Long time lurker coming out of the shadows. I love this game and decided to come out of hiding to i'd share some some of my experience and a major issue I've been running into. I have the digital deluxe edition and to unlock the Eiffel Tower you need 30,000 squares of industrial (that's close to 3 map tiles of industrial), at around 270k population I finally unlocked the damn thing.
Traffic was ridiculous on my major arterial roads and highways, as you can imagine with so much industry in the city. I had to rebuild highways, fix interchanges, try different combinations of roundabouts and frontage roads and a built a spaghetti monster network of on and off ramps to keep from the lorries from plugging up my road networks.That was a blast btw, love that aspect of the game. I had to budget for a ludicrous amount extra fire departments (and free smoke detectors) because industrial building catch fire at an absurd amount, and because industrial traffic blocks most of my fire trucks. It wasn't always helpful and I was left bulldozing burnt down buildings.
To make things more difficult RCI demand had been pretty much flat-lining even before my city hit 200k population. For the last couple of days playing I spent most of my time watching Netflix and once in awhile peaking at my city to see if any demand increased, so I could zone a couple blocks here and there, pretty damn boring play experience.
That's my biggest issue with the game at this point, the slow growth I experienced after about 7 city tiles filled. I tried a few things to try to boost RCI demand lowering taxes for high density residential, tried tax break policies, more residents means more people needing jobs. Was there any change to RCI demand? Nada. It would take 30 minutes for a small area of high density residential I zoned to get built. I tried lowering Industrial taxes and offering breaks. Any demand anywhere? Nothing. It took about 4 hours last night of me letting my city run in the background to go from 29,000 to 30,000 industrial squares.
After unlocking the Eiffel Tower I felt relieved that this ordeal was over and now I could try to max my population on the city, and get those damn lorries off my highways. I de-zoned a small area of industrial hoping to slowly shift my city from an industrial city to a service city with more commercial and offices. I thought some of my demand issues were a result of my workers being highly educated and overqualified for a lot of the industrial work I was forcing on them. But demand remained flat and after about an hour I got frustrated and I thought, "i'll force my citizens into these goddamn offices" and de-zoned a whole district of industrial. My unemployment went from 3% to 13%. My cims needed jobs but there was still very little CI demand. I have an educated population and even at 1% taxes on offices I can't get these cims to take cushie office jobs.After another hour of no demand or growth I shut down the game in frustration.
Anyone else with a big city having these RCI demand issues? I have low crime, excellent service coverage including mass transit options, low taxes and I can only get a small trickle of RCI growth. It would take years to re-zone my industrial to office and max out my population at this pace.
.
