I have been spending some time to-day and yesterday recalibrating the proportion of residential to commercial/industrial town ("city") buildings. This is an interim measure pending a full reworking of the town growth system in the code, and I have been adjusting only settings in cityrules.tab.
The recalibration has involved greatly increasing the proportion of residential town buildings in proportion to the commercial/industrial town buildings. This is because, formerly, there were far too few people to fulfil the available jobs and to act as customers for consumer industries in towns. This made it very difficult to make any use of the industries, which had insufficient staff to function and which demanded too little in the way of goods on account of the fewness of customers.
I have now committed the change, which should be available in to-morrow's nightly build. This change only applies to maps generated anew after the new version has been applied. It does not affect existing saved games.
One thing that is important with these new settings is to generate enough industry. I have been experimenting with how much industry should be generated for optimum results. To get sufficient consumer industries in towns (assuming that one is starting before the 20th century - I have not tested late starts and the numbers may differ), I recommend around forty industries per town. That is, if you are starting with a map with 10 towns, you should have approximately 400 industries. If you are starting with a map with 100 towns, you should have approximately 4,000 industries. If you are starting with a map of 400 towns, you should have approximately 16,000 industries.
In the early years, a large number of primary industries are needed to generate enough product for secondary and tertiary/consumer industries, which is why such high numbers are required. Bear in mind that the number of supplier industries are calibrated to the maximum demand levels of consumer industries, but the consumer industries' actual demand levels are based on the number of visiting passengers (i.e. customers), which is why the number of consumer industries in proportion to the number of primary and secondary industries might previously have seemed too low.
With these new settings, employer buildings in or within walking distance of towns now consistently have all or most of their jobs filled, allowing them to operate normally.
In the future, more sophisticated town growth algorithms will hopefully allow transport dependent growth to emerge naturally, but this is some way off at present.
I should be very grateful for any feedback on the balance of the pakset after this recalibration from players who have generated maps and started playing after the new settings have been applied (i.e., using a pakset downloaded after circa 0600h GMT to-morrow).