Graduates Bottleneck

[ReSimDave]

First, thanks for all the helpful info I've gleaned while lurking here. Second, I beg forgiveness and direction or indulgence if this has already been addressed and escaped my attention.

I've been playing a week or so, mostly rerunning the Nekhen scenario to get a feel for how things interact. Getting 60 prestige and six LargeEstates is no problem, I just keep playing for the practice. Things always go swimmingly for a while (five or six pharoahs worth); I can get 200+ prestige and 14 nobles yield enough farm income to keep all the offsite quarries running full time while I build a few VerySmall and Small Pyramids. With a couple spare tombs to catch falling pharoahs, I decide to try a bigger Pyramid just to see how long it'll take... and the sky starts falling.

Suddenly my elites seem afflicted with EEMS (Enron Executive Management Syndrome); they start retiring in droves. Though I've always had a full-time, priest-dedicated School and a backlog of a dozen or so graduates since early on, and have brought 2-3 more such Schools online when I could spare the elites to run them, the graduates can't keep up with attrition. My carefully constructed and (I thought) stably organized empire slowly implodes, not for lack of elite positions but for lack of qualified applicants.

What am I missing about education of graduates to fill elite positions? Do LuxuryShopkeepers and Nobles just stop producing educable children after a while? Would it help to bulldoze old LuxuryShops and NobleEstates periodically to keep young blood in the breeding pool? Or is this, coupled with the increasing prestige penalties of successive pharoah deaths just a game-duration-limiting feature, sort of "if you ain't got it by now it's time to give up" feature?

[magnum]

I just run into the same problem, I wonder if it has to do with generations, your first generation of educated workers start to retire and I believe graduates emigrate after some time if they don’t get work so you have a limited pool of graduates, if many retire at once you get a problem, also if the teacher retire you will get no new graduates.
One other tips is to have enough servants, this will more graduates from the luxury shopkeepers.
I was able to work out of it by assigning most of my reminding priests to the school, ignoring religious and healthcare complains.
It should be a jump up possibility so a overseer or a scribe would become a priest if no graduates was present because they are not essential, you get les taxes and the pyramid building might stop but the city don’t collapse.

[Innovan]

Interesting. Raises a lot of questions:


Is there a limit to the number of students that can be educated at a time by each school?
Is there a balance to keep, like 1 school for every 6 educated worker posts, or 2 students for every educated worker post, in order to keep all jobs staffed?
Does fast expansion at the beginning create a cliff's edge of retirement later on?
How old are educated staff when they retire, and is there any way to tell when educated staffs' retirements are upcoming?
How many graduates should we keep in reserve?
Can we burn through graduates too fast by educating them too early, causing them to move on to other cities before we need them? Are there any "Priest, 2nd class" kind of jobs that keep them happy while in reserve?
How well do graduates age? Do they serve X years after taking office, or can we get situations where we hire graduates six months before their retirement age, soon-to-retire guy goes to the bakery, buys his perfume, his jewelery, his monkeys, and just as he's ready to actually work... he also retires?
Do educated workers improve in efficency the longer they do a job?
Is there anything like the "timeclock" in Evil Genius that makes multiple people better coordinate on insuring continuous coverage better, like say the Hospital needs?
Will placing redundant "back up staff" set to "any job" help smooth over retiree gaps? (Assuming they don't retire also.)

[sitearm]

I've only ever used one school.

To avoid running out of graduates I found that a priest dedicated to education was necessary after you had about 10 elites in place.

Also a second priest nearby dedicated to all duties, to cover gaps whenever the first priest retires.

My cities have been up to 24 nobles / 15 elites but I know others have had way bigger.

Anybody ever use more than 2 schools?

Is there a balance to keep, like 1 school for every 6 educated worker posts, or 2 students for every educated worker post, in order to keep all jobs staffed?

[aheisey]

I ran into the same problem as well. The only thing that kept the city flowing was to plop down another Priest housing and assign him to 'Educate Students'. I was constantly churning out new students and when things settled down, I forgot about him until I saw that I had fifteen students. I left him there and from every game thereon I assigned a priest to educate students for the durality of each senario. Didn't experience the problem again.

[Tyveil]

I haven't had this problem at all and my scenarios been running for quite some time now (speed at 2.5 most of the time, probably around 8 gameplay hours). My graduates drops down to 0 occasionally and I just have to set my nearby priest to 'educate students' and before I know it I have 5-15 graduates and I set him back to 'provide all services'. Ever since I added an extra priest next to him I'm even getting graduates without having to set one to 'educate'. I only have 1 school smack dab in the middle of my town which houses 7 noble homes. I have 2-3 priests in my main town providing all services (1 of the 3 always tends to be unoccupied because of my prestige).

My nobles are the happiest of any of my groups (oh if only I could keep shopkeepers, laborers, and scribes so happy). Anyways, don't know if any of this helps but maybe you'll notice something in it that is different that what you've been doing.

[ReSimDave]

From most of the above responses, I guess I didn't make one point clear: I've ALWAYS had a School running with a dedicated Priest. That's the only job I ever assigned to the first Priest, and (until the bottleneck) that position was always promptly filled after retirement with a waiting Graduate.

