Need more passengers

[some moron]

So I think a city generates passengers per week as a base production rate.
If I need to get 3k passengers from St Louis to Atlanta, can I exceed that production rate, by transporting passengers from Indianapolis to St Louis?
Because if yes, then to maximize passengers from St Louis, I could increase the size of Indianopolis (which should increase the number of passengers generated in Indianapolis) and transport passengers from Indianoplis to St Louis, some of whom will want to go on to Atlanta. True?

[Maxim]

Bring food to city = city gains people = people looking for farm jobs or just eating out at restaurants.

Basic economics explained easy enough to prevent brain fires.

[chaney]

Maybe. This is precisely the "funneling" method I described to you recently.

I can't see a game map now, but on a real map Indianapolis is at a right angle to the line from Atlanta to St. Louis. Passengers WILL take transfers and funneling works great, but they will only go so far out of their way. Chicago on a real map would be a great "beyond the target origin" city to drive through St. Louis on the way to Atlanta and beyond.

[vezrilx]

A city generates passengers with an already preset destinations per week depending on the size of both cities. Providing transport to St Louis does yield more passengers to transport between St Louis -> Atlanta. Growing Indianapolis when it has a reliable passengers connection to St Louis will help, because there will be more passengers generated in Indianapolis destined for either Atlanta or a town beyond it.

This also means having good city to city transport from other cities up north help you (look for the unique scenario buildings, these give additional passengers). And at the same time having good city to city transport from Atlanta to other cities in the south will help.

Growing any city hooked up like this, would increase passenger flow through your main north-south line.

Passengers do diminish the further you get from a potential destination so do keep that in mind. Mail works the same way as described above but not diminished by distance.

[mbutton15]

The passenger info pane shows passengers to each city. So I'm guessing that growing a city that feeds into the start destination will increase the number of passengers coming from the feeder city.

That's certainly the logic I'm gonna be applying to my South America free-mode run. I need 3,000 from Buenos Aires to Santa Cruz. Uptake is slow at the moment as I've only done around 500 passengers so far. Buenos Aires currently sits at over 90,000 population but each train usually only has 1 passenger carriage (occasionally 2). Santa Cruz is still only quite small (barely 20,000) so I'm hoping that when I grow that that it will also make it more attractive so increase people wanting to go there.

I think there's a building that increases passenger interest ? I'm not sure on that as I usually only ever use the museum to increase the 'goods demand' (sorry, can't remember its name).

[chaney]

Originally posted by vezrilx:

Passengers do diminish the further you get from a potential destination so do keep that in mind. Mail works the same way as described above but not diminished by distance.

I just learned that, thanks! Is this verified by testing? (I ask because many things are claimed, including within the game, that are not true!) I'd like to add the detail to my guide, which needs a lot of things like this added. If you have further detail, please let me know. I'm guessing particular City to City demand will increase monotonically with each City's population and decrease monotonically with the distance separating them.

Originally posted by mbutton15:

I think there's a building that increases passenger interest ? I'm not sure on that as I usually only ever use the museum to increase the 'goods demand' (sorry, can't remember its name).

Those civic buildings are University (increases research rate), Museum (increases local Fulfillment of Demand), and a variety of attractions (increase inbound passenger demand.)
(From memory, correct me if I got it wrong.) Some scenarios have special buildings in addition.

[some moron]

Originally posted by vezrilx:

Providing transport to St Louis does yield more passengers to transport between St Louis -> Atlanta.

This was my question and you think it does and I guess it could be experimented in a sandbox which I'm too engrossed in my campaign to do, so maybe it does do that. Specifically AFAIK we cannot see how many passengers currently in the city are going where, all we can see is how much are generated per week. Unlike goods where we CAN see the count in storage, though they do not have an assigned destination.
I'm beginning to think that in this game we don't get to know the mechanics or measures of things. I am accustomed to games where you know the numbers of what's happening. Perhaps not in this game, and I guess I can live like that, it's kinda more like reality, we aren't told things but we experiment and approximate and guess why something is happening, though we will never truly know (anything).

oh and mbutton's right as I recall, that scenario has an Induction building, and also a building that generates passengers but I can't remember the name and deleted my saves.

[vezrilx]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2490179945

"Transporting the mail works in a similar way to transporting passengers. However, while there are fewer passengers between two cities the further apart the cities are, distance is less impotrant in terms of the mail."

It takes a lot of observation to predict how it should flow, but I have found that what the guide states here does hold up. You can monitor passenger and mail flow with the flow of goods display as well as checking the express goods tab within each city.

