Ideas about fixing tourism

[Ltw 401]

A topic that got my attention since the release of After Dark is tourism. The new option is flawed and people are often discussing that it should be fixed. There aren't enough tourists and especially when you're building a lot of unique buildings to attract tourists it is annoying to see that almost nobody is visiting them. I think that problems with tourism are mainly caused by how Paradox approached tourism. Tourists are visiting the city, which basically means that you will have a problem with agent-limits. This approach could lead to other problems with simulation of traffic-patterns of citizens if you want to get it fixed. Which makes it seem quite impossible to fix. However, I got an idea which might be able to fix tourism without messing around with agent-limits: Just treat tourists as residents.

First of all I want to state that treating the tourist as resident needs some serious alterations. However, this might be easier to do since traffic-patterns of tourists might be easier to calculate than traffic-patterns of residents. Tourists need hotels in order to sleep and go on the next day. However, they don't work, are less likely to commit crimes and don't need education. Tourists therefore have less needs than residents which could make a large simulation easier.

The idea is quite simple: Tourists are going to your city and stay there for a few days. If a tourist leaves another tourist might be traveling to the city, this goes on forever. Tourists 'live' in hotels, which means that hotels should have a residential type with tourist-specialization. I think it is better to approach hotels this way. The main goal (at least for the simulation) is to house lots of tourists for a short period of time, the fact that they raise money is kind of irrelevant in this case, it is nice that they do but housing tourists is the main goal. The 'life' of a tourist could look like this: They move into a hotel, they go to unique buildings, they move out. If simulating migration in large numbers would become a problem with agent-limits and computer-power you could also 'kill' them. Which seems cruel but might be working fine for simulation, basically tourists are being 'born' in hotels, go to unique buildings and 'die', in order to make this work concepts like age should be let go. Furthermore the simulation should be less deep for these tourists, since you don't want to pick up dead bodies. This simulation would roughly be like 'they appear, do things and disappear'.

Preferences of tourists are somewhat different than preferences of citizens. They want to move into hotels that are close to parks, unique buildings and public transport but schools and hospitals are less important for them. They are very picky, a hotel that isn't close to unique buildings or parks will have less tourists in them and will more likely get vacant. Furthermore tourists prefer leisure/tourist buildings over normal commercial buildings. In another thread I've made the suggestion to split up tourism into hotels and bars/restaurants, this could be in addition to the suggestions I'm making in this topic. Other suggestions made by OcramsRzr on hotels are also very nice, especially his suggestion to make a different demand is very nice in this case (number two in the thread linked to earlier). In this case demand would be a little bit like demand for residents, but in this case for the tourists only (which could be connected to tourist/commercial as well).

In an average day a tourist would visit at least one unique building and a restaurant/bar. Unique buildings should work more like commercial buildings. Not the number of visitors, but the tax-income they gain is important. They still cost (a lot of) money, but it is possible to earn it back. I'm always annoyed by the fact that I plop some unique buildings which cost at least $1000,- a week and they barely get any visitors at all. Therefore the focus should be on income and not on visitors. Just like commercial buildings, getting enough visitors is important too but the most important thing in this case is earning money. Unique buildings sell tickets in order to get you in and this way they make money, which could be taxed. The stadium, aquarium and expo clearly have something to sell. But also monuments like the Eifel Tower sell tickets (at least I never managed to get in the Eifel Tower for free ). Therefore it would make sense to treat unique buildings as commercial buildings. This would mean that you don't know how many people are visiting the buildings (lets be honest, that doesn't work properly), you only know how much you earn from them and how much it costs you. What I like about this approach is that unique buildings could still cost you money, but if you would do it right it could be possible to earn that back.

These are my suggestions about improving tourism this far. There are still lots of things to figure out but I think this would be a nice start. Do you have any suggestions on this problem? I would like to know your suggestions on this topic!

[boformer 3,169]

8 hours ago, Ltw said:

Tourists are visiting the city, which basically means that you will have a problem with agent-limits.

That's not true. Tourists (like any other citizens) only count as agents while they are travelling. As soon as they are disappearing in a hotel, a unique building or a commercial shop, they count as (virtual) citizens.

The (virtual) citizen limit is 1,048,576.

The agent limit is 65,536.

[Turjan 1,048]

The main problem with tourism at the moment is a bit overflow bug. I hope they found the formula with the error, but I haven't heard a thing.

I don't really mind the number of tourists that much. It's up to 1000 tourists per week at the moment. Most of the unique buildings I have see okay numbers of visitors (except those with screwy stats). However, I think CO didn't "fix" the aspect of parks and tourists properly. While parks don't count for tourist visits in some of the representations anymore, tourists will still visit them. I still have tourists go to my awesome vanilla plaza with benches in my even more awesome industrial zone. This looks very lazily done, like just hidden away from the spreadsheet.

