After Dark's Elementary/High Schools has midnight classes?

[Azurespecter]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

 

[Cymsdale]

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill?

Sure, but I'd want it to automatically use zero budget in this case.

Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals?

Wouldn't have a problem with this either.

What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

I don't understand the question.

 

[k-59]

30-50 bucks? That ain't a DLC pal, that's a whole new game. That's why I'm posting threads like these, to make them sure they'll sort it out. Another thing is, the night and day patch Is just for cosmetics, but the After Dark DLC is suppose to give more depth into how nightlife works (which they haven't delivered yet).

So I hope you see the differences this time.

Again, the cosmetics are free. The actual DLC does add real features.

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

Those are good points. Really my problem is just how light up the schools are. I'd be fine with a purely cosmetic fix.

 

[Imsvale]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

School is one thing, homework is another, things maturing in your head a third. As long as someone goes to school every day, I'd be fine with education increasing constantly throughout a day/night cycle. Even while sleeping your brain is processing the day's events and learning. You don't learn just while you're at school (from things you did at school).

Of course determining if someone does indeed go to school every day is precisely one of the problems, given the half-simulated nature of the game. It's really up to CO what path they want to take on this point: Will they stick to statistical modeling and just let the effects tick away as they would, or should they start relying more on consequences from the simulation?

The alternative version where kids only learn while at school would also be fine, I'm sure. Easier to explain, even if some know-it-alls will still object.

Constant education sounds like it would be easier on the developers. As for the players, I already imagined a plausible scenario that fits with this, so I'm aight.

As far as the two-slider budget is concerned, it seems to me that a school should require a flat near-zero budget at night (= no interesting decisions to be made), unless CO can conjure up something interesting for schools to do at night that requires a player choice on how much money they want to put in it. (If the answer to the budget question is always the same, honestly, where's the gameplay?) Basically the game tells the player "schools are only open and active during daytime, so no night time budget for you".

What's more, CO has to decide whether they will commit fully to the day/night cycle, or leave it mainly cosmetic. School is just one aspect, albeit a more glaring issue than most.

 

[Disclaimer]

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

I'd prefer a solution that makes the night education budget slider actually useful, so that you'd do the obvious, close down schools for the night. But the way education works in game (to my understanding) makes this difficult, since then kids who would graduate during night due to ageing couldn't at lower capacity. A solution might be to only look at the day budget when calculating education effects and make daytime education more expensive to keep the overall price the same as before.

A quickfix might be simply to get rid of the visual effects, both lights and people traveling to schools during night. People would still be confused about budget sliders, but at least it'd look right.

EDIT:

Actually Imsvale just mentioned another aspect: A really optimal long-term solution would be pupils actually having to travel to school and only graduating if they successfully did so x times before the grow out of the age group for that school level. Then you could reduce night time budget to 0 (automatically ideally). It also wouldn't matter if they graduate during night when the capacity is 0, the check would be if they made the required minimum successful trips during daytime before that (while a certain % wouldn't even then graduate, having failed the exams and thus stay uneducated).

 

[trigorin]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

Since students' progress is absolutely not affected by the fact whether they have ever been in the school or not, I think we're speaking about only a presentation question (and a reason for generating traffic, of course). So visually closing the schools and sending students home would be more accurate to the feeling, I think. Everybody knows that schools are working in an abstract way in the background.

 

[Keltia_Vikinga]

In my opinion, closing schools and sending students home would be more accurate, indeed...
Time (dates in day and night running fast) has to be fixed since its strange to see dates without night or daylight...
cycle cosmetic only ? I hope not because so much could be in game thx to cycle if we dig this...

 

[draqsko]

This might also drop the land-value, though. This would cause buildings to get abandoned over night due to low land-value.

Since education is statistical in this game (it doesn't matter whether students can actually get to the school, as long as they're "enrolled"), it should be easy for CO to make it so that students don't show up for school in the middle of the night.

You might be right statistically, but realistically I've never had buildings abandoned overnight due to low land value. In fact, I never have any complaints about land value unless I demolish and re-network and rezone a large section of my city while leaving some buildings standing in that area. They will almost always complain about low land value until it gets rebuilt because as soon as you demolish everything around a building the land value drops to barren land value. Once the area is rebuilt even to level 1 buildings, the complaints about land value go away. The only time that won't happen is along a coastline with its higher barren land value.

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

I'd say standstill if no other changes are made. I've felt that vanilla CS resulted in too many educated citizens, the new policy helps on the university level but there should also be one on the high school level given it's capacity and range compared to elementary schools.

 

[Imsvale]

I'd say standstill if no other changes are made. I've felt that vanilla CS resulted in too many educated citizens, the new policy helps on the university level but there should also be one on the high school level given it's capacity and range compared to elementary schools.

Let's leave balancing education velocity out of it. This is for presentation logic. Balancing can be done accordingly no matter what the final answer will be to this question. With mods if nothing else.

 

[grizzycz]

Well, it has been always like that. Schools were running 24/7. AD day/night cycle only made it visible. Same with parks. I found it at least strange that all my parks are fully packed in the middle of the night. I hope this will be fixed soon.

 

[benzoll]

It is very simple: at night there are no schools, are closed.
Students should be 0 and be off with 2 lanterns lit at the entrance, for example.

This should not have anything to do with level of education and budget, and its mechanics in the game. If the game engine should continue, continue. But if someone clicks a school, students should see 0.

It's something simple that too attracts attention and is against.

 

[Quaade]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

In my mind, schools would still have cost associated with them at night, ie rent/taxes and perhaps a nightwatch to prevent vandalism. If this were to be changed, the budget should be reflected by a larger revenue in the day-time due to staff and other expenses.

