Last week we touched upon the economy in Cities: Skylines II, how it works now, and how it might be subject to change based on your feedback. This time around we’ll answer some of your questions about the citizens, education, and public transport.

Could you talk about how citizens are simulated in the game?
You have noticed that sometimes citizens don’t behave the way you might expect. Sometimes citizens vanish or they might stay at home for a day. So let’s talk about when that can happen and why. A citizen can despawn in some circumstances: for example, when there is a dead-lock with other agents, such as an overly long queue of cars, or there is no reasonable path to their destination. There is still the rule that a citizen cannot teleport to their destination. If they despawn, they teleport to their previous destination so they can’t just skip bad traffic by teleporting. Some of you have also noticed that when the city grows bigger there is a probability for whether or not an agent will travel to work or school. This is intended, and citizens become a bit more passive to reduce traffic, but there is no limit to the number of moving agents. This choice was made to keep traffic manageable because reducing private car ownership didn't help as city centers were filled with pedestrians. Performance gain from the reduced pathfind load was just an extra benefit.

How do citizens choose which products to buy?
When a citizen goes shopping for their household, the game picks the type of goods through a weighted random check. Products that citizens should need more of or more often have a heavier weight and are roughly based on real-world consumption statistics. Additionally, each age group has certain products they “prefer” which affects the weighted check. As an example, citizens are more likely to purchase food over media, and a household of seniors is even less interested in media than the other age groups. Once the products have been purchased, they’re added to the household’s resources and eventually consumed.

How did you balance the education system?
The citizen Education system closely follows the same system we had in the original Cities: Skylines. When a citizen is educated, they will get a job with a better salary which gives them more opportunities to live in different places. While we have made some improvements to it to encourage more High School students, the Education system still needs some balancing, as we feel it’s currently not working as well as it could. For example, the number of Elementary Schools needed in the city is quite huge because the percentage of the population that goes to Elementary School is big.

The children don't have a choice between studying and working so that also raises the number of students compared to other education levels, where a portion of the eligible students will choose to work instead. The Elementary School’s student capacity has been balanced around how many students the building could reasonably hold, and while it might improve the situation, a small school building with 1000 students is quite unrealistic. Currently, we are checking the factors that need to be considered to balance this issue. This includes, for example, how long it takes to graduate from different types of schools. Additionally, each school type has its own Graduation check curve that determines the probability of graduating. Elementary School has the highest probability and University has the lowest probability.

Is there a system to “unbunch” public transportation vehicles?
Public transportation vehicles can get “bunched up” due to traffic or most often when a new line is created and the vehicles spawn. We have a system that spreads out the vehicles on a singular line by extending stopping times when necessary. This helps the vehicles to move at regular intervals, so your citizens can get where they need to go and you don’t have all buses arriving in one long line, but it may take a little while for vehicles to spread out properly on a brand new line. We have received reports of public transportation vehicles getting stuck for too long at a stop and we are investigating what are the reasons behind this.

Feel free to send more questions our way and we’ll be answering them in future Words of the Week!

Sincerely,
Mariina