guide for pop/workers/transport(buses)

[Monarchco]

Does anyone know of a good guide that covers this?

In a lot of city builders, they simulate the population wanting to go someplace(work, school, shop, etc) and then automatically select what bus they want and then get on it.

Here you just get a giant blob of workers to show up and then they fill in buses that show up first come first serve.

I'd like to know more on how to make this system work well. *especially* for areas where you may have a large residential area feeding a massive industrial area that requires 6+ bus stops.

[kbeza41]

para mi, y es mi opinión personal, el juego libera mucho el día a día de los trabajadores, o sea , las industrias,comercios,fabricas, no tienen plantillas fijas de ocho horas de trabajadores, si en realidad quiere ser un simulador lo mas real posible creo que debería haber puestos fijos de trabajadores en todos sus niveles, y que tenga movimiento social según su educación, o tal vez lo que digo es una utopía, pero si tu problema lo tenemos todos

[Monarchco]

That's not what I asked.

[Karma]

I'm not aware of any good guides, specifically, but here are some major points that can help.

1) The positioning of your worker drop-off stations relative to your industries is *critically* important in this game, much more so than in other city-builders. This is because they are rather 'dumb' in terms of their automation: a bus arrives at a dropoff station, and each worker only then decides which work-place within walking distance from that station they will go to. If none are available, they stay on their bus.

That means that you want to set up your bus routes (same for trains) so that the vehicles travel to drop-off points in descending order of importance: You need to drop off workers at your coal mine before you drop workers off at the coal processing plants, which in turn must be before the steel mill. (Don't forget to ensure power & water workers get first priority of all!)

Lastly, there is no way to prioritize worker distribution from a passenger station. Workers are assigned evenly (in terms of absolute numbers of workers, not % of possible workers at a workplace) to all workplaces within range. You can also set a passenger station to *only* send workers to certain workplaces, in which case they will utterly ignore all other workplaces.

2) Vehicle routes to passenger stations don't record whether or not there's any point to visiting that station: if all the workplaces that can be reached from Station A are full, buses and trains will keep on stopping at Station A even if nobody can exit, rather than skipping ahead to Station B.

3) What buses are fantastic at (assuming minimal other traffic on the roads) is maintaining *constant* staffing levels in workplaces, especially if you use the bus end-points that let you set manual timing between buses on a route. For keeping up with the massive workforce requirements of many industries (mining, steel mills, and vehicle factories come to mind) passenger railroads are much better. However, there is no easy mechanism to 'space out' trains so that industries have a near-constant manning.

[Monarchco]

Originally posted by Karma:

I'm not aware of any good guides, specifically, but here are some major points that can help.

1) The positioning of your worker drop-off stations relative to your industries is *critically* important in this game, much more so than in other city-builders. This is because they are rather 'dumb' in terms of their automation: a bus arrives at a dropoff station, and each worker only then decides which work-place within walking distance from that station they will go to. If none are available, they stay on their bus.

That means that you want to set up your bus routes (same for trains) so that the vehicles travel to drop-off points in descending order of importance: You need to drop off workers at your coal mine before you drop workers off at the coal processing plants, which in turn must be before the steel mill. (Don't forget to ensure power & water workers get first priority of all!)

Lastly, there is no way to prioritize worker distribution from a passenger station. Workers are assigned evenly (in terms of absolute numbers of workers, not % of possible workers at a workplace) to all workplaces within range. You can also set a passenger station to *only* send workers to certain workplaces, in which case they will utterly ignore all other workplaces.

2) Vehicle routes to passenger stations don't record whether or not there's any point to visiting that station: if all the workplaces that can be reached from Station A are full, buses and trains will keep on stopping at Station A even if nobody can exit, rather than skipping ahead to Station B.

3) What buses are fantastic at (assuming minimal other traffic on the roads) is maintaining *constant* staffing levels in workplaces, especially if you use the bus end-points that let you set manual timing between buses on a route. For keeping up with the massive workforce requirements of many industries (mining, steel mills, and vehicle factories come to mind) passenger railroads are much better. However, there is no easy mechanism to 'space out' trains so that industries have a near-constant manning.

Thanks for the information. Seems like it'll be easy to work with all of it with the exception of pax distribution at starter stations.

Seems like with the amount of effort they go into simulating everything else, pax are woefully sub-par compared to the rest of the game. It'd be great if workers were visualized like in games like captain of industry and just found their way to workplaces- though obviously the scale is different. It's somewhat seen in a game like transport fever where every pax decided a place they want to go, and then only after that they figure out how to get there - ideally via your transit system.

Either way the game should upgrade to pax that know exactly where they want to go, what line to use, and what stop to get off of.

