Thoughtful reflections on Oompa-Loompas (aka Where are all the workers?)
Thoughtful reflections on Oompa-Loompas (aka Where are all the workers?)
“Of course they're real people. They're Oompa-Loompas...Imported direct from Loompaland...And oh what a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the world - hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles. A whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast and come galloping back for a second helping.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Here's a screenshot from one of my old cities, Castle Island in Boston.
It's from the vanilla SimCity 4 Rush Hour game, before I installed the NAM, and before I fully understood these economic drivers of the game:
- Commercial traffic.
- Neighbour connections.
- Taxes.
- Demand CAPs.
- Education (EQ).
- Land desirability: landmarks, yimby/nimby, pollution, crime, garbage.
- Commute accessibility.
The /,click Query dialog shows 73/75 jobs, but the Alt+/,hover Route Query tool shows Workers (none). The whole strip of shops and nearby industry have the same problem. What's up with that?
I call them "oompa-loopas", workers that keep the wheels of commerce and industry spinning, even when no sims are coming to their jobs. We should be grateful for them, because without these phantom workers, these businesses would never grow or develop. Even utilities and civic plops would fail to function! They take the jobs that local sims don't want, but that doesn't help our unemployment problems for our local sims. So the big question is this one, why don't the local sims want these jobs?
The oompa-loompas are taking all our jobs!
One reason is match of education level (EQ) to job type. A more pressing reason is commute time for those sims of the right education level, from their home to their workplace. You see it even more frequently for manufacturing (I-M) and dirty industry (I-D), simply because those districts tend to be further away from residential zones.
I'm a longtime vanilla SimCity 4 Rush Hour player, with a thorough expertise in the economic drivers of growth in the game, but I'm new to the NAM, so I'll be running experiments to see how these commute time factors are changing. In the meantime, for my latest city, Breezy Point, New York, I'm taking precautions using carefully planned backroads from low-wealth residential (R$) to the manufacturing (I-M), dirty industry (I-D) and utility plant districts.
The red arrow points to the one location of backroad access from low wealth residential (R$) to the manufacturing (I-M), dirty industry (I-D) and utility plant districts. I've heard that it's only the morning commute that affects employment levels, the sims being content to take a longer route home on the evening commute. I've already verified that power plant jobs are are still very sensitive to commute distance in the NAM.
It's a difficult juggle to balance commute distance employability, versus funnelling sim traffic through commercial districts to encourage C$$ and C$$$ growth. I'll report back here in the comments with my NAM experiment results.
NOTE: If you don't want to worry about economic aspects of growability in the game, just use small city tiles, which are far more forgiving economically ... but for me, I LOVE those big city tiles! 
-
8
1 Comment
Recommended Comments
Sign In or register to comment...
To comment in reply, you must be a community member
Sign In
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In NowCreate an Account
Sign up to join our friendly community. It's easy!
Register a New Account