Mind the indirect cities shown in this list as having some portion of express goods being served and how that could function.

A common side effect now for me is mail income surging in the mid game since I design with this in mind. Map-wide express goods flow. It helps passengers too, but it's better based around already grown cities so takes freight infrastructure.

You may notice quite heavy passenger goods flow simply by connecting 2-3 cities in the middle of the map. But doing that on the side of the map you will see the town nearest to the rest of the map (middle) acting as a hub for express goods, mostly mail, coming from the very edge.

[vezrilx]

Something I noticed when trying to explain in detail about this map... are we talking about the 4th campaign mission? If so, ideally you'd be sending passengers from Indianapolis to Louisville. In fact sending passengers to St Louis from Indianapolis would REDUCE passenger usage for Louisville -> Atlanta.
If this is not and you still need St Louis -> Atlanta then, looking at the spacing and angle.. with a very direct route from St Louis -> Atlanta it would also pick up express goods from Indianapolis destined for Atlanta, Augusta, Montgomery, Jacksonville. But likely not Charlotte or Knoxville. A key point here besides trip time is thinking about the total rail distance, which must never exceed 2x direct city map distance as a crow flies.

Originally posted by some moron:

Specifically AFAIK we cannot see how many passengers currently in the city are going where, all we can see is how much are generated per week. Unlike goods where we CAN see the count in storage, though they do not have an assigned destination.
I'm beginning to think that in this game we don't get to know the mechanics or measures of things. I am accustomed to games where you know the numbers of what's happening. Perhaps not in this game, and I guess I can live like that, it's kinda more like reality, we aren't told things but we experiment and approximate and guess why something is happening, though we will never truly know (anything).

You're right here, you do not get any direct indicator that passengers actually get to use the the entire series of legs of a trip other than seeing the trains and income it yields. Just the fact that it has been covered by at least 1 leg of it's journey.

The best you can do, is check out the express goods list in St. Louis first. Make sure it has 75%+ service direct to Atlanta. Now also check the flow from St. Louis to any cities below Atlanta on this list. That should also be a respectable value for most towns where a passenger would not have to travel too far west after reaching Atlanta.

Then, do the same check for Indianapolis. Obviously you will need a good % of coverage for the direct line to St Louis. Then, same deal, check if it's getting usage shown for Atlanta trips, as well as cities south, but in this case you would perhaps lose the coverage of cities if there is any line between Indianapolis and Louisville and/or a line between Louisville -> Atlanta.

Provided your trains are making frequent enough stops for these values to not spike up and down, they should be a decent measure of usage. You can know this because Indianapolis wouldn't have any train connection to southern towns directly given your goals.

[chaney]

Thanks vezfilx. There are a lot of things claimed in the in-game documentation that are not true. Verifying these details is tough sometimes. It wouldn't be too difficult to characterize the details on express demand since we have explicit lists and can measure distances and know populations. It would take some time though. Tougher would be verifying the nuances of transfers/indirect paths. I did verify that the claimed passengers to a specific destination/week is what we think it is once, and it needed a lot of attention to detail to do that, watching transfers I don't think would be easy! I think there was some indication that the indirect path had to be shorter than 1.5X the direct distance to be used, rather than 2x for example. I'm still not sure of the details ... does the entire alternate path need to be on rails? Probably not. So how do the various trip legs get weighted in calculating the passengers' paths? Non-train is probably just the sum of non-train leg distances, and maybe the train legs of the trip are calculated as track-length/2 or track-length/1.5 for example.

Anyway, this is all detail abstracted into the game that not a lot of people will find interesting. I'm glad a few other people at least think about such minutia :)

[vezrilx]

I wouldn't know the math to figure that kind of stuff out, I just assume the 2x rail distance holds true for the entirety of the trip. I don't think 1.5x distance leaves enough room for error around terrain and pulling into stations for it to really be viable.

As for which legs of a trip an express good would use, I would again assume this is compared against some static time per city->city of some arbitrary speed for wagon travel, in the same way some folks believe express ratings are checked vs a given speed.

But then you also have average vs real frequency of traffic... all changing the dynamic of which legs would combine to form a shortest route.. as some legs may end up not being serviced in time for the prior leg to make sense anymore.

So again assumptions... express goods choose a route when they are loaded onto a train, but then calculate this again at the start of each leg, to slowly start to work through towns which may be viable to use for train transport.

[chaney]

I don't expect we will ever fully characterize multi-leg trips, but those notions match what I suspect is happening, too.