In general I disagree with having to "close" the school at night, since no "budget" actually juggles schools this way. However, it should be visible closed and cims should not use it. Think people forget that budgets in real-life are not handled on a day-to-day basis, but visuals and function should be a thing. If a school opens up in the night, I´m okay with children enlisting at once and getting the modifier, in reality a school would take months to build and parents would already have enrolled their children.

 

[JimmiG]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

The changes should just be cosmetic (lighs out and no students hanging around the school at night). It's not like students stay in school 24/7 in the real world. That doesn't mean their education "pauses" when they're home sleeping. A school with 500 enrolled students will still have 500 enrolled students at night, even if they're all home sleeping, because full-time studies are not 24 hours/day but more like 4-6 hours + homework.

Think people forget that budgets in real-life are not handled on a day-to-day basis, but visuals and function should be a thing.

That's a problem with the day-night cycle being out of sync with the actual in-game time (one night lasts for weeks). So having stuff shut down during the night has a big impact on the city (because they're actually shut down for weeks), where as in real life everything shuts down at night and nobody minds. So it's better to just keep the simulation running 24/7 but changes the visuals to "fake" stuff shutting down.

 

[FourWinds]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

First of all, schools shouldn't be open at night. When's the last time someone said to you, "I can't talk now, it's nearly midnight, and so I have to get the kids ready for school?"

How should you balance it? That's your job mate; It should work!

If you make a day/night cycle that isn't only graphical, then it has to work - I personally think you should have made it graphical only. You can't just reflex patch it so education only works half as fast and the resultant ripple means that C and I are all shouting about the lack of educated workers. Also, if schools are not going to be open all night, as in our reality, why would you have split budget sliders, and are split budget sliders appropriate/realistic for all things.

This is still a great game, and my favourite, but you sure as hell have given it a good kicking with this update and DLC.

 

[JimmiG]

First of all, schools shouldn't be open at night. When's the last time someone said to you, "I can't talk now, it's nearly midnight, and so I have to get the kids ready for school?"

How should you balance it? That's your job mate; It should work!

If you make a day/night cycle that isn't only graphical, then it has to work - I personally think you should have made it graphical only. You can't just reflex patch it so education only works half as fast and the resultant ripple means that C and I are all shouting about the lack of educated workers. Also, if schools are not going to be open all night, as in our reality, why would you have split budget sliders, and are split budget sliders appropriate/realistic for all things.

This is still a great game, and my favourite, but you sure as hell have given it a good kicking with this update and DLC.

Some things in the DLC certainly seem odd or poorly balanced, but overall I'm enjoying it. It just looks a bit weird when your zooming across your city at night and there's a mob of Cims outside the school at 2 a.m.. It breaks the immersion because real cities don't have them. I also agree that a separate night budget slider for schools doesn't make sense since they should be closed at night.

Arguably parks have the same issue, though it depends on the park.

 

[Viljainen]

As I understand it most of the students never actually go to the school even once during their "childhood" (that lasts just a couple of weeks anyway). So there's no reason the education should stop at night, even if it means the students who are children during the weeks-long night never have a chance to show up at school. The separate day/night budgets for the schools are just unnecessary the way they are now.

Ideally I'd like to get rid of the sliders and handle the budgets using policies (which you can make either citywide or separate districts only). For example for schools you could have policies like

- Double class sizes (increases school capacity, small increase in budget, some students will fail to graduate)
- Adults' Academy (Allows adults to increase their education at schools in the evening, makes the schools run in the night)

 

[Sunsanvil]

For goodness sake night time school should be cosmetic only. There will be catastrophic repercussion if you start to mess with the underlying simulation. This dovetails with the other thread we have going about how day/night budgets makes no sense whatsoever.

 

[Greygor69]

We've been getting a lot of feedback about schools being open at night. I don't have any changes to announce, but as always, CO is listening.

I have some questions though that I'll put to you guys:

If schools are closed at night, are you going to be okay with your citizens education being at a standstill? Or should education just continue in the background, but no visuals? What if you build new schools, should the game give you coverage from that school as if it were run at max capacity?

I think what concerns people, at least from the threads I've seen both on Steam and here is

1. The visuals, people don't understand equal activity when night falls, even though night lasts for weeks.

2. Why the cost demand should be the same at night.


If the Night Cycle slows down education time because no one is educated in that cycle. I don't think there would be that many complaints. Most people find it pretty quick for people to get educated as it is, sometimes, too quick.



One thing I would say that for both this and other feedback, e.g. the lighting. It would be really good if, when the devs are ready and if they want to do it, to have a AMA or a post outlining the issues they want to address or are addressing.


EDIT: BTW I posted your comment over on Steam as well http://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/483366528900812982/

 

[Raz415]

What if you just allow us to set budgets to 0 during the night? Then we can just choose ourselves.

And also add a button on the schools for day/night, the same as bus lines have. Then we can have some schools set as "night schools" too.

 

[Garensterz]

I have always wished for Cities Skylines to implement real simulation of rush hours (including certain services). But sadly it's impossible at this time because of how the game works by day and night phases takes several days for it to switch phase. Which means it's might have negative impacts to the game mechanics or no impact at all, if they implement such things Because the night and day are mostly just for visuals and mechanics are still the same.

Maybe if CO changed how phases work for example, I couldn't explain enough but (not the day and night phase) the general end phase of the game where you get to collect your income, to make that longer and make that phase as a Day phase and the next phase as Night. So there still going to be a cycle of day and night, but now it's separated by two phases, which you can give different parts of functions such as Rush hours, service shifts, etc. I know it's too much to ask for the devs, but this is just a suggestion for the DLC to justify the title more.

I hope I explained it clearly lol.