I need help! My cities stall out at Busy Town ~ 3000 pop

[BulletSponge3010]

I am losing my cities at My cities grow fine until they hit that point. Then they start dying. I grow slow, and add small sections according to the RCI indicator. Traffic is good (80%+) with no really red areas. All services are covered. Happiness is high, and the only problem icons are workers and educated workers. I have both Elementary and High Schools in all areas (usually 3 or 4 each) and a Public library each set, as well as playgrounds and basketball courts for each set. That should be as good as I can make it. I also have a workshop university that is unlocked, and I use one or two of them. I also have at least two each of the Eldercare and Childcare facilities, as well as a Cemetery and a workshop Cemetery/Crematory. I have plenty of money, and that may be part of the problem. I use the 81 tiles mod, and usually unlock all the tiles at the start.

At about the 3000 population point in the game, I start to think about expanding into new territories. I usually pause the game to run the roads, and build the bridges, overpasses, and rebuild the interchanges. But I inevitably forget or leave it running to insure the expansion money. And then get involved in setting up the layouts and infrastructures for the planned expansion. When I look up, the RCI box is empty, and population is falling. At this point, I totally lose control. I can't figure out how to get back to growth. I build more parks, add more services, and bulldoze abandoned buildings...but nothing seems to work.

Any help would be appreciated.

[MarkJohnson]

you are building way too much and too fast

don't plop down any services you don't need now, except education. Wait until you get avatars over a lot of buildings before plopping the appropriate service.

Once you get in the green on money, put the game at x3 speed so it can mature faster, so your city will grow on it's own. Even then, you'll still need to slow down and wait for the city to mature at different intervals.

Early game, make sure service buildings are inside residential. If they are near or inside job areas (industry/commerce) they will level up immediately. But in residential, they won't level up until your cims educate themselves. So builds schools with each milestone bonus money, and build only roads and power/water to keep up demand. Don't mess with taxes, budgets, nor policies as they can change the behavior of your cims and cause weird side effects and make buildings abandon or cims leave town.

But never pause the game. Instead, let it run at x3 while building roads and such as you will generate a lot of money while constructing roads.

Just keep an eye on power/water and avatars over buildings. Also, education help conserve water, power, garbage plus prevent crime, fires, and level up buildings to make more money.

Education should be #1 priority.

[azamazz]

Do not depend in the RCI bar..
Make sure the the industry bar always higher than the comercial. And commercial higher than residential.

How to know the RCI bar is ok eventhought it is not in balance. Check you unemployment rate..if it is between 5 to 10%. The your balance is ok, you can build more industry or commercial depend on your RCI bar. You also also can do more residential zoning if you want to. But make sure unemployment does not exceed 15%

If it is below 5%, you definitely need more residential.

Fot service. just make sure you got some. dont worry about leveling up. But it will sure does help to increase the resident building.

So, want to to do if your RCI bar flatten. check your unemployment rate to know what you really need

[ThisHero]

I am starting a new city right now and one thing I never noticed before is my city hit a wall around 5,000 cims simply because I had not built a post office & sorting facility yet. And yes, try to limit large city projects until you hit at least 25,000 people and the money is reliably flowing.

[MarkJohnson]

I am past 10k pop without issues, and never had to do anything post office nor sorting facility.

Maybe you plopped something that enabled its requirement?

[ThisHero]

verrryyy interesting. yeah, the effect was immediate for me upon plopping the post office. do you have access to the post office stuff via dlc? its possible if you dont have the relevant dlc its not factored in.

if you do have the relevant dlc then... im flummoxed.

[MarkJohnson]

Yes, everyone has post office. But if you plop the post office and you own the DLC it is tied to, then you may need to plop the sorting facility and/or other related DLC?

Yes, I do own all DLC, but I don't use hardly any of it. I find it makes you do stupid stuff you don't want to actually do.

[BulletSponge3010]

Thank you all for your responses. I had plenty of cash ($200k +) and better than $3K/week coming in, so having all the services and amenities was not a problem. Then I remembered a trick Biffa mentioned in a Youtube video early on. He said for quick cash, max taxes until people start leaving. What if I reversed the trick? I was taxing at 12%. I dropped all the tax rates to 3% and ran a deficit for a while, relying on my big cash reserves. People came flooding back, and taxes are now up to 10% and I making $8k/week and my population is 8.6k and growing at 150/week. That appears to have solved my problem. Sort of the reverse of Biffa's max the tax to make quick cash. I had the cash, what I needed was people. Problem solved.

[Liralen]

Glad to hear that worked.

However, I've had no problem getting above 3k pop, despite being a newb myself. I bought the game at release, then abandoned it. I've played SimCity since it was released too, so I got tired of trying to fix traffic problems a long time ago, and so prefer the Tropico series, until the devs decided that appealing to Facebook gamers was the way to go.

Then Covid 19, and found that Cities Skylines has evolved nicely, except that it's still a solve the traffic morass game and the same solutions work, although much prettier than SimCity.

But gaining population (and lots of cash) is really easy if you watch Global Happiness, which I have no clue what it means, but I have learned that if it's positive, just sit and watch and let the city bake (at 12 % tax rates) until it gets into single digits or lower before reacting to RCI meters, unless one of them pegs.