Suggestion: CIMs, Jobs and Educational system

[DocDesastro]

Education already has caused problems in city sims. The main problem is - from my perspective - that the cims are either educated or not. And how to relate this with jobs.

E.g.: from Sim City 4 you might know that farming requires no education at all so it is great place it first. But once you drop your first school nobody will work there anymore because they have a higher education. Some whole blocks changed because I dropped a school there and placing a university which accepts sims from all of the map whole zones collapsed because the workers now had no work anymore because they were overqualified. I do not think that this depicts reality correctly. Not every school graduate will study. And not every pupil will even graduate at all. Current games just look for a school in the vicinity and change the workforce accordingly causing problems like changing a big stack low $ residental changing to a villa with loosing 500 workers in the process as those were evicted crippling industry. Then those $$$ Sims complained that there are no $$$ jobs and left.

On could relate however education with criminality. No education will most likely result in increased crime stats in the vicinity. Higher education will produce blue collars or even white collar workers.

Let us assume to have the following schools available and results on a CIM and the following model:
The Cim is born a child and placed into a household. After a certain time the program checks whether there is an available school to send him to. Education begins. Buildings might offer a certain number of blue and white collar jobs or untrained workers or jobs for university graduates and will be hampered when they do not get them.

No education: There is a good chance that the cim will become an untrained worker or to a lesser extent a blue collar worker after some time and never a white collar. Also there might be a slight chance the CIM will become a criminal and not part of the citiy's workforce but instead increasing crime unless caught by the police. You can see it as a chance per cim - maybe 5%, maybe 15%

Elementary Schools: Makes the CIM literate. Still this produces only blue collars but removes the negative crime factor or greatly reducing it to say 1-2%. Also reduces the chance of unqualified workers. Those schools can be funded and accomodate most likely about a maximum of say 300 pupils and have a "range" of approx 1-2km unless you take school buses into account.
I assume 3 classes with 25 pupils in 4 school terms. You would need 1 university graduate (teacher) per 25 pupils and also there will be 3 blue collars (facility manager and janitors) at all the time for building maintenance. So basically: the more you fund, the more pupils the school can accomodate for to the building cap. This is why those schools are placed if there are more than 1,500 citizens around in reality. CIM will wait unless reaching work age without improving.

Middle schools: Elementary school graduates will go to these, if possible. Those will produce not only blue collars for the workforce, but also blue collar+. A blue collar+ is basically a worker who would take the possibility to become a white collar if further education is offered. While they have no qualms of working in a blue collar job they might be annoyed if working at a job for untrained workers. Those schools will only marginally produce unqualified workers (there are always dropouts), but most will be blue collar+. Usually, if you think about 25 pupils per class, 3 classes a draft year and 6 terms to go you will find there will be approx. 450 pupils satisfied with this and a need of 6-30 teachers as the subjects differentiate and more teachers per class are needed. Still about 3-5 blue collar jobs for janitors.

High schools: While the blue collar workers will look for a job the blue collar+ would go there to become white collars or students (white collar+). Some will become blue collars and take up jobs, some will become white collars and some will become white collar+ which can work at the jobs or go to university if possible to become university graduates for the most specialized jobs. Also, the latter will possibly leave your city if you do not have a university (and some will come back, if you have jobs for them)

Universities: Convert white collar+ to university graduates and to a lesser extent white collars (not everybody graduates). This is an expensive process but on the other hand those are your best taxpayers besides they make high $$$ jobs possible.

Prisons: Odd, aint it? These turn criminals into unqualified/blue collars after some time. Some will stay criminals. See it as the correctional aspect of locking away evildoers. While not being educational buildings they do just that.

Summary: There should be a chance for the citizens to find a place in the workforce of the city and this workforce should be taken into account. Education enables better jobs but not for 100% of the CIMs at school so a balanced workforce can be obtained thus all kinds of jobs will get their workers. Funding affects quality and capacity of schools. Some policies can tip the scales to a more rounded picture.

Biggest issue: this requires to allocate jobs of various levels to buildings.

