My City Was Abandoned in Record Time and I Think I Just Pieced Together Why

[pyrotechNick]

I just started using the Industry 4.0 policy but forgot to build a University. After a few months I got a warning that there weren't enough educated workers for my industrial section and within a week I lost 4/5th's of my population.

I'm 90% sure it happened bc I chose Industry 4.0 but then forgot to actually give my citizens any higher education. Oh well lol

[snowflitzer]

Good to know but I always build a Uni within 30k resident or even less

[MarkJohnson]

In theory, it shouldn't affect your population much. It may have put a few residential out of jobs. but that should just raise unemployment rates and lower residential demand. They shouldn't leave town from it. I have 10% to 20% all of the time and I've had over 50% unemployment several times without issues.

There is no penalty for high unemployment.

[Fart_Gas]

Originally posted by pyrotechNick:

I just started using the Industry 4.0 policy but forgot to build a University. After a few months I got a warning that there weren't enough educated workers for my industrial section and within a week I lost 4/5th's of my population.

I'm 90% it happened bc I chose Industry 4.0 but then forgot to actually give my citizens any higher education. Oh well lol

The Campus and Parklife DLCs, while I do have them, make this game pay-to-win. They allow you to turn university and recreation areas into profit-making ventures while still maintaining their other benefits. I often make park areas that bridge rivers and ravines so that everyone has to pay admission to walk across the bridge on their daily business.

[pyrotechNick]

Originally posted by snowflitzer:

Good to know but I always build a Uni within 30k resident or even less

Yo I only had about 6k population when this all happened, it caught me completely off guard

[pyrotechNick]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

In theory, it shouldn't affect your population much. It may have put a few residential out of jobs. but that should just raise unemployment rates and lower residential demand. They shouldn't leave town from it. I have 10% to 20% all of the time and I've had over 50% unemployment several times without issues.

There is no penalty for high unemployment.

I understand what you are saying. The rate at which my citizens abandoned was suspiciously high so it makes me think maybe there was another factor at play.

I'm wondering if it was because of the way I had previously specialized my industry according to the available resources. I had both Farming and Forestry industries and when I switched to Industry 4.0 I think a bunch of people lost their jobs right away without me noticing. I'm struggling to remember, but it just occurred to me that I remember having problems with Industry 4.0 before. I lost my town of Beavis so I will have to start over lol

[pyrotechNick]

Originally posted by Fart_Gas:

Originally posted by pyrotechNick:

I just started using the Industry 4.0 policy but forgot to build a University. After a few months I got a warning that there weren't enough educated workers for my industrial section and within a week I lost 4/5th's of my population.

I'm 90% it happened bc I chose Industry 4.0 but then forgot to actually give my citizens any higher education. Oh well lol

The Campus and Parklife DLCs, while I do have them, make this game pay-to-win. They allow you to turn university and recreation areas into profit-making ventures while still maintaining their other benefits. I often make park areas that bridge rivers and ravines so that everyone has to pay admission to walk across the bridge on their daily business.

Smart but does doing that not decrease citizen happiness considerably? If not then that ♥♥♥♥ is broken and I might just buy that DLC lool

[MarkJohnson]

You don't need to buy anything for the game to work. I do however highly recommend leaving taxes, policies, and budgets alone. Messing with them have both a positive and negative effect on the city.

This can sometimes cause cims to leave. Just leave taxes at 9%, budgets at all 100% and avoid policies. This will give you the most stable game and help you learn the game more quickly.

[buda atum]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

You don't need to buy anything for the game to work. I do however highly recommend leaving taxes, policies, and budgets alone. Messing with them have both a positive and negative effect on the city.

More positive, depending which ones. 150% on schools, medicals, thrash, fire and police increases capacity and coverage and reduces need for more buildings, while 150 on Industry makes them produce more so fewer generic industrial needed. On parks, land value is increased. But on trains, you'd be in for a long unmoving tracklock.

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by buda atum:

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

You don't need to buy anything for the game to work. I do however highly recommend leaving taxes, policies, and budgets alone. Messing with them have both a positive and negative effect on the city.

