How to stop citizen education from sending my blue-collar industries into decline?

[Co Starring]

I think there are a few mechanics that could use a little tweak.

There needs to be a variation in max age (like in really real life, not everyone get's to be as old as the next.)
And there should be an "education limit" as well. Not everyone has the capacity to go to university.
And not everyone needs to go to university (I don't need a PhD to become a carpenter or a bricklayer for instance)


(A separate topic, but touching this one,is better interconnection between (specialised) Industry & Commercial (Offices need paper (wood), Commercial need food stuff etc (farming) etc.)
This would make/keep more variation in industry.
Doesn't work very good if everyone is a Doctor (degree)

 

[ReginaRC]

I think there are a few mechanics that could use a little tweak.

There needs to be a variation in max age (like in really real life, not everyone get's to be as old as the next.)
And there should be an "education limit" as well. Not everyone has the capacity to go to university.
And not everyone needs to go to university (I don't need a PhD to become a carpenter or a bricklayer for instance)


(A separate topic, but touching this one,is better interconnection between (specialised) Industry & Commercial (Offices need paper (wood), Commercial need food stuff etc (farming) etc.)
This would make/keep more variation in industry.
Doesn't work very good if everyone is a Doctor (degree)

Sometimes I think about this in the realm of real world education and you're right, not everyone should go to college but at the same time I understand the simplification of the system. Obviously when we start our cities we don't have any educated Cims so as such they can work in generic industry or farms and timber. Granted, many modern-day farmers get college degrees and I'd hate trying to run a tree farm without some education in horticulture but the place where my hubby works is owned by a high school graduate and not a single person who works there went past high school in their education so I like to think about the timber and farming as the two industries that hire people right off the bat based on experience rather than education but later they can't find enough experienced workers so are forced to hire educated Cims instead, and this is why it takes so long for those jobs to be filled.

I have seen in my own cities where someone just up and died very shortly after my city started. It was the weirdest thing in one of them, I'd barely got some housing in, a few industries started and a few stores on Main Street when I noticed the death icon above one of the stores. Sure enough, someone had gone shopping and keeled over. There was no way they could've died of old age in that short amount of time. It would only seem natural if sometimes they died of something other than old age.

 

[Co Starring]

Sometimes I think about this in the realm of real world education and you're right, not everyone should go to college but at the same time I understand the simplification of the system. Obviously when we start our cities we don't have any educated Cims so as such they can work in generic industry or farms and timber. Granted, many modern-day farmers get college degrees and I'd hate trying to run a tree farm without some education in horticulture but the place where my hubby works is owned by a high school graduate and not a single person who works there went past high school in their education so I like to think about the timber and farming as the two industries that hire people right off the bat based on experience rather than education but later they can't find enough experienced workers so are forced to hire educated Cims instead, and this is why it takes so long for those jobs to be filled.

I have seen in my own cities where someone just up and died very shortly after my city started. It was the weirdest thing in one of them, I'd barely got some housing in, a few industries started and a few stores on Main Street when I noticed the death icon above one of the stores. Sure enough, someone had gone shopping and keeled over. There was no way they could've died of old age in that short amount of time. It would only seem natural if sometimes they died of something other than old age.

"I understand the simplification of the system"

Me too. It is designed for a game. So it needs to be understandable for gamers.
On the other hand, this is supposed to be a simulation of "a realistic community" (town/city/metropolis) and most people are familiar with the concept of death.
The way the system in C:S works makes it looks like "mass suïcides" or "mass extinction" are a normal thing.
The current system doesn't feel right at all (even with the given that this is a simplification and a game).


"Many modern-day farmers get college degrees"

Indeed they do. Maybe I oversimplified my statement.
Modern farms require a bit more work than milking the cows on time and fertilizing the fields.
Health issues, environmental issues, animal welfare etc.
Even a farmer's son needs his papers/diploma/degree before he get's to take over the farm nowadays.

But some professions don't require a lot of theoretical knowledge (and therefore no real need for higher education).

 

[MarkJohnson]

I built a very successful lumber industry zone, with its own regulations, etc. and before too long it was thriving, exporting a lot of its product by road. However, once my citizens became highly educated, it appears to me that the jobs in the forestry complex were hard to fill and an ugly rash of abandoned businesses occurred, followed by what appears to be a decline in exports from this business. Oddly, my generic (purple) commercial sites are now exporting very well, even though I do not think they employ any more graduates (or maybe they do...) than forestry and the farm zone I built, which I would assume is also unattractive to highly educated citizens, continues to import effectively and thrive. Can anyone explain the logic here and advise if I am doing, or interpreting, anything wrongly?

Education is all about priority. If you don't have everyone educated, then educated cims will take office jobs first, then other educated jobs, then lastly specialized industry. It may take a short while, but as long as you have enough cims, they will find there way to work. You will just have over-educated workers.

