Where the workers come from

[ema8_88 0]

Around my main residential / commercial city I've set lot of minor towns (mainly industrial, zero pop.), the questions are:

 

- Can workers travel through a whole town to reach their job in a third one?

 

If yes (as I suppose):

 

- If I see no usage of trains/metro and no workers moving (buf factories are fully employed), where the workers come from?

 

From a general 'outside'? Like other (but empty) towns or outside the region (Sim Nation)? This way I increase the employment of my main city or it's totally useless?

 

Thank you.

[His Divine Hand 244]

When you query a commercial or industrial building, the numbers given, are not of workers there, but of POTENTIAL workers.  Lets say the building says 8/9, the 9 is the maximum amount of workers this building can ever have, while the 8 is what this building will satisfy based on the desirability of your city.  The only way to know for sure how many workers actually work in a commercial or industrial building is to use the route query tool, select the building, then add up the numbers.

[ema8_88 0]

Are you really sure of this?

This make me no sense: in the city overview (region) and in the employing graphs there's a certain amount of effective workers, but using the query tool this amount should be 0.

[Ro-Bo 183]

My understanding is the number you see in region view are the amount of jobs available; not the amount of workers. You have to use the road query to see how many sims really working in each building.

[ema8_88 0]

Following this criterion, in the city overview the amount of citizens should be the totality of available flats in the city and not the total population!

For what I can see, the road query tool it's pretty approximative, and you should remember that is an add-on of RH and not present in the clean game, so I concluded that it's not so basic in the game mechanics.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The route query tool is the only way to find out what's going on in a building unless you have the Extra Cheats DLL.  If you have this add-on for the developers' debug tools you can select the regular query tool (/) then holding CTRL+ALT+SHIFT move the tool over the building for more statistics than you can digest at a glance.

 

The same group that wrote the original game also wrote the Rush Hour package.  What we tell you three times is true.  The ordinary query of any building gives you the number of jobs available under the current conditions/maximum possible jobs under ideal conditions.

 

Please bear in mind that this is a legacy game, written and essentially untouched since the release in 2003.

[ema8_88 0]

I'm not stubborn, I'm just trying to understand: I see BIG inconsistencies in paths showed by the root query (e.g. between borders) and it's not easy to accept that only what is showed by the tool are the real numbers.

[timmie 988]

What the route query shows is what's 'real'. If you hover over a building with the route query tool, it tells you how many people live there or work there. When you query a building (not the route query tool, but the 'query'-tool), it shows you theoretical numbers. The highest number on the right is the theoretical maximum, under ideal conditions, the left number is the maximum number of workers under the actual conditions. This is also the number you see in the city overview and in the jobs chart: the number of jobs, not workers.

 

With an example: it's quite possible that you have a commercial office with a maximum of 250 jobs, but that when you use the route query, only 10 people actually work there. So the building has a lot of jobs left and for some reason your sims don't go to work there. This can be due to a lot of factors. The location may be bad, so sims travel somewhere else that's closer, or the building doesn't match the job needs of your population (this is related to wealth, education,...), or...

 

I'm not quite sure about what you mean with 'inconsistencies', can you clarify that? If you mean that on one side of a border, let's say, 1000 sims commute into the neighbouring city, and on the other side only 500 appear, yes, that happens in the game. The game doesn't know what jobs there are on the other side of the border, it just knows 'there are jobs' and it thus sends people across the border. But when you switch to the other city, it can be that there there are no right jobs available for the commuting sims. When the game doesn't find a place to send the workers from the other side of the border to, it just doesn't let them appear.

 

Odd, but that's how this game works. The mechanics have serious flaws.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If the developers had had the time needed to get everything right, there would have been no patches and no problems.  Unfortunately, they were rushed out the door by the EA Marketing Team.  Probably just as well, because a program of this complexity is never really finished.  However, profit motives have cut off any ongoing maintenance; fixing that might have been done given infinite resources.  Even after 10 years and millions of users, things still turn up.

 

The reality of simulation software development is that, like the weather simulation, it is never complete enough.

 

New faster machines with greater resources make it easier to ferret out problems.  These were not available at the time of development.  There are better development tools around too, after 10 years.