Fake Population

[panikattak]

While waiting for the patch I'm getting bored so I've been modding/adjusting my game quite a bit. One of the things I've done was I emptied my buildings folder and have been slowly going thru the files, adjusting them, and reintroducing them back into the game rebalancing it in different ways.

One thing I've come across I thought was interesting was the fake population score for each home which accounts for the population score of to the lower lefthand side of the UI.

Personally, I don't like how it's handled and I don't care for an arbitrary # for my population. I could adjust this number so my village could have hundreds of millions in population but in reality, that number makes no difference to what's going on other than it is ultimately calculated by how many sims live in your city.

What I've done was adjust the number so it's one to one with my actual sim count. The effect is if I pause my game just as I start a new map, lay down a bunch of housing, the number of spots a sim move into is on the housing icon but the population number is zero. If I unpause my game, I can see the population counter go up exactly with how many sims are moving into my town. In my eyes, where the math of trying to caluclate how many actual sims lived in my town before was impossible with the population meter, now it is possible. Ok, my cities got a whole lot smaller population # wise, but nothing actually changed other than my population meter is now useful for something other than looking at.

[PsYChoWaTrMelon]

wonderful. can you zip the files or scpack them please. i was thinking
of doing something similar but now i can focus on making things spawn
random sims with some new C# code :D thank god its similar to java ;)

[panikattak]

I don't think you would want my files as they are heavily modded and no longer balanced to play in vanilla Societies.

I was just relating this to others as an interesting little thing they can do with their game and something that's useful.

If anyone is interested, just navigate to:

Data\XMLDb\Game\Objects\BUILDINGS

and open a housing .xml file with notepad, scroll down to:

<FakePopulation>****</FakePopulation> and change that number to equal the max population number of that home, such as if the fake number is 12 and the max population number is 2, then change the fake population number to 2.

Wash, rinse, repeat until all are done.

[Tinkerbell]

I believe, but don't quote me, via initial Labbing, that workers + unemployed + homeless >= available Homes worker slots (after you give time for all the new workers to appear). You can delete Homes & get homeless with a larger number (reason for the >=).

Special Sims including children are not counted in the pop total.

True?

[panikattak]

First off, I errored and I should have said to make the fake population number equal the max population number.

But I can't confirm what I said is right. I only have about 30 buildings in my gallery at the moment, nine of which are homes. The towns I've built reflect what I'm talking about but when I just tried to reload my old cities to confirm what I've said I'm finding my cities are reporting back weird numbers and I may have broken something.

On the towns that it seems to be working right, my population number on the panel is equal to my population number on the city stats screen.

[Tinkerbell]

Interesting stuff, Panikattak, a point I failed to acknowledge. :)

You are definitely on the right track, dissecting the fake population numbers.

I have also had a Global Event (Tsunami? ~ Game guide sez caused by high carbon levels), where the popup said that refugess were coming to my city "Do you have Homes for them?"

I would guess that the fake population numbers mask a lot of what is actually going on in the game.

[panikattak]

I'm still unsure about what's going on and what I've done so far hasn't answered these questions for me yet:

Do homeless sims = one person or is there a similar converstion as there is for homes (such as 1 homeless sim = 10 fake population)?

Is the fake population number for the house the total number for a full house or is it a number for each sim that moves in (such as a full hut might have 16 fake population, or if two sims move in, it's actually 32 in fake population that's counted)?

[Tinkerbell]

I'm still unsure about what's going on and what I've done so far hasn't answered these questions for me yet:

Tell me about it! The more I discover, the more questions I have. I have been lost, dazed & confused since day one & it hasn't gotten much better. This game IS both deep & complex, but we can build successful cities easily, if that is what the player desires.

Do homeless sims = one person or is there a similar converstion as there is for homes (such as 1 homeless sim = 10 fake population)?

I believe, at this point in my noobness, homeless are only one person. Walkers are real, but perhaps not counted. It is just the Homes non-worker-slot numbers that are fake. If we delete a Home, Sims that used to live there do not simply disappear. They become Homeless & are the first to move into a newly placed home after-the-fact (unless there is a race perhaps).

Is the fake population number for the house the total number for a full house or is it a number for each sim that moves in (such as a full hut might have 16 fake population, or if two sims move in, it's actually 32 in fake population that's counted)?

The fake population number is arbiturary & meaningless, attached to the building, I believe. Except for triggering goals like trophies & unlocking things.

TM basically put the fake population numbers in there so that SimCity fans would not yell & scream about non-million tiny populations like they got in similarly fake SimCity games. <ducking>

It hasn't helped them a lot. ;)

[Alex Mullins]

Do homeless sims = one person or is there a similar converstion as there is for homes (such as 1 homeless sim = 10 fake population)?

Homeless sims count for a random number between 2 and 8 fake population each; this is set in Data\NewConstants.txt:

SimConstants/HomelssPopulationAmount/Min;int;2
SimConstants/HomelssPopulationAmount/Max;int;8

Walkers are real, but perhaps not counted.

Special sims don't count towards the fake population.

Is the fake population number for the house the total number for a full house or is it a number for each sim that moves in (such as a full hut might have 16 fake population, or if two sims move in, it's actually 32 in fake population that's counted)?

The fake population for a house in the xml is the fake population for a full house; so 1/2 people in a house with a fake population of 10 would count as 5 fake people.

Also, note that the fake population that is displayed updates each hour in increments towards the "real" fake population number. So if you're doing a lot of building this won't be 100% accurate but if you let it run for a bit without any change in the fake population it will eventually reach the number.

[Tinkerbell]

Thankx for the kewl new info, Alex!

I knew that the answers were not simple. I know TM Games too well! ;)