In principle, the workshop is a good indicator of what people think about tourism or leisure. There's hardly any assets made for those categories. Tourism has 4 or 5 new models and altogether the grand total of 8 assets made.

[Ltw 401]

16 hours ago, boformer said:

That's not true. Tourists (like any other citizens) only count as agents while they are travelling. As soon as they are disappearing in a hotel, a unique building or a commercial shop, they count as (virtual) citizens.

The (virtual) citizen limit is 1,048,576.

The agent limit is 65,536.

Okay. Thanks for the clarification. However, if you would want to build a city which is more or less based on tourism you can have a problem. Since tourists are planning to stay in your city for a short time there is probably going to a lot of traffic from and to your city if you have a lot of tourists. For some reason that isn't possible and 'killing them' might be a way to reduce traffic-patterns. Which could lead to an increase in tourists. However, this would reduce the depth of the simulation, which might not be desirable. Turjan posted something about tourism and unique buildings quite some time ago. An issue I'm having right now. Even though Turjan got it sort of working in that thread it shouldn't be fixed by the player in the first place. And honestly, I think the difference between tourists and residents is a distinction without a difference, that's why I don't get why the amount of tourists is this low. They arrive, sleep at hotels, go to commercial buildings and leave. The main differences are that they have a lot of money to spend, are 'unemployed' and prefer unique buildings. Especially when taking into account that they are virtual citizens if they are in buildings it seems understandable what causes those low numbers.

13 hours ago, Turjan said:

The main problem with tourism at the moment is a bit overflow bug. I hope they found the formula with the error, but I haven't heard a thing.

I don't really mind the number of tourists that much. It's up to 1000 tourists per week at the moment. Most of the unique buildings I have see okay numbers of visitors (except those with screwy stats). However, I think CO didn't "fix" the aspect of parks and tourists properly. While parks don't count for tourist visits in some of the representations anymore, tourists will still visit them. I still have tourists go to my awesome vanilla plaza with benches in my even more awesome industrial zone. This looks very lazily done, like just hidden away from the spreadsheet.

In principle, the workshop is a good indicator of what people think about tourism or leisure. There's hardly any assets made for those categories. Tourism has 4 or 5 new models and altogether the grand total of 8 assets made.

That's most certainly true. I think tourists shouldn't visit parks at all to be honest. It has a positive influence on the desirability of an area but they shouldn't have to visit it. It is not likely that people will drive/fly to a city in order to go to a medium-sized park. Thus making them visit unique buildings and commercial buildings only makes more sense to me.

Tourist-numbers should be higher in my opinion. If you would have 1000 tourists a week this would mean 52.000 per year. Which is quite low actually. Especially when you compare it to real cities it doesn't make much sense. For instance cities like Paris and Amsterdam get more tourists a year than their total number of residents. This would be impossible in Skylines, doesn't matter how many Eiffel Towers you would plop in your city. This is something that annoys me, more unique buildings should lead to more tourists but at a certain moment it hardly has any influence at all.

[GC_Vos 714]

I completely agree with you on most points. I understand there's a limit but it's especially annoying to have visitor counts drop to 0 when you do reach that number (which is not very hard).

[benzoll37 0]

It seems incredible that find no solution to tourism. Actually this solution would give life and meaning to "After Dark".
Therefore, they do not know how to fix it. This is possible? Unheard.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

Hotels should get their own zone

 

They should also get their own demand bar

 

By AzemOcram

https://imgur.com/a/9r88Y

[Ltw 401]

8 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

Hotels should get their own zone

 

They should also get their own demand bar

 

By AzemOcram

https://imgur.com/a/9r88Y

Yes, that could still apply and has some great benefits indeed (as stated in your thread earlier). Since it is commercial right now you can get problems with customers in your hotel, even though you have enough demand for commercial zones. I sometimes notice that it is very easy to build new hotel-specialized zones but it is very hard to keep them and make sure those zones have enough customers. Therefore it would be important to make demand for hotels similar to the residential demand, main difference is that it is connected to 'tourist-migration' instead of 'regular migration'. Hotels should function as a way of 'housing', tourists are sleeping there thus it would make sense to approach it a little bit like a residential buildings because right now I'm wondering what is driving those hotels to exist, there aren't that many tourists in a city and still it is possible to have lots of hotels. At the moment I'm having 12 tourists a week in my city (because of the tourism/unique buildings issue Turjan was talking about in another thread) and Istill have four hotel-districts that are working properly. Even if I would have 1000 tourists a week the number of hotels is too much.