I'd like to build another lumber commercial complex on appropriate land in another region, and connect it to my first one by a train line that will go off-map, hopefully to bring trade benefits to/from my city. Before I do this, however, I'd like not to repeat any mistakes I might have made. If over-education really is the issue, is it even possible to set a low education budget by zone (I do not believe it is) and if so, this is rather cynical social engineering, isn't it? I have deliberately chosen a sustainable resource to work for the benefit of my city but how is it sustainable if education (or whatever else that I am not taking into account) appears to kill it off?

It is a good idea to connect two districts together by rail. But you may want to segregate it from the outside connection. Just have two separate rail systems. one for connecting all of your districts together. Then throw in an extra an extra cargo train here and there to supply import/export that you need. This will free up your trains so they don't clog up your tracks.

Be careful on import/export. Make sure you aren't exporting too much. otherwise you are making too much stuff and causing excessive traffic. Watch your imports. This means you don't have enough and need to find out what you need to try to eliminate the need to help keep traffic under control. early game this won't be a problem, but late game will get out of hand and next to impossible to fix.

As always, many thanks for any guidance you can give me.

No problem, hopefully my advice will be of use to you.
-=Mark=-

 

[Co_Karoliina]

Citizens will always accept jobs with lower education requirement than what they have, and there's no negative effect in having highly educated citizens working in low or no education jobs. Ideally your city should have a low unemployment percent, not 0%, because then you can't easily see when there starts to be more need for workers. Citizens prefer to work at places that already have some workers, so they tend to fill up existing workplaces before any employees go to new locations. This might be the reason for it taking long for some new industry areas to find workers, as the old industry areas can lose workers due to the workers aging, and they will then hog all the new employees instead of letting them go to the new industry area.

There actually is randomization in the dying age of citizens, but it might currently be so small that it's hard to feel it having an effect. Small "death waves" are something that can create interesting situations in a city, but naturally they should not be something that makes your whole city go crazy.

 

[apd1004]

I've realized after a couple hundred hours playing that immediate reactions to "negative" things in this game can cause major problems down the road. The negative things you are experiencing right now in most cases took a long time to develop. To illustrate, death waves are caused by a combination of massive spamming of residential areas at some point earlier in your city's life with current traffic issues that prevent or hamper hearses from keeping up with the demand. When you spammed that huge area of residential in one shot a long time ago to try to get to the next milestone, now all those folks are dying of old age at pretty much the same time, and the randomness of dying age that Karoliina refers to above isn't enough of an offset to prevent it from happening.

Same thing can be said with your specialized industries, which at one point were healthy and thriving but for some reason now they are hurting for workers and abandoning plots for lack of workers. Once this starts, the knee jerk reaction is to spam large tracts of residential to make up for it. This will start to cause unemployment to rise and then the new knee jerk reaction to that is to spam more commercial and industry to find a place for everyone to work. I understand the desire to build a healthy industrial system with specialized industries feeding the general goods producing industries. This works great up to a certain point in the game because this system relies on uneducated workers, but at some point you will need to shift to higher level industry and offices (which satisfy industrial demand but produce or use no goods at all). Understand that there are transition periods in your city development that will cause shifts in the employment/unemployment rate among other things. We actually need these transitions because we need to level up to get the higher tax base that an educated society provides. Once you start to add education, now you have to be prepared to transition from menial labor jobs to more educated jobs. This needs to be done in small increments, which many players don't have the patience for. The problem with specialized industry is that it doesn't level up, and agriculture and forestry only use uneducated workers, and once commercials and general industries start to level up they will suck up the educated employees which causes temporary vacancies in your agriculture and forestry. Everyone wants to get to that 100k city as fast as they can but this will most of the time be a disaster along the way. Let time make the adjustments naturally because like Karoliina says, it is ok to have over-educated employees, but as soon as a more appropriate job to their education level opens up, they will stop working the fields and head for the white-collar job in the city.

Just like in real life, moderation and balance is the key.

 

[Chyll]

While range may not really matter, and all the education level discussions are spot on... I do find I have fewer problems with getting/keeping workers for my industrial areas if I drop a bus line or two to them from residential areas. As an example, I had a successful industrial area nearly collapse from workers abandoning it after a larger investment into offices in the shiny new downtown. With few other residential changes I set up two bus lines into different parts of the industrial area, and the factories returned to a productive state.

I think it simplifies the planning of the Cims on how to get to their chosen work. But that is merely a theory.
The upshot is it let me get to work on finding a longer term solution, as apd1004 rightly discusses above, before rushing to continue my office expansion.

