Workers and Tourists

[Kythlyn 80]

Off-topic: So, first things first, I'm actually enjoyed this game. I'm not blind to the problems, and I'm as upset about them as most people, but I can see the potential underneath it all. So if you don't mind, let's not argue about the state of the launch in this thread.

 

Topic: Workers and Tourists

 

Workers: I have a city with over 100,000 population, yet barely 10,000 workers. Is this normal? It seems I can never zone enough residential to provide enough workers for even a comparitively small amount of businesses and industries.

 

Tourists: How do you get more tourists? I've connected my city to the region with trains, planes, ferries, two types of buses... yet the tourists that used to flock to my casinos have pretty much disappeared. I have a theory that my low wealth, high density commercial buildings have drawn their attention, but I've only got about 200 tourists in the whole city. I tried building a momument, but it too was left empty of visitors. I even built a neighboring city, hopeing its residents would be the tourists of my first city, but no luck. I need to increase the number of low and medium wealth tourists. Any ideas?

[loerelau 5]

I think they turned off the communication between cities. My workers are not going to another city either.

[y2chong 0]

I aslo facing the same thing.

[TinyWeeny 6]

This is what I was afraid of

 

Like you, Kythlyn, I'm very much enjoying this game, but it's starting to be almost impossible to play.

 

I'm trying to build a casino city, and I've done pretty much the same as you: Big bus center, street car center, ferry, etc. I have 4 cities built up in the region with 100k+ population per city. And yet, I barely have enough tourists to keep one of the tiny casinos going.

 

At this point, I'm just chalking it up to server problems, because there's no reason for my lack of tourists. I have tons of nice commercial buildings and everything, but they I have to make sure to get rid of any failed businesses because they just aren't getting enough shoppers right now.

 

Hopefully this will get addressed soon, because I really want to make a casino city. I built this whole city around the idea of making a cool Las Vegas style strip, but it looks like I'll have to focus on some other city for a while till something gets patched.

[Kythlyn 80]

This is what I was afraid of

 

Like you, Kythlyn, I'm very much enjoying this game, but it's starting to be almost impossible to play.

 

I'm trying to build a casino city, and I've done pretty much the same as you: Big bus center, street car center, ferry, etc. I have 4 cities built up in the region with 100k+ population per city. And yet, I barely have enough tourists to keep one of the tiny casinos going.

 

At this point, I'm just chalking it up to server problems, because there's no reason for my lack of tourists. I have tons of nice commercial buildings and everything, but they I have to make sure to get rid of any failed businesses because they just aren't getting enough shoppers right now.

 

Hopefully this will get addressed soon, because I really want to make a casino city. I built this whole city around the idea of making a cool Las Vegas style strip, but it looks like I'll have to focus on some other city for a while till something gets patched.

 

I was playing until about 2:30a PST last night, and by the time I had to stop to go to bed I had improved my city so that it had some $$$ shoppers and workers. All of a sudden there were a ton of tourists coming in from the ferry and bus station. Not sure if they use the train or not... I think that's mostly commuters and shoppers. But of course, by that time, I had given up on the casino. My momument did benefit from the new tourists though.

 

I have no idea whether the tourists came because of my improvements to the city or improvements to the server though!

[sidnitzerglobin 0]

I totally agree that from what I've seen so far the game seems to have a lot of potential (and even more so if we got even incrementally larger individual city maps to work w/ down the road).

 

Unfortunately, the core mechanic for this iteration seems to be borked as all inter-city connections have been non-functional for me so far in the two regions I've set up neighboring cities in.  Sounds like it's kind of working for some so I'm inclined to think it's a server sync issue, but???

[Shardak 8]

I have City A that has 90% commercial buildings.  It has 10,000 medium wealth jobs open. 

 

In City B I have about 8000 unemployed medium wealth workers.  It shows about 500 workers commuting from B to A..not sure why the others dont commute.  Also, when I look in the population numbers in City A it shows 20,000 people commuting in...but that number does not match the "Commuting Out" numbers from my other cities.

 

So something is seriously borked with region play.  Maybe just adding new servers will help spread out the load and fix these issues, but I doubt it.

[Kythlyn 80]

I have City A that has 90% commercial buildings.  It has 10,000 medium wealth jobs open. 

