This page says they are industry:
That’s really bad interface design. If you’re going to color code your demand, and then match it by color coding your zones that same color as the demand… who would assume blue offense space = yellow industrial? I’ve been building offices to satisfy commercial demand and not quite hitting the mark.
And it’s apparently worse than that, since you don’t even know from the industrial demand bar which type of zone is in demand.
Yeah, I’m glad I read that now before I got too deep into my game. I had already rezoned some commercial areas as offices, assuming that they would be meeting the same general RCI meter demand.
Is there a downside to having overeducated workers? I often get the notice that my workers are over-educated in various industries and commercial zones. But all I’m doing is allowing all of my citizens who are eligible for a certain school the capacity to go for it. So eventually most people are going to end up as educated. Is this undesirable? Are you supposed to enforce some sort of balance and keep some of your workforce uneducated? What would you do to make that happen, just ensure your schools don’t have enough capacity?
I have heard (so take with a grain of salt) that yes, an overeducated workforce is bad. You need uneducated people too for industry (non-office). Educated demand offices, uneducated demand traditional industry. Traditional industry is necessary for some commerce.
The suggestion to sort this I hear was to have some low value housing near industrial parks. Don’t make all housing idyllic.
Maybe you can make a utopia of only offices; might be an interesting goal. In theory there is trade from off screen. Whether the game can allow support that I don’t know. If it can willing to bet it is difficult.
Day/Night mod incoming:
When you’re trying to place stuff, what does “height too high” mean, exactly? I’m trying to get a cargo terminal in a sloped area, and while I get “slope too steep” messages that I understand, I often get “height too high” too. But I could place it in an area that’s a higher elevation and the message disappears. So it doesn’t seem to do with elevation. And I’m not building it underneath anything. So what does it mean?
Maybe an elevation difference between the terminal and the nearest rail line? Haven’t seen the message myself (and only made one cargo terminal so far) and can’t find any references online. You could ask at the Skylines reddit.
Looks really cool. That said I assume it is cosmetic. While that’s fine I think what people really want is rush hour.
If I’m wrong and it does do rush hour I’ll be very happy.
Heh, on Reddit a former Maxis employee posted some mods he did. And a guy from Cities told him to watch the job postings.
I haven’t tried it yet but you can apparently import heightmaps from the real world here and make map locations of the real world.
Operation Make Shitty Neighborhoods isn’t going well. Even if the property value is mediocre, it seems like people still get educated if there’s capacity at a school. It seems like the only thing I can do to maintain sufficient uneducated people is to cut education budgets until not not everyone can go to school. Which seems pretty counterintuitive at best as a city design method.
I had a lot of industrial demand, so I built a lot out, but nowhere is getting enough workers and now I’m getting mass abandonment. This is the first time my city hasn’t been booming. I’m hitting a plateau around 45k citizens until I can figure out how to solve this worker issue.
I’m having similar issue in my industrial park. I might try building an isolated neighborhood near the industry that simply has no schools. Maybe if they have to drive a long way they won’t bother.
I tried this, waited a while, and clicked on some of the houses to see how they were doing. People are still getting educated.
On the other hand, my worker problem seems to have gone away, so I’m not going to worry about it right now.
My residential demand has flatlined again. Last time I was ably to stimulate it by adding lots of services, but everything is really well covered, so I’m at a bit of a loss. Huge industrial demand, but no residential.
Incidentally, there is a known bug where adding parks cripples commercial demand. Something to do with how tourists are calculated. Presumably they’re working on it and will release a patch, hopefully soon.
I haven’t been able to do anything to get my industrial buildings worked, even adding new residential districts will only temporarily provide a boost as uneducated workers may start working there (and I don’t know if they actually do, aren’t they going to school instead?) but it seems unsustainable. I hate to de-zone a ton of industrial just to keep my city from being blighted from abandoned buildings. Unless I essentially delete 2/3rds of my elementary schools and deliberately send my children to factories instead, I don’t know how I can keep the industrial sector growing.
At some point are you just supposed to start building offices exclusively? Transition from an industrial economy to an office/service one? Considering that industrial and offices don’t distinguish on the meter it’s hard to say. I guess I’m going to stop building industrial and build more offices.
It really seems, though, that rather than having everyone become educated if you have the school capacity that the sims themselves should decide how much education you have. Maybe only 30% of them should decide to go to college even if you have plenty of school space available. It seems like there should be a mix, and not everyone is on the track for high education. It encourages weird incentives in your job market.
Yeah, after an initial bump to worker availability, my industrial area is back to being desperate for workers. I expect some of these issues will be worked out in future updates and patches. You might want to give some feedback either on the subreddit or the Paradox community forums. I think the developers keep track of both.
I did solve my residential demand problem (it was unemployment this time), but the park/commercial demand bug may be enough if a game-breaker for me to take a break from my cities for a bit and wait for a patch. Maybe practice building interchanges and figure out traffic management in the meantime.
ETA: You might want to try industry specialization, which I think requires education. My forestry area is fine as far as workers go.
That’s a good idea with the specialization - I already do have a lot of forestry area though and they were still hurting for jobs.
I ended up eliminating about half of my available industrial area - just dezoning the whole thing and wiping it clean. I replaced about a quarter of what I lost with office complexes. There are very few places being abandoned and the employment needs seem to be getting filled reasonably well. The city is a lot healthier for it and has resumed growing, I’m over 50,000 people now.
Commercial demand has been higher than I’ve thought, since I originally thought offices were part of that. I’ve started building mall type areas with big clumps of high density commercial to meet the demand. Before I would usually just build small commercial areas near busy intersections and scattered throughout residential blocks, but I wasn’t quite meeting the demand. I’m not sure if the mall model is ideal, but it seems to work logically and aesthetically. I’ve been using pedestrian walkways - they really shouldn’t be under the decorations area, since they are more functionally useful than I would’ve thought based on their placement. Unfortunately you can’t retro-fit your city with pedestrian walkways everywhere without destroying a lot of valuable property.
The map editor needs more work for this to be practical.
I imported San Francisco and tried placing a bridge over the Golden Gate. It refused to place one bridge between the highest points. Instead, it placed the highway at sea level with bridges to the shore at either end.
My established industrial is doing fine. Industrial areas that have been around long enough to “level up” are now producing electronics, aerospace and other high tech stuff and require educated workers. It’s starting new industry that’s a killer for me. I made a ‘suburb’ of sorts out from my city with a agriculture district and a forestry district. Even with a ton of housing in the area, the businesses keep dying. I think everyone heads into the big city for work.
Could just need more residential though; it’s hard to get the balance right sometimes.
Also, regarding fires, I managed to have a traffic jam of fire trucks on a one-way street and watched several buildings merrily burn down.
I’ve been playing around withe the game a bit. It’s a bit odd how most buildings etc. are gated, but custom assets aren’t. Garbage dump filling up before you have incinerators unlocked? Make a custom asset identical to the garbage incinerator, except it unlocks when garbage dumps unlock. This doesn’t seem to disable achievements. In fact, you can make really cheaty variants of buildings quite easily. Yes, I went there almost immediately for some reason.
My first overall impression of the game is that it’s a happy medium between SimCity 2013 and CitiesXL. The latter felt sterile and spammy (though admittedly I didn’t play it very long), while the former felt too bound up in the limitations of its engine.
I’ve been too much in the habit of building in boring grids to maximize density; let’s blame SimCity 2013’s small plots. I feel like this game may give more leeway for sprawling freeform roads and zones. I just need to get the hang of things first.