I think Innovan is on the right track here. There are two sides to the Graduates balance (forgive, but we ChemEngs view every problem as an IGOA balance; works for everything from entropy to anteaters):

Input+Generation = Output+Accumulation

Input = Zero

Generation = School production of Graduates

Output = Graduates assigned to Elite jobs to replace Retirees

Accumulation = Number of available unassigned Graduates

On reflection, I'm not really positive that the Generation rate of Graduates really got ridiculously low; I'd have had to track the statistics more carefully than I did. I am, however, certain that the Output rate of retiring Elites accelerated to breakneck speed.

Since the number of available Graduates grew quickly into the teens in the early game but did NOT get much larger during the more-or-less stable years, there must be an intrinsic limit to either the number of unassigned Graduates overall or at least the number educated at any particular School (much like a PapyrusMill won't accumulate more than 12 units, even if there's nobody to haul it away). If there were no such limit, my continuously-open School should have produced a more or less continuously-growing pool of Graduates.

I think this bottleneck can be explained if (a) Graduates age without regard to their actual assignment to an Elite position (don't we all?), (b) Elites retire without regard to their initial employment date, and (c) there is some sort of limit on the number of unassigned Graduates.

If that's true, then here's what happened:

1. The School produces a full set of Graduates, all about the same age.

2. All Elite positions get filled initially by Graduates who are all about the same age.

3. The Graduates filling the early Elite positions get promptly replaced with Graduates who aren't much younger, yielding a "backlog" or "pool" of Graduates not much younger than the working Elite.

4. New Elite positions created by growing prestige get filled with aging Graduates from the "pool"... who aren't much younger than the old farts they replace.

5. Graduates assigned to the new Elite positions get replaced with possibly younger students... but because many or most of these get assigned in the first few years, the unassigned Graduates pool isn't much younger than the workin Elite.

6. The odd early-retiring Elite (presumably a statistical spread, I'd bet that retirement is a random event with a probability that increases with age) gets replaced by a Graduate of comparable age.

By educating Graduates during the early years without restraint, almost the entire working Elite population turns gray together. As their retirement probabilities increase, they start leaving in droves. The first to go get replaced by folks who won't be around much longer. I haven't done the math, but I'll wager that if the retirement:age distribution is Gaussian that this sort of replacement will "sharpen the peak" considerably.

This is untested conjecture, of course, but doesn't it seem plausible?

The only workaround I see is to manage the age of the unassigned Graduates pool. The only way I see to do that is to restrict access to working Schools. The only ways I see to do that are either (a) control the places to study by bulldozing Schools when there are "too many" unassigned Graduates and rebuilding them when there are "too few", or (b) control the supply of teachers: assign all Priests to specific functions and let none ProvideAllServices which would let them wander into a classroom.

Comment?

[ReSimDave]

If potential students can wait around forever for an open School to educate them into Graduates, then we're up a creek with almost no way to manage the age of the Graduates pool. Only if an educable child gives up after a while and goes off to do something besides get hisself edumacated -- including leaving town -- will restricted school access yield younger Graduates. If he can mooch off Mom & Dad forever as a seventeen-year-freshman, we'll still get an old Graduate; he just won't sit around so long admiring his unused diploma.

Well, restricted School access may save some education slots for a younger generation to come... if the young folks can get to class quickly enough to get a degree before the old guys who got a head start the last time the School was open. Not very satisfactory IMHO.

Does anybody know how long educable children will hang around home waiting for schooling? Do they hang around any longer if they're Graduates?

DLS

[sharco99]

I used two schools and 3 fathers. The result is postive. in 5 years i think I had 60 graduates. You acutally just need one father and one school. However, don't forget students come from lux shop keepers and nobles. Therefore keep some number of them. The number depands on the size of your city. :D

[Raccoon_TOF]

I was able to maintain a steady supply of graduates to cover 35 EE positions over 140 game years with only one "bottleneck" - and it was due to a bad string of deaths together with a mass retirement at the same time (total of I think 23 of my 35 EE needing replaced over a 4-5 year time span...). Recovery was a matter of swapping two of my "tend gods" priests to 1 extra educate and 1 alljobs, and then waiting about 5 years for the graduates to be replaced and the jobs refilled. Note that this was with 2 operable schools, one with a dedicated education priest and one in an auxillary location along with a hospital and apothacary, with a single priest there on alljobs.

[wondertwin]

Personally, I like to keep a small noble population (5 or so) and a small educated elite population unless the scenario dictates otherwise.

As a result, I usually have one priest dedicated to education, one to funerary services, two to gods, and one or two to healthcare. Since the schools can educate up to three students at a time, I usually have at least 11-12 graduates within a few years--not sure how many years, I haven't ever paid that much attention.

In Bubastis, for example--my prestige rating allowed me to have 21 educated elite, but I only had 12. I find that by not maxing out the level of educated elites I use, I always have plenty of graduates to fill the void. That way, if your prestige drops for some reason, you are still left with a functioning city.

My experience is that small tends to be better for me. I have never had nobles leave, just the occasional overseer or commander whose families don't shop (see other post) LOL.

Hope this helps!