[pierreh]

In this post I document what I consider an anomaly in the Talaran cluster : an excessive amount of surface used by commercial areas. I don’t think that it is caused by the notoriously weak support of region playing. Rather, I think that the culprit in this case is the Colossus Addon Mod (CAM), that is demanding too much commercial zoning.

For too long during the development of the cluster I have yielded to the continuous requests for more commercial space, by zoning such space with abandon. The result is bloated commercial zones and an abnormally high number of commercial ‘jobs’. For example, this is the zoning of Marlande :



The commercial zone occupies nearly half of the constructible land in the city square. This is clearly too much.

When selecting a city to play, we see a little rectangle with the name of the city, of its mayor, and 3 numbers that indicate the population, the commercial ‘jobs’ and the industrial ones. (What exactly those last 2 numbers represent is open for debate, has already been discussed in this CJ, and the discussion is not over yet).

For the 9 cities of the Talaran cluster I put side by side the numbers of the population and of the commercial ‘jobs’, in the following table :



The numbers of the commercial ‘jobs’ are clearly excessive. In total they represent 79 % of the population. In one case (Arcens) there are even more commercial jobs than there are Sims in the city.

Only lately I have ceased to zone more commercial space in the cities, in spite of the repeated requests to that effect. Some commercial buildings are getting replaced by higher ones. But the commercial zones don’t grow anymore ; the population keeps increasing though, at a moderate rate.