the usual deathcare and garbage, but I've grown used to these two and I can't really fix bad vehicle AI. I do need to add more garbage services tho. I do not currently have Sunset Harbor.

[~\\Savarast//~]

Originally posted by CaddyShack:

I haven't played since after I got Industries so I'd expect some changes to algorithms might've changed since then. I am currently tho working on adding more of those care buildings and I've gotten a good range of them around my city (well except eldercare which are huge buildings). The only other city issues that are more major are the usual deathcare and garbage, but I've grown used to these two and I can't really fix bad vehicle AI. I do need to add more garbage services tho. I do not currently have Sunset Harbor.

How large is your city? Also, if you are in the middle of a deathwave, that could be the loss in customers to a certain extent. If you don't have the "Large Crematorium" from the workshop I highly suggest it to help with deathwaves. Its not a cheat-y/cheesy building but gives a much needed boost to deathcare without 100 regular crematoriums. If you don't already, make sure you have transit connecting residents to shopping areas to give them more customers from potentially further away.

[CaddyShack]

Originally posted by ~\\Savarast//~:

How large is your city? Also, if you are in the middle of a deathwave, that could be the loss in customers to a certain extent. If you don't have the "Large Crematorium" from the workshop I highly suggest it to help with deathwaves. Its not a cheat-y/cheesy building but gives a much needed boost to deathcare without 100 regular crematoriums. If you don't already, make sure you have transit connecting residents to shopping areas to give them more customers from potentially further away.

My city sits at ~210k pop and I have both Citizen Lifecycle Rebalanced and Empty It! mods that has fixed those problems before; the amount of dead waiting to be picked up used to be much much worse, because when I first started my city I didn't really understand the mechanics of city building and suffered from massive death waves that killed off 100k cims each cycle.

As for my commercial areas, I set these up before I had Mass Transit, and when I did get Mass Transit years ago I made sure to connect these commercial zones to each other as much as I could, using every single available public transport to do it. So I like to think I do have these connections well covered by now.

[~\\Savarast//~]

Originally posted by CaddyShack:

My city sits at ~210k pop and I have both Citizen Lifecycle Rebalanced and Empty It! mods that has fixed those problems before; the amount of dead waiting to be picked up used to be much much worse, because when I first started my city I didn't really understand the mechanics of city building and suffered from massive death waves that killed off 100k cims each cycle.

As for my commercial areas, I set these up before I had Mass Transit, and when I did get Mass Transit years ago I made sure to connect these commercial zones to each other as much as I could, using every single available public transport to do it. So I like to think I do have these connections well covered by now.

Some people are reporting mass culling of the elderly post Sunset Harbor, do you have a corresponding drop in population? If not, your city is at the same point population-wise as mine, and I've only been able to mitigate the issue with customers by selectively building up residential near where the complaints are or thinning out the commercial density. If you have the Watch It mod it'll give you a summary of how many buildings are affected, I've come to accept a few disgruntled commercial zones instead of pulling my hair out.

Oh, and I stopped listening to the RCI meter. Its telling me I have a demand for commercial, yet I know for a fact that is not the case.

[CaddyShack]

Originally posted by ~\\Savarast//~:

Some people are reporting mass culling of the elderly post Sunset Harbor, do you have a corresponding drop in population? If not, your city is at the same point population-wise as mine, and I've only been able to mitigate the issue with customers by selectively building up residential near where the complaints are or thinning out the commercial density. If you have the Watch It mod it'll give you a summary of how many buildings are affected, I've come to accept a few disgruntled commercial zones instead of pulling my hair out.

Oh, and I stopped listening to the RCI meter. Its telling me I have a demand for commercial, yet I know for a fact that is not the case.

My city post-SH has been having the opposite; I've been having a steady, healthy increase in pop for awhile, even before the last patch. I can't say about the fate of the elderly but it never hurts to add more eldercare facilities anyway (currently sitting at avg age of 64 years). My recent use of Watch It mod has been the reason I started even noticing these numbers anyway, it really helps knowing what I've done wrong with my latest changes. The numbers for both death and garbage fluctuate between 20-30 alerts so I can at least live with that; numbers for the commercial tourism alerts are even lower than that but it's nice to know if I should begin removing some of these old tourist areas should it get worse. I haven't added any new tourism nor leisure commercial tho since.

[~\\Savarast//~]

Originally posted by CaddyShack:

My city post-SH has been having the opposite; I've been having a steady, healthy increase in pop for awhile, even before the last patch. I can't say about the fate of the elderly but it never hurts to add more eldercare facilities anyway (currently sitting at avg age of 64 years). My recent use of Watch It mod has been the reason I started even noticing these numbers anyway, it really helps knowing what I've done wrong with my latest changes. The numbers for both death and garbage fluctuate between 20-30 alerts so I can at least live with that; numbers for the commercial tourism alerts are even lower than that but it's nice to know if I should begin removing some of these old tourist areas should it get worse. I haven't added any new tourism nor leisure commercial tho since.

20-30 death alerts! The one deathwave I wasn't watching the city for I got to 2300~ death alerts and had to go into full crisis mode. I think ~20 of pretty much any warning is normal for a city in the 200k's. I used to try to avoid noise complaints completely, but after a while I just rationalized "Hey -you- chose to live next to the red light district, deal with it!". Got some cims complaining its too noisy behind the museum across from a park. Where I live that would be called prime real estate...

You could try to slowly wean out some commercial zone nearest to the problem area and see if that helps? I also haven't really tested if there is a "commercial hierarchy" in that regular cims are less likely to visit specialized commercial and you -must- have lots of tourists for those types to thrive, maybe that is contributing? Sight-seeing buses and walking tours might also encourage cims to use those areas...

I should build test cities for these kinds of questions, but I get pulled into a city after building it for so long. This city was supposed to just test if I could be stable past 120k cims... then 150k... then I said i'll stop it for sure at 200k... and yet here I am at 220k and planning for the 300k milestone. My computer might melt at that point though, so we will see.

[CaddyShack]

Yeah I like to think that my city has been one long experiment that's still ongoing. It wasn't meant to be the city I would stick to for most of my play, and there are now much better maps to play on then the sad basegame map I started with, but I can't just abandon this city after all the years I worked on it, carefully managing all its problem areas; so I'm sticking with it and it's become my real passion to make this city the best.

I had just thought up of another possible reason for the complaints in commercial tourism; could my park areas have taken away more of the tourists? Since I know this issue only started popping up very recently and I have 2 5* park areas in 2 areas on opposite sides of the city, one of them I recently reached 5* on, I'm beginning to think it could also be a factor. I'm planning to start up another park area soon so if even more start complaining after that park area is finished, that maybe the real culprit.

[ThisHero]

How many tourists does it say you are bringing in per week?

[ThisHero]

Originally posted by CaddyShack:

I had just thought up of another possible reason for the complaints in commercial tourism; could my park areas have taken away more of the tourists? Since I know this issue only started popping up very recently and I have 2 5* park areas in 2 areas on opposite sides of the city, one of them I recently reached 5* on, I'm beginning to think it could also be a factor. I'm planning to start up another park area soon so if even more start complaining after that park area is finished, that maybe the real culprit.

Is that how it works? I always thought Tourism districts provided hotel and restaurant accommodations, literally temporary food & shelter for temporary people. From there the tourists go out and spend money visiting your landmarks, shopping at your stores, and visiting your theme parks/normal parks, etc. before they leave your city.

[CaddyShack]

Originally posted by ThisHero:

Originally posted by CaddyShack:

I had just thought up of another possible reason for the complaints in commercial tourism; could my park areas have taken away more of the tourists? Since I know this issue only started popping up very recently and I have 2 5* park areas in 2 areas on opposite sides of the city, one of them I recently reached 5* on, I'm beginning to think it could also be a factor. I'm planning to start up another park area soon so if even more start complaining after that park area is finished, that maybe the real culprit.

Is that how it works? I always thought Tourism districts provided hotel and restaurant accommodations, literally temporary food & shelter for temporary people. From there the tourists go out and spend money visiting your landmarks, shopping at your stores, and visiting your theme parks/normal parks, etc. before they leave your city.

I believe that's still how it works too, but seeing as these are all recent happenings this could be just some coincidence. It's still all theory at this point. As for my tourist counts, I'd have to go into my city and check back later.

[ThisHero]

Yeah. Well here is some data, it might help you narrow down your search.

In my 400K city I have ~5,500 tourists per week. I just checked how many tourists I was bringing in per week at 200K (like your city), and it was approximately 3,700 tourists per week. My tourist districts are healthy and without complaints, so if you're around that mark or even above it you can likely eliminate that reason.