Residential demand

When using Ploppable RICO Revisited, it's important to remember that building and district demand behaviour remains exactly the same as the unmodded game. The only difference is that buildings with larger populations will have a larger individual impact on demand compared to vanilla buildings with smaller populations.

A common experience is inexperienced players plopping down large RICO employment buildings and wondering why their residential demand keeps so high. That is nothin specific to do with Ploppable RICO Revisited, and would be the same if you replaced the custom RICO building with the equivalent number of vanilla buildings (quite often dozens, sometimes even hundreds, especially for office buildings).

Apart from the number of workplaces involved, the education levels required are also significant, and often confuse new players where the game is showing a high residential demand. A common scenario is one where residential demand remains very high because your city has a shortage of highly educated workers, but the population (and immigrants) don't have that education standard.

The mechanics of this are exactly the same as without the mod, and the same responses are warranted; please refer to your usual favourite guides on managing demand for more detail.

When it comes to managing demand, Ploppable RICO's gives you the ability to directly place buildings, which in itself is a very powerful tool in managing city balance - if you take demand into account when placing buildings (of course, one of the advantages of hand-placing buildings is that you can ignore the demand meter entirely when it comes to creating new buildings).

Note that players using mods such as Realistic Population 2 probably won't notice any difference when using RICO buildings; the underlying issue is really the unrealistic and poorly-balanced vanilla game population calculations, which are fixed when usinmg Realistic Population mods.

Residential demand example scenario

The education level of migrants to the city is influenced by your available residential levels; highly-educated individuals won't migrate to level 1 residential buildings, for example.

An example of a situation might be where you've plopped down a couple of RICO offices, requiring hundreds of highly-educated workers each. You see your residential demand bar shoot up in response, as there's now lots of extra unfilled jobs in your city. So far, so good.

Then you decide to meet the residential demand by plopping down some high-capacity RICO residential buildings and/or creating new residential zoning. Sounds reasonable, right?

However, if the RICO buildings you plop down are only level 1, then that doesn't match with the requirements of the workers you need for the new jobs. Similarly, that new residential zoning - well, all those new houses are going to spawn at level 1.

Which means that your new residential capacity doesn't match the new workplaces. Residential demand will stay high, and people will move to your city - but they aren't eligible to fill the jobs that are creating the high residential demand in the first place, so unemployment shoots up, and the demand bar stays high!

There are two main responses to this:

1. Place RICO buildings of higher residential levels, and/or
2. Educate your population, encourage buildings to level up with approriate levels of service provision and beautification, and wait it out.

In either case, you should hold off on placing any more RICO workplace buildings until the situation has stablized.