So...Tourism? Where are they?

[Turjan]

Yeah, it's a difficult mess. I have enough cities with the bug, even some with only few custom assets (like the savegame I uploaded for the game limit research), but none before it triggered.*
It's probably a bug that is triggered by a combination of factors. The city has to have already a very high attractiveness value (someone said 1000). Adding the Space Elevator to such a city has been reported as trigger (I never tried this). Adding unique buildings with high tourist values was said to do this, also only with already high attractiveness values The only common point I see is adding a huge swath of tourists at once without increasing attractiveness too much. Then again, testing this takes also weeks.

*Actually, not completely true. I should have two cities with before/after saves as I only rarely overwrite savegames but make new ones (one of them is at save 49, the other at save 73). Unfortunately, both of them have quite a few custom assets, many of which I don't use anymore.

 

[BlackViper.com]

Well, I waxed all my save games while transferring to Win10 and After Dark. However, I observed with retail that after dropping the Space Elevator (or at least... this is when I noticed it), tourism tanked. I thought it was by design, though. The SE was near my airport (right across the street to be exact) if that helps any. I sort of assumed that people were just going there instead of anywhere else and "going to space" did not count as tourist population. LOL!
I was trying to get achievements and unlock all buildings, so that is why I kept it after tourism dropped.
Shortly their after, traffic went South in a bad way and I moved on to try again with a new city.

I will see if I have cloud saved or otherwise backed up my game when I make it home.
I don't use mods or custom assets.

 

[Turjan]

Immediately after writing the last post, I knew I could do better than that. The basic problem has been isolated already in the old Reddit post from months ago that has been linked in the Bug Support forums here. The magic number may be "1000". The game seems to be based on a limit of 1000 tourists per week. If, by any method, you go over that limit, the surplus may be subtracted from the weekly tourist number until you reach the number of 12. The effect is relatively easy to test, so I just now performed this very simple test.

My city of Skye had already suffered from the tourist bug once. However, I managed to cure this by deleting quite a few unique buildings. It has been happy ever since. I have shown the tourist development here in post #94 in this very thread. Note that the short spike downwards around year 2220 had a real reason (city restructuring) and was not related to any bug. Now, at the time of my last save, the city is very popular with tourists indeed, so it's the ideal "victim" to drive over the edge.

At the moment of the test, it attracts 883 tourists/week. That should be easy to kill off.

The ideal candidate for the dreadful deed is, of course, a vanilla game building that describes itself as attracting lots of tourists, the Space Elevator. Note, I don't claim the Space Elevator itself has a problem. It's just easy to cross the threshold with it, because it attracts so many tourists. You can use any building that attracts many tourists and achieve the same thing.

So I added the Space Elevator. This is principally the only thing I did. The only other things that happened is that I put it on top of three LD commercial buildings (obviously no big deal), and I had to replace the trains in the station near the Space Elevator with some with higher capacity to move all those people. Or in other words: I did only one important change, nothing else: placing the Space Elevator.

The effect is immediate:

This value will then slowly creep down, week by week, until we reach this:

It's the city without tourists, or 12/week to be exact. All modes of transportation will see 9/week:

All outgoing airplanes and most trains will be empty:

After a while, the yearly graph will update to reflect this:

In principle, this should be very easy to reproduce for CO without any outside help. Just make a city that attracts more than 800+ tourists and add the Space Elevator. I would upload my saves, but this specific game uses too many custom buildings. It's obvious that they are not at fault - tourism is fine with just them - as the Space Elevator is the trigger in this example. However, I assume that it's not the Space Elevator that needs fixing, but the faulty calculation.

 

[Turjan]

I made a second test, this time avoiding the Space Elevator. Adding 6 unique buildings also pushed the same test city over the edge.
I never saw any tourist number above 895 before it tanked. Slowly adding the buildings seemed to yield some adjustment first (individual unique buildings went down regarding their tourist numbers while the overall number stayed roughly the same), but then everything suddenly collapsed.

 

[BlackViper.com]

I made a second test, this time avoiding the Space Elevator. Adding 6 unique buildings also pushed the same test city over the edge.
I never saw any tourist number above 895 before it tanked. Slowly adding the buildings seemed to yield some adjustment first (individual unique buildings went down regarding their tourist numbers while the overall number stayed roughly the same), but then everything suddenly collapsed.

Great find! That also explains why, as I said above, I put my Space Elevator right next to the airport and the planes were... from what I recall, not "empty", but like 1 to 3 people per plane. I just didn't get what I did wrong and it kinda contributed to me starting a new city. Maybe replicate your findings in another post so this information does not get buried? Bug forum? I just want the devs to see it and finally fix it as this is the best explanation and reproducible with or without custom assets (as I said above, I use no mods or assets and had the same issue... it is not mod related). Plus, so many people complain about this problem, it might bring some confused people back with After Dark tourist heavy (or a bunch of stuff revolve around tourists).