More positive, depending which ones. 150% on schools, medicals, thrash, fire and police increases capacity and coverage and reduces need for more buildings, while 150 on Industry makes them produce more so fewer generic industrial needed. On parks, land value is increased. But on trains, you'd be in for a long unmoving tracklock.

You're an experienced player. You have already figured this out over many game hours. You know to automatically set your budget and policies from the start of the game to fit YOUR playstyle.

You're Not an inexperienced players that wants to learn the game.

It's a much quicker learning the game by not adjusting the game and throwing things out of balance for new players.

[buda atum]

Originally posted by MarkJohnson:

Originally posted by buda atum:

More positive, depending which ones. 150% on schools, medicals, thrash, fire and police increases capacity and coverage and reduces need for more buildings, while 150 on Industry makes them produce more so fewer generic industrial needed. On parks, land value is increased. But on trains, you'd be in for a long unmoving tracklock.

You're an experienced player. You have already figured this out over many game hours. You know to automatically set your budget and policies from the start of the game to fit YOUR playstyle.

You're Not an inexperienced players that wants to learn the game.

It's a much quicker learning the game by not adjusting the game and throwing things out of balance for new players.

I'd say budget balancing is a huge part of learning the game, and not building more services than necessary helps a huge deal especially the larger the city gets. I do agree with your "inexperienced" though.

[pyrotechNick]

So just to derail my own post: I find it funny that it's being inferred that I am an inexperienced player when I started playing city building sims in 1993 with Sim City 2000. To me, this suggests that Sim City set my expectations on what a city building sim should be, and that Cities is missing a lot of core aspects that I expect in a city building game.

For example, early game in Cities feels like ez mode bc my Residential Demand Bar is almost always maxed out. In Sim City early games, you had to actually do things to make your city attractive before the residential demand bar could grow higher than a sliver. In this Cities, I'm not even sure what's driving residential zoning demand. To test it out I set taxes to some exorbitant rate just to see if res demand would go down. It didn't instead people just complained about taxes and eventually started to move out. But demand for residential zoning never went down. That doesn't seem right.

Another thing I enjoyed a lot in Sim City was starting my city in the year 1900 and slowly unlocking all the new techs over time rather than by population size. It makes much less sense to base new unlocks on pop size plus squanders what would have been a much deeper level of immersion. In Cities it feels like my town is stuck out of time, Thread closed lol

[VinceP1974]

Originally posted by pyrotechNick:

So just to derail my own post: I find it funny that it's being inferred that I am an inexperienced player when I started playing city building sims in 1993 with Sim City 2000. To me, this suggests that Sim City set my expectations on what a city building sim should be, and that Cities is missing a lot of core aspects that I expect in a city building game.

No one here is trying to put you down. In fact, the cross-criticism's motivation is that the help you're being given is the most effective.

For instance, the RCI Indicators in this game are not saying what you think they do. So SimCity mechanics might steer one away from what they're actually saying.

The Industrial Indicator is not saying more industry is needed. It's actually your city's unemployment. Jobs are created by Commercial, Office, and Industry.

The commercial indicator is not saying more commercial is needed.

This quote here is from the paradox wiki for the game:

https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Zoning

Commercial demand is a measure of two things. 

First, it measures the ratio of the number of citizens to the number of commercial workers. For 0 demand, there must be 1 commercial worker per 8 citizens. This acts as the cornerstone of the city's RCI ratio. 

The demand meter also measures the ratio of visitor spaces available, to the amount of visitor spaces unused. In other words, citizens ask for more commercial to be zoned, not only so they can work in retail (and not at all because of goods available to sell), but also so that they have something to do (go window shopping). 

Although it is commercial demand on the RCI indicator, this demand (which is actually a demand for leisure) can be fulfilled with non-commercial buildings such as parks and plazas. This old forum post discusses this dynamic, though patch 1.0.6b addressed any problematic interactions of parks suppressing too much commercial demand.

There are also subtle differences between this game and SimCity that are only fleshed out by many hours of play and experience.

[VinceP1974]

Using the RCI indicators alone, you might be at a loss for knowing when more residential is needed. You might look down there and see no green bar (and also no yellow bar) However, if you supply more jobs (counter-intuitive to there being zero yellow bar) people will suddenly want to move in. This is not intuitive by looking at the demand indicators.

