SimCity

So this is the second thing that has been puzzling the hell out of me today. Did EA lie about how much population a city could support in this game in order to reassure the potential player-base that small tile sizes would be okay?
Check out this thread from the Sim City forums. In particular this post:
A Low Income - Low Density House has 6 adults, 4 are workers and 2 are shoppers. If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 6. Makes sense.
A Low Income - Med Density House has 60 adults, 40 are workers, 20 are shoppers If you destroy this home, your total population at the bottom center of your screen goes down by 60. Makes sense.
A Low Income - High Density House is where things go all whacky... By the pattern above you would assume that a high density home would be 600 adults where 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers, and this is true. If you look at the data layers (at the right times) you will see that there are indeed 600 residents and 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers....
BUT...
If you destroy this High Density house, your population goes down by 5200!!!!! (As well as increasing by 5200 when it gets rebuilt)
So either the worker/shopper count is bugged for high population buildings, OR they are purposefully "padding" the bottom center population numbers to make the city look bigger than it actually is.
So what the hell? This basically confirms a lot of suspicions of mine and others that we aren't actually seeing that many sims in our cities and it also explains why only 1/10 of the population is working. We don't actually have as many people in our cities as we think! EA has stated numerous times that their internal testers were able to get cities of 500k and even 1 million sims, but in reality they may have been blowing smoke up our asses! What the fuck, if I'm having traffic problems at ~100k sims (which is actually more on the order of 10k sims) imagine what would happen if I had 10 times more sims on the streets.
Am I deluding myself or is it a real possibility that this gamebreaking design decision cannot be remedied?

What's particularly frustrating is that the addition of phantom population is not linear :
1.
I don't mind if they have to put in phantom pop because they can't sim every individual, I just wish they did it consistently say 4 phantom for every real pop. Instead the phantom pop grows exponentially so you see your pop go from 100k to 200k and think you have doubled but in actuality you have gone from something like 20k to 25k. The higher your pop the less sense the game seems to make because you are seemingly supporting more and more massive populations with ever decreasing percentage of real sims.
2.
The magic figure is 500 or when there is no medium density buildings. When the total population is below 500, the total population = the number of workers plus shoppers. After 500, they beefed up the total population in certain percentage. For larger cities, the ratio is 1:10.
This is why your tax revenue doesn't double when the population of your city doubles. Your population counter might claim that your city has doubled in residents, but the number of AI agents actually being simulated has only increased by a small percentage of that (which gets smaller and smaller the larger your city gets).
If you're going to artificially inflate numbers to make your game seem more impressive, at least do so in a way that doesn't significantly impact gameplay.

