Natural Resource industries vs Offices

[krutik]

What's the point of having industries that use up natural resources when you can just plop more office areas? In my city I have two MASSIVE office districts, one with IT specialization and the other with no specialization, but there is almost always constant demand for more industry. With the normal industries you can't make them too big because you get traffic problems, but with offices I don't have that issue because there are not many trucks going through these office districts. When I first started I had farming and deforestation industries and had some issues with traffic, but never had issues in office areas

[M.S.Referee]

Normal office need 'Goods' product. And normal industries produce 'Goods'. Specialization industries don't product 'Goods'.

[me22ca]

Offices are certainly easier, since they produce almost no traffic.

I believe industry allows for a higher density of jobs, though -- whenever I'm using offices it feels like I need like 5x as much office as residential in order to employ everyone.

[krutik]

Originally posted by M.S.Referee:

Normal office need 'Goods' product. And normal industries produce 'Goods'. Specialization industries don't product 'Goods'.

Is there a way to know what your city exactly needs? I have two small industries specialized for forestation and farming, but no normal, non-specialized industry to produce "goods". There's no indication that any of my offices need any "goods" so far, the only issue I've come across is these offices not having enough buyers which I fixed through commercial zones. Idk if I am supposed to be building more normal industry but there is no indication that tells me to

[M.S.Referee]

I forgot to say Specialization Office produce 'Goods'. So you need more normal commercial to let them sell to. Or you need build more warehouse and set to 'Zoned Industry – Goods'.

Specialization commercial need Specialization farming product.
(Specialization farming product: Food, Specialization Forestry product: Lumber, Specialization Oil product: Petrol, Specialization Ore product: Coal)

And you need to know, what type of Specialization industries, commercial, office you have built, and you can only assess the needs yourself based on these built factories.

[Avanya]

Specialised industries produce the raw materials generic industry uses to make goods, which are in turn used by commercial. Offices do not need goods. The regular offices just provide jobs, while the IT offices produce some goods.

You don't technically need industry in your city, and if you have enough IT offices, you can supply your commercial with that. But if commercial needs more goods, they will import instead, which costs them more than local goods would, meaning less tax for you.

You can use the "Outside Connections" info view on the panel on the left to see which buildings import (or export) to see if you are fulfilling your city's needs locally or if some import is needed.