[pyrotechNick]

Originally posted by VinceP1974:

Using the RCI indicators alone, you might be at a loss for knowing when more residential is needed. You might look down there and see no green bar (and also no yellow bar) However, if you supply more jobs (counter-intuitive to there being zero yellow bar) people will suddenly want to move in. This is not intuitive by looking at the demand indicators.

Yes thank you for doing a better job of summing it up. In Sim City, it was not only intuitive but it was immersive. Cities feels so one dimension in comparison. The goal in Cities is ONLY for you to make a sprawling metropolis. But in Sim City you were free to have any size city you desired, just like IRL. The level of one-dimensionality continues with Residential Zoning Demand. Here's a very specific example from Sim City 3000. In most early games in SC3000, the residential demand bar is only a sliver. But you can directly increase it by enacting policies that would make it attractive to live in your town. Things like: Giving residents free parking instead of installing meters and making them pay, or lowering taxes significantly.

Why doesn't Cities have a Legalized Gambling Ordinance? Why are there no Carpool Ordinances? No Free Shuttle Service Ordinance? I seriously question the focus and direction the devs chose for this game.

Here's an excerpt directly from a Sim City 3000 Advisor and Ordinance Guide that details how the RSI Demand works:

"Early on, Industrial demand is high because outsiders want cheap land to
build new industries. Once industry is established, Residential demand grows
becase Sims who work in industry need a place to live. Gradually, these Sims
need Commercial services so, over time, demand for the Commercial sector
grows.

Residential demand is usually equal to the aggregate demand for Industrial and
Commercial, or simply stated, R = C + I. Younger cities demand more Industrial
than Commercial, while in mature cities the opposite is true. Industrial
demand comes from outside the city, while Commercial demand is primarily
internal -- as the city grows, it creates more and more internal demand for
Commercial."

Sounds like they put the proper amount of thought into it, while I'm not sure wtf the devs at Paradox were thinking. I'm desperately hoping that Cities 2 will have more of what I want but if it doesn't have co-op play then I'm going have to legit make my own game....

[Professor H. Farnsworth]

Originally posted by pyrotechNick:

Originally posted by VinceP1974:

Using the RCI indicators alone, you might be at a loss for knowing when more residential is needed. You might look down there and see no green bar (and also no yellow bar) However, if you supply more jobs (counter-intuitive to there being zero yellow bar) people will suddenly want to move in. This is not intuitive by looking at the demand indicators.

Yes thank you for doing a better job of summing it up. In Sim City, it was not only intuitive but it was immersive. Cities feels so one dimension in comparison. The goal in Cities is ONLY for you to make a sprawling metropolis. But in Sim City you were free to have any size city you desired, just like IRL. The level of one-dimensionality continues with Residential Zoning Demand. Here's a very specific example from Sim City 3000. In most early games in SC3000, the residential demand bar is only a sliver. But you can directly increase it by enacting policies that would make it attractive to live in your town. Things like: Giving residents free parking instead of installing meters and making them pay, or lowering taxes significantly.

Why doesn't Cities have a Legalized Gambling Ordinance? Why are there no Carpool Ordinances? No Free Shuttle Service Ordinance? I seriously question the focus and direction the devs chose for this game.

Here's an excerpt directly from a Sim City 3000 Advisor and Ordinance Guide that details how the RSI Demand works:

"Early on, Industrial demand is high because outsiders want cheap land to
build new industries. Once industry is established, Residential demand grows
becase Sims who work in industry need a place to live. Gradually, these Sims
need Commercial services so, over time, demand for the Commercial sector
grows.

Residential demand is usually equal to the aggregate demand for Industrial and
Commercial, or simply stated, R = C + I. Younger cities demand more Industrial
than Commercial, while in mature cities the opposite is true. Industrial
demand comes from outside the city, while Commercial demand is primarily
internal -- as the city grows, it creates more and more internal demand for
Commercial."

Sounds like they put the proper amount of thought into it, while I'm not sure wtf the devs at Paradox were thinking. I'm desperately hoping that Cities 2 will have more of what I want but if it doesn't have co-op play then I'm going have to legit make my own game....

Then you're going to make your own game, 'cos CO is not adding multiplayer.