Workers not getting on buses

[Steve]

I'm playing the second campaign, and I'd got the power station built, and put it about 1km away to avoid pollution.

I set up a bus station in the town that pretty much everyone could access, one at the power station and an end stop to space the buses out.

There's a counter as part of the 'quest' to get 15 days being self supported with electricity but it kept resetting because the power plant workers kept dropping to zero.

When I checked, some of the buses were pulling in to the station in town to pick up workers and leaving with no one on board.

I turned off everything but workers in the station so they were the only people there, the buses were set to only pick up 20% capacity of workers, 16 per bus, and there were plenty of workers (over 100) available, all with basic or better education.

I tried using more buses, I got up to 20, equally spaced out, to try to overcome the odd ones with no workers but if I got 2 or 3 in a row with no passengers, the workforce always dropped off before the 15 days was up.

The only way I got around it was to build another power station so one was always running.

What was happening here? Was this a bug or am I doing something wrong? Most of the buses worked perfectly as they should and I could see no difference in the ones that picked up passengers and the ones that didn't. Also, it wasn't the same buses every time that failed and they all had the same route loaded.

20 buses seems very excessive to keep somewhere running, but there's only 20 workers in the plant, so it was pointless filling the buses up, and once they started leaving they dropped to zero pretty quickly. The route average lap time was 270 seconds so I had a bus running every 14 seconds, but it only took 2 or 3 in a row to have zero workers at the wrong time for the plant to stop, when I'm pretty sure you should be able to keep somewhere staffed with way less buses. Even if all the buses picked up correctly it would likely have needed 10 buses to keep the power plant staffed.

Is there a better way to manage getting workers to somewhere like that? or a waiting room as a buffer so there's workers on standby when they start leaving? I feel like I'm misunderstanding a fundamental part of the game here, even without potential bugs.

[kyonkun]

They changed it a few years back so workers look if there are any open workplaces at the destination to determine if they should get on the bus. Once two of your buses arrive at the power plant and offload workers, the workplace is now full, and the next bus to hit the loading station won't pick anybody up. If that bus happens to arrive at the power plant right as the previous load of workers is despawning, there will be nobody working there.
You should probably use a small number of minibuses carrying 4-7 people with every load, which will spread out when the workers despawn from the power station. You could also put other industries in reach of the power plant bus station to provide a constant need for workers so people will get on the bus, and then they'll spread out evenly once they arrive (or you can force them to prioritize the power station).

[Steve]

So my problem is that I'm filling the workforce too quickly so the entire workforce is despawning at the same time?

If this is the case it really should be explained in game somehow. It took me a while to realise that they despawned and didn't need to catch buses back home. Worker movement isn't explained well at all here and googling my issue didn't get me any clarification.

I'm guessing the best way to deal with workers then is to have way less buses, fill them with workers and have them route around every industry dropping a few off at every stop to keep a constant trickle supply of them?

[Silent_Shadow]

There are a few ways to handle it. For stuff that must be running constantly, like power plants, it is usually best to deliver no more than a quarter of the workforce at a time, as a new worker cannot walk to the building until one of the job slots is freed up, and you don't want all of them, let alone half of them, freed up at once. For lone workplaces with 30 or less jobs, a stream of vans or even personal cars spaced 15 to 20 seconds apart usually works the best, and as kyonkun says, clustering other workplaces nearby allows you to use larger, more efficient transportation to them.

You can also build a station nearby and force off excess workers there (make two stops; the first to unload and the second to force off). After waiting for a calendar day, they will check again for any empty jobs to fill before teleporting home if they find none. This only works if the commute time (i.e. the total time travelling count in citizens' menus) is somewhat low though, maybe less than "3 hours."

Originally posted by Steve:

If this is the case it really should be explained in game somehow.

Yep, this is probably the game's largest failing, and unfortunately, there are a lot more cases where this applies. I'd recommend making a "test save" with a town and population set up so you can do tests for whatever mechanic or layout you want to use. Asking on the forums about the pitfalls of whatever new feature you want to mess with is also a good idea.

[Steve]

Cheers for the detailed replies, I've got a much better grasp on worker movements now.

There's some pretty obtuse mechanics and systems in the game, but I've managed to understand them so far with trial and error even if they seemed nonsensical at first. The worker movement issues didn't seem to make sense to me though, even with googling and youtube (which I didn't want to resort to) until it got explained here.

Thanks.