Hello heroes! 👋
It’s great to catch up with you again. This episode is all about how the outdoor population size works.
Let’s get right into it. 😉
The City has an outdoor population size and a base population size.
The outdoor population size is the total number of customers that are outdoors and willing to make a purchase. The base population size is the total number of customers, including those indoors.
The City’s base population size is the sum of the base population sizes across all localities.
The base population size for each locality is shown below:
Because many prices in the game are similar to their real-life counterparts, and given the limited number of customers we could include in each locality, we implemented a customer effect scale of 1:10 to ensure businesses could become profitable.
In effect, each customer has an in-game impact of 10 customers. For example, the 60 customers in Street Corner have an effect equivalent to 600 customers.
The outdoor population size in each locality depends on the influence of three main factors, which are:
- General happiness of the population (Population Happiness)
- Economic well-being of the people (Economic Happiness)
- Random Events
The influence of any of these factors determines the outdoor population size in each locality and the City at large.
For example, the image below shows the difference between the outdoor and base population size in Glamour and Hip Street.
This difference results from the current Economic Happiness in the City being lower than expected.
Economic happiness affects all localities and effectively produces a current population for the City, 968, lower than the base, 1260.
We looked at the impact of economic happiness and random events in this episode and this episode, respectively, so let's look at Population Happiness.
The population starts with an average Happiness level of 50. Their current happiness (Population Happiness) per time will fluctuate upwards ↗️ or downwards ↘️ depending on the outcome of the following formula:
From the above, you can see that weather plays a substantial role in the overall happiness of the population.
We explained how the weather works in detail here.
Depending on the prevailing weather for the time of day, the following is the impact on Population Happiness:
When it’s sunny, the population happiness due to weather is maximum and therefore a higher outdoor population size is expected.
But as the weather worsens, population happiness due to weather reduces till the outdoor population drops to zero when there is a storm.
Whenever there is a lower outdoor population size, you will need to adjust your business strategy to operate sustainably.
That's it for this episode!
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Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries