Topic: Problem staffing industries.

[Milko]

Hello

I have several industries that are without staff (1810, pak britain extended), at the beginning of the game it was not like that and they were all full. Is the problem my transport network or can there be other reasons?


Giuseppe

[jamespetts]

When the game starts, industries are fully staffed when the game starts to avoid deadlocks. Passengers will travel to industries to work in them if the industries are within their journey time tolerance for commuting (circa 3 hours by default if I recall correctly). A recent change to prevent issues which had been reported on the server game means that industries not in towns continue to produce even if they are short of staff as out of town industries can often be built so far out of towns that there many decades in which staff cannot get to the institutes within the maximum commuting journey time tolerance by the fastest possible transport method of the time.

[Milko]

Ah, ok. I understand.


So now I have to understand where workers are from and make a better speed route.


Thanks


Giuseppe

[DrSuperGood]

The problem is that once cities reach a certain size even industries in cities struggle to get staffed. This is because the city is so big the workers cannot walk from one side of the city to another in 3 hours.

In real life this is not a problem as workers try to minimize their commute by living near their place of work. However it appears in Simutrans Extended they do not care how far away they are from their place of work when choosing a place to live, probably because they are randomly created within the city and not from dedicated houses.

The solution requires some SimCity style mechanics. Industries need a list of building where their workers live. When building this list it tries to choose sufficient/sensible numbers of nearby residential buildings, preferring ones as close as possible. If the average distance of these buildings is not reasonable, say 3 hours walking, then work around mechanics can take effect and a warning in the industry window states that it has poor access to labour.

Visitor mechanics probably do not need to be changed since it makes sense that people might walk accross a city to visit a market or simply not visit at all if the market it too far away from them to visit within a reasonable time.

[jamespetts]

I think that you misunderstand the way in which passenger generation works. Geographical locality is not relevant. Passengers will choose a destination of a suitable type (i.e., for either visiting or commuting) from anywhere on the map. If they cannot reach that destination within their journey time tolerance, they will pick another destination at random and repeat the process until the pre-set number of alternative destinations (which automatically scales with the number and weight of buildings on the map) has expired. Thus, there is never a point at which a specific town becomes too large for passengers to find a destination within it, as passengers never look for destinations specifically inside a town: a destination inside a town that is too far away is treated in the same way as a destination in another town on the other side of the map that cannot be reached within the passengers' journey time tolerance. The expansion of the map should make it more, rather than less, likely that any given packet of passengers will find a suitable destination, all other things being equal.

This was a deliberate design decision from some years ago to eliminate the serious anomalies that resulted from setting geographical distance ranges for passengers, which is an inherently arbitrary mechanism.

What you describe as "Sim City" mechanics were actually not used in Sim City (2013) even though the game pretended that they were in some cases because they proved to be too computationally intensive for the inefficient "Glass Box" engine. Cities: Skylines has this, but its maps are far smaller than those in Simutrans-Extended: doing it this way would take far too much memory bandwidth and would make little real difference.

[DrSuperGood]

What you describe as "Sim City" mechanics were actually not used in Sim City (2013) even though the game pretended that they were in some cases because they proved to be too computationally intensive for the inefficient "Glass Box" engine. Cities: Skylines has this, but its maps are far smaller than those in Simutrans-Extended: doing it this way would take far too much memory bandwidth and would make little real difference.

I was referring to SimCity 4 (the last true SimCity). Each residential building had a number of buildings its residents worked at. Each Industry/Commercial building had a number of buildings its workers lived at. The engine tried its best to sort these by locality such that people working at a factory or commercial building would generally come from nearby residential buildings rather than those across the entire city. If commute time from a residential building was bad it would almost always degrade or even become abandoned. If the commute time from an industry/commercial building to workers was bad it would almost certainly degrade or become abandoned. There were problems with the model used, especially due to engine bugs.

The problem is that in real life worker commute is based on geographical distance. People move homes purely to live closer to where they work. In Simutrans they do not, nothing stops a worker taking a job several days travel away from where he lives as he does not live anywhere but rather was randomly spawned several days away from his work. As such there is a limit to how big a city can become before it becomes impossible to deliver workers to their place of work within their required time. 20th century transport helps with that, but even that has eventual limits before it becomes impossible to deliver a worker in their required time. As such eventually industries will stop working due to lack of employment. This happens to my fish ports on the server game as their supporting city is now so large that they cannot work most of the time due to a lack of employees.

There are only 2 realistic solutions.

• SimCity style lists of structures to source workers from. These are only a few elements long and rebuilt every month or few hours from nearby residential buildings. All employees are sourced from these buildings and only these buildings.
• The employee count increases with city size while the number needed to work at full efficiency does not. This means that statistically the place will keep operating at full efficiency even if the percentage of workers making it to work decreases.

[jamespetts]

I think that you still misunderstand the passenger generation mechanic at a very fundamental level. The size of cities is irrelevant, as already written. Commuting passengers are equally likely to choose a destination anywhere on the map, whether in the same city or not, but, if they cannot travel to those destinations within their journey time tolerance, they pick another destination at random anywhere on the map and keep doing so until their pre-set number of alternative destinations has expired.

In reality, commuting is based on time not distance. Although the two things are, of course, related, they are very much not the same. This is why towns were able to grow outwards when and only when modes of transport (such as trains and trams) were invented and deployed to allow people to live in the suburbs and work in the centre. The function of the passenger generation system is to simulate the fact that it is time, not distance per se, that is important to transport.

[Milko]

Hello

I managed to fill the jobs at a company (market and fishport, year 1810). The market and the port are on the edge of a large city. The staff was filled only after I created a stop near the market and created a circular line that carries all kinds of wealth.

Giuseppe

[accord2]

I have a question about this. So, sims go to work by foot or with their car or do I need to take them with my vehicles?

[DrSuperGood]

I am unsure how public cars work but most of the commuters seem to go to work via two methods.

• On foot, with or without nearby stops.
• Taking transport services.

They will use whichever is fastest.

Both have a maximum journey time tolerance. The value of 2 hours seems to crop up with regard to this but I am doubtful about that as on the server it feels more like 1 hour or less. This might be because balance changes made to the value could not be reflected on the in progress server game so only apply to new games. Even with 80 km/h steam trains and regular 15-20 minute services I cannot get commuters reliably to a reasonably remote attraction building from the nearby cities in time.

Do note that transport services to involve both walking time to/from the stops as well as internal transfer time. Unless a stop is right next to their source location and destination location this can easily be 30-60 minutes before even reaching your transport. That does not leave a lot of time to move the passenger around, especially with 7-15 minutes of wait time at stops and using slow/old convoy types.

[ACarlotti]

I am unsure how public cars work ...

A certain proportion of passengers (varying over time, and also varying by passenger class) have access to a private car, which they are able to use as an alternative to walking or using public transport. The exact values can be found in config/privatecar.tab (in either the pak or the global config), which are interpolated between the given data points.

[DrSuperGood]

A certain proportion of passengers (varying over time, and also varying by passenger class) have access to a private car, which they are able to use as an alternative to walking or using public transport. The exact values can be found in config/privatecar.tab (in either the pak or the global config), which are interpolated between the given data points.

I know that. Just I am unsure how it works when it comes to industries, especially ones without good/near road access. In any case this will only make a significant difference once the timeline hits the stage where private automobile ownership becomes common, since coaches and horses are mostly only slightly faster than walking.