Did you know that Realistic Population 2 has the option to apply realistic student capacities to schools based on building size (in the same way calculations are done for other types of building)?


There's a page on the wiki[github.com] that goes into this in more detail.

These options are available in the options panel under Schools

If this option is selected, the mod's school capacity calculations will be enabled. This means that student counts will be determined based on real-world figures (via calculation packs[http//Calculation+packs]) applied to the physical size of the school building.

As with other buildings, the calculation packs used can be changed for each school building asset, or for all schools individually. You can also enter a manual override to specify exactly how many students this school asset can take (just like entering a manual override for any other building managed by the mod).

Note that this will result in school buildings that are unrealistically small (like the vanilla game schools) will have correspondingly small student counts. For example, the vanilla elementary school is barely larger than a suburban house, and in reality would only fit two (small) classrooms. To overcome this limitation, you can use any(or all!) of the following:

• Use the school capacity multiplier slider (see below) to increase school capacity
  
• Change the school calculation packs in effect (either for all schools, or just individual school assets)
  
• Use a manual override[github.com] to directly enter the school capacity that you want for that asset

Disable this option to restore base game behavior.

Restart your game after changing this setting to ensure that the change is correctly applied to your city.

This is a game-balance option; when enabled, the vanilla game's school statistics are extrapolated to fit with the revised capacity.

For example, an elementary school with twice the student count as the base game's elementary school will have almost twice the jobs and cost almost twice as much (a small scaling figure is applied to represent economies of scale).

The default scaling figures can be overriden on a per-asset basis using the individual building settings.

Disable this option to revert to the defaults for each school building asset.

Restart your game after changing this setting to ensure that the change is correctly applied to your city.

Realistically-calculated student populations based on physical model size is a good starting point, but is (of course) dependent on having realistically-sized school models.

To overcome the unrealistically small size of the game's default school models (and some older workshop models, too), the mod includes a slider to easily change the number of students in all schools (elementary and high).

When custom school calculations are active, the student capacity of each school calculated by the mod will be multiplied by the factor of this slider (for example, a multiplier of 3 means that each school will be able to handle 3x the calculated number of students - so if a model is calculated as having 100 students, a multiplier of 3 will mean that it now takes 300).


Feel free to ask me any questions! Your input will help inform future updates to the wiki.