Workers not getting to work has no consequences!

[Epicity]

Epicity, they would not have trucks to ship any more stuff. The trucks need to return to their home buildings, just like in real life.

I've noticed that delivery trucks seem to disappear once they reach the destination if they can't get back and nothing really happened to the industry.

Is it possible to mod the pathfinding to the cims to check every industry (might need a super computer to run all those combos)?

 

[Epicity]

Thanks for the feedback Karoliina!

If agents were simulated but not individually rendered, would that effect CPU capacity? I.E real simulation but fake rendering like SC4.

If agents are to be individually rendered they need to move in realistic speed to make sense. With realistic I mean for them in relation to their game speed. Thats what killed SC2013, cars moved waaaay to slow to make any sense = eternal gridlock.

What's the point of real simulation (agents) if CPU limitations forces you to make the agents behave in a unrealistic fashion? Why not just make SC4 with better graphics?

I guess they wanted a both of best worlds. They are simulated and rendered but not everyone at once. It doesn't need to be that realistic surely?

 

[magitsu]

Maybe there could be potential in the future for a micromanagement DLC where these relaxed rules would be stripped down and traded for e.g. that 65k population cap to enable full simulation for everyone.

Then again I'd personally just tweak this current one to make it little more plausible by adding that worker-road check etc. It's laughable if these no-access cities keep appearing.
Perfecting micromanagement just leads to boredom.

But there's room for tightening up the skill requirement after people learn to master the current ruleset. Can't go rewarding continual failure too much.

 

[CNightwing]

Lets see if I can shed some light to this issue!

All workers do not need to get to work. This would simply need too much processing power if all 1 million citizens left to work at the same time. The worker numbers shown in factory information windows are the employees assigned for that building, the ones who can visit it as a work location. Not all of the workers will visit the building at the same time, some might not ever visit it, but they are the ones marked to work in the building. Employees don't need to get to work, but there need to be enough people in the city to assign to each workplace.

If citizens get stuck in traffic they will return to their starting point and abandon the traveling. This mechanic prevents city-wide gridlocks from happening, because when the traffic got that bad, it was very hard for players to see where the actual problem was because the traffic info view showed all roads as congested. Now the traffic jam will stay, but not expand uncontrollably, so it can be found and dealt with. Traffic jams do affect the city, because citizens can't travel to shopping locations, tourists can't travel to shopping locations, goods don't ship to local businesses and raw materials don't reach the industry.

Industry needs connections to receive raw materials and ship goods to outside locations or businesses in the city. For the most tax revenue, you should produce raw materials locally, have industry make them into goods and have local shops sell them. The shared save (Worker bug) has a city that does not even cover the upkeep of the roads with the industry taxes because they do not ship to local commercial areas. All buildings spawn with a small buffer of the items they need (goods for commercial, raw materials for industry) and will only require a shipment once the buffer gets low. In the save's very small city the buffer lasts quite a long time, but if you let the save roll on top speed for about 15 minutes, the buffer empties and commercial starts to need more goods. In a larger city, the buffer is gone fast and thus buildings react to poor connections faster.

So basically goods and raw materials work as agents, but citizens are a combination of agent and statistical model. A good road network makes the city produce more tax revenue, and having public transportation to take citizens to work will benefit the player by generating ticket income. Tourists only spend money in the city if they can reach commercial areas.

The city is quite slow to react to changes, but this was a choice made for stability so you can't accidentally destroy your city by a few poor choices. There's always time to react and fix things.

Do industry buildings spawn with a buffer of raw resources they can convert to goods, or also some goods they can ship out? It would make sense to have some raw materials, just as commercial buildings ought to spawn with some goods to sell, but industry shouldn't have any goods to sell until they are produced.

Have you considered tweaking the sim to reward getting cims to work? Something like the number of workers in the building increase the conversion rate of raw goods to products?

 

[Icarus619]

Epicity, they would not have trucks to ship any more stuff. The trucks need to return to their home buildings, just like in real life.

PForsberg, a happiness effect might work for this, I'll look into it! Keeping the game in balance is quite tricky since there are so many systems that affect each other, so we need to test things carefully before releasing any fixes. The work place traveling might be changed to have a happiness effect, but I can't promise anything yet and it will take some time. Thanks for the great suggestion!

Inge, I'm afraid that might be too much for the pathfinding, because if cims would continually lose jobs, the new employees would then start looking for a route and the old workers would look for routes to new workplaces. It sounds like it could set in motion a chain reaction. But it's still a nice idea, it would work very well in smaller cities

I also think that the suggestion with the happiness of each Cim is a pretty nice idea which could work well without destroying the cities too fast.
But maybe you should consider that industries with workers actually reaching it are working a lot better than those who are not reachable. Or vice versa: Make unreachable industries more inefficient, so the player actually needs to care for the traffic pretty much. If he doesn't and the streets get jammed up the consequence will be that his industry generates a lot less money and people get unhappy because they can't reach their work.

