This game is making my year :O
Currently on scenario 4 and I have some questions about aspects of the game I still seem to not grasp. Wall of text, I know...
With about one a half year remaining before the deadline (playing on normal difficulty), I have yet to reach 40k population, being at 32.5k...but the housing demand has peaked at 100% and suddenly no more house buildings are spawning (while the prior period saw 2k inhabitants earned in just two months). On top of that, some "residential demand is getting lower" warnings are popping up, which I fail to understand how to interpret: is it something ADDITIONAL to the lack of demand or it is just a reminder of the situation?
What I tried to do was mostly placing public buildings near the cities as they are suggested in the description of housing complexes, but that doesn't seem to have improved the situation after two game months.
I also planned for a mega loan to use the bullet train to improve the economy (stagnant this fourth year) but there seems to be literally no spot in the map near cities where I can place it, and being a station wouldn't it be useless to be placed in the middle of nowhere?
All towns are reached by some railways and have a good (?) amount of passengers, access to materials and a bus system in place, placing stations outside cities seems stupid given that the AI doesn't build if there's no housing to begin with.
tl;dr: what do I have to do to combat the lack of housing demand? Or do I have to build houses myself all the way through 40k and someone will inhabit them?
One more small related question would be: how do I interpret the colors in the depot subsystem? Red obviously means not buildable zones, yellow should mean zones with no resource available, but what about blue, green (with...varying shades? I'm colorblind so I'm not sure) and no color at all? They are probably guiding in the development of the city but without understanding them it's all useless.
Thanks in advance to whoever helps me, as Gaf is probably the only place where I could ask that, even the Steam discussions seem kind of empty for this
And to anyone who loves simulators and still didn't consider this: BUY IT NOW, on 3DS or Steam doesn't matter, a real gem.