I’ve heard some people say that to keep your industry filled you need to put houses on the trashy polluted land to drive down their value so uneducated/poorer people live there.
I’ve basically cut my industry in half and spent time ensuring that what core industry remained was level 2 or 3 and required higher educated workers. It looks like the game’s model assumes a growing up phase of industry followed by gradually eliminating it and replacing it with offices. It’s a pretty simplistic notion and something overall that I don’t like - industrial demand should be more flexible and potentially grow with the size of the city.
But once your city is highly educated, almost all or perhaps all of the yellow demand you see is for office complexes. At 75k population I don’t have any more industry than I did at 20k pop, but I have about 15x the office zones.
Or deliberately keeping your citizens poorly educated by having insufficient schools will lower the amount of educated workers. That’s definitely not the ideal route since your land values will suffer, your residences won’t upgrade, etc.
The game seems to see industrial->office as a developmental progression rather than two separate things to keep in balance.
Doesn’t work. They’ll go get educated anyway. Even if the schools are on the other side of town.
The developers are Finnish, so of course university is free. There should be an option to make the university really expensive so my dirty poor people can’t afford it. Commie bastards.
I tried something with some success. I have a little city, so industry should still be relevant, but I was having the same abandonment issues because of too few uneducated workers.
I started dezoning every abandoned plot. The result was the few that were left actually levelled because they were able to use the small pool of worker available.
Now I have to deal with the insane number of tractor trucks attempting to use my dirt farming roads. 
I had the abandoned-industry syndrome and the no-workers alerts. I think the two things that were driving it were: too far to commute, and office “industry” zones consuming the industry demand.
I added a swath of high-density residential right in the middle of my industry zone, and it seemed to fix everything. I can’t vouch for the life-expectancy of my indentured-tenement-sweatshop victims however. Maybe I’ll give them a nice park.
What’s the advantage of using ramps (on the highway tab) as opposed to one way two lane roads to connect highways?
Ramps have a higher speed limit.
I did something similar, and it helped temporarily. After a few weeks, though, they all went to work somewhere else.
I really enjoyed one mod I picked up. Tiny Parks. 4 squares, and is a huge help to happiness.
Now I want to find a 4 lane road with no median in the middle.
Ah. Not to mention people tend to associate those jobs with “commercial” from SimCity.
So which zone is best for creating high-rise office towers? I assume Office even though I don’t seem to have any.
Office will generate high rises if you level up your buildings to level three.
How much of a hassle is it to go from low industry to advanced industry? Low industry is usually pollution and undesirable and so usually best put at the outskirts. Things like law firms, publishers etc are (in the real world at least) best situated in the center of the city. So, how is that handled? Do you get international law firms with their HQ in the suburbs?
I heard it was rather easy as a game. Is it so?
Roundabouts: Everywhere, or nearly everywhere?
Here’s a Reddit post by an alleged city planner (convincingly) explaining traffic patterns.
The roundabouts are huge, at least to how I build. One would cover 3 city blocks 
You don’t get advanced industrial until a bit into the game. I wouln’t say its a hassle at all. Lay them out, they will eventually grow.
In real life I have no problem seeing how this works, but it isn’t how it seems to work in-game. I find that I’m having the best success at traffic using only highways, offramps, and then the most basic two-lane roads. Vehicles don’t do traffic-light stops at connections, they just go, which does mean delays while they bump into each other a bit… but it’s still far faster and causes less traffic build-up than replacing them with four- or six-lane roads.
A quick experiment - I timed an exporting truck going from the farthest end of my industrial district to reaching the edge of the map. With normal 2-lane roads, it took 1m30. Changing nothing but altering the main route up to the highway ramp to 4-lane roads and spooling time on a bit, it took 3m55. The same again but with 6-lane roads - I got bored at 4 minutes, by which point it hadn’t even got out of the industrial district yet. Both changes also backed up the traffic coming into my city, too.
I’m not struggling at it and I suck at sims so take that for what it’s worth.
Of course, there’s a difference between creating a vibrant metropolis clicking like clockwork and derping around in the world’s most disorganized suburb. And I have seen posts from people who seemed to have some issues although I think those are mainly because of the lousy “tutorial” and info-sparse tool tips.
There’s also mods for infinite money and unlocks if you just want to play city painter rather than trying to build a working urban economy.
I have about 1200 Cims. Even with two health clinics and spending of 1200$, there are still lots who get sick.
My clinics are close to the residential zones and have road access.
My residential zone is not affected by much pollution.
My water intake is upstream of my sewage dump.
So, what gives?
I’ve never had any sort of problems with health, so I don’t know. I would guess you must have some sort of sewage in your water system even though you say the intakes are upstream.
In fact I’ve had such low incidence of health problems that I end up having maybe 5-10% of my health facility beds and ambulances in use ever. I end up placing a lot of health centers so that they have the green road coverage area (for service provided) but when I actually look at them, they’re usually using 0 or 1 ambulances (even my hospital in the main high rise downtown area) and maybe 1 or 2 patients.
In this case, I could get by capacity wise with only 1/10th of my current medical buildings (the one big hospital in the city center would probably cover it), but then I’d lose out on the benefits of areas being covered by services, right? What about ambulances? Will people die when ambulances have to travel too far to get to them?
Basically I’m asking if my strategy of placing medical centers all over the place so every area is covered by one is correct even if I’m vastly over-capacity on beds and ambulances.
Can someone please explain how to place harbours? Mine keeps saying I’m too far from a connection, with a red dotted line right to my bus station. Do I need to ahve a bus route going to the station, even if it’s for cargo?
You need a line of sight connection to an outside shipping lane. The red line is pointing to the nearest shipping lane, and probably goes through your bus station by coincidence; it will be red unless there is line of sight, at which point it will turn green. Not all maps can have harbors; to tell, go to your region view (the “world” button in the lower left) and click on each of the tiles. I will tell you what sort of connections you have. Or you can look at the data for whatever map you used in the main menu. They should all have information regarding connections.