@fireflyk64 wrote:

This video at 12:05 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuCoRKkNz9Q&list=UUlRib6ZoLLCcO0uV3uOMr8w&index=5 shows how many jobs a single commercial building provides. In the earlier version HalbyStarcraft seemed to think that each low wealth commercial district provided 1200 jobs (he mentions at 11:25). It seems that this number was changed to 400 in the new patch. This would explain why everyone's balanced cities are falling on their knees. If commercial provide 1/3 as many jobs before but sell the same number of goods, suddenly you cannot balance your city on commercial alone: if you have enough to provide the jobs people need, then they won't sell enough goods to stay in business.... and if you have few enough that the goods get sold, then people will go jobless--either way you lose. I liked having a R/C specific city and I'm sad that option is gone now. But at least it's *an* explanation for why "out of money" happens so frequently now.

First of all, Halby bulldozed a mid-wealth high-dense C which employs 400/200/70 workers while he relates to a low-wealth high-dense C which employs 600/100/10 workers. He got 1200 $-workers as there was (maybe still is) a bug where 2 nearby C's which upgraded to higher density counted twice in the population detail although there was only one building. So instead of 600 he got 1200 - this issues required multiple bulldoze-tests to get the numbers taken directly from the population detail statistics.

So far numbers seem to be the same as prior to 2.0 - at least I get the same numbers as before (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqH0vGdeE23BdDZOWmNOQzc3TUVmX0lnci00andGZ1E&usp=sharing... Moreover, numbers taken from the population detail statistics do not match (exactly) with the true values used in the simulation. So these numbers do not consider the shifting-system which occurs between 6 am and pm or vice versa. Moreover running $-only, $$-only or a mixture of $- and $$-cities end in different worker numbers. So an oil power plant f.e. should employ up to 40/12/4 workers a day while for a low-wealth only city an oil power plant can employ up to 21 low wealth workers a shift (so 42 per day); a $$-only-city employs 7 $$-workers per shift (14 the whole day); 3 $$$-workers per shift (or 6 the whole day) for a $$$-only city. If you run a mixed city of $ and $$-wealth, the oil power plant can employ up to 13 workers in total per shift. These numbers partly deviate from the numbers taken from the statistics in a strong way.

But you don't have to fill all possible spots to run those buildings. Every building including I's and C's require a minimum number of workers to maintain its service to the city - these numbers are reached on shift-change when the old shift heads home and the new shift arrives. The mimimum number stays within the building until they get replaced by the new shift - one by one. If not enough workers reach the employer till the end of the shift, the old shift (which now worked 12 hours overtime) will leave the building and force the building to stop providing its service as not enough agents are at work.

As you hopefully can see your conclusion is not the (real) reason for the OOM issue. What changed in 2.0 is however the behavior of buses going for stops that have most passengers first instead of the stops with the highest utility value (# of passengers + distance or distance + available space). This behavior can easily be examined by watching school-buses. With only a smal city, school-buses now collect up to 40/80 students (depending if school is ground or high school). While they do not have their maximum limit of students collected and there are other school stops with students waiting, they will head for the stop with the highest number (so every bus seem to follow the other buses). If a bus is full it will deliver its passengers to the nearest school and start collecting students again. This repeats till either all students are at school or 3 pm. Then all students are put into school buses again and they are dispatched to bus stops which have the highest number of free spots for students in their influence-area - and they will dropp all of their passengers at once! So 5 busses will dropp all their students at 2 school-bus-stops and force the students to walk to a "nearby" home - where nearby can be on the other side of the town. As school-bus-stops don't accept agents past 3 pm they have to walk, this differs from ordinary bus-stops where agents can queue up anytime resulting in a loop where a bus/streetcar takes passengers and throws them out at the next stop forcing these agents to walk to the next stop - which might be the stop they already came from. So the fix was actually no fix at all ...