 

[Cropper]

Citizens will always accept jobs with lower education requirement than what they have, and there's no negative effect in having highly educated citizens working in low or no education jobs. Ideally your city should have a low unemployment percent, not 0%, because then you can't easily see when there starts to be more need for workers. Citizens prefer to work at places that already have some workers, so they tend to fill up existing workplaces before any employees go to new locations. This might be the reason for it taking long for some new industry areas to find workers, as the old industry areas can lose workers due to the workers aging, and they will then hog all the new employees instead of letting them go to the new industry area.

There actually is randomization in the dying age of citizens, but it might currently be so small that it's hard to feel it having an effect. Small "death waves" are something that can create interesting situations in a city, but naturally they should not be something that makes your whole city go crazy.

Karoliina,

You must be aware by now that massive death waves are occuring in everyones cities, therefore you must be aware that citizen aging is a huge problem. It is neither interesting, nor fun, nor realistic for every CIM to die within a very short window of each other. The dying of citizens needs to be modified much more dramatically to slow or stop the death waves. There needs to be a better mechanic other than "just zone super slowly so people all arrive at different intervals". That is a workaround to what I consider a bug, not a fix.

In combination with the horrible hearse pathfinding, these death waves literally wipe out entire cities, which again is not fun, realistic, or interesting in any way. It does not ADD anything to the game, and in fact detracts from it.

The workplace issue is another not so fun aspect of the game. You must be aware that people are complaining about this issue quite loudly. Why should we be forced to micro-manage our employment percentage, and wait umpteen years of game time in order for employees to finish using up every available square inch of office space, before they will even consider moving into specialized industry zones or regular industry? Again, not fun, not interesting, and makes it difficult to design really nice cities with a multitude of industries. We dont all want wall to wall office towers.

In addition, if I do wait umpteen years for the workers to balance themselves out again, and then I zone more office space later, the exact same effect will re-occur. Mass unemployment in my specialized industries as all my oil workers suddenly put on suits and ties and run to the offices. The nI have to wait another umpteen years for it to rebalance again. That is not a fun gameplay mechanic.

Simple fix : Don't force everyone to become a university PHD, and then dont force everyone to become an office worker first. Not everyone wants that in real life, not everyone can become a PHD in real life, and it is hurting the enjoyment of the game.

 

[JerkyJerry]

I know this has been commented on before but I just want to supply a specific instance and maybe you guys can verify the nature of the problem and advise:

You can try what I do
I only zone industrial (yellow) until I unlock the high/dense zones (I think 11k population?)
I then remove all yellow zones and replace them with the blue zones and never use the yellow zones again
I never zone/use farming, oil, ore or forestry. They simply are not worth the trouble of trying to get and keep cims working or supplying commercial buildings with supplies. IMHO they are just not worth the aggravation of having those specialized industries running out of raw materials, traffic, importing/exporting & acquiring and then keeping employees. IMHO, much like tourism this aspect of the game does not work at all at best works very poorly & in the end creates more issues/annoyances than any type of benifits it seldom produces.

What I do instead is play on maps that have the water capability to use cargo ships. Along with trains I simply import everything. In doing so I avoid all of the "education" issues. I also avoid all of the "death" issues that so many other players run into. I have 100% education and everyone works in an office or service related business. While I would like to use the specialized industries I would much rather keep my sanity while playing so I avoid the numerous pitfalls that industry brings.

Maybe someone will be able to make a mod to address specialized industry & tourism and fix them so they become compatable with the rest of the game.

This is just a suggestion that works for me. The game that I play is fun and far less aggravating than when I played trying to use specialized industries and tourism. It might be a solution for you if/when/until these aspects of the game are addressed?

 

[Kingman]

There is a mod that gives infinite resources for the specialized ones.

I think forestry and agriculture work well enough in vanilha game but ore and oil industrys run out of resources in just a few months....That mod fixes that


Though I still would prefer if instead of infinite, the mod author had simply extended the lifeline of them to 50 years or something like that.

Still, you can check that mod

 

[MarkJohnson]

There is a mod that gives infinite resources for the specialized ones.

I think forestry and agriculture work well enough in vanilha game but ore and oil industrys run out of resources in just a few months....That mod fixes that


Though I still would prefer if instead of infinite, the mod author had simply extended the lifeline of them to 50 years or something like that.

Still, you can check that mod

It still creates a lot of extra traffic. Specialized still needs to send its products to generic industry so it can make goods to send to commerce.

It is just much simpler to not even have industry and just import the goods. Traffic is already chaotic to begin with. Especially if you go past 9-tiles. It gets very overwhelming. I hate to see what happens to my city when they enable tourism. My city is going to crash big time. I better make sure I have a few million on hand just in case. lol

 

[JPGM22]

I think that residential zone should be divided in social stracta (also as residencial demand). It will made the game much more realistic.

 

[JPGM22]

And I think that if there are many undergraduated jobs available in the city, only uneducated works will want to live in your city. And it could be more challenging to the player, make an effort to atract rich people.