Private sector unmothballing takes 10+ turns

[jimwinsor]

Something that I've noticed in my past couple games, in those cases where the private industry mothballs its in-city assets due to a short term population shortage (usually because they did something stupid like build a huge dome farm), it can be a VERY long before it decided to reopen them, even when population is once again made available (usually by my nationalizing and scrapping the stupid private mega dome farm).

In my current game my capital almost suicided itself by mothballing most of its QOL buildings after a building a Dome III boondoggle. This caused a downward spiral whereby happiness began to tank, then emigration began from my capital to neighboring cities. So many emigrated that there was not enough private population left to run what was still open. The only way I was to save the situation was by playing 2 Boom Town cards on the capital to stabilize the population. And I broke down and built a public Hospital (which really grinded my gears because there were perfectly good private Sewers and Clinics that were mothballed).

The solons of the private industry there did finally begin unmothballing some assets, about 10-12 turns after the crisis began. Again, there was plenty of population for reopening most of that time ... they just refused to do so in a reasonable amount of time.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

Something that I've noticed in my past couple games, in those cases where the private industry mothballs its in-city assets due to a short term population shortage (usually because they did something stupid like build a huge dome farm), it can be a VERY long before it decided to reopen them, even when population is once again made available (usually by my nationalizing and scrapping the stupid private mega dome farm).

The problem with nationalizing or scrapping the domefarm is:
- wait, I need a Domefarm of size X and no longer have it
- better budget all the workers for that one job
- I guess that means we can not reopen any of those QOL assets anytime soon?

So it is quite possible you made the issue worse by nationalizing it, delaying until they could bring the rest operational again.

[jimwinsor]

Yeah, it's possible, although I'm not sure not nationalizing would have made things much better. They still would have run short on private workers to run everything. As a matter of fact, it's possible my mistake was not nationalizing soon enough, due to me overlooking the problem for a turn or two.

I think the main issue is that private industry does not utilize (or even recognize?) Hydroponics. As I recall, in both of my games I was in the process of replacing my own public Dome Farms with Hydroponics at the time. Perhaps the loss of the public Domes triggered the irrational response from the private sector?

[jimwinsor]

An update: I had to end the campaign as a loss. It seems the AI private industry was insistent on building Dome III farms in my capital city, which has a worker demand of just under 40,000. The city only has a few thousand unemployed workers, free folk no longer exist, so that Dome projects once complete would have tanked my economy, and inevitably lead to a new round of mothballing of all other non-agricultural private buildings. Every time I tried to nationalize the Dome, the AI would begin a new one somewhere else ... and not cease until it reached level III (or beyond???).

I want to re-emphasize there was no food shortage whatsoever. Hydroponic food had filled my granaries to capacity, and excess food spillover was being sold to the traders every turn.

So there is something terribly wrong currently with the AI logic for the private industry. Save file is here: https://we.tl/t-QQKf3PEITt

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

An update: I had to end the campaign as a loss. It seems the AI private industry was insistent on building Dome III farms in my capital city, which has a worker demand of just under 40,000. The city only has a few thousand unemployed workers, free folk no longer exist, so that Dome projects once complete would have tanked my economy, and inevitably lead to a new round of mothballing of all other non-agricultural private buildings. Every time I tried to nationalize the Dome, the AI would begin a new one somewhere else ... and not cease until it reached level III (or beyond???).

I want to re-emphasize there was no food shortage whatsoever. Hydroponic food had filled my granaries to capacity, and excess food spillover was being sold to the traders every turn.

So there is something terribly wrong currently with the AI logic for the private industry. Save file is here: https://we.tl/t-QQKf3PEITt

I am not quite sure if you understand the rules for food quite right, so I better list them:
- The food in your SHQ and Zone Storage - the Public Food - can only be consumed by Workers and Soldiers
- Private Citizens eat primarily private food, produced by private farming assets, stored in the Private Economy, with excess being sold to traders.
- If the private food production is not enough (like you nationalized the food asset): 1. If it is enabeled, they will get emergency food. This one is delivered with no costs to logistics. 2. If there is no Emergecy Food avalible, they will buy food from the traders
- However wheter emergency food is avalible or not, they will try to get food autonomy back ASAP.

Sounds like you tried to make them 100% dependant on Public Food, wich is a bad idea. So they did not want that. The single large Domefarm in the City Hex is usually the best thing that can happen to you. It keeps the Private Citizens fed, gives you some kickbacks as well and does not need water or power maintenance.