E.g. a snack bar like a hot dog vendor offers 1-2 unqualified workers while a supermarket could offer jobs for
1-2 white collars (store managers)
4-6 blue collars (cashier and full time workers)
5-8 unqualified (guys refilling the shelves or janitors)

This seems to be a big issue to cope with but if you want to represent education more properly, you must differentiate the jobs and refine the job structure and maybe the crime mechanism as well. Main advantage: Buildings now have a big impact on jobs and social structures.

 

[Emaer]

I could never undestand it, why games assumes that, no education = farming. We have XXI century. Current farms uses ALOT of machinery, electronics, automation etc.
Cims education level should be primary affected EFFICENCY of their jobs not only restrict economy sector.
Universities should be divided into species, for example:
- University ( overall )
- Univeristy of Technology ( improving city industry, new technologies, educated cim is more efficency than non-educated at the same job )
- Univeristy of Life Science ( improving farming, boost efficency )
- Univeristy of Economics ( commercial and offices impact )
- etc.

Amount of natural resources can impact on cims willingess to study at cetrain type of school.

 

[DocDesastro]

I should specify this a bit. You are correct as farming requires lots of knowledge today. So a farm should offer at least a blue collar job or better for the farmer himself or the farm manager. But the farm hands however, how trained or better "educated" must one be to harvest for example asparagus or cucumbers, or milk a cow? You are right, you must be quite educated to run such a farm, but for just working there i don't know - these jobs in general...well, where I come from, most native workers would not quite do it as the payment is horrible but those people are coming from neighbouring states who have not such qualms. I am talking about farm hands here. Otherwise farms would eat up much space but offer very few jobs in the model. Farms in general are quite wrongly depicted, that is for sure. What I wanted to emphazise is that we should look at the quantity and quality of jobs a single prop can offer.

In that case, a "simple" farm could offer 1-6 blue collar jobs and up to 50 for untrained which work maybe seasonally. A high-tech farm with biolabs could even offer jobs for university graduates.

As blue collars in my model would still work in "unqualified" jobs without qualms this is not true for the blue collar+ which will try to opt for higher education. We need to differentiate the workers and the education to prevent the model from collapsing by introducing schools. And this also requires taking a closer look at props and what jobs they offer. Think of the problem that there is a prop that needs a certain kind of worker but the city has no free ones. This will create commuters from off-map. Good if you have trains, bad, if they all come by car. And bad, since they block up jobs for native citizens. So you have to carefully balance demand and manpower output of your city. And education is one facet of this all.

In order to address the topic more precisely in hindsight i should have named it Jobs and Education

 

[DocDesastro]

I gave the whole thing a good night of sleep and came up with some new aspects. Colossal did a great job to design the game that we could build splendid looking cities. Now we need to work under the hood to make this logical. Cities are not just some neatly arranged buildings and props. The core of every city are the citizens. I wonder, how deep we could depict the needs of the CIMs in our city. Education is, as I said just one aspect as it determines, what job a CIM will take. One thing first: I do not know, how a programmer would be able to cope with that but for me a CIM is just a number of bytes the program manages.

Now for the hypothesis and it will get complex a bit:

Each CIM has NEEDS, a grade of EDUCATION, and a JOB and maybe we introduce another number: WEALTH. Those could be a string of numbers characterizing the CIM.
All those values are connected to each other and they form a kind of circle.
The NEEDS like taking part in culture, shopping, housing and safety are needs. The CIM will satisfy them using his WEALTH which is earned by the JOB he does for which he needs a certain EDUCATION, which influences the NEEDS in turn.

Also, I will change the Education levels into the following as i do not seem it fit to label all high school graduates white collars. Blue/white collar has something to do with the job itself. So my rankings will be:

E: no education
D: Elementary School Graduate
C/C*: Middle School Graduate/qualified for High School
B/B*: High School Graduate/*qualified for University
A: University Graduate

I will try now to split up the four things I proposed and take a closer look at them. Before that, I will also assume that each CIM is part of the town's available WORKFORCE.
Also, a CIM belongs to a household (usually 4). All WEALTH the CIMs of a household generate, is collected into a household pool.