Edit: I should also state that I had a bunch of unique building in my city as I was achievement hunting/unlocking them, so when I dropped SE, it put tourism "over the edge" as described above in detail by Turjan. I don't have to load up my save game to verify this, but I will still look and see if I have a save before and after. Stay tuned!

 

[Turjan]

So, test #3, which is checking the last unique building placed before the bug got triggered. This would show either that
(ii) the building triggers the bug by itself or
(ii) provides a nice control to the other two triggering experiments.

The result was that this serves as control. The number of weekly tourists stayed around 900.

@BlackViper.com: Hopefully, you have a savegame that's easier to upload than these. I'll see what else I can do here.

 

[Pallidum]

This is very good information. I know I'm asking for much, but if anyone has an unmodded savegame that could be used to trigger this bug, I'd appreciate it a lot! Having a reproducible case that we can use in-house makes it so much easier to track down and fix the bug. Building a city up from scratch, or even from our test cities, to trigger this bug may take a relatively long time.

 

[Turjan]

If you don't mind that it's using two mods and a few assets, I recommend using the savegame I submitted for the survey about building limits. It's easy to load if you follow the instructions and subscribe to the necessary assets (or put them in the local folder as I do):
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540145042

MarkJohnson from this forum assured me that this loads. The two mods enable the European buildings (the savegame is my first city ever). There's one custom unique building used, but that one was featured in the game's release trailer and available on release day: the Annunciation Cathedral.

When I uploaded that savegame, I already mentioned that this features not only the building limit, but also the tourism bug:

I then went ahead and unzoned some parts of the city to get rid of the building limit and to be able to move fire stations or parks from one place to another. First task was to restore tourism. I deleted the Space Elevator - no success. Which is in line with the observation that it is not only about the Space Elevator. Then I went and deleted the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. As a result, tourism was fully restored to 810 tourists/week.

I can already say that I am able to re-introduce the bug by putting the Arc de Triomphe and the Space Elevator back (it's not completely down yet, because all of this takes hours). Which means, the process is fully reversible with this savegame. I can upload the intermediate saves later when it's done and I have more time.

 

[Pallidum]

Holy crap! Thank you so much! I'll send this off to QA and see if they can get a confirmed repro case.

This is why I love this community!

 

[Turjan]

Okay, as promised, tourism was brought down again. I didn't wait till the yearly graph updated to the last state, as this takes two hours game time or something like that. However, the savegame is down to 12 tourists/week again, and the graph looked like that at the moment:

So it's nicely reversible.

I uploaded the savegames. Requirements should be the same as with the first game (minus one item I probably erroneously listed for the first savegame).

Restored tourism savegame:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547357548

Savegame with reintroduced tourism bug:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547361303

 

[benzoll]

I think the problem may come by attractiveness. As Turjan says.
When goes to zero, the tourists go down to stay in 12.
I'm just testing my city saved for limits.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=553104874
I had no space elevator nor variuos special buildings. And I have atrractiveness 191.
I put them, and game speed x3, in about 20/25 minutes will reach 12 tourists.
Attractiveness is zero.
I continue with the test and get some catch now.

Edit.-
In my town saved for limits (european), I have:
Central Fusion and 19 Special Buildings.
Attractiveness = 191
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547416816
I put space elevator and 7 Special Buildings more.
Attractiveness = 1253
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547416447
I put a special building more, whatever (use 4 different).
Attractiveness = 0
Incoming tourists = 0
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547416577
And this, within 30 minutes speed x3 I will have 13 tourists any more.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547417749
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=547417040

Posdata.- By putting catches I just saw on attractiveness = 1253, there is already a significant drop in incoming tourists.
Maybe 6 special buildings more than the limit. Depending on the value of attractiveness of the special building.

 

[Turjan]

I think the problem may come by attractiveness. As Turjan says.
When goes to zero, the tourists go down to stay in 12.

Nice observations. I probably should get that "CSL Stats Panel". Makes things easier to track.
By the way, similar tests have already been done 6 months ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/34eyat/bug_in_attractiveness_and_unique_buildings/

The exact mechanism has stayed elusive however. When I talked about some putative limit of 1000 tourists up there, I also forgot that the first crash in that city happened with much less tourists. Let's hope they find the error in the attractiveness formulas.

 

[Baro]

Great investigative work guys!

 

[benzoll]

Nice observations. I probably should get that "CSL Stats Panel". Makes things easier to track.
By the way, similar tests have already been done 6 months ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/34eyat/bug_in_attractiveness_and_unique_buildings/

The exact mechanism has stayed elusive however. When I talked about some putative limit of 1000 tourists up there, I also forgot that the first crash in that city happened with much less tourists. Let's hope they find the error in the attractiveness formulas.