[jimwinsor]

Well no, the problem began before I nationalized the Dome III. I noticed people were fleeing the city in droves, and looked closer, saw the problem: the capital had expanded to a Dome III on their own, and immediately ran out of workers. So to staff the dome they mothballed all their QOL buildings. This caused happiness to tank and mass emigration to my other cities that still had parks and arenas and sewers.

My nationalizing the Dome III was an attempt to fix a problem that was already in progress. It didn’t work because a) even if you free up the workers, the private industry AI will simply refuse to unmothball their QOL buildings for an inordinately long period of time; and b) they will simply build another Dome III they don’t have the workforce to staff, and keep at it no matter what.

I’ll tell you what I think may have triggered it. It’s just a theory, but prior to this all going down I had replaced all my PUBLIC Dome farms with hydroponics.

I think the AI got triggered by that, and thought *I* needed the food. Perhaps it totals up the Dome levels, both public and private, compares it to the total population, then if that ratio is beyond a certain threshold it build what it thinks is the missing domes? The problem being, it doesn’t seem to factor in the existence of Hydroponic plants in that calculation. It’s worth noting that I had lucked into Mass Food Pool tech from Fate card play easy on, so just a single Hyroponics II was supplying all my public food.

And to digress just a bit, the root of the problem here IMO is the inability of the AI to use hydroponics for the private industry. It seems odd that this valuable tech isn’t getting shared, especially given how labor inefficient dome framing is.

[zgrssd]

Well no, the problem began before I nationalized the Dome III. I noticed people were fleeing the city in droves, and looked closer, saw the problem: the capital had expanded to a Dome III on their own, and immediately ran out of workers. So to staff the dome they mothballed all their QOL buildings. This caused happiness to tank and mass emigration to my other cities that still had parks and arenas and sewers.

Why not just lower the working speed of your Public Asset so you needed less workers?

The upgrade should have given you some free food.
If you are late enough into the game to have T3 Private Dome Farms, there should be plenty public buildings you can mothball or at least lower production on to make sure you got enough workers to run what is actually nessesary.

[zgrssd]

My nationalizing the Dome III was an attempt to fix a problem that was already in progress. It didn’t work because a) even if you free up the workers, the private industry AI will simply refuse to unmothball their QOL buildings for an inordinately long period of time; and b) they will simply build another Dome III they don’t have the workforce to staff, and keep at it no matter what.

They could not unmothball as they needed those workers for the Food production. That you kept sabotaging.

I’ll tell you what I think may have triggered it. It’s just a theory, but prior to this all going down I had replaced all my PUBLIC Dome farms with hydroponics.

It is possible that you suddenly unemploying up to 32000 people (~320 population units) overtaxed the Private food production, you had forgotten to turn on Emergency Food for the Capitol, leading to mass starvation and thus Emigration.

And by the time you noticed, you wer still operating on a much higher population.

[BlueTemplar]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd
Why not just lower the working speed of your Public Asset so you needed less workers?

I'm pretty sure that he's talking about Population's Private Jobs and not Workers ?

[Twotribes]

Less federal workers more available for private assets.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Twotribes

Less federal workers more available for private assets.

That^^

Having to many Workers is actually a major factor in driving Private Wages and thus lowering Worker happiness:
- more public workers means less Private Workers
- less Private Workers means higher Private salary, as companies compete for what little workforce there is (I have seen from 0.0001 to 0.007)
- higher private Salary means more money has to be spend to keep workers happy and numerours

I do think a high Private and Public Salary is also a dirving factor for Migration, so it somewhat balances itself.

[BlueTemplar]

When doing a bug report, you should strive to be as precise as possible.

And you haven't given us even approximate values for the issue at hand :
- How much private food does your population produce ? How much do they consume ?
- How much "unemployed" population there is ? How much population private jobs are needed to go from a Dome II to a Dome III ? (According to what you are telling us, I guess the "unemployed" number is lower than that difference, but still ?)

And ideally, you would give us the above values for these various rounds :
- The one before the private industry decided to upgrade the Dome (you can see that on the window opening when you click on the zone's population button next to "Next:")
- The one when they decided it, and it appeared there.
- The one before they started building it.
- The one when they started building it.
- The one when they finished building it.
- The one after they finished building it.

Yeah, sure, you (now) have given us a save file -
(and just one, and I guess after this all happened ?)
- but it's really for you to provide these numbers (especially since you're more familiar with your game than we are!) so as to minimize the time we and Vic might spend trying to debug the issue.

[zgrssd]

- How much "unemployed" population there is ? How much population private jobs are needed to go from a Dome II to a Dome III ? (According to what you are telling us, I guess the "unemployed" number is lower than that difference, but still ?)

