Spac3y wrote:Well Circa 27 years in and the population of this city for example has only gone up by 250K people
Plenty jobs going
Only 16K people imgrating a year
First of all, the Quality of Life (QoL) in your city isn't very good, From the looks of individual ratings, I would imagine the civic building location convenience (coverage) and supply/demand indexes for most civic buildings aren't very good (in my city, QoL is nearly 100, at least above 95 the whole time). QoL affects the natural growth rate a lot (comparably, in your graph, the natural growth rate is negative 1.12%, only immigrants pull up population growth). Also the city needs to have higher real wage rate comparably to other cities (I feel this somewhat important, but not indicating in the tooltip, health economy status affects immigration, like I have constant booming for decades the whole time, while in your city, it's in recession, GDP needs to be growing all the time to keep good economic status).
Second, the job opening really isn't that high either (due to excessive media buildings to provide jobs in your city than due to high industry competitiveness perhaps?), in my city the job-opening is at the level of hundreds of thousands due to very high industry competitiveness. Also in your graph, the job opening is only recently shooting up (even start to trend down). I feel there's some kind of a delay affecting immigration with various factors, it won't go up immediately, but slowly changes its tendency overtime (like utilization changes I suppose). Besides, there seems to be certain random fluctuations in immigration (like the stock market price fluctuations), I can get a 50k growth the previous year, 90k this year, and then 70k the next, but on average it's 70k.
Third, the supply for residentials in your graph shows it just barely meets the demand. (You can even see in your graph the immigration started to go up the same time unemployment dropped to 2% all the way to 45k, but slowly went down as the supply of apartments dried up). I feel there's a need to have at least the amount available equivalent to the intended immigrations, and new apartments' overall rating need to be good enough for immigration to rush in (like I would put them at most 80% to current market rent price, and have good access to civic and sport facilities). In my city I always kept the supply/demand index for apartments above 10, even 20 all the time.
I am not sure about the effect of policies to population growth, like consumer tax, I keep it at 0% to promote consumption, even lowering the individual income tax, as well as corporate profit tax. However, I feel they are not directly affecting population growth, but more indirectly strengthen the economy and in term better GDP, and higher income, better QoL, more government income for civic buildings, etc. In the very late game when I have 25 universities with full 3 million budget each, promoting all product classes, the government spendings are extremely high, especially in education.
And finally be aware of the power of exponentials. Like compound interests, a slight difference in population growth over time greatly affects how fast it reaches certain benchmark (like in your graph there are even some years with very little, even negative population growth, with "emigration" to pull down growth for many years). Just do a calculation of (1.02)^30, and (1.03)^30, the first one of 2% growth only reaches 1.8 times of the original value in 30 years, but the latter one with 3% reaches 2.4 times in the same period. With just a few improvements from the start, the later difference is significant.
But would still expect cities to grow alot quicker.