 

In City B I have about 8000 unemployed medium wealth workers.  It shows about 500 workers commuting from B to A..not sure why the others dont commute.  Also, when I look in the population numbers in City A it shows 20,000 people commuting in...but that number does not match the "Commuting Out" numbers from my other cities.

 

So something is seriously borked with region play.  Maybe just adding new servers will help spread out the load and fix these issues, but I doubt it.

Do both cities have municiple bus stations and a train stations for workers to commute with? Have you checked the wait time on your mass transit?

[Spatzimaus 77]

Do both cities have municiple bus stations and a train stations for workers to commute with? Have you checked the wait time on your mass transit?

 

I'd guess you're on the right track, here.  Last night, I was getting plenty of commuters back and forth between my biggest three cities, but I started running into bottlenecks that limited this.  The biggest was simply the interface with the highway; one of my cities had a perennial traffic jam at the first light, and it sounded like that was making the travel undesirable to many commuters.  I hadn't developed far enough to add train stations, though, so I'm sure it'd get better eventually.

 

Basically, just because city A has a medium-wealth job and city B has a medium-wealth worker doesn't mean he'll WANT to commute if the travel is difficult enough.  You even see this within a single city, especially for high-wealth jobs (since high-wealth folks won't ride the bus).  Work a little more on transportation infrastructure and you might improve it enough that he'd change his mind.

[Shardak 8]

I have City A that has 90% commercial buildings.  It has 10,000 medium wealth jobs open. 

 

In City B I have about 8000 unemployed medium wealth workers.  It shows about 500 workers commuting from B to A..not sure why the others dont commute.  Also, when I look in the population numbers in City A it shows 20,000 people commuting in...but that number does not match the "Commuting Out" numbers from my other cities.

 

So something is seriously borked with region play.  Maybe just adding new servers will help spread out the load and fix these issues, but I doubt it.

Do both cities have municiple bus stations and a train stations for workers to commute with? Have you checked the wait time on your mass transit?

 

Yes I have the big bus stations, trains and ferry connections, and all report thousands of users per day and 30-60 minute wait times.

 

Its just bugged due to server volume according to a maxis employee on reddit.  The high server loads mean that the transferring of anything between cities is not working consistently enough to make regional-play system work.

[Foley803 2]

I would almost rather not be able to connect, than to connect to a server that doesn't have the resources available to function properly.Why are the user caps so high, lol?

[TheGoodGoodMan 0]

It is a bug. Tourists stuck in the hotels (not casino rooms but in commercial zone hotels). To fix it go to city specialization pick tourism then click in left down corner on tourism filter (small camera). Now you will see in color only tourists, tourists attractions and commercial zone hotels (blue ones). This hotels should have a bar showing you how many visitors stays in. Now pick bulldozer tool and destroy this hotels. After a moment tourists will start visiting your city again. 

[jas19illini 2]

Do u need a ferry in each town in order to get tourists commuting via boat, or can u just have a ferry in ur tourist town??? Same question goes for a municipal airport.

[Jack_Bauer_333 2]

Do u need a ferry in each town in order to get tourists commuting via boat, or can u just have a ferry in ur tourist town??? Same question goes for a municipal airport.

 

Only in tourist city. Tourists are just generated based on your tourism attractions and approval rate (more here: ), you don't need any other cities in a region to create tourists. Buses and trains will bring you low and medium wealth tourists, ferry high wealths. As for airport it brings high wealths but compared to ferry it will bring you very few tourists, from what I've seen more people use airport to leave your city, than to visit it (which isn't bad, you can place it at opposite side than your highway to ease traffic a little bit).

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

The way tourism works is actually quite simple: you provide enough population to work at commercial buildings ($ and $$ preferred at start). Since population isn't big enough to bring in enough shoppers, you need tourists to "fill in the gaps". 

Tourists come from intercity transport options (rail, airport, dock) and leave by highway or municipal bus station.

 

Commercial buildings attract the initial few tourists, but the real tourist magents are the casino and convention centre totems. Placement is important, as the convention centre and casinos need to be closer to tourist entry points than commercial buildings (hotels), otherwise tourists will go straight for the commercial district.

 

That's mostly it. It works as described.