Asuming there was no change since his savegame was created, the values for Private Agri Dome, Upkeep + Production costs are:
L1 - 10500
L2 - 23500
L3 - 39200

So that is an additional 15700 Population for the L3 Agri Dome. Yeah, Prviate Agri domes need a lot of workers. No wonder, given they have no other Upkeep or Production cost.

[jimwinsor]

It is possible that you suddenly unemploying up to 32000 people (~320 population units) overtaxed the Private food production, you had forgotten to turn on Emergency Food for the Capitol, leading to mass starvation and thus Emigration.

That exact thought occurred to me as well, so before I wrote this I double checked ... and yes, Emergency Food was on.

Bottom line, the AI made the unilateral decision to build a level of dome farms it couldn’t handle, and thus commit suicide. And since it was in the private industry there was little I could do other than the inelegant solution of nationalization.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

It is possible that you suddenly unemploying up to 32000 people (~320 population units) overtaxed the Private food production, you had forgotten to turn on Emergency Food for the Capitol, leading to mass starvation and thus Emigration.

That exact thought occurred to me as well, so before I wrote this I double checked ... and yes, Emergency Food was on.

Bottom line, the AI made the unilateral decision to build a level of dome farms it couldn’t handle, and thus commit suicide. And since it was in the private industry there was little I could do other than the inelegant solution of nationalization.

Again: The private economy does not want to rely on Emergency food. They want to be able to maintain themself, even if the SHQ is suddenly disconnected or runs out of food.
They will always build a bigger farm.

Also, what about the option to turn off/turn down Public buildings, so there were more private workers to operate all the private economy parts?

[jimwinsor]

I’d call the programmed behavior of a city to “maintain itself” in this manner something that needs to be fixed.

The city had a total population of just under 100K. Public workers made up about 40K IIRC, which meant the remaining 60K felt they compelled to build a building that would employ just under 40K of them (in other words, 2/3 of the entire private sector) just to feed themselves.

So you can see where I’m coming from when I say they went overboard on food production, for some reason.

And you’re absolutely right, in hindsight the best response to this crisis is was to mothball my own public buildings to feed the gaping maw of the private Dome III. Nationalization didn’t work, so by process of elimination letting public workers go is the only solution left (for now).

Although I do wonder in this instance whether it would have used those new private workers to keep going, and build a Dome IV?

[jimwinsor]

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

I’d call the programmed behavior of a city to “maintain itself” in this manner something that needs to be fixed.

The city had a total population of just under 100K. Public workers made up about 40K IIRC, which meant the remaining 60K felt they compelled to build a building that would employ just under 40K of them (in other words, 2/3 of the entire private sector) just to feed themselves.

So you can see where I’m coming from when I say they went overboard on food production, for some reason.

And you’re absolutely right, in hindsight the best response to this crisis is was to mothball or throttle my own public buildings to feed the gaping maw of the private Dome III. Nationalization didn’t work, so by process of elimination letting public workers go is the only solution left (for now).

Although I do wonder in this instance whether it would have used those new private workers to keep going, and build a Dome IV?

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

ORIGINAL: jimwinsor

I’d call the programmed behavior of a city to “maintain itself” in this manner something that needs to be fixed.

The city had a total population of just under 100K. Public workers made up about 40K IIRC, which meant the remaining 60K felt they compelled to build a building that would employ just under 40K of them (in other words, 2/3 of the entire private sector) just to feed themselves.

So you can see where I’m coming from when I say they went overboard on food production, for some reason.

And you’re absolutely right, in hindsight the best response to this crisis is was to mothball or throttle my own public buildings to feed the gaping maw of the private Dome III. Nationalization didn’t work, so by process of elimination letting public workers go is the only solution left (for now).

Although I do wonder in this instance whether it would have used those new private workers to keep going, and build a Dome IV?

60k Private Citzens = 600 Private Food need
T2 Private Dome: 500 Prviate Food Produced
500<600

The Logic to go for T3 Private Dome seems quite simple and sound

[BlueTemplar]

That's what I feared, but this logic is IMHO *too* simple, and without enough population to work the upgraded dome, IMHO *NOT* sound.
IMHO under these conditions they should probably try to make a second Dome 1 instead ?
(Even if it's less efficient (?) in the "long run", as the "long run" doesn't guarantee ever enough "jobless" population for a dome 3 !)

[jimwinsor]

Yeah and that's the fundamental illogic of the whole thing. To make up that 100 food difference, they opt for that rather than go to the Hydroponics storage across the street, where the food is free.

And looking at later turns after the population had fled, they were still striving to build to Dome III despite having less than 40K private population. Which made it basically impossible for the city to recover.