I will describe the WORKFORCE first as it kind of sorts the CIMs into categories:

Kids: have no JOB, can get EDUCATION, have NEEDS, have no WEALTH (could be raised by policies like child benefit program, which raises wealth of the households having kids at cost of city funds)
Adults, sorted by levels of EDUCATION, can have JOB, can get EDUCATION under certain circumstances, have NEEDS (depending on EDUCATION), generate WEALTH for the household (depending on JOB)
Retired: have no JOB, have NEEDS, will not get EDUCATION, generate WEALTH (pensions, can be increased by policies)

other than that, we have the
Tourists: have NEEDS, have fixed WEALTH and leave, when wealth is depleted or when needs are not met

NEEDS:
Before I start with this we need to talk about props. Props i.e. buildings and stuff are functional buildings which should fulfill a logical role in the city and explain, why the CIMs do as they do. In my opinion the commercial buildings are the best to describe the concept i have in mind:
The building offers:
JOBS - requiring a certain requirement on EDUCATION level and giving the workers WEALTH for their households
The building satisfies:
NEEDS - depending on the type of building. E.g. a grocery satisfies need for food
A building can only satisfy a certain amount of customers in a certain interval - kind of service cap.
The building accumulates:
WEALTH from which the wages for the JOBS are paid. Each time a customer visits, he gives his WEALTH to the shop. Net WEALTH can be reduced by Criminals and is taxed at the end of the month. Think about the following: Having a building which is reaching the cap as it generates more net WEALTH which can be taxed than two generating less net WEALTH but offer double the jobs. Also, low crime has its benefits as it damages your coffers directly by reducing taxes. A shop going into the reds fires workers or closes at all.
The building demands:
Food from farms or outside the map explaining trucks stopping there.

CIMs will use their household WEALTH to satisfy their needs in intervals. Those needs could be the following:
Food: CIM will visit buildings like butcher's, groceries or when the city grows: supermarkets
Shopping: CIM will visit stores, malls etc.
Culture: CIM will visit libraries, theatres, operas
Entertainment: CIM will visit parks, pools, stadiums, cinemas
Health: CIM will visit clinics (health insurance policies could reduce WEALTH spent there with some overall household wealth deduction subventioned by city funds)

Optional: the NEEDs come in 3 levels */**/*** depicting that a wealthy or highly educated CIM will not go to the low buget-supermarket or will visit an opera instead of a public library. CIMs will visit higher qualities but refrain from visiting lower ones so keep your high-level workers happy.

For the NEEDs the CIM will check the shortest available lot with open capacity and go there maybe as pedestrian if withing 500 metres. Then he looks elsewhere in the city genrating traffic (this is, why it is good to have small groceries in residental areas) or commutes outside the town generating trains income or clogging up highways. If too many needs are neglected, CIM will leave the city - and no one likes empty houses.

EDUCATION:
I talked about that before - see above. Just exchange the blue/white collars with levels of EDUCATION

JOBS:
CIMs will work on lots where their EDUCATION level meets the criteria. They will look for the best paid job maxing out their EDUCATION level in certain radii of their household. They cannot work at a job with higher requirements. They will work in jobs with lower requirements, but lower than 1 level makes them unhappy and they try to change the job monthly. If this is not helped, they will move out of town - so EDUCATION without proper available JOBS is useless and costly. Each JOB generates WEALTH which is aded to household.

WEALTH:
Think of it as an abstract amount of money units. Call it $ or give it an abstract number. This is added to the household and the CIMs use it to pay for services. So we have a kind of cash flow inside the city and a skilled mayor can use this to his/her advantage. Wages can be taxed, revenues can be taxed and some city services cost money as well. If a CIM leaves town to satisfy its NEEDs, that money is lost an cannot be taxed. A tourist or commuter brings money to town.

