Topic: Staff Shortages Troubleshooting Problems

[Gooch]

I am having enormous difficulty troubleshooting staff shortages, so that industries keep closing. I tend to play 1920X1280 maps from 1960-ish with timeline on, Pak 128.Britain, currently using recent nightly builds since the last few weeks (#163e2b4 is my current).
It does not seem to matter how much infrastructure I connect to an industry the people don't visit (this seems to go for vistors as well as commuters but this is not such a problem, although I have definitely had some brickworks and so-on close because no customers visited the builders yard, not to mention the pub that has all the grain farms in the world supplying it with beer nobody drinks......)
The simplest version of this problem is with oil-fired power stations. I set up crude to refineries, then refineries to the power station but even though I have by this time got a fairly map-wide mail and passenger network (planes, trains and trucks) there is never enough staff to process the crude to feed the power station (nor for that matter enough staff to operate the station, but this does not matter so much as the few staff there are just sit around playing cards waiting for the fuel-oil that never comes.....)
Anyway that is just one example, to cut a long story short - does anyone have any tips on troubleshooting this issue as although I have mightly enjoyed many different approaches none seem to give me an insight into the problem or a solution.
I would be grateful for any illumination.

[jamespetts]

Welcome to the forums! I hope that you will find this a useful place.

There is a known balance issue with commuting passengers at present: the difficulty appears to be that towns generate too many commercial/industrial buildings in proportion to residential buildings such that there are not enough people to fill the simulated world's jobs. Town growth is a complex matter which will eventually need to be rewritten completely, although because there are not many developers working on Simutrans-Extended, it might take a while for this to be dealt with fully.

[Gooch]

Thank you so much for the swift reply!
I will stop tearing my hair out over this one then and just enjoy the trains.

Thanks for the welcome and for being so dedicated to a rich and consistent simulation. There is nothing else like Simutrans Extended.

[DrSuperGood]

From experimentation done on the server game the current solution is to manually bulldoze commercial buildings until enough staff make it to the industry. Outside of town growth implications, this should have no negative impact to your transport network as the same number of commuters are heading to the industry instead of random spread out buildings.

Why this is a problem I am not sure. As a guess it might be because the town does not adjust its growth model to accomodate industries inside it. What should happen is that when a town absorbs/gets an industry it rapidly grows its residential until it has sufficient workers to maintain the industry on top of its existing commercial. Like wise when a town loses an industry it rapidly expands its commercial to replace the lost jobs. This at the very least would mask the problem until a better solution.

[Gooch]

From experimentation done on the server game the current solution is to manually bulldoze commercial buildings until enough staff make it to the industry. Outside of town growth implications, this should have no negative impact to your transport network as the same number of commuters are heading to the industry instead of random spread out buildings.

Why this is a problem I am not sure. As a guess it might be because the town does not adjust its growth model to accomodate industries inside it. What should happen is that when a town absorbs/gets an industry it rapidly grows its residential until it has sufficient workers to maintain the industry on top of its existing commercial. Like wise when a town loses an industry it rapidly expands its commercial to replace the lost jobs. This at the very least would mask the problem until a better solution.

Thanks for the tip. Do you mean any commercial building, eg Shops and Offices, or any industry building - I am guessing a commercial building is any building that has jobs available - so for example a football ground that has 1100 visitors but has only 32 jobs available might be best to leave alone but some offices with a visitor demand of 20 but 176 jobs available I would want to bulldoze?

*edit* - I just read some of the other threads about this issue. Sorry for creating another thread about it. I think I understand better now.

[Gooch]

Further to my attempts to work as well as I can with this aspect of the simulation.
I have been bulldozing offices and such - and when a new supermarket is generated with a gazillion farms the bulldozer comes out. This does seem to be having some impact in that the numbers of workers visiting my refineries is creeping up but still - and I have been quite.... enthusiastic... with the buldozer - still the refineries (for example) have nowhere near enough staff even after a couple of years.
I have been looking at the Passengers generated/Departed/Arrived graphs in the Production/Boost tab in the Industry Information screen and I am having difficulty correlating it to what this actually represents and how it might be affected by my efforts. These numbers are very low (20/20/93) - even though I may have 1252(882) Jobs available although they have improved - they were 1252(>1240) before bulldozing.
The connected/nearby stops have over 300 arrived each in the graph. I am not sure how to interpret these numbers, and they don't seem to have changed since my buldozing antics started.
Also trying to tie this to building information for residences - most of the buildings I check around the map have Passenger Success(Commuting): at 100% so this would seem to indicate that people who want to commute are managing to go somewhere.
Simply in terms of troubleshooting this what are good strategies for finding/correlating information using the in-game graphs and available information?
Thanks for the patience - It seems that the information is out there on the forums and these questions have been asked before but for some reason it is not clicking for me.

*edit*
 I have been frantically destroying offices and warehouses which I think may be having some effect but it isn't really where I want to be going with my game. In search of a solution I found the "minimum_staffing_percentage_full_production_producer_industry" in simuconf.tab. If I change this would it mean that the refineries would produce even though there are few staff? I could rationalise this to myself with hand-wavey explanations about automation.....

*edit again*
It seems to have gotten my production based freight flows working, it still says staff shortage but setting minimum_staffing_percentage_full_production_producer_industry = 30 seems to have done the trick for now.
My map is an enlightened society where workers can go to work if they want but due to the robotics only 30% need do so for production not to suffer.