 

[Epicity]

Have you considered tweaking the sim to reward getting cims to work? Something like the number of workers in the building increase the conversion rate of raw goods to products?

Cims are already working though. They all just don't arrive at the same time. Although, if they were to do active workers and reducing conversion rate, that could be a good workaround firing and rehiring non connected cims.

 

[CorkMan]

All workers do not need to get to work. This would simply need too much processing power if all 1 million citizens left to work at the same time. The worker numbers shown in factory information windows are the employees assigned for that building, the ones who can visit it as a work location. Not all of the workers will visit the building at the same time, some might not ever visit it, but they are the ones marked to work in the building. Employees don't need to get to work, but there need to be enough people in the city to assign to each workplace.

But do the workers who never visit still contribute to the workplace?

 

[Red_warning]

So basically goods and raw materials work as agents, but citizens are a combination of agent and statistical model. A good road network makes the city produce more tax revenue, and having public transportation to take citizens to work will benefit the player by generating ticket income. Tourists only spend money in the city if they can reach commercial areas.

The city is quite slow to react to changes, but this was a choice made for stability so you can't accidentally destroy your city by a few poor choices. There's always time to react and fix things.

Although I would prefer full simulation of everything I guess I'll have to accept that home computer power isn't there yet to be able to reliably simulate over 1 million citizens. The most important thing is that having poor infrastructure impacts your tax revenue.

 

[Inge Jones]

Ok then, would it be impossible to change the engine so that Cims can walk over terrain? Maybe at a slower speed and with a happiness penalty per kilometer? At least then there wouldn't be this uncomfortable feeling that the simulation was "cheating".

 

[kissof]

thank you for your feedback co_karoliina

if i got a city of 100 000 people, do i get to see 65k at all time rushing around the city? and the other 35k are "simulated' in buildings?
or do the game show "statistical" people visually on the streets?

does every cim i see in the game is an agent and the other are "simulated" in buildings?

same as a population of 1 million people? how does it actually work if i reach this number?

what if i have a big city, will i see less people on the streets because it stops at visually showing 65k people?

thank you

 

[Letar]

We're noticing that no workers need to go to work at all. So sectioned off residential and industry would work as normal not even needing a simulation.

OK not sure if I completely follow you now but let me try. If you completely section off residential and industry, then you probably won't have any connection from industry to commercial either or otherwise you would need to section off residential and commercial as well. What I am after here is that you will have some connection among all RCI otherwise you will hurt at least one of the types (by not getting raw materials or making people go to shops etc). Thus if you want to have a working city you will need the connection. Then you will also have a connection between R and I which means the cims can find a routes to their jobs. If you transport network is not taking this into account, you will most probably glog it and the city doesn't function properly...

So, all in all, you should design working connections between R and I as well, otherwise your city is not working very well in any case. Or did I miss something here?

 

[PForsberg]

I also think that the suggestion with the happiness of each Cim is a pretty nice idea which could work well without destroying the cities too fast.
But maybe you should consider that industries with workers actually reaching it are working a lot better than those who are not reachable. Or vice versa: Make unreachable industries more inefficient, so the player actually needs to care for the traffic pretty much. If he doesn't and the streets get jammed up the consequence will be that his industry generates a lot less money and people get unhappy because they can't reach their work.

I really like that idea! But as @Co_Karoliina said, they have to be careful when they tweak those values, because you never know the side-effects that could appear. But if both of these suggestions would find a way into the game, I think most of the hardcore simulation freaks ( ;-) ) will be pleased.

I also read about perhaps checking if an industry has all needed paths before it really runs. So an industry would be built, but if there is no way for the workers to come, no way for raw materials to come in an no way for goods to be transportet or exported, it will not work at all (with an according message) or just at a very low pace, so it will not be generating much money. The same could apply for commercial buildings and even for resedential areas. In short: Not only check for availabilty of needed other buildings but also for reachability.

Short note at the end: I love not only this game but also the way the developers reply here in this forum! I really appreciate that!

 

[Nashetovich]

So, all in all, you should design working connections between R and I as well, otherwise your city is not working very well in any case. Or did I miss something here?

You can live and get money without I and C connected to anywhere. Just need to destroy abandoned I and C periodically. I allready posted screens at thread beginning and I'll try to provide more obvious screenshots tonight.

 

[Epicity]

OK not sure if I completely follow you now but let me try. If you completely section off residential and industry, then you probably won't have any connection from industry to commercial either or otherwise you would need to section off residential and commercial as well. What I am after here is that you will have some connection among all RCI otherwise you will hurt at least one of the types (by not getting raw materials or making people go to shops etc). Thus if you want to have a working city you will need the connection. Then you will also have a connection between R and I which means the cims can find a routes to their jobs. If you transport network is not taking this into account, you will most probably glog it and the city doesn't function properly...

