Are Offices Commercial or Industrial?

[Mr. Redlego]

Not sure as they are blue, but there is already an upgraded commercial building

[SugarSoap]

I think they count as Dense Industrial, I agree the blue colouring is a bit confusing

[Elrigh]

Offices definitely count as Industry. But they produce no goods which has influence on traffic and maybe on tax income.

[Blazur]

They're industry for highly educated cims. Unsure if they produce goods for commercial, however. They don't produce pollution.

[Monkerlotus]

i use offices almost exclusively late game, they make good money, they dont mess up traffic, they look nice, they dont pollute with sound or toxins, and they fill my industry.

[Randox]

They are sort of like dense industry. They produce no pollution, but also produce little to no goods. They also suck up more educated sims, like dense commercial.

[Brokenshakles]

Perhaps offices should be patched to fullfill commercial demand slightly, and should have the number of goods they produce bumped up.

[McWilleybury]

if this is true then they should patch the offies to a different shade of YELLOW! I mean come on; the building satisfies Industry Demand after all. The light blue of offices seem to imply they satisfy the commercial demand. Sloppy if true.

[Brokenshakles]

I prefer the cyan, actually. I still think offices should satisfy both commercial and industrial demand.

[Vercinger]

Originally posted by Brokenshakles:

I prefer the cyan, actually. I still think offices should satisfy both commercial and industrial demand.

The idea behind commercial vs office is that commercial is customer-facing and office is not. So commercial demands regular deliveries of goods and people travel there for shopping and leisure, while office has no freight input or output and no customers (aside from irregular business customers that aren't simulated).

Since commercial sells services to people who actually physically go there, its demand is only local, it can't be exported or imported. Whereas offices provide services that can be performed from a distance, and thus can be exported. So you can have a city with no industry and all the non-commercial jobs filled by offices, and you'll be exporting services and importing goods. On the flip side, a city with only industry and no offices will export goods and import services.

However, there's a caveat. There's a fair amount of office services which are impractical to import and export, such as accountants, lawyers, advertising firms, local bank offices, cable and internet company offices, tv and radio stations, newspapers, travel agencies, employment agencies, logistics companies, etc. So it doesn't make sense for a city to have no offices at all.

An easy partial fix for this would be to have offices give diminishing returns, with better profits than industry if there are more industry jobs than office jobs, and worse profits once offices outnumber industry, as jobs start becoming ♥♥♥♥♥♥ outsourced service jobs like customer support and telemarketing. It'd be even better to have a sliding tipping point based on population, so for small towns it would be most profitable to have lots of industry and a few offices, and for large cities the opposite would be best.

I imagine this can even be modded in, so we don't have to rely on the devs deciding to implement it.

Oh, and, of course, office zones should absolutely not be that color. I'm surprised they haven't been patched to orange or something already. It's been years.

[Rena]

It helps to think of industry demand as job demand. Commercial provides some jobs but industry and office provide many more.