As a user of the Simcity forum named ?anickle? brought up an experiment he made so he could understand why only a minor percentage (10-15%) of the sim population is considered workforce, I have decided to run the same experiment myself and stubled upon major flaws in the core game, flaws that are until now probably unknown for almost every player, if not all of them. This is new, and this is very concerning.
The credit of the idea goes to anickle, who performed his own version of the experiment, which can be found here:http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9359265.page
My experiment:
I started sandbox mode and built water, electricity and garbage facilities, police and fire stations and a clinic.
I built one single house, low density and low wealth, and stood obeserving them. The whole experiment is made entirely with this type of house.
One single house, as already explained by anickle, has a pop. of 6: 4 workers, 2 shoppers and actually 2 kids that are never included in the population count. So it is safe to assume that from now on, provided sims don?t die, my workers count and my shoppers count will always be: ?no. of houses x 4? (workers) or ?no. of houses x 2? (shoppers).
I kept building more houses and recording the increase in the numbers of workers and shoppers. As expected, all the numbers were perfectly fine. For a while. User marcoyim believed the pop. count started to go wrong at 500, so I tested for that, and he is absolutely right.
This is the count of the population and the number of workers and shoppers so far:
1 house = 6 pop, 4w + 2s; 12 houses = 72 pop, 48w + 24s; 53 houses = 318 pop, 212w + 106s; 83 houses = 498 pop, 332w + 166s
And here it goes the odd part: as the next house was finished, the population count increased by 7, not by 6. As the next house was finished, the population count increased by 10, and at the next time it increased by 12.
BUT THE HOUSES CONTINUED WITH 6 PEOPLE (4W+2S).
So indeed, the game adds a phantom population in the count that doesn?t really exist, and I guess I figured out the general way in which it does that. I will put the numbers as they are easier to understand by themselves.
House 1, which would achive 500 or more in the pop count: 7 sims (6 real); House 2: 10; House 3: 12; House 4: 13; (...)
I kept counting this for 41 houses, always subtracting the former pop count on the new one to find how many sims the game added in the pop count, while the houses always actually had 6 sims. The real progression I found was this:
7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 15, 15, 16, 17, 18, 17, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 19, 18, 19, 19, 19, 20, 19, 20, 20, 21, 20, 20, 21, 21, 20, 21, 21, 21, 22, 21, 21, 22, 22, 22.
The final house count was at 121 and the population was at 1.294, but I had 507 workers and 254 shoppers. If you do the math, I should have a little less (and 1 worker died too). It was not at the ?pop x 4? and ?pop x 2? ratio I told you before because 24 workers and 12 shoppers were added to the real population trough this process of adding phantom people. So as you see, they increase both real and ghost sims in our cities.
I stopped counting there as I though I already had the general idea, and I am sure you get it too: The game adds an increasing number of sims per house to the population count, in an organized way, without ever adding these sims in your actual city.
This is alarming, at least. It means that the game is not what is advertised (intentionally or not), it means glassbox does not process every sim individually. One can argue that each sim is technically tracked individually when it exist in the map, but that is not so true as I will continue below.
Besides the experiment above, playing with the concepts of the game brought me insights of how the engine works and how it is flawed at every level. Here are miscellaneous things I captured while doing the whole thing:
If you demolish a bulding that provides jobs, for ex. a power plant, while a worker is working, this worker is deleted along with the building. I managed to intentionally have a city with no workers by doing this. Note that I did it when I only had 2 houses, so I don?t know if that will ALWAYS happen.
After I closed the police, fire station and clinic, 1 worker at the police and 1 at the clinic took AGES to go out. It means that if you demolish it, chances are you will lose many workers there.
The game does not know how to behave when sims die: If one sim die both the pop count and the workforce go down by 1 (so far so good), but the house where he lived keeps showing 6 citizens. Worse, if those sims leave your city the count will go down further 6 points instead of 5, meaning that you actually lose 7 sims, not 6.
Even if you only have 1 single house in the map, the house will show 3 kids running around it and 3 different sims appeared for me going in and out while 2 workers were at work. That means I saw 6 people + 3 kids (9 total), and these people, although (usually) maintaining their names, used different ?sprites?/models each time, with no consistency at all. There was no connection with the names and ?surname? of the house. The only rule was that sims that leave the house for working always had the same surname as the house. That means the sims are not ?real? agents, they are randomly generated each time, with different names and models every time, provided they are not going to work.
Numbers I gathered for you guys while playing:
Commercial: 5/10L, 2/4M, 0H (I found two different values for C, I guess different buildings have different job slots. There may be more); Industrial: 20L, 6M, 0H (Again, there may be others); Wind Power Plant jobs: 20L, 6M, 0H; Sewage facility: 0L, 0M, 0H; Garbage dump: 20L, 6M, 0H; Police: 10L, 4M, 0H; Fire Dept: 20L, 6M, 0H Clinic: 12L, 8M, 4H.
So, how are you feeling about our great simulation game?
EDIT: As some users asked, I uploaded the only screenshot I have right now, taken at the end of the experiment. I will try to take more and post it here soon:http://img203.imageshack.us/img203/8...0312230819.png