Let us think about a hypothetical household - meet the Anderssons

Lauri Andersson has a level C EDUCATION and works at a sawmill (C required) which earns him 10$/per month
Birgit Andersson has also a level C Education and works at a supermarket (B required) earning 7$/per month
they have one child, Johan earning 0$/per month
So they have 17$ to spend monthly

Income tax will be at 30% so 5.1$ are deducted directly into the city's coffers, leaving the household with 11.9$ for the month

They live in a 1*-Residence which costs 4$ monthly (those properties are taxed as well based on land tax level) -> 7,9$ left
Each week the Anderssons try to satisfy their NEEDs for food and visit a grocery (1*) costing 3x 0,25$ which nets up to 3$/per month -> 4,9$ left. The Grocery will get 0.75$ from the Anderssons which can be taxed at the end of month.
The cultural needs are met as the sneaky mayor has build a public library nearby that costs the Anderssons nothing (but the city has upkeep to pay)
The entertainment cannot be met in the city as the mayor forgot to place lots for cinemas etc. So the Anderssons spend 1.50$ outside town which can - alas - not be taxed.
The shopping demands are met as the city sports a mall. they spend 3$ leaving their wealth at 0.4$ Now if the Anderssons get into the negatives it is possible that the NEEDS are not fulfilled so they might leave town or worse - one of them becomes criminal thus reducing other lots' WEALTH and that money cannot be taxed either.
Those NEEDs can have a decay timer and might degrade differently which will explain that CIMs will visit the grocer's more often than the cinema.

So...with a model like this, you have a cash flow, a demand for certain stuff, and influence of education on job quality and CIMs going from A to B for a reason. I just do not know how much work this takes to code and how much RAM the sim will use for number-crunching.

Also, this was lots to read, I apologize, but it came to me that you just cannot talk about Education as a single item - it is intimately intervowen with the other aspects i mentioned here.

 

[DocDesastro]

I wondered, whether CIMs could accumulate WEALTH to buy cars for their household? Why should they start life with one? And with a car they can reach JOBS and shops farther away, but also NEED gasoline (gas station demand) and servicing and parking lots and generally clog up streets. Cars could be taxed and this would also explain, why poor CIMs would be pedestrians mostly and use bus/tram more often (And why it makes sense to put bus stops where they live). And it forces to plan the residental hubs more carefully as wrong decisions could severily clog the streets. I remember when in S4 times high-$ R-areas would not accept bus stops but complained that the streets were too full (duh - no wonder having them drive around by costly car because the bus is too smelly or something!). Also thinking about differentiating the NEEDs by EDUCATION.

 

[boshk]

i would like to add that buildings such as librarys, museums, landmarks and maybe to some extent theaters or other types of culture locations (all of which should be added to the game through an update or the ability to mod them into the game. i dont mod so i dont know the limitations of doing so) should also add to the education of all levels of education elementary through university. i have combed through some of the education mods available, and say, something like a library, would only have an education level of elementary. basically just making it another elementary school.

plopping a music school should boost all levels of education in one way or another. maybe then it would have the cascade affect of not only adding to the education but also adding to the happiness of the cims by adding an employment pool that would then be able to work at places such as a concert hall. or for more immersiveness the occasional event such as a concert at an arena or stadium.

but what do i know, i think game designers should build their games and direct them towards the audience that will put the most time into playing them instead of trying to design to every person on the planet. which is the major downfall of city building games.

 

[DocDesastro]

I only have some qualms about the fact that most city builders are too abstract to either make them more easy so that a younger audience might buy them or just neglect some basic aspects like WHY there is a city at all and how does it work. Just SEEING certain buildings is far from being enough - they need a reason and cause stuff. Otherwise they are meaningless landmarks.

Sim Cities Societies made some advances on that topic as the citizens themselves were important, not the streets and the zoning. But then IMO it failed, because it was either way too easy, comicesque and put together some strange stereotypes to represent groups of citizens. There was no cash flow, no real demands, ware cycles. All these make a town grow and explain why there are certain buildings. It is normally not like the government invests gazillions of $ to paint a town into no mans land - but this is how the game starts - or most of those start. Paint a zone and you get random buildings, even duplicates which only serve to create $ to paint more zones. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Hardtofind]

Would be also nice to mess around with % of students from schools becoming criminals graduating from those schools depending on where is the school located (based on a level of education in its vicinity or wealth level) and the school itself would have an option menu to choose what kind of education is provided which would affect its surroundings in the same manner (high school industrial / office / farming / oil / ore / sales - for commercial zones)