How many Post Offices?

[Imhotep]

If using Post Offices, how does one do so efficiently?

When placing the building, it shows a fairly small radius around it, so small that it cannot be that the aim is to get the whole city within the radius of Post Offices.

[andycishere]

Are you placeing them at one-way roads?
And are these original offices or mods?

[Ripp]

Didn't even know there were PO's. I'm gona stay out of this one for now. :)

[Imhotep]

The Post Offices come with the Industries DLC.

[Moyocoya]

If you've got posts offices, I suppose you have the corresponding DLC ; then you get also a button to see the efficiency area on the left panel.

[Imhotep]

I have a vanilla no-DLC city of around 300,000 people that I downloaded from the Workshop to do some testing. I've loaded it up with the Industries DLC activated.

The Post Office map overlay initially shows everything as High efficiency (blue). I let the game run for a while and it stayed as High, so maybe the Post Office game mechanic doesn't come into play until a Post Office building is built.

I've placed a single Post Office building, which produces a fairly wide radius of happy citizens. I've then let the game run for several weeks and slowly the map overlay colour is changing.

In this screenshot, there's a single Post Office in the top-right of the screen.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2663504856

There's a bit of bright green in the streets around the Post Office. Since this shade of green doesn't appear in the Efficiency map overlay Legend, this could be the local Appeal bonus provided by the Post Office.

Following from that, it's striking how evenly-distributed the low Efficiency areas in the map overlay are across the city - the area around the Post Office is no better than the area on the opposite side of the city. Different zones are also affected differently. The zones from bluest to reddest on the map appear to be: Commercial, Industrial, Residential, Office.

[Imhotep]

I built a couple of Post Offices and let the game run for a few weeks.

The Post Offices' stats look something like this:

Unsorted mail: 0 / 100,000
Sorted mail: 50,000 / 100,000
Post vans in use: 10 / 10
Post truck in use: 0 / 2

The Sorted mail and Post vans/trucks in use numbers seem to be roughly constant. The unsorted mail is very slowly going up, but I think I'd need to run the game for a few months to see if this would eventually produce a problem.

The vans in use is always at or close to maximum. Building other Post Offices in the city looks like it can bring down this number.

So my thinking is that this might be the way:

1) Keep an eye on the map and if there are red areas build more Post Offices - it seems like anywhere will do.
2) If the number of post vans in use is at maximum, then build more Post Offices.
3) If the number of Unsorted/Sorted mail looks like it might reach full capacity then build more Post Offices.

Next is to try and work out how the Sorting Office fits into this.

[admiral8q]

It makes people happy. Something I tend to neglect is the postal network. (It just slips my mind when focusing on other things like bloody traffic, heh!) Think of it more like schools or fire-stations. Covers an area that makes people happy (without any other benefit).

Keep in mind, mail is a service that increases happiness and the speed/ability of buildings to level up.

You probably only need one sorting facility. However in a huge city, if you need more, keep them far apart from each-other or they just send mail back and forth to each-other, lol!

[ThisHero]

Bit of advise for running your postal network as efficiently as possible: place your post sorting buildings near outside freight connections (train/sea/air ports) to minimize transit time.

From my experience, you should add a new post sorting facility every time you notch another 50,000. Try to keep them spaced around your city so that you dont have dozens of vans swarming a single freight station with incoming/outgoing post.