[Silent_Shadow]

I think the Devs simulate passengers pretty well. Citizens may not be able to path to far away places on their own, but their implementation saves a lot of processing power, so you can have more actual agents in the game. Cities skylines has an agent limit of 80k, but I've seen W&RSR saves with over 300k agents (citizens, vehicles weren't counted). In exchange, you just need to design the public transit lines well, which I wouldn't consider too much to ask for.

Citizens will accumulate at stations that allow them when they cannot walk directly to a job or place they can satisfy their current need. They will only board a vehicle if:

1. The vehicle stops somewhere they can find a job (workers/students) or satisfy a current need (free time 'passengers'), or
   
2. The vehicle's line has a stop where its applicable riders are forced off (the station must accept them too)

Citizens will not board otherwise.

[Monarchco]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

I think the Devs simulate passengers pretty well. Citizens may not be able to path to far away places on their own, but their implementation saves a lot of processing power, so you can have more actual agents in the game. Cities skylines has an agent limit of 80k, but I've seen W&RSR saves with over 300k agents (citizens, vehicles weren't counted). In exchange, you just need to design the public transit lines well, which I wouldn't consider too much to ask for.

Citizens will accumulate at stations that allow them when they cannot walk directly to a job or place they can satisfy their current need. They will only board a vehicle if:

1. The vehicle stops somewhere they can find a job (workers/students) or satisfy a current need (free time 'passengers'), or
   
2. The vehicle's line has a stop where its applicable riders are forced off (the station must accept them too)

Citizens will not board otherwise.

That's still seriously problematic.

It completely prevents any usefulness in centralized bus stops for large cities.
For those centralized bus stops your options are:
A) have a single bus line zig zagging throughout the land going back and forth based off priority of buildings.
B) have multiple bus lines(the whole reason that multi-platform bus stops exist) - and then just gamble which line will be saturated and which one won't.

[Stele]

Or just have enogh workforce to saturate everything with direct lines to crutial plants. Limit number of pops allowed in earlier buildings, if they drain workers. They won't be fully staffed if you don't have enough pops to fill everything anyway.

[ling.speed]

Technically we can set how many workers should get out on each stop, prioritizing the later stops over inital ones... allowing for a single loop line. BUT the percentage to set is off vehicle capacity, not current passanger count, so its not without issues either.

[Monarchco]

Originally posted by Stele:

Or just have enogh workforce to saturate everything with direct lines to crutial plants. Limit number of pops allowed in earlier buildings, if they drain workers. They won't be fully staffed if you don't have enough pops to fill everything anyway.

That sounds like a good way to run high unemployment.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by Monarchco:

For those centralized bus stops your options are:
A) have a single bus line zig zagging throughout the land going back and forth based off priority of buildings.
B) have multiple bus lines(the whole reason that multi-platform bus stops exist) - and then just gamble which line will be saturated and which one won't.

You have more tools than that:

• You can improve the frequency to stops you care about to increase their priority.
  
• You can have multiple lines with a place as their first stop to prioritize it.
  
• You can use bigger capacity vehicles to pull more people to prioritized places.
  
• You can also build multiple workplaces within a single stop's range and set their priority by the station's "where should workers go?" mechanic.
  
• You can build a station near a workplace, and set the line to stop at it twice in a row. Set both stops as a worker drop off, but force workers off at the second stop. This will let workers who find empty slots leave the bus and go to work while the rest wait at the station for an hour and check again for empty work slots (a buffer industry nearby can absorb extra workers)
  
• Do the above trick, but build another station near it, and set them as each others' 0% option for "where should workers go?" and set the desired industry as 100%. This way, citizens will wait until they get a job. Your desired building should not ever be empty this way and you should be able to tailor the line to deliver just over the amount of people you need.

To name a few...

[Dave]

This will probably sound very weird and abstract, but I like to think of workers in terms of "pressure". They tend to prefer jobs in walking distance, and waiting for transit is akin to squirting out under high pressure when the valve (bus/train) lets them out to industrial areas. Identify low and excessively high pressure and adjust your city to try and equalize it. Move a bus from one line to another. Move one line's pick up location to another. Adjust a passenger train's pick-up/drop-off percentages if it has more than 2 total stops, etc.

I realise this is not realistic, and the game could simulate things better. But this is a macro way to think about it that in my experience jives very well with the underlying game mechanics.

Designing a city to have relatively few transit lines, all of them high frequency and high capacity, makes it easy though. An ideal city for example, could just have just one passenger train system (or a metro now if you're playing on the beta!) with multiple pick-ups and multiple drop-offs. You set it up and then tweak the percentages to "equalize pressure". And tweak the train signals to make the trains run as fast and as frequenctly as possible. Could fill all the jobs of a 20-30k city with just one train line like this if you wanted to.