As a user named ?anickle? brought up an experiment he made so he could understand why only a minor percentage (10-15%) of the sim population is considered workforce, I have decided to run the same experiment myself and stubled upon major flaws in the core game, flaws that are until now probably unknown for almost every player, if not all of them. This is new, and this is very concerning.
The credit of the idea goes to anickle, who performed his own version of the experiment, which can be found here:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9359265.page
My experiment:
I started sandbox mode and built water, electricity and garbage facilities, police and fire stations and a clinic.
I built one single house, low density and low wealth, and stood obeserving them. The whole experiment is made entirely with this type of house.
One single house, as already explained by anickle, has a pop. of 6: 4 workers, 2 shoppers and actually 2 kids that are never included in the population count. So it is safe to assume that from now on, provided sims don?t die, my workers count and my shoppers count will always be: ?no. of houses x 4? (workers) or ?no. of houses x 2? (shoppers).
I kept building more houses and recording the increase in the numbers of workers and shoppers. As expected, all the numbers were perfectly fine. For a while. User marcoyim believed the pop. count started to go wrong at 500, so I tested for that, and he is absolutely right.
This is the count of the population and the number of workers and shoppers so far:
1 house = 6 pop, 2w + 4s
12 houses = 72 pop, 48w + 24s
53 houses = 318 pop, 212w + 106s
83 houses = 498 pop, 332w + 166s
And here it goes the odd part: as the next house was finished, the population count increased by 7, not by 6. As the next house was finished, the population count increased by 10, and at the next time it increased by 12.
BUT THE HOUSES CONTINUED WITH 6 PEOPLE (4W+2S).
So indeed, the game adds a phantom population in the count that doesn?t really exist, and I guess I figured out the general way in which it does that. I will put the numbers as they are easier to understand by themselves.
House 1, which would achive 500 or more in the pop count: 7 sims (6 real)
House 2: 10
House 3: 12
House 4: 13
(...)
I kept counting this for 41 houses, always subtracting the former pop count on the new one to find how many sims the game added in the pop count, while the houses always actually had 6 sims. The real progression I found was this:
7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 15, 15, 16, 17, 18, 17, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 19, 18, 19, 19, 19, 20, 19, 20, 20, 21, 20, 20, 21, 21, 20, 21, 21, 21, 22, 21, 21, 22, 22, 22.
The final house count was at 121 and the population was at 1.294, but I had 507 workers and 254 shoppers. If you do the math, I should have a little less (and 1 worker died too). It was not at the ?pop x 4? and ?pop x 2? ratio I told you before because 24 workers and 12 shoppers were added to the real population trough this process of adding phantom people. So as you see, they increase both real and ghost sims in our cities.
I stopped counting there as I though I already had the general idea, and I am sure you get it too: The game adds an increasing number of sims per house to the population count, in an organized way, without ever adding these sims in your actual city.
This is alarming, at least. It means that the game is not what is advertised (intentionally or not), it means glassbox does not process every sim individually. One can argue that each sim is technically tracked individually when it exist in the map, but that is not so true as I will continue below.
Besides the experiment above, playing with the concepts of the game brought me insights of how the engine works and how it is flawed at every level. Here are miscellaneous things I captured while doing the whole thing:
1. If you demolish a bulding that provides jobs, for ex. a power plant, while a worker is working, this worker is deleted along with the building. I managed to intentionally have a city with no workers by doing this. Note that I did it when I only had 2 houses, so I don?t know if that will ALWAYS happen.
2. After I closed the police, fire station and clinic, 1 worker at the police and 1 at the clinic took AGES to go out. It means that if you demolish it after closing, chances are you will lose one worker there.
3. The game does not know how to behave when sims die: If one sim die both the pop count and the workforce also goes down by 1 (so far so good), but the house where he lived keeps showing 6 citizens. Worse, if those sims leave your city the count will go down further 6 points instead of 5, meaning that you actually lose 7 sims, not 6.
4. Even if you only have 1 single house in the map, the house will show 3 kids running around it and 3 different sims appeared for me going in and out while 2 workers were at work. That means I saw 6 people + 3 kids (9 total), and these people, although (usually) maintaining their names, used different ?sprites?/models each time, with no consistency at all. There was no connection with the names and ?surname? of the house. The only rule was that sims that leave the house for working always had the same surname as the house. That means the sims are not ?real? agents, they are randomly generated each time, with different names and models every time, provided they are not going to work.
5. Numbers I gathered for you guys while playing:
Commercial: 5/10L, 2/4M, 0H (I found two different values for C, I guess different buildings have different job slots. There may be more)
Industrial: 20L, 6M, 0H (Again, there may be others)
Wind Power Plant jobs: 20L, 6M, 0H
Sewage facility: 0L, 0M, 0H
Garbage dump: 20L, 6M, 0H
Police: 10L, 4M, 0H
Fire Dept: 20L, 6M, 0H
Clinic: 12L, 8M, 4H