Having separate zones for hotels is a nice solution since you could place hotels between other buildings this way. It could be possible that you would get really large hotel-districts if you have a lot of tourists if the only way to zone hotels is via the district-policy (which isn't very realistic). I think placing hotels in the commercial demand doesn't make any sense. It would make a little bit more sense to place it in residential demand but that's not a solution either, this way it reacts to wishes of the residents too which could mess up your residential demand. Making hotels have their own demand would therefore be the best solution, I don't know how difficult this would be to do afterwards but I guess it would be possible to do so (FYI, my knowledge on programming is very limited ).

In the situation I'm describing tourists start their days at the hotel, visit some buildings and go back to the hotel, they repeat this pattern until they leave the city, which could be a few days. This way hotels function similarly to residential buildings, which could be of large benefit if you have a lot of citizens. Now it seems like the game is turning off tourism almost entirely when getting to a certain population/number of landmarks (someone did some research to the overflow-bug Turjan was describing earlier which was kinda interesting imo), the best situation possible would be turning off active agents if the game would get trouble with simulating everything, in this case some parts of the city might be quite empty but at least the numbers are still right. This is also being used for citizens and might be annoying too, but I think it is the best 'bad situation' you could get as far as simulation goes, especially considering the fact that this kind of simulation is very demanding for a lot of computers.

[ethansprang 41]

On 1/23/2016 at 2:05 PM, GC_Vos said:

I completely agree with you on most points. I understand there's a limit but it's especially annoying to have visitor counts drop to 0 when you do reach that number (which is not very hard).

I made local copies of a LOT of unique buildings and dropped the attractiveness to single digits.  Especially a few that had attractiveness over 25 or 50.

[Ltw 401]

2 hours ago, ethansprang said:

I made local copies of a LOT of unique buildings and dropped the attractiveness to single digits.  Especially a few that had attractiveness over 25 or 50.

That's an interesting approach. However, it shouldn't be necessary in my opinion. Unique buildings could have a large desirability and should be treated as such in my view. The fact that this solution could help in order to keep the number of tourists up is kind of messed up in the first place I think. Out of curiosity, how many tourists do you get in your city with this solution? It seems a little bit strange to me that this helps but it is also strange that more unique buildings lead to a breakdown in tourism. Thus I wouldn't be surprised if this would work properly.

FYI, there are some more desirability-issues in Skylines, such as the universities in the game, in real life universities cover large parts of a region and the large numbers of students could have some large effects on an entire city. The universities in Skylines can't even cover one city, which leads to a lot of unused capacity in a lot of cases. But that is a little bit off topic in this thread.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

The Tourism Overflow Bug seems like it's caused by the number for tourism attractiveness is a signed integer. This could easily be fixed by the developers to change it to an unsigned integer with a cap at 65,000 (to prevent overflow).

If hotels got their own zone and their demand was based off attractiveness (there should be 3 wealth levels and 3 draw numbers, which could push the cap up to 80,000 if 2 or 3 wealth levels of tourists are attracted), they could easily function like housing for tourists. I also suggest tour buses (tacky, cultural, and VIP) be added to the game to carry many tourists with 1 agent. High density housing and offices could also send out mosh pits (for lack of better word) to represent many locals with 1 agent.

[Turjan 1,048]

On 1/27/2016 at 11:47 AM, ethansprang said:

I made local copies of a LOT of unique buildings and dropped the attractiveness to single digits.  Especially a few that had attractiveness over 25 or 50.

There are buildings on the workshop with attractiveness values of 300.

There must be more to the formula, because I sometimes had the effect that lowering the attractiveness value increased the number of tourists that visit the building.

[LivingInThePast 364]

I haven't paid up money for After Dark's DLC (mostly because a lot of the core mechanics are so disappointing, which have no timetable of ever being fixed), but I think values for tourists should be a separate value from everyone else, because it looks like the Attractiveness value is universal and not specified to tourism. A lot of people may want to visit the Great Pyramids, but actually being close to them is a different issue. Since it's hard to imagine a world where the Great Pyramids are crowded out with residential buildings in anything less than an overpopulated dystopia or some tacky replica (which let's face it, if you plop down the Great Pyramids in your commercial district, then your city will end up looking like a discount Las Vegas).

Let's take the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas for an accurate example. The Alamo, despite historic representations of it essentially being out in the middle of an arid landscape with it being located where it is in an oasis of sorts, is today nestled in the San Antonio downtown area, with a wax museum and other tourist amenities located across the street. It's popular with tourists but locals just don't care and rather get away from it as possible (in general, locals generally despise/avoid tourists, in many many cities). Therefore, a place like a touristy wax museum or something will have a slight negative attractiveness to locals but be attractive to tourists.

The same "lives in hotels with no day job" could also be used for a transient population number...