So, all in all, you should design working connections between R and I as well, otherwise your city is not working very well in any case. Or did I miss something here?

Yes you're correct, I did notice R and C need to be connected and so does I and C. But, you can make it one way so, R never actually reaches I. Which is why I asked if industry trucks that can't get back from deliveries have any consequences, supposedly it does but I haven't noticed any so my R and I are never connected.

And it's also true that you can just destroy the buildings anyway when they run out of deliveries to make (separate issue to losing delivery trucks).

 

[Alfa55]

But if you connect them, it doesn't matter whether your network is good or bad: the business will keep running whether the commute is 2 days or 20 years long. The houses and business just keep upgrading, nobody moves out. If there's no challenge to make the city functional and you can't fail unless you explicitly choose to, the game isn't rewarding to play in my opinion.

Bad traffic has tons of consequences for your city. Hearses will not pick up bodies, health-care can not handle sick people, buildings burn to the ground, ... The feared spiral of doom. The quillapocalypse. So bad road design (mainly caused by commuters) is already causing lot's of troubles.

To sum up: in this game there a two processes: the relation industry-workforce is mainly calculated and not agent-based, and there is the commuter aspect which is agent-based. In 99% of the circumstances the two are synchronized. Only in the rare case where there is no road connection between workplace and home a desynchronisation can bee seen if agents have no path to the workplace and eventually automatically go home again to be 'confused', that's an in-game safety feature. I do not blame the dev's if they have not taking into consideration the unlikely event that there is no road connection at all. Feels like cheating by the player to exploit such things. True, there are no consequences when an agent is late at work. But since the unrealistic time scale (1 day = 10 sec) time in this game is an abstract thing anyway. Don't take the in-game time too serious: yes communing often take like 3 days. Yes it takes over a year in-game time when commerce starts to complain that there are not enough shoppers. But no game is time-realistic. Otherwise you need a 24 h = 24h gameplay model and that's off course unrealistic.

Also, I don't want the productivity of industry is depended on real agents, at least not for workfoces. That only increases CPU-usages with only a tiny game-play advantage. A simple solution for this could be that if workplaces have not seen workers over a period of time they close no matter what the city statistics (that are internally used for that sort of calculations for the appearance of factories) say. That would be a satisfying solution for all the complainers and is simple to implement without the need to change the entire system. An agent not able to reach work return home and is 'confused'. That is a state of mind they can track and collect. So the game has that information (I think). Since an agent can also be linked to a workplace it must not be difficult to link 'confused agents' with 'workplace is unreachable' if too many people that work for that company are 'confused'.

That is one possible solution. But that does not respond to the complaint that traffic jam's do not affect the industry in your city. Another possible solution that handles both the first problem and the second is a calculation tool were a workplace tracks the number of people actually arriving at work (a simple time-based counter). That way the game knows if agents are not able to reach workplace or take to long to reach it. That could be met with consequences like closure. Let's say if less than 50% workers were able to reach destination within 10 (real) minutes the text could be display 'it takes to long for workforce to reach destination' and eventually 'closure because of bad accessibility of workers'. I would like this solution.

 

[Epicity]

But do the workers who never visit still contribute to the workplace?

Yes. That's the issue.

 

[Letar]

You can live and get money without I and C connected to anywhere. Just need to destroy abandoned I and C periodically. I allready posted screens at thread beginning and I'll try to provide more obvious screenshots tonight.

OK yes I see. Interesting exercise would be to know how well you could actually make in such case. And how much better it would be with proper transport network in between. Then we could see if there's actually something CO could adjust in the modeling.

 

[Teodosio7]

You can live and get money without I and C connected to anywhere. Just need to destroy abandoned I and C periodically. I allready posted screens at thread beginning and I'll try to provide more obvious screenshots tonight.

Yes I believe that you probably could.
But once you have thousands of them you will be spending your entire time demolishing buildings. It would not make a very interesting play time by the sound of it.

 

[Nashetovich]

But once you have thousands of them you will be spending your entire time demolishing buildings. It would not make a very interesting play time by the sound of it.

Sure. It is extremal case to show our concerns about traffic simulation.

But keeping in mind what CO said itt, I think it is not a bug or "fake" simulation, but some kind of exploit, may be.

 

[Inge Jones]

Anyway, the explanation totally answers the question about what triggers a Cim to go to work or school, which I asked several times before launch and was never answered before. Basically it's random and may not happen at all for any particular Cim. I hope one day we will be able to get in and mod that, even if the price was to restrict our city to one tile if we had that mod.