Hopefully there lucky and get this time fix.
It's difficult. It is not something constant. It comes and goes.
In my analysis clearly step today. But I think it does not always happen.

Logically, there can not be limit to attractiveness in the game, would not make sense: most players get all monuments and special buildings. And that amount exceeds 1250.

 

[Turbo Kebab]

My first city's early years tourist graph looks almost as Turjan's in this picture http://i.imgur.com/CMX2Dzw.jpg , the amount of tourists hit the cap of 1018 around year 2100 and then it dropped to 700-800, though my city grew in population and I fixed many traffic issues and made public transportation better. The strange thing is the amount of tourists dropped to 500-700 after I purchased After Dark :/ It was a bit disappointing to add many fancy tourist buildings and the amont of the tourists just dropped. My game was all vanilla by then.

I read about the tourist problem in reddit and here and wanted to test a few mods (CSL stats panel, Traffic++ and 25 slots) and tried to see if I can make my tourists back to 1k or to hit the floor of 12. Neither worked. I didn't have any custom assets, only all the vanilla unique buildings, monuments and many parks. After downloading the CSL stats panel I checked the attractiveness value and it showed 0, but the amount of tourists was still around 500. I disabled only one unique building and it started showing the real value of 1780, but after waiting many in game years, I only got max 600-700 tourists.

What is the highest amount of tourists all of you have managed to get? Is that "around 1020" a cap or does anyone have a graph showing a higher number?

 

[Omnius1Prime]

Some interesting tests proving tourism and the Space elevator are broken. We can only hope that the developers will actually do something radical like fix the problem in the core game. Absolutely confounding why they didn't think of fixing this for the AD expansion which needs more tourists to be worth it.

 

[benzoll]

My first city's early years tourist graph looks almost as Turjan's in this picture http://i.imgur.com/CMX2Dzw.jpg , the amount of tourists hit the cap of 1018 around year 2100 and then it dropped to 700-800, though my city grew in population and I fixed many traffic issues and made public transportation better. The strange thing is the amount of tourists dropped to 500-700 after I purchased After Dark :/ It was a bit disappointing to add many fancy tourist buildings and the amont of the tourists just dropped. My game was all vanilla by then.

I read about the tourist problem in reddit and here and wanted to test a few mods (CSL stats panel, Traffic++ and 25 slots) and tried to see if I can make my tourists back to 1k or to hit the floor of 12. Neither worked. I didn't have any custom assets, only all the vanilla unique buildings, monuments and many parks. After downloading the CSL stats panel I checked the attractiveness value and it showed 0, but the amount of tourists was still around 500. I disabled only one unique building and it started showing the real value of 1780, but after waiting many in game years, I only got max 600-700 tourists.

What is the highest amount of tourists all of you have managed to get? Is that "around 1020" a cap or does anyone have a graph showing a higher number?

I've never been 450 or so tourists.
Typically people say is 300/350.

 

[HMV]

Some interesting tests proving tourism and the Space elevator are broken. We can only hope that the developers will actually do something radical like fix the problem in the core game. Absolutely confounding why they didn't think of fixing this for the AD expansion which needs more tourists to be worth it.

Nice job, coming into a thread where the developers ask for examples of the problem, get them, thank the people for the examples, and say they're working on it, just to spew vitriol about how much the developers suck.

 

[Turbo Kebab]

I've never been 450 or so tourists.
Typically people say is 300/350.

This might be totally wrong, but I have also been thinking the max amount of tourists is maybe someway tied to computer specs. I have 4 years old rig (overclocked i7 2600k though) and the game started to lag just "a bit" when I hit my highest amount of tourists. I had population of 200k by then. By lagging a bit I mean that the fastest game speed didn't go as smoothly as it did earlier when moving screen quickly. FPS dropped around sometimes to 20 and I got randomly notifications that my CPU is hitting 75c heat, but game was still very playable.

I haven't tried to use yet any custom buildings, which add far too much attractiveness and haven't had the 0 tourists problem. The number of tourists just dropped drastically when my city grew and placed those new AD commercial districts and leisure buildings.

 

[Turjan]

Hopefully there lucky and get this time fix.
It's difficult. It is not something constant. It comes and goes.
In my analysis clearly step today. But I think it does not always happen.

Logically, there can not be limit to attractiveness in the game, would not make sense: most players get all monuments and special buildings. And that amount exceeds 1250.

Thanks for the recommendation of the CSL Stats Panel again. This way, the tests only take seconds instead of hours, which is definitely an improvement. The attractiveness number can be higher than 1250, at least for a very short moment. This city starts with a number of 1117:

A few seconds after placing the Space Elevator, the next value is 1652:

Again, a few seconds later, it jumps to zero:

Which means that observing tourism itself is not really necessary, as that just follows from the attractiveness value, as has been said by you and the original Reddit article. That's pretty fortunate, as testing should be very quick now.